Stanley Fish NYT "Blog Posts" on DH

Submitted by Kent Emerson on Wed, 01/25/2012 - 23:50

 Most of you have already seen these because I posted them in Modernism and New Media, but here are all three blog posts in which Stanley Fish dicusses DH:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/the-old-order-changeth/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/mind-your-ps-and-bs-the-digital-humanities-and-interpretation/

The final one may be of particular interest because he mentions some of the larger debates within and about DH and links to what appear to be important articles.  

Comments

Jeff Drouin

Mon, 01/30/2012 - 23:46

Thanks for posting these highly topical op-eds. Fish makes a lot of valid points that are some of the same criticisms I've had over the years, but he also draws a picture of DH work that is so narrow as to mischaracterize it. Matt Wilkins, Steve Ramsay, and the other DHers he criticizes for having a naïve anti-methodology are actually far more sophisticated about it if you really read their stuff. DHers do in fact have plenty of methods (most of them long-standing) for separating information from noise and contextualizing data interpretation.

While it may be the case that there hasn't been a landmark project in DH and literature yet, I would put forth that the Tanya Clement reading for today is among the strongest examples of how DH and text mining can be used to "read" a difficult text like Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. Looking forward to talking about that in class today.