Digital Millenarianism

What can digital humanities do? Not much, according to Stanley Fish. Fish recently penned a blog post that takes issue with both the methods and results of the digital enterprise.

His methodological objection is that digital humanists start by churning out data:

“. . . first you run the numbers, and then you see if they prompt an interpretive hypothesis. The method, if it can be called that, is dictated by the capability of the tool.”

Fish prefers to happen on an idea, then look for evidence to support it:

“The direction of my inferences is critical: first the interpretive hypothesis and then the formal pattern, which attains the status of noticeability only because an interpretation already in place is picking it out.”

Why should the former be inferior to the latter? Fish’s fundamental objection to digital methods is that they open up countless possible perspectives and interpretations but offer no way to choose among them. Fish wants to start and end with the human mind, that of the author (he writes of “a criticism that narrows meaning to the significances designed by an author”) or the reader. The notional intention of the author and the reader’s hypothesis provide a focus for interpretation and establish a hierarchy of meaning.

But Fish’s particular alternative to digital methods looks ill-considered. We can’t take refuge from the rough sea of numberless interpretations in the harbor of authorial intentionality. The problems with that approach have been well explored. On the other hand, if the reader is to be the ultimate arbiter of meaning, or rather if communities of readers create meaning, as Fish himself has argued, it should make no difference whether that meaning is formed with or without the use of a digital algorithm. Either way, the last steps in the process are always the identification of some pattern and a claim about its significance that the critic’s readers can take or leave.

In the Aeneid, Vergil starts a section on the war for Italy with an acrostic, spelling out with the first letters of four lines the name of the war god “MARS” (Aeneid 7.601-4; N. Horsfall, 1999, Aeneid 7, p. 391). The verbal play has long been recognized. Imagine, however, that it was detected yesterday by a program searching for acrostics. What difference would the use of digital methods make to our interpretation? Little to none, in my view. Fish might concede that digital techniques are fine for such formal criticism, but not for more subtle forms of meaning-making. But of course digital humanists are energetically pursing new methods precisely because no one yet knows what the limits are.

This brings us to Fish’s other objection: digital humanities scholars overpromise either “the perfection of traditional criticism” or “the inauguration of something entirely new.” Fish takes issue here with the evanescent visions of DH scholars looking to the future. We might better start by considering the basis for their projections.

Digital methods can bring consistency and comprehensiveness to traditional approaches. Creation of an algorithm requires that the scholar define formal criteria for the feature to be identified, and so ensures that every result will meet (just) those criteria. Digital methods also enable scholars to collect every instance of a given feature. Literary critics are accustomed to weighing individual instances, but when they employ digital methods, they must learn to make inferences about large scale phenomena (a version of Moretti’s “distant reading” to which Fish refers), which inevitably requires quantification.

The potential for consistency and comprehensiveness is clearly an advantage to the critical enterprise. To return to the example above, I would be in a much better position to interpret Vergil’s acrostic if I knew how previous Greek and Latin authors, and Vergil himself, used such devices generally, and to see how they were used by later generations. But digital methods alone can’t (yet) get us all the way there, even in a relatively formal study such as this. The most persuasive interpretations will be produced by scholars working back and forth between distant and close reading in process that allows for adjustment and refinement.

As for the claims that the digital humanities represent something totally novel, we can only wait and see. In the history of ideas, most that are eventually regarded as genuinely new in fact emerge by a sort of meiosis—even Newton stood on the shoulders of giants. Though I personally doubt it, it’s possible that the digital humanities may fizzle out, but let’s not judge the issue before we’ve had a chance to see what will emerge.

Though I disagree with Fish’s position, I nevertheless think he raises good questions, ones that my colleagues and I confront working on our Tesserae Project. The project is an effort to try to map text reuse (allusion, intertextuality, reference, quotation) among classical (Greek and Latin) and later western authors. My responses to Fish arise in large part from this experience, and I would like to think that our approach actually answers his criticism. We test our results against those of traditional critics and adjust our algorithm to mimic their findings. From there, we use their implicit criteria to find instances they have not. We are in effect creating an algorithm of a model reader, one that is rather crude at the moment, but that with luck and labor should become increasingly sophisticated. Constructing this model reader requires defining, more precisely than before, what has traditionally counted as an “allusion,” “intertext,” or “reference.” We hope this work will allow us to not only say something about the texts we’re studying, but also about how readers (or at least critics) read them.

I personally believe that the digital humanities hold great promise. But projecting too far forward from current work risks the censure of critics like Fish. We ourselves got into a spot of trouble on this score with the local classics authorities. When we suggested in a journal article we submitted that our work could lead to a genuinely new way to understand intertextual relations, an anonymous referee took us to task for a “millenarian” tone. Did we go too far? Maybe. Fortunately the referee also recommended publication. So we’ll temper the revised version. And keep working away at our results, waiting for the digital rapture.