Digital Arts & Humanities - Scholarly Reflections - James O'Sullivan

eminent critic Stanley Fish. Fish mocked the claims of digital
humanities enthusiasts that they are creating a more
interdisciplinary, open and participative form of humanities
scholarship. Fish is suspicious of what he sees as an insurgent
humanities, ‘a left agenda (although the digital has no inherent
political valence) that self-identifies with civil liberties, the
elimination of boundaries, a strong First Amendment, the
weakening or end of copyright and the Facebook/You Tube
revolutions that have swept across the Arab World’. Fish
regards the suggestion that digital media will promote forms of
scholarship which are more provisional, tentative and openended
as inimical to the whole critical enterprise. He sought to
demonstrate how the digital humanities promotes vacuous
statistical approaches to the study of literature by providing his
own specious and misleading statistical analysis of a poem by
Milton.
Attention of this kind from such a major intellectual figure as
Stanley Fish is certainly evidence that the digital humanities
has carved out for itself a position for itself in the academic
landscape. But it is perhaps disappointing that there was no
extended or convincing reaction to Fish’s criticisms from
practitioners of the digital humanities. Is there an intellectual
framework to the Digital Humanities which goes beyond
motherhood-and-apple pie statements about interdisciplinarity,
the need for greater openness in scholarship and the
importance of cultivating new audiences? Does working in a
digital environment give us genuinely new insights into our
cultural heritage? One might look for answers to these
questions in the recent publication edited by Matthew Gold,
Debates in the Digital Humanities, which was apparently to a
large extent prompted by the discussions around the
appearance of digital humanities sessions at MLA. The
resulting volume, however, is sadly one of the worst examples
of the sort of American academic parochialism which the
politics of an institution such as MLA can generate. Its American
contributors are completely preoccupied with the place of the
digital humanities in American academic career structures, and
appear to have little real interest in the study of the humanities
or in wider scholarship.
Fish observes that, in discussions of the digital humanities, the
significance of the humanities side of the equation is little
discussed. Nobody can deny that the use of digital tools has
transformed the way in which humanities scholarship is done,
but will these tools change the intellectual character of the
humanities – change the way we think about literature, history
or the world? That is the question at the heart of the digital
humanities. Attempts to theorise the use of computing in the
humanities, such as the fundamental discussion by my
colleague at King’s College London, Willard McCarty, have
focussed on the significance of tools, and have argued that at
the heart of the development of such digital tools is an
elaborate modeling and integration of the intellectual methods
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