Participatory DH

In a recent essay, “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities,” Todd Presner identifies as the core Utopian idea of the Digital Humanities, “participation without condition.” For Presner this concept begins with how DH is making the walls of the academy porous through its “conceiving of scholarship in ways that foundationally involve community partners, cultural institutions, the private sector, non-profits, government agencies, and slices of the general public,” thus expanding “both the notion of scholarship and the public sphere in order to create new sites and nodes of engagement, documentation, and collaboration.” In so doing, DHers “are able to place questions of social justice and civic engagement, for example, front-and-center; they are able to revitalize the cultural record in ways that involve citizens in the academic enterprise and bring the academy into the expanded public sphere.”

Presner’s discussion of what might be called DH’s “Participatory Turn” can be reformulated for humanities scholars and teachers into a more specific and crucial question concerning how we might best reach productively beyond the walls of the literary classroom. Such a question gains added force from three relevant contexts: (1) David Marshall’s observation that the current academy is a 19^th century institution in which a 20^th century curriculum is taught to 21^st century students; (2) The fact that most humanities undergraduates don’t even know that there is such a thing as humanities research; and (3) The assertion made by Donald Brinkman of Microsoft Research that humanists don’t just need “big data,” they need “deep data.” These contexts raise at least three important questions: (1) How can humanists bring our research into the graduate and undergraduate classroom?; (2) How can we best curate and explore our datasets? and (3) How can we fruitfully engage the public, “citizen humanists,” in the work of the humanities, helping to deepen our data and the questions we ask of it?

I think these are key questions both for the future of DH and the future of the Humanities, well worth discussing at a THATCamp devoted to Leadership. They cut across many aspects of DH work, from teaching, to coding, to archives, to editing, to publishing, to licensing, and crowdsourcing.