Collaboration, and Consensus
Michelle Moravec
In 2013 Diane Jakacki wondered “Is There Such a Thing as Digi-tal Exceptionalism” and concluded that digiDigi-tal humanists have
“spent so long being on the outside, marginalized, trying to con-vince anyone who would listen that what we do matter and that it is meaningful scholarship; now people are paying attention.
[…] We can’t quite shake that need to justify, to foreground, to compare, to privilege.”1 Digital exceptionalism is suffused with techno-optimism around what the digital can do and with the belief that the digital represents a marked, and presumably bet-ter, break with all that came before. Paul Fyfe has described the
“hack versus yack” debate as digital humanities’ particular vari-ant on this theme.2
My inquiry focuses on the ways the rhetoric of exceptionality appears in the discourse produced by the community of digital
1 Diane Jakacki, “Is There Such a Thing as Digital Exceptionalism ..?” Blog post, 6 October 2013.
2 Paul Fyfe, “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged,” Digital Humanities Qarterly 5, no.
3 (2011).
humanities. I first began hearing what I recognized as echoes of the rhetoric of what I know as “American exceptionalism” in digital humanities discourse in 2013. “American exceptionalism is the distinct belief that the United States is unique, if not su-perior, when compared to other countries.”3 Replace “countries”
with disciplines and this seemed a pretty apt description of how digital humanities often presented itself. As Michael J. Kram-er mused in 2013, “the digital is supposed to “transform” […]
through the pastoral dream of technological solutions to social and political problems (hello Leo Marx?).”4 Like Kramer, I was reminded of those men who taught at or went to college in Bos-ton and of their wilderness and hills, discovery and conquest, salvation and civilization (table 1).
While in the wake of 9/11, the term American exceptionalism gained political currency as a sort of short hand for jingoistic foreign policy, its older association within academia is with a particular strand of American studies. That scholarly narrative has been criticized for “produc[ing] an image of U.S. national unity in which the significance of gender, class, race, and ethnic differences was massively downgraded,” a fate I fear digital hu-manities may replicate.5 As an editor of a 2012 digital
humani-3 Jason A. Edwards and David Weiss, eds., The Rhetoric of American Excep-tionalism: Critical Essays (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 1.
4 Michael J. Kramer, “Reviewing Lauren Frederica Klein’s Review, ‘American Studies after the Internet,’” Digital American Studies, 17 January 2013.
5 Donald E. Pease, “Exceptionalism,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 108–11 (New York: NYU Press, 2007).
Exceptionalism in Digital Humanities
ties anthology noted, criticisms of digital humanities include,
“a lack of attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexual-ity; a preference for research-driven projects over pedagogical ones; an absence of political commitment; an inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners.”6 Th ese problems — identity, research v. pedagogy, disengagement, and diversity — off er ways to operationalize the topics I want to explore computationally. I build here on many analyses that come before me of the commu-nity known as digital humanities, careful counts of citations, of content, of grant recipients, of conference participants, listserv subscribers. I also place myself in the tradition of #transform-DH, #DHPoco, Hybrid Pedagogy, FemTechNet, and the many individual writers who have called attention to similar concerns.
Methodology
Th e nexus of identity and power in digital humanities is a place fraught with diffi culty and has already resulted in more than a few kerfuffl es. Because of that, my approach here is to turn digital humanities methods on the fi eld itself, and rather than exploring scholarly literature about digital humanities to focus on various expressions of digital humanities by many diff erent people.
6 Matthew K. Gold, “Th e Digital Humanities Moment,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 2012).
Fig. 1
Th ree bodies of texts are used to represent various levels of community in digital humanities. Th e Digital Manifesto Archive, compiled by Matt Applegate along with Graham Higgins and Yu Yin (Izzy), represents the most visionary aspect of digital hu-manities (fi g. 1).7 Using the “collections” created by the site’s au-thors, I created several corpora.8 Th e fi rst contains fourteen dig-ital humanities manifestos. For comparison, I used twenty-two manifestos categorized as digital composition and then twelve manifestos under the heading “digital feminisms.” Defi nitions off ered by participants in the annual Day of Digital Humanities, for the years 2009–2014, excluding 2013, off ered both a broader base of authors, as well as more prosaic eff orts to delineate digi-tal humanities (fi g. 2).9 Finally, from its inception in March of 2009 through the end of 2012, the Twitter hashtag
#digitalhu-7 I’m grateful to Sharon Leon for alerting me to this excellent site. See The Digital Manifesto Archive homepage at http://digitalmanifesto.omeka.net/.
