I spent this past weekend at the inaugural Digitorium, a digital humanities conference sponsored by the University of Alabama Digital Humanities Center. It was a great experience, and I hope to attend again next year. The program was a mix of pedagogical and research applications of digital tools to the study of humanities. The conference was a wonderful experience because I got to see all of the interesting things that people are doing. It’s hard to walk out of a conference like that and not want to run back home and do more with tools like Omeka and start brainstorming about how digital tools can do more than make our research and teaching more efficient, but create entire new subfields of research.

For my own part, I participated in a session entitled “Teaching and Analyzing Writing Digitally.” The first two presentations, from Jeanne Law Bohannon at Kennesaw State University and Geoffrey Emerson of the University of Alabama focused on creative uses of digital tools in the classroom. Jeanne talked about her use of Twitter to engage her students in her literature and rhetoric courses; a great example of empowering students to own their learning. Geoffrey explained his use of journaling and timelines in his literature courses to give students a forum to reflect on and connect with their readings. My part of the session was focused on research. I gave a paper entitled “Pick Up and Read: The Methods, Tools, and Promise of Distant Reading Biblical Commentaries.” You can check out the slides I used here. In this presentation I took a hands-on approach for a distant reading project I’ve been working on. Seeing the genre of Biblical commentary as a structured data set (verse by verse comments means that all commentaries have a basic structure that is consistent), I showed how I am using software tools to parse and compile statistics on a given commentary’s treatment of a given passage. So, for example, we can use software to ask questions like “Which verse of 1 Corinthians gets the most attention in commentaries?” or “How has the treatment of 1 Cor 11:24 changed over time?” or “What is the verse in 1 Corinthians that gets the most attention in Calvin’s commentary?” I tried to show the participants the significant of a project like this, but more importantly, I tried to show them how to design a project like this. We got a bit in the weeds with things like XML, Python, and MySQL, but I thought it was important to show people that with a few basic skills we can all learn to “read” in new and interesting ways. The potential for distant reading is tremendous (more on this another day), but we need people to learn to write software in order to see it adopted on a wide scale.

The conference reinforced some of my previous thoughts about one particular danger inherent in the current state of the digital humanities, and my paper attempted to mitigate against that. By “danger” I mean the divide between the “haves” and the “have nots” in the digital realm of university research. I heard presentations from some fascinating research projects. Most of the most amazing though, were the products of collaboration between subject matter experts and large centers for digital humanities, well-funded resources at major Universities. This is a great situation, as it allows the tech-people to do what they do best, coordinating with the researchers who are allowed to do what they do best. One particular example of this was the Spenser Archive, an online version of Oxford University Press’ forthcoming collected works of Edmund Spenser, developed in coordinating with Washington University in St. Louis. Professor David Lee Miller of the University of South Carolina did a marvelous job of introducing this (and several other) digital projects he’s working on, showing the amazing future of critical editions of important works. However, this project (which again, I stress, is amazing and exciting) was done in coordination with DH centers across multiple universities, with incredibly well-funded teams of researchers. They have programmers and computer scientists working on search algorithms, interfaces, and text mining tools. This can all be a little overwhelming to anyone who does not have access to such resources. How can one wade slowly into the digital humanities? The world seems to be split between those doing full bore digital projects, and those who depend upon existing tools matched with creative pedagogy to alter the way we have always done thing. Professor Miller made the excellent point that there has to be leadership from the senior level if we want digital humanities to go mainstream. He stressed that those who can afford it (and by “afford” he means primarily those who have the security of tenure) must show how real scholarship can be done with digital tools and in online fora. This will pave the way for giving credit to junior scholars who work in the digital humanities. My concern, though, is that the way being paved by these senior scholars may be one that is unattainable to many junior scholars; how can they replicate the level of incredible work Prof. Miller and his team are doing if there is no access to the types of digital humanities centers that he runs?

I would argue that this replication can come by the junior scholars who are interested in the digital humanities learning to write software themselves, rather than having to rely on centers with programmers. What I find exciting, and what I was trying to show in my presentation, is that we’re getting to a point where the perceived divide in digital humanities between the “haves” and the “have nots” should start to go away due to the availability and accessibility of programming tools. Software development tools are so accessible and easy to learn, even for those working in the humanities, that individual researchers can do impressive digital work with very basic knowledge. There is still a barrier to entry, though, and I was trying to help some get over that barrier. Basic programming and database skills are no longer “nice to have” on a resume; they are going to be essential parts of a researcher’s toolkits. The challenge is that we don’t know how they’re going to help us until we have a lot of researchers out there experimenting with them. If the world depends upon the resources and know-how of large digital humanities centers, with their staffs of programmers and data miners, then I’m afraid the digital humanities “revolution” is going to continue to be a slow-moving one. However, if subject matter experts themselves learn development skills, then they can more efficiently determine how digital tools may allow us to do things we’ve never imagined with texts.

So, I don’t want to knock those Universities that have these amazing centers that allow collaborative projects to move forward (heck, I work at one such University). However, I do want to invite individual researchers to learn programming tools that allow for text manipulation and adaptations like distant reading. We won’t know what’s possible until people start experimenting, and people can’t start experimenting until they learn to write code! So, to sum it all up, learn Python!