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    Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities
    Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities
    Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities
    Ebook502 pages5 hours

    Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities

    By Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson

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    About this ebook

    The digital humanities is a rapidly growing field that is transforming humanities research through digital tools and resources. Researchers can now quickly trace every one of Issac Newton’s annotations, use social media to engage academic and public audiences in the interpretation of cultural texts, and visualize travel via ox cart in third-century Rome or camel caravan in ancient Egypt. Rhetorical scholars are leading the revolution by fully utilizing the digital toolbox, finding themselves at the nexus of digital innovation.

    Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities is a timely, multidisciplinary collection that is the first to bridge scholarship in rhetorical studies and the digital humanities. It offers much-needed guidance on how the theories and methodologies of rhetorical studies can enhance all work in digital humanities, and vice versa. Twenty-three essays over three sections delve into connections, research methodology, and future directions in this field. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson have assembled a broad group of more than thirty accomplished scholars. Read together, these essays represent the cutting edge of research, offering guidance that will energize and inspire future collaborations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJan 19, 2015
    ISBN9780226176727
    Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities

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      Book preview

      Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities - Jim Ridolfo

      http://melissaterras.blogspot.com/2011/11/stats-and-digital-humanities.html.

      PART ONE

      Interdisciplinary Connections

      ONE

      Digital Humanities Now and the Possibilities of a Speculative Digital Rhetoric

      ALEXANDER REID

      Discussions of the digital humanities often encounter the problem of defining the field. There are some methods and areas of study that are clearly defined as digital humanities: these employ computers to study traditional objects of humanistic study, an area that was once called humanities computing. Other methods and areas bear a more ambiguous relation to digital humanities, such as media study and rhetoric and composition, which have long-standing practices of studying digital media and technologies that have paralleled those of humanities computing. Within rhetoric and composition, digital rhetoric faces identity challenges similar to those of the digital humanities as it potentially envelops work from various subdisciplines such as technical and professional communication, computers and writing, and new media rhetoric. Given the difficulties in defining either digital humanities or digital rhetoric, imagining how the two might relate in general terms generates a wide range of possibilities. The relation is further hampered by the now well-known troubled relation between rhetoric and the humanities. For more than a century, starting in English departments, the humanities have largely disassociated themselves from rhetoric. Some rhetoricians no longer consider themselves humanists; they are trained and work in communications departments and practice social scientific methods. There can be a fair amount of ill will and suspicion that must be overcome for digital rhetoricians and digital humanists to collaborate. This disagreement might be a relatively minor matter, to be settled locally, were it not intertwined with the problems that the humanities in general and the digital humanities in particular face. As has been widely discussed in both academic and mainstream discourses, the humanities are in an apparent state of crisis, with declining numbers of majors, fewer jobs for faculty, funding cuts, and a general questioning of their value in a system of higher education that is itself under attack. Digital humanities has been identified, rightly or wrongly, as a potential solution to this crisis. However, it seems unlikely that any new methodology, digital or otherwise, will solve this problem. Instead, the promise of the digital humanities lies in its potential to address the political, ethical, and rhetorical challenges of living in a digital age: a set of challenges that are not particularly addressed by the traditions of conventional digital humanities but that are at the core of digital rhetoric. This is not to suggest that rhetoricians have all the answers either. Rather, what is required is a rethinking of the humanities that accounts for technology and rhetoric in a new way.

      In this brief chapter, I will propose one possible approach to this rethinking. While there are certainly many possibilities, my central argument is that any approach will need to identify and address the problem with modernity that Bruno Latour has elaborated in We Have Never Been Modern (1993) and elsewhere. This is not to suggest that we must all become Latourians; there may be other ways to address this concern. Instead, what I believe is crucial in Latour is the issue that has resulted in this particular kairotic moment that brings together a humanities in crisis, the digital humanities, and (digital) rhetoric. This issue, simply put, is the identification of cultural objects and practices as knowable only through a limited set of humanistic methods that are kept separate from the methods of mathematics and science. This identification has created the absolute divide between nature and culture: a definition that, for Latour, shapes the modern era. The humanities has, as a modern discipline, operated on the principle that scientific discourses and methods are appropriate only to matters of nature while cultural matters demand a separate set of methods and inquiries. The contemporary moment has put unrelenting pressures on that divide. The complaints raised about the digital humanities reflect those pressures as humanists reject the idea that human experience and aesthetic endeavors can be productively or legitimately explored by computational means. Digital rhetoricians face a related objection from those who view digital literacy as secondary to, and often disruptive of, a primary, humanistic (and print-based) literacy. Not coincidentally, thinkers in the speculative realist movement, such as Latour, have faced similar criticism for their willingness to consider the value of contemporary mathematics and science for addressing traditionally humanistic concerns. The traditional views in both rhetoric and the humanities share a faith in a human exceptionalism that must of necessity posit every new technology as a potential threat to the already existing human with his independent and self-contained capacities for thought, agency, and expression. On the other hand, digital humanities and digital rhetoric share (at least potentially) the speculative realist view that humans are not ontologically exceptional but rather participate openly in an environment that includes other nonhuman objects and blends nature and culture. (I put potentially in parentheses here as it is certainly possible to undertake digital work and hold on to a belief in human exceptionalism.) How is this step toward the nonhuman and away from the modernist nature/culture divide related to the perceived humanities in crisis? The easiest way to understand this relation is as a paradigm shift wherein scientific discoveries, the emergence of digital media, and the development of new global relations (i.e., all the trappings of the postindustrial world) have created new conditions for which traditional humanistic paradigms, built in the modern, industrial age, are no longer suited. I will focus primarily on Latour as one thinker who offers some insight into this issue. Latour’s work has become increasingly well-known in digital rhetoric, so he offers a somewhat familiar starting point. However, I also want to situate him in relation to the larger philosophical movement of speculative realism and, thus, as one possible contributor to a speculative rhetoric that might

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