(Director’s note: Gabriel Hankins teaches English literature and digital humanities in the Department of English at Clemson University. His research interests include modernism, and digital literary studies. His book, Interwar Modernism and Liberal World Order, has been published by Cambridge University Press. He is co-editor of a new series on Digital Literary Studies, also published by Cambridge University Press. As he and I corresponded this summer about online teaching tools suitable for close reading and group discussions, I asked him if he might contribute to this series. He said yes, and this is the result. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
How do we do research in the humanities now?
Once, this might have been the title of a quietly confident survey of changing research practices in the humanities, some gradual, some sudden, with the confidence that familiar pathways and byways of humanities research remain largely unchanged. That confidence in the stability and continuity of the present has ended. Now the question has a slight tone of desperation: how are we, in the conditions imposed by a viral pandemic, going to do our research? Particularly in historical fields built around books, libraries, and archives, not to mention conferences, the conditions of our work seem to have changed utterly.
My response to the titular question is contradictory, like life in the present crisis, but I hope we can learn something by thinking through the contradictions.
We are all digital researchers now.
Within the digital humanities community, this is a familiar claim made by Lincoln Mullen, among others. I have refined a version of the claim for modernist studies in particular, in which I argue that literary fields are now contiguous with “digital humanities” methods and approaches along all their fractal boundaries. But, as I conclude in that essay, if we are all digital humanists now, we don’t yet know it. In the time of coronavirus, that knowledge is inescapable. Neither our teaching, research, nor service can escape a confrontation with digital mediation and its consequences. How we confront the digital mediation of our fields cannot be predetermined: in some modes, the dialectic of the digital and humanist plays out in terms of conflict, resistance, or refusal.
The middle matters: digital mediation is a problem of proximity, distance, and transmission.
Since T. S. Eliot at least, literary studies has seen its problem as that of positioning the individual experience in relation to inherited traditions, cultures, and texts, even if those texts and cultures are “inherited” from our contemporaries. Our method of constituting our traditions has everything to do with the historical moment we are in: Eliot’s particular mode of historical thinking arose out of a crisis in Western political order, a chaotic war, and a viral pandemic that recalls our own. At first the pandemic might seem to separate us from the archives, libraries, and conferences that formed the structure of research in the humanities, as it separates us from a livable past and a thinkable present. Digital mediation of those resources is experienced as distance and remove from the original. But in several senses digital archives and methods bring us unbearably close to our objects and interests, even as they always transmit, mediate, and thereby omit something of the original. All of Shakespeare is now available to the panoptic queries of the researcher; even more unbearably, the entire corpus of eighteenth-century Anglophone fiction, or nineteenth-century women novelists, or detective fictions of the 1930s. Certain archives, too, are available in digital form as they never were before – I am thinking here of queer fanfictions, but also the letters of Robert Southey, uniquely captured in digital form. The problem of researching these materials opens onto the more general problem of a self-reflective research practice, in which the modes and materials by which we do our work do not simply disappear in the background.
Digital research has to begin and end with the questions, objects, and interests of the humanities.
This may seem obvious, but it has not been clear for some generations of digital researchers. Our research questions and interests must rise out of the vibrant cultures, languages, traditions, and materials that inspire our work. We can and must think through the implications of our current digital condition, and the ways in which digital mediations of all kinds shape the questions we can ask and the canons we consider. But our questions should remain framed by our attachment to the primary questions of the humanities: what are the ways in which we make meaning, how is that meaning grounded in a history, a time and a place, a specific culture? How does a material history, a technological moment, a set of canonical texts, determine and enliven our response to a given textual and historical situation? What do we want our always-already digital research to transmit from the past to a more human future? In answering these questions, we move from the anxiety of a crisis-ridden present to our grounding in a meaningful past and our work towards a livable future.