A piece in last week’s New York Times explores the growth of data-oriented research in the humanities.
In Mr. Scheinfeldt’s view academia has moved into “a post-theoretical age.” This “methodological moment,” he said, is similar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when scholars were preoccupied with collating and cataloging the flood of information brought about by revolutions in communication, transportation and science. The practical issues of discipline building, of assembling an annotated bibliography, of defining the research agenda and what it means to be a historian “were the main work of a great number of scholars,” he said.
Stanford’s own Mapping the Republic of Letters project figures prominently in the article and Arts Beat explores the project and its visualization of correspondence during the enlightenment in more detail. The resultant grumbling in the stuffy old mailing lists and among the comments of the article that this has been going on for quite some time before the New York Times noticed is similar to the kind of discomfort caused by the Digital Humanities conference at Yale, which gave the imprimatur of a major Ivy League university on the whole pursuit–something considered unnecessary by the various universities (Ivy and less easily categorized) that had been doing this kind of thing for quite some time.
The unsuitability and inevitable splintering of the Digital Humanities would be just another academic tempest, but for the rising popularity and funding opportunities associated with the work being done under the Digital Humanities rubric. Instead, precisely because there is so much at stake with the folding of data and new tools into the production of traditional humanities scholarship, the vibrancy of debate both within the academy and without is heartening.