Klein - Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field

We are by now well into a phase of civilization when the terrain to be mapped, explored, and annexed is information space, and whats mapped is not continents, regions, or acres but disciplines, ontologies, and concepts.

John Unsworth, What is Humanities Computing and What is Not? 2002, http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg02/unsworth.html

Cathy N. Davidson

Julie Thompson Klein has written a capaciously definitional book. By that I mean, at this crucial moment in the formation of the many fields that, together, intertwine to be called digital humanities, Klein provides an invaluable guidebook that resists the temptation to restrict and, instead, invites exploration. Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field challenges the reader to not only visit the intellectual bounty across, around, and in and about digital humanities, but also helps us to explain its evolution. How did we get here? Where are we now? How far can we go? For an emerging field to become an established field, this work marks a necessary and vital contribution at the right moment.

This book will have many audiences at once and is the rare publication that actually keeps those multiple audiences in mind. Whereas most books that have this level of sophistication do not explain their founding principles, Klein patiently (and provocatively) explicates the basicskeywords, disciplinary inheritances, historical legacies, originating voices. We are never left to feel as if there is a conversation happening and we are not part of it. Rather, by analyzing the deepest assumptions and principles of the field, Klein also brings the reader up to speed, allowing us to run along when she makes her most demanding and expansive case for the way interdisciplinarity forms digital humanities and the way the digital humanities offer a new formation to classic accounts of interdisciplinarity.

This book should be required reading for anyone interested in the digital humanities, beginning student or founding figure. Its appreciations are Page viii wide and original. That means Klein makes the best case for the importance of the field and shows us how some of its most seminal debates, arguments, differences, and disjunctions have, over the last decades now, helped to form its vibrancy, relevance, scope, and impact in the academy and in the more public intellectual work of museums, libraries, and other civic spaces.

To my mind, one of the most important audiences for this book sits on academic committees that judge the quality of work produced within it. Especially for those who make hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, Interdisciplining Digital Humanities is indispensable. In the academy, we are often called upon to judge the integrity of research outside our own field of expertise. We often rely upon peers we trust for judgment and those peers may or may not carry our own prejudices and predilections as part of their judgments. When a disciplinary boundary is traversed, it can sometimes look, to the more clearly defined disciplinary peer, as if it has been violated, ignored, or, in the case of junior colleagues, not yet been mastered. Klein helps those who do not understand the digital humanities to see how they, in fact, can both contribute vitally to central disciplines and also work through the assumptions at the heart of those disciplines, including methodologically. Digital humanities do so not out of navet but out of the interdisciplines own generic needs. A literary professor doing a close reading of one novel, for example, may not need to know how to use or design algorithms for network analysis; a digital humanist understanding word clustering in 200 nineteenth-century British novels most certainly does. The outcome of this second kind of work may well also be a critical interpretation of texts, but that final analysis is by no means the only part of the process that is of intellectual significance. In the manner of many fields in the quantitative social sciences, the process on the way to the analysis is itself something that needs to be carefully, clearly documented and, in the end, is something also to be evaluated by those determining scholarly contribution.

Klein defines the contours of several fieldsfrom computation to data-driven or Big Data analysis to visualization on the digital or technology side and to the full array of the humanities and interpretive social sciences. More importantly, she shows how, in the digital humanities, it is often the combination of and interplay between and across fields that results in the most exciting workincluding work that requires a meta analysis of the fields themselves.