A Response to “The Productive Unease of 21st Century Digital Scholarship”

Alyssa Arbuckle
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

While digital humanities (DH) was establishing itself as a field in the late nineties and early oughts, there was much debate over how DH was different than just H — that is, the “traditional” humanities. In “The Productive Unease of 21st Century Digital Scholarship,” Julia Flanders takes a straightforward stance on the issue: DH is not radically different from the non-digital humanities; where it diverges is in the use of tools or technologies to open up new avenues of inquiry. Flanders argues that when DH is done well, it draws unique attention to one’s object of study through technology. She deems this action a

distancing, a translation which, like any translation or transmediation, provides a view into and requires an understanding of the deep discursive structures of the original expression. (para 11)

In doing so, Flanders suggests, DH practitioners trigger a “productive unease” or else raise new questions that might not be apparent otherwise. Familiar territory; different perspective.

To illustrate her argument, Flanders reviews three areas that DH practitioners have inspired productive unease in: the importance of medium, institutional structures of scholarly communication, and the significance of representation in forming models. Regarding medium, she cites the concern of DH scholars with remediation and copies, especially vis-a-vis digital editions. Despite the section’s subheader — “Digital scholarship is uneasy about the institutional structures of scholarly communication” — Flanders focuses more on the incompatibility of professional structures at universities (e.g., faculties, departments, evaluation committees) with DH realities. This is not scholarly communication per se, as the subheader would lead one to believe, but Flanders’ point regarding the light that DH sheds on ingrained and perhaps even previously unquestioned academic systems is well taken. Finally, Flanders acknowledges the DH preoccupation with creating models of knowledge, rather than “the real thing” (para 23), and how this has reflected back onto non-digital humanities considerations of cultural materials as copies, surrogates, or models of source material.

Leaning on John Unsworth (2002), Flanders is very clear about her opinion of digital scholarship activities that do not draw attention to something new, profound, or hitherto unnoticed:

The act of publishing digital content, or making an uncritical digital facsimile of a physical artifact, does not produce this effect of translation or the resulting potential for insight. (12)

For Flanders, mere digitization is not scholarship. This is relevant to my own research inquiry insofar as it raises a significant question: in a field (or movement) as pragmatically oriented as open scholarship — which encompasses technological, policy-based, infrastructural, and cultural concerns — how can we inspire the productive unease that is representative of digital humanities and essential for “real” scholarship, as per Flanders’s argumentation? Where is the intellectual contribution of open scholarship to the larger tradition of the humanities? The practical and ethical service of open scholarship to higher education and the larger public is obvious. I reckon that the intellectual service lies in the reimagining of scholarly communication artifacts as networked, web-nascent, multimodal, and flexible. In this way, we can follow Flanders in using technology to reconsider our object of study — even when, like a set of matryoshka dolls, the object of study is research output itself, as is the case with scholarly communication.

Works cited

Flanders, Julia. 2009. “The Productive Unease of 21st Century Digital Scholarship.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3 (3): n.p. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000055/000055.html

Unsworth, John. 2002. “What is Humanities Computing, and What is Not?” In Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 4, edited by Georg Braungart, Karl Eibl and Fotis Jannidis. Paderborn: mentis Verlag. http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg02/unsworth.html

Alyssa Arbuckle

Written by

digital text, new media, & books in Vancouver & on Van Isle. Assoc. Director @ Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, interdisciplinary PhD student

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