Digital humanities, knowledge complexity, and the five ‘aporias’ of digital research

Abstract

This article introduces a frame of reference for understanding the fundamental challenges that inform digital humanities as an interdisciplinary research area between arts, humanities, information, and computer science. Its conclusions are based upon the evidence base developed within an EU-funded collaboration known as Knowledge Complexity, or KPLEX for short (www.kplex-project.eu), in particular via the project’s thirty-eight linked interviews about big data research. When viewed from the perspective of the digital humanities, five distinct points of ‘aporia’ with a significant impact on digital humanities (DH) appear in this corpus, places where the interviewees explicitly or tacitly expose gulfs between the epistemic cultures that contribute to DH and that create tensions between these disciplines, even as they seek to collaborate. This article will explore these areas of apparent irreconcilability, and conclude with a series of reflections on how digital humanities researchers might build upon their unique competency profile to negotiate within these critical conversations, in particular in the framework of the emerging subfield of critical digital humanities.

Digital humanities: Mission accomplished? An analysis of scholarly literature

“…In the opinion of McCarty (2016), what DH inherits goes far beyond the debate about the two cultures: ‘It inherits many centuries of now relevant work that has been foreign to the humanities since Galileo.’ To Montfort (2016), closing the gap between the two cultures would entail that ‘programmers’ should learn something about the humanities as well. Edmond and Lehmann (2021) treat DH as an interdisciplinary research area, particularly in relation to ‘big data’; they argue that, in practical experience, communication across different epistemic cultures is neither easy nor smooth: ‘computer scientists showed a reluctance to discussing what certain key terms might mean or imply, a lack of precision that would surely draw criticism in a purely humanities context’. However, ‘when reaching across the boundaries of disciplinary norms and epistemic cultures become central rather than peripheral to progress, creative and productive compromises can be found’.…”

“…With no harm to the traditional introspection characterizing humanities scholars, HC is methodologically focused. Edmond and Lehmann's (2021) perspective does not agree with this account, rejecting the vision of a discipline without a theory: ‘interdisciplinary co-operations often failed because of the lack of a shared theoretical framework’, and ‘data without theory is as problematic as theories without evidence’. Bradley (2019) reported complaints about ‘the lack of theoretical underpinning behind toolmaking for humanists’.…”

The Epistemic Cultures of the Digital Humanities and Their Relation to Open Science: Contributions to the Open Humanities Discourse

“…Having the same object of study as the humanities, while using relatively different practices, DH is due to the application of digital tools and techniques, collaboration practices, but also to the fact that DH produces, interprets, and analyzes data, taken in the same context as in the hard sciences (Arthur & Hearn, 2021). They reflect a transdisciplinary level of epistemology, including all methods, systems, and heuristic perspectives related to the digital, in the fields of social sciences and humanities, in information as well as computation science (Edmond & Lehmann, 2021).…”