On Professor Burton's blog, Moby Digital, he says that his blog is all about "chasing the white whale of the digital humanities."
Moby Dick was published in 1851.
The internet was born in the mid-1980s.
Geocities, one of the first social media sites, was invented in 1994 (it is now no longer available).
Amber, Victoria, and Brittany each discuss the categorization of the novel and whether or not Moby Dick fits into that category. They talk about our need as humans to categorize. Extending this idea to the digital humanities, can we categorize the digital humanities? I suppose we do in a way by broadly calling written material online the "digital humanities" and then by subdividing these humanities into blogs, status updates, posts, notes, tweets, even online encyclopedias, dictionaries, and poems...but never a novel. I mean, if someone wrote a novel and posted it online in a form normally reserved for blogs, would it be considered a very long blog or a novel? Does a 40,000 story have to be in print in order for to be considered a novel or is the online medium I just mentioned okay?
These are the kinds of questions Melville explored without using a computer. Moby Dick does not fit into any one category of print. What is it? What can we call it? What should we call it? Moby Dick is digital culture before the digital was invented. And people rebelled against it. They called it an "ill-compounded mixture" and not "entirely comfortable." (See my blog post here for more information on what people thought of the book in 1851).
This is much the same with the digital humanities: blogs are not cited in scholarly papers because they are generally viewed as an "ill-compounded mixture" of one person's thoughts generally not based in hard research or even written with much skill. We are not "entirely comfortable" with the digital humanities. Yet we chase after them anyways. We love our blogs, our tweets, our status updates, etc. We cannot just let them rest, much like Captain Ahab cannot let Moby Dick rest.
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| Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick |
The digital humanites are becoming a part of us in a very real way (e.g. Facebook updates are sent to our phones which are attached to our hips), and that scares us. Just take a look at Shelly's latest post. Sometimes we rebel against them by not getting on a social media website just because everyone else is on it: there is something very unsettling about that. If we are a part of it, we feel a need to categorize the digital, to control it, to master it. And in some ways we have: We've categorize things into tweets, blogs, Google + updates, etc.We select what stays and what goes. Geocities didn't make the cut for us. But that doesn't mean Geocities didn't influence future social media sites. We got rid of it, but we didn't get rid of its influence. Will we soon learn that we are dealing with a force much greater than ourselves? Should we continue to try to control it? Or should we just let it be much like Captain Ahab should let Moby Dick be? Let it be whatever it is and whatever it will be?
So let's answer that question: "Is the digital really new or is it actually super old?" I say, it's actually super old. Moby Dick cannot be truly categorized, and neither can the digital world. Moby Dick, the whale, cannot be controlled and neither can the digital humanities. It is in their nature. Each will change according to the understandings and changes of each generation. Categorize it if you will, but that category will soon change. The white whale of the digital humanities will never be caught.
I like that idea, especially at the very end when you say that no matter what category we put Moby Dick or the Digital Humanities into it will soon change. It just goes to show how flexible and moving language and our culture always is. It's frightening, but also exciting. It goes against everything we want to believe about categories and whether or not they should be solid.
ReplyDeleteI think 'the digital' is really just an intensification or acceleration of a debate that has been going on for thousands of years: what is human expression, and what are its purposes? And for that matter, what does is mean to be human? In the introductory comments to Moby Dick, it said that as readers, we should not necessarily expect to find Moby Dick in Moby Dick. Yeah, it doesn't make a ton of sense, but I've thought about it a bit in terms of digital media, and has convinced me more and more that digital media serves its best purpose in reminding us of the interactions that we *can't* have through digital media.
ReplyDeleteBe careful not to confuse the digital humanities with a list of digital services. This is a field trying to define itself, but as a subset of digital culture and not just another label for it. I think you are onto something with discussing how we are trying to control or master something and that this is elusive. Maybe digital culture (and/or the digital humanities) is going to be something forever out of our grasp, unharpoonable. But this doesn't mean that the hunt cannot be meaningful, as Ishmael demonstrates in finding a lot of meaning in the middle of what is ultimately a futile chase. It is useful to look at the cognitive coping tools used to wrestle with trying to master an unmasterable mass. So let's keep doing that, both within the novel and within digital culture.
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