HDA at PSU

The Digital Archive of Japan is a genre—an example of a participatory archive.”

“It becomes an organic thing,” he says. Konrad Lawson jokes, “It will be like a Heisenberg archive. You won’t be able to be a part of it without affecting it.”

At a recent meeting of the American Historical Association, Guldi proposed that the power of digital tools in research would expand the focus of dissertations from the 20-year span that has been “the hallmark of historical scholarship over the last three decades” to 150 years.

“Most literary historians work on a small corpus of texts where their expertise is manifest through the finesse with which they can demonstrate certain features of that corpus. Those noble skill sets are not about to disappear with a wave of the digital magic wand. On the other hand,” he explains, “there are really exciting research questions on the scale of, ‘How does the socioeconomic history of publishing as an industry relate to the production of certain literary genres?’ And when you start to operate on that scale, of course your data set has suddenly expanded: no human being can possibly read the one million books on the shelf that might document that history.”

“Well, it puts us at a place where the boundary line between what we have traditionally called the humanities and what we have traditionally called the social sciences becomes awfully porous. For me that’s an expansion and enhancement of the humanities of the most creative and best sort.”

Many areas of the humanities have always been engaged with fundamental issues that have reemerged as central to the digital humanities, he says, such as “the relationship between text and image, the analysis of cultural networks, or the very multiplicity of print itself as an instrument for communicating and conveying knowledge, everything from typography and book design to systems of distribution.”

Design means everything from typography to design in the abstract, the cognitive sense of how you conceptualize something, thinking about the ways in which art, or sound, or tactile environments operate separately or together,” he says. “What can you do on a screen that you can’t do in a physical environment and vice versa?” And it means thinking also about the traditional publishing model—where research ends with a stable artifact, like a book—versus one that is iterative, is disseminated in multiple forms, and generates continual feedback, unifying the linear stages of the traditional research cycle into one ongoing parallel process. For Schnapp, devising new models of scholarly publishing that enhance academic study is a design question—an urgent one. As he puts it, “When you move from a universe where the rules with respect to a scholarly essay or monograph have been fully codified, to a universe of experimentation in which the rules have yet to be written, characterized by shifting toolkits and skillsets, in which genres of scholarship are undergoing constant redefinition, you become by necessity a knowledge designer.”

Schnapp remains passionate about print. One of his goals is to figure out ways to “reimagine print culture,” and so metaLAB is experimenting with new publishing models, print as well as digital. In 2013, the lab will publish a series with Harvard University Press (then celebrating its hundredth anniversary) called metaLAB Projects, dedicated to exploring what a scholarly book might look like in an era where knowledge is being produced in digital forms from the outset.

There is no such thing as ‘The Digital Humanities’; there are multiple emerging domains of experimental practice that fall under this capacious umbrella. Second,” he continues, “some of these domains of practice imply novel sorts of research questions and results; but others involve reviving forms of scholarship—like critical editions and commentaries—that were killed off by market constraints within university publishing. A lot of spaces that have been closed down are being reopened, thanks to the digital turn. And third, research tools and methodologies necessarily evolve and the humanities are no exception.