A Digital Insurgency? Mapping the Transformation Continuum
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- February 26, 2019
- Creator
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Kincaid, Jessica Averill
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Comparative Literature
- Abstract
- In order to evaluate the digital humanities’ effects on the traditional academy, we must recognize the dichotomies and nuances involved in both the rhetoric of digital humanists, and the effects of digital methods within an academic context. The question, then, is not one of overarching success or failure, but of examining the field in terms of a transformation continuum. Certainly aspects of digital humanities have shaped the literary experience in innovative ways that challenge traditional academic values; however, these methods and tools often lend themselves to a simple amplification of traditional humanities pursuits that largely undermine the more transformative rhetoric of the digital humanities. In fact, imagining such a continuum reveals a more complex—and accurate—picture of the academy and the digital humanities. When we separate digital effects from the digital humanities’ utopian rhetoric, we discover the nuances that render a study of the field as a whole meaningful. Upon first glance, aspects of the digital humanities like geospatial representations of texts, data mining, open peer review, and changing views of scholarship may appear revolutionary, but a closer look often reveals barriers to transformation. This contrasting framework of rhetoric and practice offers a critical look at individual aspects of the digital humanities and their place on the transformation continuum. Beginning with micro-level digital tools present in university classrooms—namely geospatial data and text mining—and progressing towards the overarching practices that characterize academia such as publishing tactics and definitions of scholarship, we may more precisely contextualize digital humanities’ revolutionary potential. The emerging field’s purpose, then, becomes one of reconciling the digital age with serious humanistic inquiry in a way that facilitates a meaningful encounter between scholars, scholarly materials, and the scholarly environment within which they interact. These intersecting forces may render the digital humanities difficult to define—possessing unique qualities that harbor the potential to reform traditional structures, but oftentimes reinstantiating familiar values and practices—which renders the notion of a continuum so valuable. Observing the often conflicting relationship between digital humanists’ idealistic rhetoric and the practical effects of digital tools and methods serves as a means of materializing this transformation continuum in an effort to better understand the digital humanities’ role in the literary process and academia as a whole.
- Date of publication
- summer 2013
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- Funding: None
- Advisor
- Anderson, Daniel
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Honors level
- Highest Honors
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Extent
- 50 p.
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