Alternate Histories of the Digital Humanities: A Short Paper Panel Proposal

Recent work in the digital humanities has moved away describing the digital humanities as a “big tent,” to quote William Pannapacker’s famous 2011 post. Taking inspiration instead from the multiple histories and temporalities of media archaeology, such research emphasizes the local contexts where technological and institutional history take place. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s identification of the digital humanities in 2014 as a “discursive construction” that ignores the “actually existing projects” of the field set the stage for scholars to rethink how the digital humanities conceptualizes its work and its history (“What Is” 48). More recently, in the introduction to Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein use the scholarship of Rosalind Krauss who, in 1979, described art history as emerging as “only one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities.” Whereas Krauss saw this as a failure of art history, Gold and Klein celebrate the multiplicity of what Patrik Svensson calls a digital humanities that is less a tent and more a disaggregated “trading zone” of various interests and disciplines. Instead of a transcendent, disciplinary category, the digital humanities emerges as an imminent set of assemblages and rhizomatic localities — converging in some places, diverging in others. This panel of short papers intervenes in the discussion of an imminent digital humanities by describing several actual alternate histories of the field. All of the thinkers for this proposed panel have sketched variations on digital humanities history in the past. Steven Jones begins his book on Roberto Busa, for example, with an extended discussion of the “multiple potential continuities” existing beside the mythological figure as providing a possibility for “better historical understanding” (16). While Amy Earhart’s work historicizes digital literary studies in America through the work of the new historicism, Tara McPherson sees it in the screen cultures of media studies, Roger Whitson points to the publics outside academia invested in steampunk and other nineteenth-century sources, and Padmini Ray Murray explores the repurposing practice of jugaad in India. Such alternate histories point not to a denigration of the meaning of the digital humanities as a disciplinary field, but rather describe — as Lori Emerson says about media archaeology — each strand as “one possibility generated out of a heterogeneous past.” Each of the presenters will spend 10 minutes discussing how DH can be historicized using various disciplinary, national, and outer-institutional contexts.