The Digital Humanities as Lightning Rod

The Litz Boat

The recent New York Times story on Franco Moretti’s & Matt Jockers’ Stanford Lit Lab presents two classic criticisms of the Digital Humanities: that it is scientism at worst and, at best, using computers to do what humans can already do.  To be clear, the author doesn’t simply dwell on the negative, but the outrage is simply too visible to ignore.  As opposed to the generally positive response to digital humanities work that deals with geography and history, journalists take a dim view of the digital humanities when it approaches traditional literature studies.  Bringing sophisticated digital tools and techniques to bear on Walt Whitman’s Washington?  Good.  But any attempt to do more than catalog the poet’s work and you’ll likely receive the same worried remarks as Kathryn Schulz directs toward Moretti’s paper on networks in literature:

Reading the paper, though, I mostly vacillated between two reactions: “Huh?” and “Duh!”

But Moretti is no stranger to this kind of treatment.  His earlier work has been assailed both by young statisticians and old literary critics and everyone between.

Moretti, a mythopoeic figure, generates around himself a dense network of folklore and apocrypha. Franco Moretti, it is said, has hired five graduate students to retype the first paragraphs of every Victorian novel ever written; Franco Moretti is coauthoring a book on morphology with a team of Canadian ornithologists. Franco Moretti, who “doesn’t believe in” word count, prefers instead to calculate the average number of characters per word in his students’ papers, and anyone with an average of six or higher gets an F.

At Stanford, I once overheard two of my classmates at a department party, drinks in hand, debating the question of Moretti’s office hours. “I wonder whether he’ll be in this Friday,” mused the first student. “I need to show him my reading list.”

“I happen to know,” said the second student, a bit importantly, “that he’s going to be on campus at midnight on Wednesday, to be teleported to Sweden.”

Elif Batuman – “Adventures of a Man of Science: Moretti in California”

It’s unlikely that one will find similar language and high profile criticism directed toward, for instance, Peter Bol, whose work and forceful personality is similar in scope to that of Moretti, except directed at Chinese historical geography and not Shakespeare.  The primary reason for this is obvious: culture as represented by popular journalism simply has more familiarity and investment with story in general and the Western canon in particular than it does with political geography and, specifically, the historical political geography of China.  You can still find folks that have issues with digital maps “replacing” traditional historical scholarship both related and unrelated to historical China, but they tend to academic and make their critiques without reference to how the scholar treats graduate students.  The attention, and especially the level of emotion as seen in the comments section of another recent NYT article on the Lit Lab, is a signal to do more of this work, to engage with it more extensively and promote the adoption of these techniques among young scholars and students in the academy.  Whatever the Digital Humanities may or may not be is still an open question, but if popular opinion is any gauge, then one thing is sure: the Digital Humanities is important.

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2 Responses to The Digital Humanities as Lightning Rod

  1. David Ritchie says:

    I’d be interested to hear more about the idea that animates this post, namely the different conception of culture “as represented by popular journalism [that] simply has more familiarity and investment with story in general and the Western canon in particular than it does with political geography and, specifically, the historical political geography of China.” Indeed, the differences between the journalist’s ‘culture’ and the digital humanist’s ‘culture’ are left almost entirely implicit, while the post seems (almost) to sneer at anyone so naive as to approach the very question of this difference.

    Particularly given the way this post closes by conceding (or championing?) the fact that the Digital Humanities is still “an open question”, it seems that there might be a more charitable (and also productive) way to interpret these criticisms as representing a set of common and widely held questions about the Digital Humanities, at least so common and wide as to appeal to the readership of the NYTimes. Is/are the DH simply a set of research techniques seeking dissemination and adoptions among young scholars? Certainly Moretti is a large figure in DH work, but his approach is admittedly driven by a extremely particular conception of literary analysis, and thus not representative the field as a whole. Perhaps these NYTimes articles could have been used to demonstrate that the Journalist’s conception of the DH as Franco Moretti Studies is, in fact, misguided, limited and an obstacle.

    • Elijah Meeks says:

      I hope I’m not sneering at the reception of Moretti’s work. My point in regard to how it evokes an emotional response was to distinguish between how digital humanities work that deals with analysis of characters, plot and story in literature causes more tension than digital humanities work that deals with history and geography. This tension isn’t restricted to journalists or the lay public but, based on the claimed affiliations of commentators on earlier DH stories in the NY Times and elsewhere, includes traditional and self-identified digital humanities scholars.

      Based on my admittedly incomplete review of the literature, I think that Franco Moretti Studies is a vibrant and well-defined field and, I agree with you, its strong signal and those like it disrupt attempts to define the larger field. That question–what, precisely, (the) digital humanities is/are–is unsolved and amenable to problemitization from a variety of perspectives, as I’ve tried to demonstrate with my ongoing The Digital Humanities As… series.