0.5 Digital humanities 2.0: a report on knowledge  (Page 5/10)

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Reflecting on the Manifesto nine months later, I believe it is not only a call for Hhmanists to be deeply engaged with every facet of the most recent information revolution (Robert Darnton points out that we are living through the beginnings of the fourth Information Age, not the first), but also a plea for humanists to guide the reshaping of the university—curricula, departmental and disciplinary structures, library and laboratory spaces, the relationship between the university and the greater community—in creative ways that facilitate the responsible production, curation, and dissemination of knowledge in the global cultural and social landscapes of the twenty-first century. Far from providing "right answers," the Manifesto is an attempt to examine the explanatory power, relevance, and cogency of established organizations of knowledge that were inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to imagine creative possibilities and futures that build on long-standing humanistic traditions. It is not a call to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, but rather to interrogate disciplinary and institutional structures, the media of knowledge production and modes of meaning making and to take seriously the challenges and possibilities set forth by the advent of the fourth Information Age. The Manifesto argues that the work of the humanities is absolutely critical and, in fact, more necessary than ever for developing thoughtful responses, purposeful interpretations, trenchant critiques, and creative alternatives—and that this work cannot be done while locked into restrictive disciplinary and institutional structures, singular media forms, and conventional expectations about the purview, function, and work of the humanities.

The Manifesto in no way declares the humanities "dead" or placed in peril by new technologies; rather, it argues, the humanities are more necessary and relevant today than perhaps any other time in history. It categorically rejects Stanley Fish's lament of “the last professor” and the work of his students, such as Frank Donoghue, which claims that the humanities will soon die a quiet death. To be sure, we must be vigilant of the “corporate university” and distinguish our Digital Humanities programs from the “digital diploma mills” (Noble), but we must also demonstrate that the central work of the humanities—creation, interpretation, critique, comparative analysis, historical and cultural contextualization—is absolutely essential as our cultural forms migrate to digital formats and new cultural forms are produced that are “natively digital.” Fish and Donoghue make an assessment of the end of the humanities based on the fact that its research culture, curricular programs, departmental structures, tenure and promotion standards, and, most of all, publishing models are based on paradigms that are quickly eroding. Indeed, they are not wrong about their assessment, which is quite convincing when we start from the crisis of the present and look backwards: academic books in the humanities barely sell enough copies to cover the cost of their production, and the job market—as the 2009 MLA report attests—betrays the worst year on record for PhDs hoping to land tenure-track positions in English or Foreign Literature departments (Jaschik). What this evidences is certainly a crisis, but the way out is neither to surrender nor to attempt to replicate the institutional structures, research problems, disciplinary practices, and media methodologies of the past; rather, it may be to recognize the liberating—and profoundly unsettling—possibilities afforded by the imminent disappearance of one paradigm and the emergence of another. The humanities, rather than disappear as Fish predicts, can instead guide this paradigm shift by shaping the look of learning and knowledge in this new world.