As Study or as Paradigm? Humanities and the Uptake of Emerging Technologies

This paper takes a broad perspective on the disciplinary formations represented by digital humanities and new media within the academic humanities. In doing this analysis, I show that the gap between digital humanities and new media, the subject of this panel, is the result of incompatible institutional functions. I consider today digital humanities and new media studies as two strategies of containment by which the academic humanities incorporates but also ignores new ideas, which I call the paradigm and the study. These two strategies are the ways in which the disciplines of the humanities absorb challenges to core methodologies from ideas from outside this core. In the first of these strategies, the paradigm, a new methodology or series of questions to be asked of a textual artifact is generated in the humanities, generally by the importation of some foreign methodological framework. This paradigmatic model, I suggest, is at work in the formation of digital humanities as a field of academic inquiry but is also what drove the creation of Theory and other hermeneutic forms of criticism in years past. The second model of new disciplinary forms is what I call study. In this model, new classes of textual artifacts–whether they be from a specific ethnic group, unified by a common subject matter, or emerging from a specific historical period–are found to fall under the purview of the academic humanities and can be studied using a variety of methodologies. In this paper, I suggest that the field of new media is one such example