DH Conference Commentary

Université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté

Rare Book and Digital Humanities

M2 (2022–2024)

9 October 2023

Commentary on the "What is Digital Humanities?"
Conference hosted by Columbia University in 2011.

Amanda Hemmons

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All three speakers, Daniel Cohen, Fedorica Frabetti, and Dino Buzzetti, had very different methods of addressing the topic “How do you define digital humanities?” Cohen’s focus seemed to be more on the practical side of things, talking about scholarly usage and communication. Buzzetti spoke more about the advancement of technology and digital systems themselves and their history.

Frabetti’s part of the presentation was more difficult to follow along. She assumed a very advanced baseline of knowledge for the listeners. I was looking up a lot of her terminology; things like “originary technicity,” utilitarianism as a philosophy applied to technology, and also ended up looking at an article about post-postmodern humanism. Extremely complicated stuff. But as far as I can understand it, her point was that people usually describe digital humanities as something like digital technology applied to the study of humanities, but in fact technology in general is intrinsically linked to humanity itself. Therefore, we should be talking about what counts as academic knowledge and who counts as scholars. I’m assuming the implication there is to broaden the concept of scholarship and allow more people to qualify, but she doesn’t actually say that explicitly.

The Q&A at the end is interesting in that it really tells you more about the questioners than anything else. You have several people with questions that implicitly or explicitly criticize the field of DH as a whole– like “has digital technology rendered reflexive thinking obsolete?” The answer from all three speakers was, obviously, “no.” I question if that person was even listening to the talks, because Cohen says right at the beginning that charts and data visualization doesn’t replace close reading but just helps you determine your focus among a large corpus. Then you have the questioners who seem to be there to talk themselves up and like the sound of their own voice, like the gentleman from Yale.

I do think it’s funny how often the speakers don’t actually answer the question given to them. “Are you incentivising students in some way to add more to their workload” (i.e. running blogs and twitter accounts) ? Cohen’s answer being “it’s an outlet.” Which means no!

My last thought is wondering about how many of the questions were aimed at Cohen rather than Frabetti or Buzzetti. Is it because he’s more well known in the DH community, or his topic was more accessible? Or because he’s a white guy with an American accent? Things to ponder.

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