Digital Inhumanities: The Poverty of Quantification

Recently I attended a conference wherein a major focus was upon the "Digital Humanities," the latest cause célèbre in English and Philosophy today, oft hailed as the coming savior of our collective disciplines.  In one panel, the presenter showed a digital map of the Book of Matthew, with an interconnecting series of dots of various sizes representing the Book's proper names.  "Can you guess who the biggest dot represents?" asked the presenter.  "Um...Jesus?" we finally said.  "Yeah," he chuckled, "Newsflash, I know, Jesus is the most important figure in the Book of Matthew."

The next day, in a different panel, a different presenter showed a similar digital map for the Book of Luke.  "Can you guess who the biggest dot is?" she asked.  "Um...Jesus?"we said after an awkward long silence, scarcely believing that this was happening again.

It was cute the first time it happened; but by the second time it was already highlighting some serious shortcomings concerning the "Digital Humanities."

Because, yes, computer models can certainly quantify that Jesus Christ is the most central figure of the Four Gospels...but that ain't exactly news to, well, everyone who's ever read the Bible ever.  Moreover, that statistical data point still tells us precisely nil about how the staggering number of Christian sects over the past 2,000 years have interpreted and reinterpreted his role in the Trinity, the physicality of his Resurrection, how he accomplished the Atonement, what was considered heretical, what doctrines were considered dying for, etc, etc, etc.  These have been and remain highly contested controversies within Christendom, which a statistical word count is highly unlikely to resolve (to put it mildly).

Before proceeding, I must first make clear that, despite my own weak math skills, I do believe that statistics are absolutely critical, that computers are amazing resources, that the Medieval monks who had to walk on foot across war-torn dukedoms towards the next-nearest monastery to gain access to a meager collection of maybe 200 worm-eaten manuscripts hand-copied in dead languages would all have committed cold-blooded murder to have access to the digital resources we have today, which we mostly just use today to download pics of funny cats.  We absolutely should be using computers and stats more often in the Humanities.

But my problem isn't with the tools, it's when the tools begin to be fetishized as the ends unto themselves, as opposed to a mere means to an end, one of many valid approaches.  For though computers are priceless resources for gathering information, they do jack-all for interpreting information.  Scientists (whom we're clearly trying to ape here) already know this, by the way; the world's most powerful telescopes can gather us data from the far reaches of the universe, but it is all mostly meaningless till someone actually sits down with the data and interprets what the heck all those numbers even mean.  And those interpretations often differ between scientists; and they must constantly make arguments to each each other about why their interpretations are more accurate than others'.

Scientists are engaged in the interpretation of texts, in other words.  

Which you'll note is what the Humanities are supposedly trained to do from the start.   A text is placed in our hands; what does it mean?  Can you justify your readings?  Why or why not?  Finding new ways to re-categorize and present the text is not the same as actually interpreting it. 

The irony is that it is usually the older scholars who really foist the "Digital Humanities" upon us; the younger grad students, the ones who have been raised on computers and therefore are the most intimate with their limitations, are the ones in my observation listening with the most skepticism, folded arms, and cocked eyebrows.  Most of us entered the humanities because we dreaded a dull life of clerical data-entry, because we actually wanted to think about the data for a change--specifically, about what's happening to us when we enjoy a really good book, about what that experience reveals about us and the world we live in.

We didn't major in English to just do data-entry; what's more, we didn't need to major in English to just do data-entry--something the extollers of Digital Humanities as the hope and salvation of the English major would do well to remember.