I mention Twitter so prominently here because it was through tweets that I first heard about associations like HASTAC and conferences such as THATCamp.  Though I did my doctoral work at Berkeley, in the tech-heavy Bay Area, I was not in an English or History department — the two disciplines that strike me as being most “plugged in” (no pun intended) to the DH discussion. I was in a language department, doing my best to discern how best to incorporate DH into my language/literature classroom beyond the basic employment of multimedia in my teaching.  I was also trying to figure out  an answer to the question: how does one define “digital humanities”?  What on earth does it mean to be a “digital humanist”?  Despite eavesdropping via Twitter, and reading DH blogs, as well as poking around on HASTAC, a simple answer to these two questions eluded me.

My hope was, when I heard about THATCamp KS, that I would finally have an answer to these questions, and that in between Boot Camp workshops on Thursday and the Unconference on Friday, I would, by late Friday afternoon, have a satisfactory, pat definition for exactly what elements constitute the digital humanities.

By late Friday afternoon, what I had was not a definition — I still can’t really define with total precision what DH is.  But I can speak to what DH does, which is break down the artificial, antiquated barriers between disciplines in the hopes of reinvigorating both scholarship and teaching (big-picture education) through the integration of new technologies, and the simple (yet difficult) recognition that at some point in the last 15 years, our world experienced a fundamental paradigm shift.  We are hyperconnected to each other now, in ways unimaginable not so very long ago, through technology.  The digital humanities, in my mind, are here to push a simple agenda: the world has changed, our students have grown up with an ubiquitous technological presence that has shifted their perception and shaped their needs, and we, as educators must actively respond to this new generation’s intellectual physiognomy and landscape with our own innovative practices.  In the interest of retaining learners and nurturing thinkers, we cannot stultify in our 19th- and 20th- century pedagogical practices, but rather adapt to and actively shape the intellectual pathways of both present and future.

In this way, DH strikes me as a communicative practice; as a language learner/teacher, I recognize the need for communication where it stands and where it fails.  Educational institutions are flailing because their faculty and their students cannot communicate with each other about the way they learn.  Students resort to the word “boring” to describe their classes, and professors rage about how “frustrating” students are because of their “lack of attention” and “level of distraction”.  What DH does (or would do, given a bigger voice and a wider reception) is create a way for faculty to couch their knowledge in a presentation that is recognizable, even palatable, to the detached undergraduate plugged into his/her iPod/Pad, texting on their cell phone right up until the last minute before class.

To quote that famous line from a movie I’ve forgotten, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” This new generation wants to learn, but hasn’t been given a chance to learn in a way that is commensurate with their own intellectual mechanisms; faculty want to teach but they don’t have the training or the tools to re-learn, unlearn, or simply learn a whole new manner of intellectual interaction with their students.  Digital humanities is a toolkit for those who recognize that current educational practice no longer functions because it is essentially the equivalent of dead language — it is a remnant of a historical reality that no longer has much of a presence in our day-to-day existence.  It is not a revolution, as I thought, but a profound recognition that education can no longer maintain its inflexibility with regard to the changing needs/desires within the present reality.  Education must adapt, must shift, must examine and incorporate The New.  It is the field in which academe steps up for an exacting auto-examination, frequently arriving at the conclusion that on some basic level higher education, as it currently stands, does not speak to nor prepare students for the realities they face, leaving them unequipped for change.

THATCamp helped me to arrive at that work-around collage of a definition, or helped me to see that Digital Humanities is more of a communicative principle than a disciplinary field.  Or at least that’s how I understand DH, and it is with that understanding that I will go about adjusting my intellectual approach(es) to my research and my teaching.

I have more to say about THATCamp itself, and will post more on this topic soon.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve discovered Digital Humanities.  My work is about to drastically change.  Thank you, Twitter, for putting me in touch with this thing called THATCamp!  I wonder if they have any conferences coming up anytime soon… Wait, what??  This weekend in the Bay Area???  ::sigh::   Late for the party, yet again.  Maybe… maybe next year, if I’m still here…

Manhattan, Kansas – August, 2011

I left the Bay and moved to Kansas in late July, arriving on 1 August in MHK, in the middle of one of the most scorching heat waves that this country has had in the past century.  As I settled into my surroundings, and established all the necessary connections (water, electricity, INTERNET) I began to plug back into Twitter and the DH scene, only to discover that there was a THATCamp coming up in September, in Lawrence… And that the deadline for registration had already passed.

NOT AGAIN!

I missed THATCamp in SF.  I was not going to miss it in Kansas!  I wrote to the Institute for Digital Humanities at KU and asked for a pardon on my late registration, which I submitted regardless of it being three weeks past the deadline.

IDH got back to me with pleasant news:  I would be attending THATCamp KS in September of 2011.  The next entry will tell you of my experiences there, and the outcome of my first (but I imagine, not last) THATCamp.

As the saying goes, “patience is a virtue.”

We’ll return soon.