# 118: “Making” Digital Humanities
Story behind the Passage
Sometimes it is hard to believe what life does to you. You think, you are lost, but then you realize that everything you have been doing makes complete sense. You have just been using different names for what you have been doing than the names you thought other people use for what they are doing. Is this complicated? Sure, it sounds like it but the most important thing is that, as soon as you realize the complexity, it already dissolves. You start seeing that what you are doing actually has a name that you heard of before but never quite paid attention to — at least not that closely.
In my case, this ‘name’ is Digital Humanities (DH). Of course, as a humanities researcher, I heard about it when it emerged. But then I quickly stopped paying attention to it because to me, it did not seem digital enough at the time. I mean, yes, people started digitalizing documents (something that German bureaucratic institutions are still planning to do nowadays!) and they started talking about digital culture. Fine. That was alright. I had the feeling that new things were happening and that people would be joining the movement who had a digital mindset. This was around 2016. But that was it. I did not see, except for computer linguistics, that digital technology building was actually part of it; that people were really applying code like I saw my colleagues in physics do it, for example.
Well, people in the humanities are still not physicists, of course. But many things seem to have happened in the past two years or so which I did not really pay attention to — at least not in the academic sense. In practice, I have been doing ‘DH’ every day. Working and writing as a humanist in the startup environment is pretty much digital humanism, right? Still, I did not think about starting to code myself for a long time. More importantly, however, I never thought of DH while being surrounded by digital practitioners. Only recently did I realize that I have been doing what other people are writing about. This is why I was the chapter “Making Digital Humanities” in Svensson’s book particularly caught my eye.
My Learnings
“Making happens on many levels at the same time, and the digital humanities needs to convincingly address these multiple levels.” When I started writing some stories about women entrepreneurs, I first called them “Maker Women.” Only later did I switch to “Women Entrepreneurs” as the title. Seeing Svensson’s nuanced and emphatic use of “making” now reminded me of this. And the way he addresses the issue is exactly how I meant it. Making involves hands-on practice. This, unfortunately, is something that is hard to find — especially in the humanities.
But it might be changing.
When I wrote my last book about the bridge building between the humanities and business (studies), I did pay attention to the potential of the digital humanities that were just emerging but I did not have their transformative potential on the radar (yet). Actually, to a large extent, they are achieving what I wanted business studies to achieve as an interdisciplinary innovation impulse. But, of course, startups are a combination of the three: digital, humanistic (i.e., social aim), business. So, there is still room for writing about all this, I guess, because people might not be that far yet (it has always been my problem that I am too fast but I think I am too slow with my thinking… in either case, it is hard for people to follow).
What I am trying to say is that exactly this impact of the digital humanities on “multiple levels” is really great. As Svensson is writing in the subsequent passages: you cannot separate the institutional and motivational aspects from research in the digital humanities itself. And the great thing that now seems to be happening increasingly is that people are “MAKING” DH, i.e., they are not just talking about digital tools, they are employing them. This is exciting, it is terrific, because that definitely triggers a cultural change that cannot be reversed. Remember:
“Software is eating the world” — Marc Andreessen
With world, I do think software is kind of eating cultures around the world — not by making them disappear but by transforming them (well, no more human digestion wordplay here…). You can argue about this but I strongly believe that the cycle of ‘culture produces innovation which then produces innovative technology which then produces a respective culture’ is terrific. I had never thought about it that way. Even though culture and technology oscillate, at a given point in time, like right now in Germany, it is technology that now has the upper hand because digitalization has picked up speed and culture will follow. At least, in organizations you can witness this more clearly because organizations are still more easy to study as singular entities than national cultures.
So, making DH is actually something that sounds really exciting because it will, indeed, change the entire university system. And change is something that this system desperately needs. After all, it was the lack of change that made me lose my belief in the humanities. Sure, ‘never say there is no change,’ you might interfere now. True. Still, some people long for change more than others, right? I just did not see that many people around me who thought and acted like me. But it is also true that I did not look closely enough in the DH sub-culture, if it already existed. I do hope that this is indeed changing very right now. If there are more hackers among the humanities folks now who are actually MAKING things — i.e., software, the chain reaction of change has been triggered already. There is no way back. As soon as people get to touch and feel what digital products are all about — they will value them.
Yes, this will take more time.
But it is happening.
Let us MAKE it work together to implant innovation cells into humanities departments and the university at large.
Reflection Questions
1) How do you think about the hen-and-egg-image of ‘culture driving technology and/or technology driving cultural change’?
2) Do you think anybody who does not use technology can really understand the cultural and thus somehow emotional and invisible aspects of tech?
3) What is a small problem in your daily life that you suspect, software might be able to fix?