This week my Racing the Beam co-author and platform studies series co-editor Nick Montfort spoke at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science. In addition to discussing the two new platform studies titles shipping this spring, Nick reports that he met Perry Collins, a a new program officer for the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. Here’s Nick’s summary of his own complaints about the idea of “digital humanities,” which I’m sorry I have never heard in complete form:

This was Perry’s first trip outside the Washington, D.C. metro area, and she immediately (first talk of the colloquium) got to do something all of her colleagues at the ODH — Brett Bobley, Jason Rhody, Jennifer Serventi — have already done: listen to me complain about the prevailing, overly traditional, overly narrow model of the digital humanities that doesn’t embrace contemporary work and the expressive, creative power of computational media. There are some things to enjoy about being a gadfly, but I do wonder if I’ve now become a hazing ritual at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

published November 22, 2011

Comments

  1. Elijah Meeks

    He’s right, but part of the reason for this is the overly clannish way in which Games Studies and Critical Code folks approach Digital Humanities. And by clannish I mean elitist, and by elitist I mean snobby.

    Sure, a lot of what’s called DH is recapitulation of overly conservative humanities theory (but with *computers*!!!) or blogging but there’s also interesting, very sophisticated work and some of the more traditional stuff (like mapping out transportation networks in Rome, which sounds to me about as stuffy as you can get) is integrating topologies, agent-based modeling, geographic network analysis and other rather novel techniques.

  2. Ian Bogost

    Brett Bobley from NEH has also responded to Nick’s post.

    Elijah, I don’t mind being called a snob.