On March 6, 2012, LTS held the second conversation in the “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age” Symposium where Angel David Nieves gave an excellent talk on “Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative: A Liberal Arts Model for Future Scholarship, Research and Teaching”. It was a very interesting and thought provoking presentation and the discussion that followed was very interesting as well. We had good attendance including several who watched the presentation remotely. Angel kindly agreed for us to post his presentation on YouTube, which you will see below.

So, what exactly is “Digital Humanities?” If anyone (including me) expected to get a clearer definition of this during this presentation that what we may already know, I don’t think that question was answered. Taken from the Digital Humanities Initiative website: “digital parlance for a research and teaching collaboration – where new media and computing technologies are used to promote humanities-based teaching, research, and scholarship across the liberal arts.” Obviously, if you replaced humanities with any other discipline, the same exact description would work too, so there is nothing particularly unique about such a broad definition. I think what Angel tried to convey was that the way in which scholarly works in Humanities are being produced in this new digital world is radically different from the way it has been done so far – mostly, the scholars working alone, using the institution’s resources, primarily libraries and librarians. By using the digital media and through collaborations extending worldwide, the work that is getting produced is very different and highly collaborative.

I strongly encourage you to listen to both the presentation as well as the discussion following it. My only regret is that Angel was not able to show us any specific examples since things are in their final stages and are being wrapped up. I was reminded of the work the Academic Computing group at Wesleyan did several years ago, called the Learning Objects. Some of the work there are indeed what could be characterized as Digital Humanities initiatives, very closely mirroring what Angel was discussing. However, the technologies used to produce them and the fact that we were overly customizing them meant that the cost to produce and maintain these could not be justified. As a result, we had to abandon the program (while I was there) though the existing ones are still used heavily.

I specifically would like to draw your attention to: Music in the Afghan North, Shakespeare’s Globe Theater Model, Scroll Singers of Naya, Ukiyo-E Techniques, Cycles of Life in a Bengali Town, and a Virtual Village. Some of the early ones were done 7-8 years ago. Whereas these are very powerful adjuncts to teaching and scholarship, the criticisms were the obvious ones – they are used only a few times during each semester, so the amortized cost of production over the usage (a metric that the academic administrators are interested in) looked exorbitant. What was missing here was the intangibles – how many others outside the institution benefited from these as well as the reputational value for the scholar – unfortunately, there is no way to clearly measure these. The takeaway from this (and many other projects we engage in) is at the risk of not delivering exactly what everyone want all the time (over customization), develop creative and intelligent frameworks that are highly functional and reusable, so the amortized cost becomes reasonable. Besides, maintenance and longevity will be addressed. Angel discusses this and also answered my question on this along these lines.

So, as we talk to the faculty on how we can support them on digital humanities projects, let us remember these two key points – reusable frameworks and less customization. Frankly, today, the technologies are fairly advanced that frameworks can still provide drastic differences in look and feel between two systems. They are also highly functional. In other words, most of these involve mashups of various kinds and there are many different ways to be able to put together highly functional and very useful scholarly works fairly quickly. The other major component of this is the time that the scholar needs to spend – it is critical that we explain this to the scholar up front not necessarily to scare them away, but to make sure that they are willing to commit the time. The rewards of  a well done digital humanities project can be very high – as measured by how many others are using, commenting and reaching out to the scholar.

I would like us to take the examples of existing digital humanities of relevance (such as the Wesleyan learning objects or the examples from DHi when they become available) as a starting point of conversations with our faculty. It makes a lot of difference when they see an example of two rather than an abstract notion!