Political Considerations
Michelle Moravec of Rosemont College in Pennsylvania points to exceptionalism in the digital humanities and the “uneasy” fit between the discipline and power politics. She delineates problems of identity, disengagement and lack of diversity , as well as the important problem of the relationship between scholarly research and pedagogy. Although she supports the “utopianism”, or optimism, generated by digital humanities, she also concurs with several areas of neglect listed by digital humanities scholar Matthew K. Gold of City University of New York, as he describes the content of a 2012 collection of digital humanities critiques: “a lack of attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; a preference for research-driven projects over pedagogical ones; an absence of political commitment; an inadequate level of diversity among its practitioners” (Gold & others, 2012). Gold also notes a disconnect between humanists that use the new technologies to enhance traditional scholarly practices and those that see them as a “disruption”, revolutionizing the entire humanities enterprise.
At the level of higher education, austerity budgets, and specifically budget cuts to humanities departments, have been deeply felt among faculty. Therefore, it seemed natural to think of the digital humanities as a way to revitalize the departments’ fortunes in the academy. Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (Koh, 2015), writes that the “digital humanities” is in some ways a guise for “humanities computing”, with support from new concepts such as Big Data and “object oriented ontology”, and that this is not enough to improve the standing of the humanities in higher education, nor will it prevent further reduction in funding. In fact, it may even accelerate the humanities’ further decrease in prestige. Of particular concern, according to Koh, is the relationship of the humanities to tools and techniques from STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Computational methods, considered in isolation, render the “humanities” component of digital humanities as only a servant to the dominant STEM fields. Meanwhile, the “digital” component of digital humanities often leads to the perception that the latter is a “pseudo-STEM” field, and not strictly humanities. Koh also points to the objective methodologies that characterize STEM as not conducive to introspection and, vis-à-vis the humanities, “does not integrally inspect critical identity categories, access and privilege in the process of making, issues that designate what the humanities considers to be “critical” (Koh, 2015). Furthermore, the traditional “non-digital” humanities is relatively inexpensive, compared to STEM fields. The technology to fully support and incorporate the digital component in digital humanities, Big Data analysis, 3D printing, computational hardware, and the development of useful software tools are very costly in comparison. One of the salie