Where Should Humanities Reside?

Why should we do "humanities at the command line"? It doesn't seem like it would be the natural place for it. The command line is a place for engineering, one might think. It's a math-y kind of thing, a computer thing.

I have long disliked the unfortunate collision of "digital" and "humanities" as a label for a sub-field. Compare "humanities computing"... at least that subordinated computing to the use of humanities, a type of computing practiced by humanists. But digital humanities sounds like a special brand of humanism, as if it is something apart. Indeed, there's a chip on the shoulder of some work in the field that is explicitly antagonistic to the traditional mode of doing things. I've always found this strange. Philology is an old discipline, classical philology even more so; yet digital methods were embraced early and have yielded interesting results throughout. Computing is, for a philologically-minded indexer and counter and lexigrapher, an efficient tool for doing what was once done by hand, an extension of the mind's labor.

Humanists belong at the command line and humanities cannot help but extend their efforts through technological means. If we define humanities in terms of art or writing or speaking -- these are all techne, all skills and crafts, often marked and defined by the sea changes of technology. Homeric oral art was a product of a technology of memory; the canon itself is a product of that techne of memory and, most likely, its interaction with written artifacts; visual arts are preserved by nature of and in spite of the technologies of their day. Performance in music and theater is the alchemy which realizes imagination and beauty from the physical and constrained, a king's palace from a wood facade, grief from the tilt of a mask, and plaintive wailing from the shrill cry of wind through a reeded pipe.

The stuff of humanities is awash with technology, conditioned, constrained, and catalyzed by the turns of technological fortune. Humanists are technologists for the longue duree.

When I used to teach a unit on Diderot and the Encyclopédie and the Enlightenment, I would have students try their hand dividing up the whole of knowledge. Before they took a look at Diderot and company's take on the world, they would play omniscient cataloger. Most fell into academic patterns, seeing the world through academic subjects of the sort found in a college course catalog: science vs. humanities vs. art, and then various subspecies of academic departments. Some ventured into encyclopedias. A few would take up the challenge to orient knowledge around themselves or with their own idiosyncratic take, towards a specific agenda. In all those categorizations, humanities seemed to them always a thing of the university. Its place was in the college catalog, looking out on products – books, writing, art, performance, movies, music – which are all in the real world. Humanities were the study of, the academic subject of, a meta-category. Even convinced that humanities has methods and distinctions, it is often a term too vague to be useful. Is everything humanities?

As method, humanities is often defined as a critical questioning. But, as many rightly point out, humanities has no exclusive claim on that. Introspection is not the possession of humanities; critical inquiry is not only a humanistic mode. It is a human mode perhaps, the ability to wonder what if not?

It would be easy to say that humanities and humanists belong at the command line because technology requires constant interrogation. it would be easy to focus on that critical capacity and that boasting line about humanities and questioning. But that's false flattery. Engineers interrogate. It's not questioning that makes things humanism.

It is not so much where humanities resides or should reside as where humanities can grow. Digital humanists are right in thinking that digital methods can serve as catalyst for humanistic inquiry. They can be a means of growth, of exposing new data from old strata, and reorienting how we look at conventional views.

That the university is not where humanities must reside, let alone thrive, is evident enough from the long history of humanities in general. The research university and its disciplines is a relatively recent phenomenon on that larger canvas. Would we have recognized humanities in the earliest departments of divinity and classics? As an ex-classicist, and a proud philologist in the old-fashioned sense, I find it hard to claim that the sum total of that educational system was humanities in any sense we recognize today. Humanities has more often than not been an applied discipline. This is true of the familiar story of Western humanities and the Renaissance, true of ancient humanitas and the deep roots of humanism, and true in different ways of non-western humanities that can and should inform our present moment.

Where should humanities reside? A better question is where humanities will grow. My bet here is that it is in the application of humanistic inquiry and in the dialogue of ideas and artifacts of the past with the urgency of the present that the work of humanities gets done.