8 My corpora are based on the content of the site as of 16 April 2015. A list of these manifestos appears as Appendix 1. Th e site is currently in a pro-cess of revitalization and new content is once again being uploaded. Circa 2011–2012 four successive individually authored manifestos appear. In 2013 collaborative authorship resumes.
9 I am grateful to Jason Heppler for compiling these and making them avail-able. He created a website that rotates through the defi nitions. It contains a link to his github repository. Th e 2013 defi nitions are on the web but in a way resistant to easy scraping. In keeping with my use of others’ datasets as much as possible I did not attempt to pull them myself. See What Is Digital Humanities?, http://whatisdigitalhumanities.com/.
Fig. 2
Exceptionalism in Digital Humanities
manities represents many voices in conversation as its commu-nity was developed on that platform (fi g. 3).10
Data analysis was performed using three soft ware packages.
Wmatrix, created by Paul Ryerson, is a “tool for corpus analysis and comparison,” that produces a semantic analysis at the word level.11 Antconc, written by Laurence Anthony, is a concordanc-ing soft ware that provides detailed information about patterns of word occurrences in a body of texts, such as n-grams as well as collocations.12 Finally, Sci2 (Science of Science 2), off ered ways to both process data and visualize it.13
My guiding principles for the data analysis presented in this paper are as follows:
10 Because Twitter has entered into third party agreements to sell access to the historical archive of tweets, scraping it is quite diffi cult. Aft er 2012 the vol-ume of tweets increased so much that I gave up. I also felt that since Twitter represents the most individual and perhaps least carefully craft ed expres-sions of digital humanities community that a temporal buff er was neces-sary. I am reasonably confi dent I’ve grabbed the vast majority of tweets for each of the years.
11 “Wmatrix Corpus Analysis and Comparison Tool,” Lancaster University:
University Center for Computer Corpus Research on Language, http://ucrel.
lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/.
12 “Soft ware,” Laurence Anthony, http://www.laurenceanthony.net/soft ware.
html.
13 Information can be found at the Sci2 website: https://sci2.cns.iu.edu/user/
index.php.
Fig. 3
1. I have relied on machine reading whenever possible before shifting to user-driven inquiries.
2. I have utilized datasets from other scholars before creating my own.
3. I have, following a methodology I first encountered in Clare Hemmings’s excellent Why Stories Matter, left all quotations from my corpora unattributed.14
4. I have also gone to various lengths to anonymize quotations from tweets and the Day of Digital Humanities definitions.15 Digital Humanities as community
At its most utopian, digital humanities appears as a community akin to those groups in American history that have set them-selves apart because of their unique values, much as the Puri-tans did. Note, while this resonates through my own nationalist rhetoric of American exceptionalism, this is not a geographic divide. Utopian leanings appear in a 2010 document issued at ThatCamp Paris: “We, professionals of the digital humanities, are building a community of practice that is solidary, open, wel-coming and freely accessible.”16 The spirit of this manifesto is
14 Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Since I have chosen to write about digital humanities community without attribution to the authors in my corpora, I decided not to provide extensive footnotes to secondary lit-eratures in DH as that would defeat my purpose of moving away from a focus on individuals to the community as a whole.
15 Manifestos are by their very nature aimed at a public, and those collected in The Digital Manifesto Archive are ones that were explicitly circulated online.
While Day of Digital Humanities participants were certainly aware that the definitions they submitted in the process of completing an online sign-up form would be made public, I considered that they might be less carefully crafted than the texts of a manifesto and therefore by used very brief quotes and employed judicious use of ellipses to confound online searches. Tweets, also completely searchable due to the recent agreement between Twitter and Google to feed them directly into the top of the search engine’s results, do not appear as direct quotes at all beyond the pervasive patterns identified using the previously described software.
16 “Manifesto for the Digital Humanities,” THATCamp Paris.
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just one of many that expresses a commitment to creating an intentional community predicated on shared values that are at least implicitly distinctive and new.
Digital humanities manifestos refl ect the importance of community in higher semantic content, as compared to digi-tal composition and digidigi-tal feminisms manifestos, under tags such as “belonging to a group” (through words like community, public, institutions, society, and collective).17 Th e central values of this community are participating (expressed as variations on the word collaboration) and helping (which includes help, encour-age, support, and promote). One manifesto succinctly combines all three concepts in the exhortation to “[e]ncourage personal expression, collaboration, and community.”
