digital humanities and digital media

Introduction 15
terms of anthropology and cultural studies, media literacy is not
inclined to the generation of frictionless new media usage, but
is determined to explore which cultural values and social norms
new media create or negate and how we, as a society, should
understand and value this. Media literacy in this sense, is, for
example, not only concerned with how to read a search engine’s
ranking list but also with how the retrieval of information based
on the use of a search engine changes the way we perceive and
value knowledge.
The urge to develop reflective media literacy rather than
just vocational knowhow raises the question about the appropriate
institutional frameworks within which such literacy is
to be offered. Is Digital Humanities – the new ‘big thing’ in the
Humanities at large – be the best place? The qualified compound
phrase “sounds like what one unacquainted with the whole issue
might think it is: humanistic inquiry that in some way relates
to the digital.” 5 For people acquainted with the ongoing debate
(and with grammar), digital humanities is first and foremost
what the adjective-plus-noun combination suggests: ‘a project of
employing the computer to facilitate humanistic research,’ as Jay
David Bolter, an early representative of Digital Media Studies,
puts it, ‘work that had been done previously by hand.’ Digital
Humanities is, so far, computer-supported humanities rather
than humanities discussing the cultural impact of digital media.
Some academics even fear Digital Humanities may be a kind of
Trojan horse, ultimately diverting our attention not only from
critical philosophical engagement but also from engaging with
digital media itself. 6 Others consider, for similar reasons, digital
humanists the ‘golden retrievers of the academy’: they never
get into dogfights because they hardly ever develop theories that
anyone could dispute. 7
To become a breed of this kind in the academic kennel scholars
and commentators have to shift their interest ‘away from
thinking big thoughts to forging new tools, methods, materials,
techniques …’ 8 In this sense, Johanna Drucker proposes
an interesting, rigorous distinction of responsibilities: ‘Digital
Humanities is the cook in the kitchen and [...] Digital Media