Andy Guess of Inside Higher Ed uses the announcement of the National Endowment of the Humanities’ new Office of Digital Humanities to explore the rise of digital humanities in general—the challenges it faces but also the possibilities it brings to academia. A great summary of the state of our field.

What began as a plucky “initiative” has now become a permanent “office.” The National Endowment for the Humanities will announce in a few hours that their Digital Humanities Initiative has now been given a full home, in recognition of how important digital technology and media are for the future of the humanities. The DHI has become the Office of Digital Humanities, with a new website and a new RSS feed for news. From the ODH welcome message:

The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) is an office within the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Our primary mission is to help coordinate the NEH’s efforts in the area of digital scholarship. As in the sciences, digital technology has changed the way scholars perform their work. It allows new questions to be raised and has radically changed the ways in which materials can be searched, mined, displayed, taught, and analyzed. Technology has also had an enormous impact on how scholarly materials are preserved and accessed, which brings with it many challenging issues related to sustainability, copyright, and authenticity. The ODH works not only with NEH staff and members of the scholarly community, but also facilitates conversations with other funding bodies both in the United States and abroad so that we can work towards meeting these challenges.

Congrats to the NEH for this move forward.

In addition to rising job opportunities, the rise of digital humanities was felt at the annual meetings of professional humanities organizations this winter. The Association for Computers and the Humanities compiled a list of the many sessions with digital humanities talks at the December 2007 Modern Language Association convention; at the American Philosophical Association‘s annual meeting, the APA Committee on Philosophy and Computers coordinated special sessions on “The Ethics of Emerging Technologies” and “Technology in Support of Philosophy Research” (covered in Inside Higher Ed); and the American Historical Association had a number of events at its annual meeting ranging from teaching with new media, to digital archives, to “Tech Tools for Historians” (where yours truly spoke about Zotero to a large and thankfully quite excited crowd). Once again, a nice upward trend.

For those who missed it, between October 12 and 27, 2007, there was a very thoughtful and insightful online discussion of how the publication of scholarship is changing—or trying to change—in the digital age. Participating in the discussion were Ed Felton, David Robinson, Paul DiMaggio, and Andrew Appel from Princeton University (the symposium was hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton), Ira Fuchs of the Mellon Foundation, Peter Suber of the indispensable Open Access News blog (and philosophy professor at Earlham College), Stan Katz, the President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, and Laura Brown of Ithaka (and formerly the President of Oxford University Press USA).

The symposium is really worth reading from start to finish. (Alas, one of the drawbacks of hosting a symposium on a blog is that it keeps everything in reverse chronological order; it would be great if CITP could flip the posts now that the discussion has ended.) But for those of us in the humanities the most relevant point is that we are going to have a much harder transition to an online model of scholarship than in the sciences. The main reason for this is that for us the highest form of scholarship is the book, whereas in the sciences it is the article, which is far more easily put online, posted in various forms (including as pre- and e-prints), and networked to other articles (through, e.g., citation analysis). In addition, we’re simply not as technologically savvy. As Paul DiMaggio points out, “every computer scientist who received his or her Ph.D. in computer science after 1980 or so has a website” (on which they can post their scholarly production), whereas the number is about 40% for political scientists and I’m sure far less for historians and literature professors.

I’m planning a long post in this space on the possible ways for humanities professors to move from print to open online scholarship; this discussion is great food for thought.

About halfway through the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science last week, the always witty and insightful Martin Mueller humorously interjected: “I will go away from this conference with the knowledge that intelligence analysts and literary scholars are exactly the same.” As the chuckles from the audience died down, the core truth of the joke settled in—for those interested in advancing the still-nascent field of the digital humanities, are academic researchers indeed becoming clones of intelligence analysts by picking up the latter’s digital tools? What exactly is the difference between an intelligence analyst and a scholar who is scanning, sorting, and aggregating information from massive electronic corpora?

Mueller’s remark prods those of us exploring the frontiers of the digital humanities to do a better job describing how our pursuit differs from other fields making use of similar computational means. A good start would be to highlight that while the intelligence analyst sifts through mountains of data looking for patterns, anomalies, and connections that might be (in the euphemistic argot of the military) “actionable” (when policy makers piece together bits of intelligence and decide to take action), the digital humanities scholar should be looking for patterns, anomalies, and connections that strengthen or weaken existing theories in their field, or produce new theories. In other words, we not only uncover evidence, but come to overarching conclusions and make value judgments; we are at once the FBI, the district attorney, the judge, and the jury. (Perhaps the “National Intelligence Estimates” that are the highest form of synthesis in the intelligence community come closest to what academics do.)

The gentle criticism I gave to the Chicago audience at the end of the colloquium was that too many presentations seemed one (important) piece away from completing this interpretive whole. Through extraordinary guile, a series of panelists showed how digital methods can determine the gender of Shakespeare’s interlocutors, show more clearly the repetition of key phrases in Gertrude Stein’s prose, or more clearly map the ideology and interactions of FDR’s advisors during and after Pearl Harbor. But of course the real questions that need to be answered—answers that will make other humanities scholars stand up and take notice of digital methods—are, of course, how the identification of gender reshapes (or reinforces) our views of Shakespeare’s plays, how the use of repetition changes our perspectives on Gertrude Stein’s writings, or how a better understanding of presidential advisors alters our historical narrative of America’s entry into the second World War.

In Chicago, I tried to give this critical, final moment of insight reached through digital means a name—the “John Snow moment”—in honor of the Victorian pharmacist who discovered the cause of cholera by using a novel research tool unfamiliar to traditional medical science. Rather than looking at symptoms or other patient information on a case-by-case basis as a cholera outbreak killed and sickened hundreds of people in London in 1854, Snow instead mapped all incidences of the disease by the street addresses of the patients, thus quickly discovering that the cases clustered around a Soho water pump. The city council removed the water pump’s handle, quickly curtailing the disease and inaugurating a new era of epidemiology. Snow proved that cholera was a waterborne disease. Now that’s actionable intelligence.

What can digital scholars do to reach this level of insight? A key first step, reinforced by my experience in Chicago, is that academics interested in the power of computational methods must work to forge tools that satisfy their interpretive needs rather than simply accepting the tools that are currently available from other domains of knowledge, like intelligence. Ostensibly the Chicago Colloquium was about bringing together computer scientists and humanities scholars to see how we might learn from each other and enable new forms of research in an age of millions of digitized books. But as I noted in my remarks on the closing panel, too often this interaction seemed like a one-way street, with humanities scholars applying existing computer science tools rather than engaging the computer scientists (or programming themselves) to create new tools that would be better suited to their own needs. Hopefully such new tools will lead to more John Snow moments in the humanities in the near future.