Declarations of digital humanities as a community are found not only in the visionary manifestos, but also in the defi nitions
17 Italics denote words that are results from computational analysis. Words in quotations are quotes from sources under analysis.
Fig. 4. Burst analysis of Day of DH Defi nitions 2009–2012.
offered by Day of Digital Humanities (Day of DH) participants (fig. 4). Burst analysis, which identifies sudden increases in the frequency of words, shows commun bursting in 2009 definitions, the first year of the annual event, while words that indicate col-laboration burst in subsequent years, such as help (2009–2011) and particip (2011–2012). Commun is a tokenized version of both “community” as well as “communication,” which fits nice-ly with the idea of digital humanities as a prosenice-lytizing com-munity. Digital humanities is both “a burgeoning community”
but also a “social utopia.” It is also described as a community of communicators, as in “open communication collaboration and expression.” Few definitions point to a specific audience for this communication or give such a detailed a description of partici-pants as this one: Digital humanities is “the transformation of […] communication” not only by “academics [and] students”
but also by “other experts” via “communication technologies”
that amplify the “individual’s power” to both “communicate”
and to “create new [public] spaces.”
While character count restrictions tend to limit the elo-quence and expansiveness of tweets, Twitter offers an impor-tant arena for analyzing the formation of digital humanities as a community. Twitter is often pointed to as the platform where the digital humanities community coalesced: “Twitter has played an important and occasionally transformative role at every academic gathering I have attended since early 2008” by among other ways, allowing “key, already well-networked com-munity members to participate” virtually.18 Although the word community appears relatively infrequently in tweets, compar-ing unique bigrams and trigrams between the years of (March 2009 to December 2012), #digitalhumanities tweets provides evidence of how community formed and functioned.
18 Bethany Nowviskie, “Uninvited Guests: Twitter at Invitation-Only Events,”
in Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities, eds. Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, 124–31 (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2013).
Exceptionalism in Digital Humanities
In 2009, Twitter functioned primarily as a networking plat-form, as evidenced in ways of connecting people, such as “just added,” via “twitter directory” or “wefollow,” and the fi rst men-tion of HASTAC, as well as a handful of references to face-to-face connections made at “the MLA” or “digitalhumanities thatcamp.”
By 2010, Twitter began to evolve into a platform for scholarly communication, such as blogs (“blog post,” “post on” “digital humanities blog”) perhaps as a way of disseminating “digital scholarship” or highlighting a “digital humanities project” or
“digital humanities research.” Community institution build-ing is also evident both through centers in the US such as the Humanities Lab (“at humlab” “digitalhumanities humlab”) and internationally “thatcamp Paris” and “thatcamp Switzerland,”
but also fi elds like education and museums “edtech digitalhu-manities” and “digitalhumanities musetech.” Finally, Twitter also becomes a conversational platform between individual par-ticipants in the community using the hashtag. Terms of direct address become more frequent, such as “do you” and “for you,”
as do acknowledgements of others “thank you” and “thanks to.”
By 2012, references to external social media networking plat-forms have all but disappeared (who even remembers wefollow or Klout?), as Twitter has taken on that function, even as digital Fig. 5. Co-occuring hashtags #digitalhumanities.
humanities professionalizes, as evidenced by trigrams, such as
“journal of digital humanities,” and “digital humanities book.”
Looking at hashtags that co-occur with #digitalhumanities provides insights into which groups or organizations were im-portant in the early days of community formation (fig. 5). Three that pop beginning in 2011 relate to #museums, which appears in 2009, then moving into 2010 tweets about the 2011 MCN con-ference, which predates digital humanities but offered an early important venue, and the related hashtag #musetech. All three of these hashtags continue in 2012, but are smaller than a fourth hashtag (#artstech) that largely got traction due to its use by Neil Stimler, a museum professional at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, who has been one of the major voices in the intersection of digital humanities and museology.
