As it turns out, "what's in a name" is still pretty interesting.

Sometimes it seems as though there are as many answers to the question “What is digital humanities?” as there are people who call themselves digital humanists. Reading through the many definitions and explanations that exist is, luckily, one of those times when—like with so many moments in DH—the structure is just as relevant as the meaning contained within.

Let me elaborate.

If you were to Google “What is digital humanities?”, as I have, you would find a happy cacophony of suggestions. You would read pieces that sounded like straight philosophy;  you would read pieces that sounded like rebels who are thrilled to have finally found a microphone; you would read pieces that are so technical they become hard to parse. Thinking about all of these different approaches to the same questions should tell you almost as much about what DH is, as what they are actually telling you. This is not the eye of the needle; this is the floodgate.

When I read pieces like “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” (incidentally, the best use of clip-art-style graphics that I’ve seen in a long time), or the more restrained Rafael Alvarado’s “The Digital Humanities Situation,” I can’t help but try to picture myself in a place somewhere other than the sidelines. To me, it seems that both the beauty and the curse of the state of DH stems from its expansive set of possibilities. Coming fresh into this discipline (or maybe I’d rather call it a confederation of disciplines all flying the same set of methodological flags), it’s hard to know where to look first, let alone where to jump in.

It should be said, of course, that the hesitation I feel was born from my own mind, and not from any perceived closing-of-the-ranks from any writing I’ve read on this topic—or any of the lovely DH professionals I’ve talked with. The field is vast, yes, but it’s marked (I think) by a deep enthusiasm; the kind that wants nothing more than to pull you in and make sure that you, too, are excited about what could be next.

I may have found my way in, though, and it was beautiful to read something and feel, if not a full-on, mad-scientist “EUREKA!” moment, then at least a moment of clarity. To spread my cards out on the table for a minute: I see myself working in a library or archive, once I’ve gotten all my degrees in a row, and in the past I’ve struggled to articulate why a trained poet (if there is such a thing) not only wants to be a librarian, but also a librarian with a hand in the murky world of DH. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to connect. In my mind, the creative work of poetry and the creative-yet-logical work of digital scholarship pair perfectly with each other, but that’s probably deserving of its own post later on. To get to the point: there’s a place in the Manifesto (can you tell that I loved it? It’s a joy to read, how could I not love it?) where the conversation comes around to the idea of curation. Let me quote a little of it for you:

Curation also has a healthy modesty: it does not insist on an ever more possible mastery of the all; it embraces the tactility and mutability of local knowledge, and eschews disembodied Theory in favor of the nitty-gritty of imagescapes and objecthood….

Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds….

Curation also implies custodial responsibilities with respect to the remains of the past as well as interpretive, meaning-making responsibilities with respect to the present and future. In a world of perpetual data overload, it implies information design and selectivity….(9).

This may not seem like a groundbreaking excerpt, but for me it might as well have had a giant neon border. “See here?” it said to me, “THIS is what you’ve been waiting for. Here’s the reasoning you’ve been trying to articulate for the past year.” And it really is. Curation is obviously not the only skill I can or will latch onto, but it speaks to my sensibilities as a poet and my strengths as a scholar. What is poetry if not the selective promotion of some details and not others? What is storytelling if not a means to preserve what we find most important? Flash fiction and haikus from the New York Times came to be for some of the same reasons that DH came to be: a need to push on traditional boundaries of genre coupled with an unwillingness to completely divorce from traditional guiding principles; clever people getting bored with a horizon they can comfortably discern. 

One more connection with my home base of creative writing, if you will: I would argue that what separates an average poet (or prose writer, or essayist, etc.) is the ability to revise. The initial shape of an idea is not nearly so important as the shape that we leave it in. In that vein, I find the word of DH compelling because it seems to be another discipline that has embraced the guiding principle of revision. Whether you want to think about it from the vantage point of individual projects growing and morphing, or whether you want to go big-picture and think about the fact that digital editions are essentially revisions of traditional print books, it seems to be a deeply embedded concept. 

So, to all those throwing this party under the Big Tent (another great Google search waiting to be made, by the way): Thanks for inviting me! It's good to be here.