In her piece, “This Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,” Lisa Spiro jumps into the debate about what is and is not digital humanities. She argues that digital humanities is a community of scholars, rather than a field or a methodology. She then goes on to propose the following five values this community holds:
Openness refers to transparency of methods and data, use of open source software, interoperability, and open access.
Collaboration stands in contrast to the ideal (myth?) of the independent scholar and author as sole intellectual creator. Knowledge creation has always been collaborative; bibliographies are evidence of that. Digital humanities straddles fields – it uses computational algorithms to extract data and meaning from humanist texts. But it also aims to bring in other collaborators from outside strict academic departments like project managers, librarians and archivists, digitization specialists, multi-media experts.
The related values of collegiality and connectedness reinforce the emphasis on knowledge sharing and getting out of academic and geographic silos. Digital humanists emphasize online communication channels for the exchange of ideas over traditional conferences and symposia. Spiro believes that digital humanists value the non-hierarchical and informal modes of communication on the internet and that digital humanists do not disdain, and in fact, welcome newcomers and non-credentialed experts. It’s about sharing not hoarding specialized knowledge.
Diversity opens up new ideas, new modes of thinking, and new fields of research, as well as new practitioners who may have felt left out of traditional pathways.
Experimentation is about trying out new methods for analyzing text and data. This can mean more emphasis on quantitive data over qualitative data or distant reading over close reading. Experimentation is also about exploring new models for publishing, including multi-media, and for obtaining academic credit for the production of knowledge in a different form.
These values seem directly inspired by the open source community from whom digital humanists often get their tools. Using a platform like Github, every contribution can be credited and the collaborative effort is not ascribed to a single person. The open source community values contributions by their usefulness not the status of the contributor. Forums like Stack Exchange embrace teaching and sharing ideas and methods.
Academia and the institution of tenure do not always share these same values, although perhaps they should. Tenure evaluations measure individual output and give less weight to collaborative output, even if the effort and scholarship is equivalent. Academia is slow to change and values the established ways of doing things over experimentation.
As someone interested in digital humanities who is not an academic, I appreciate the emphasis on collaboration. As a potential project manager or academic librarian supporting scholars undertaking digital humanities projects, I am grateful that my role would be welcome and I would feel like a valued contributor rather than mere service provider.