Erez Aiden and JB Michel just finished their keynote and signaled the end of DH11 (except for a dinner and a few tours of Northern California) and capped off what was, for me, an extremely enjoyable and terribly useful conference. Along with meeting brilliant folks who I only knew through the web and twitter-slumming (Like Sean Gillies and Scott Weingart) it provided me with a chance to see the Digital Humanities as a scholarly field, as a change in professional academic culture, as a place of code as poetry and as a struggle to harness the possible with the practical. The number of collaborative opportunities that came out of this conference are mind-boggling and only dwarfed by the likelihood that Stanford will continue to improve its centrality scores in any measurement of the Digital Humanities as a network of practitioners (and in the process produce academics that can deftly critique such scores).
But more than any personal or institutional benefit that I could attest to, a theme emerged that I think will continue to grow and benefit the Digital Humanities as a whole: maturity. A theme reinforced by the Culturomics team presenting their research and their methods with a reminder that scientists and humanists have a lot to learn from each other about the fundamental nature of each others’ research and that the integration of digital tools, techniques and objects into humanities scholarship gives the best opportunity for that education.
Throughout the conference, scholars using GIS, network analysis, text analysis and code analysis comfortably addressed what are now familiar issues of data integrity, analytical scope, access and definition of digital objects. More than the research, which was stunning, witnessing this familiarity with a set of standard practices and critiques was in my mind the most heartening aspect of the conference. There were still a few gotcha questions and retreats into technological obscurantism, but for the most part the insecurities that have impeded humanistic inquiry using and surrounding the digital was refreshingly absent. Questions about statistics, scripting, data modeling and platforms were asked of students of literature and history and they responded like old hands while questions of aesthetics and culture were asked of scientists who gave sophisticated and nuanced answers. And everyone, whether they had a degree in science or art or no degree at all was speaking of the integration of close and distant reading in the pursuit of new knowledge.
And all the while I had the chance to meet and speak to some of the smartest, friendliest folks that have ever had the misfortune to be stuck in Kissinger’s prison of low stakes. I’m sure I’ll have something a little less triumphalist and utopian to say about DH11 later on, but for now a big thanks to everyone who attended and contributed and made it such a success.