Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field by Klein Julie Thompson

Author:Klein, Julie Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The first electronic periodical in humanities appeared in 1990 with the launch of the Journal of Post Modern Culture. By 2004, Kathleen Carlisle Fountain recalls, the number of e-journals had grown “exponentially” (47). Older journals were also introducing innovative formats. Differences remain, though. The ADHO-sponsored online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), for example, is more text-heavy than the more experimental Vectors. Launched in 2005, Vectors is a self-styled journal in “Multimodal Humanities.” It does not publish works that could appear in print, and the editors are dedicated to expanding the nature of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. Calling the journal a “test bed for interdisciplinary digital scholarship,” McPherson describes the twofold layering of interdisciplinarity in the production process. First, the content is diverse, bringing together scholars from various disciplines for theme-based issues that create a “sustained space” for experiments with multimodal scholarship by pushing beyond the limited disciplinary relationship Page 99 → of “text with picture.” Thematic focus makes it possible to “zoom out to several large questions that cut across multiple fields,” while still making close comparisons of separate understandings. Discussions exemplify the second form, a “deep interdisciplinary collaboration” that occurs in development teams.

To illustrate the second form, in producing the issue on Evidence scholars from literary studies, sociology, art, and performance co-interrogated the status of evidence in their disciplines. They were also paired with designers and programmers in a weeklong summer workshop that has been a space for rethinking the relationship of form to content. In addition, the fusion of scholarly writing with database practices involves peer evaluation and “scholar-to machine collaboration.” And, the design team has learned ways to “scaffold” Digital Humanities through new platforms and tools that can be generalized across humanities. Working in collaboration with scholars, designers developed a relational database better suited to the kinds of evidence they were exploring. The work was bottom-up, emerging from conversations about how scholarship might be reimagined in a dynamic digital vernacular. The outcome is not a predetermined tool for delivery. A middleware package, the Dynamic Backend Generator is an authoring tool and intellectual sketchpad that changes the relationship scholars have to their work and digital environments, while enabling multidisciplinary audiences to construct interfaces to serve their own needs and preferences (McPherson, “Vectors,” 210).

Monographic publishing was slower to respond. However, by 2009 Christine Borgman declared “a seismic shift toward digital publishing.” Series dedicated to Digital Humanities also emerged, including the University of Michigan Press’s Digital Humanities@digitalculturebooks, the University of Illinois Press’s Topics in Digital Humanities, Ashgate’s Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities, and Open Book Publishers’ Digital Humanities. In addition, other presses have profiles in related areas, including MIT, the University of Minnesota, Routledge, NYU, Sage, and Polity. Interdisciplinarity is not necessarily an explicit goal. However, these forums create favorable environments. Anvil Academic is a scholarly publisher of born-digital and born-again-digital research in humanities. It aims to bring editorial and institutional legitimacy to this new form of scholarship. Speaking as president of the Council for

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