These co-occuring hashtags highlight aspects of digital hu-manities community formation earlier that are perhaps less known now. As one scholar recently lamented “No one imag-ined digital humanities — as a constructed field of practice–
centered” outside academic institutions, despite the precedent of fields like museum technology.19 The same might be said of digital humanities projects. A darker band in the dispersion of communit* tweets, indicating points of greater density, turns out to align with references and retweets of an October 2011 blog post “is creating community a primary function of the digital humanities?” from Editing Modernism in Canada, a research group aimed to foster collaboration, offers training in “experi-ential-learning pedagogies,” and develops relationships beyond institutions of higher education with “public libraries, and non-profit cultural organizations (book clubs, reading groups, read-ing series, literary festivals).”20 EMiC played multiple roles, not only producing digital scholarship, but also disseminating it to the public, while at the same time shaping the conversation
19 Sheila Brennan, “DH Centered in Museums?” Lot 49, 16 March 2015.
20 Reilly Yeo, “Is Creating Community a Primary Function of the Digital Hu-manities?” Editing Modernism in Canada, 18 October 2011, and “About Us,”
Editing Modernism in Canada, 3 May 2010.
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around how that scholarship was produced and what it meant to be involved in digital humanities.
Digital Humanities as collaborative
Increasingly, what digital humanities meant was collaboration.
What we do, we do together. “Collaboration is widely considered to be both synonymous with and essential to digital humanities”
write one pair of researchers.21 Collocates of collabor* in tweets reveal that the ideal is invoked in all parts of the scholarship cycle, including how we develop a “project,” conduct “research”
and in reference to “publishing” the results. Despite analyses that question how truly collaborative digital humanities is, such as Julianne Nyhan and Oliver Duke-Williams’ analysis of co-authorship as one marker of collaboration, the most recent day of digital humanities definitions (2014) show a statistically sig-nificant increase in collab*: “DH is collaborative” and relies on a
“spirit of collaboration.”
However, it is in the manifesto corpus that perhaps, most predictably, the greatest enthusiasm is expressed (and in the most exuberant prose) for collaboration. Although one mani-festo cautions, “the Internet didn’t invent collaboration or solve all the problems,” concordancing software reveals an overall positive attitude towards what another manifesto describes as the “collaborative turn.” Of thirty-four lines containing col-lab*, about 25% are preceded by positive verbs. The optimistic embrace of collaboration is captured in one manifesto, which cites it as a marker of the revolutionary nature of digital hu-manities. “The digital humanities revolution is about integra-tion: the building of bigger pictures out of the tesserae of expert knowledge. It is not about the emergence of a new general cul-ture, Renaissance humanism/humanities, or universal literacy, but on the contrary, promotes collaboration across domains of
21 Julianne Nyhan and Oliver Duke-Williams, “Is Digital Humanities a Col-laborative Discipline? Joint-Authorship Publication Patterns Clash with Defining Narrative,” Impact of Social Sciences, 10 September 2014.
expertise.”22 References to “bigger pictures” and “digital human-ities revolution” all suggest that something new or distinctive is afoot in doing things digitally.
While there has been some pushback on digital humanities as “essentially diff erent” or “diff erent than” other traditional ways of doing scholarship, there are still plenty of people defi n-ing digital humanities by its diff erences from other academic endeavors, especially in terms of its collaborative aspects. In digital humanities defi nitions, collabor* co-occurs about 15% of the time with this sense of “new” or “diff erent” or as part of a
“shift ” or a “trend,” indicating some sort of transition. Further-more, “new” shows a burst in the defi nitions from 2014 indicat-ing that the idea of digital humanities as some sort of innovative thing is not fading.
Within academia, collaborative-produced knowledge is nothing new, as scientists and social scientists have long relied on this approach, and even in the humanities we have these his-tories. However, for most tenure track folks in the humanities disciplines at the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, collaboration appears innovative and that novelty is oft en emphasized. Th is enthusiasm for digital humanities as a novel seems to have also led to a sort of amnesiac disregard for the long history of col-laboration that has occurred in museums, libraries and archives,
22 “A Digital Humanities Manifesto,” ex.pecul.ando (blog), 6 January 2009.
Fig. 6. Locations in #digitalhumanities tweets 2009–2012.
Exceptionalism in Digital Humanities
as well as other scholarly endeavors that predate a self-identifi ed digital humanities community, which lead me to try to deter-mine who precisely is involved in collaboration? Looking at roles, locations, and actions provides ways to relate with whom, where, and why we say we collaborate.23
Not surprisingly, given the persistently recurring hashtags of #museums and #archives in #digitalhumanities tweets, these
Not surprisingly, given the persistently recurring hashtags of #museums and #archives in #digitalhumanities tweets, these