Call for a new approach in Digital Humanities
by Niels-Oliver Walkowski
on the 15. Februar 2011, 10:51 o'clock
In his interesting new Blog Post David M. Berry gives a nice new model of the development of Digital Humanities from Computing Humanites over Digital Humanities to somewhat he calls Digital Humanities 3.0. Whether it is an adequate term to describe what he is looking for, because of its marketing like speech and its notion of a linear progress, the concept behind it is a fascinating one. It’s a demand for a more reflexive approach in the Digital Humanities, the attempt to raise questions how the digital, the software, the computional change our methods, our way we interact with material, our concept of truth and last but not least our epistemology. Consequently he argues for a ‘Computational Turn’. In this perspective Digital Humanities began as a support for analog research and research methods stepping forward to a field where humanities core qualities were transformed into tools to interact with now born digital content in a ‘humanities way’ (reflexive, qualitative …) to point out now that this transformation process isn’t a one way movement. What Berry demand isn’t new in its media reflexive position and has a long tradition in Media Theory and a performative sidekick in netcritics and hacktivism as he mentioned himself. Identifying that this perspective is astonishing absent in Digital Humanities it would be an interesting discussion to clarify what a computational turn could mean contrasting to classical media theory and where the connections are. Moreover identifying the connections to other theories with same perspectives could produce a profile of what are the main questions for the Digital Humanities followed by such a perspective. For example Derrida’s concepts of trail and postponement are really interesting approaches to discuss what Berry calls the “Streaming Internet”. At least there is still a practical problem consisting in the heterogeneous backgrounds of people acting within the Digital Humanities and the still contingent discussion of what Digital Humanities should be. Grounding this issue there is still an opposition of humanities orientated computer specialists and humanities researchers with computional capacities within the field focusing on there backgorundperspecitves. This often leads to infertile discussions and a lot of misunderstanding. So a question for the computational turn would also be how it should be spelled out to make the communication about it possible.