Converting the masses

A very obvious hurdle for the digital humanities is found in pushing older (and perhaps younger) traditional pen-paper-journal-book scholars into the digital frontier. Will academics ever be comfortable with/accept what Borgman calls the “messiness of today’s content environment”(11)? Will the mash-ups, fan vids, wikis, and blogs attract the traditionalist? Furthermore, will academics choose a new audience for their work? As Santo and Lucas quantified, academics view nonacademic communities as secondary to engaging with other scholars and students (130-131). Thus, the problem of galvanizing and mobilizing the “old guard” into digital scholarship and pedagogy seems to hover around two interrelated spheres: design (infrastructure/architecture) and audience.

As the articles in Cinema Journal demonstrate, digital humanists are pushing the limits of traditional scholarship and pedagogy through Web 2.0 technologies. The “multimodal scholar” that Tara describes (120) is exemplified by Katheleen Fitzpatrick’s work with MediaCommons and the future of peer-to-peer review, Alexandra Juasz’s course about Youtube on Youtube, and the virtualization of Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window. Pushing this trajectory even further (or better, back into a humanities analysis) is Drucker’s Speculative Computing model that criticizes the “ideological agendas” (24) of current information structures. No doubt, new audiences and novel designs are at work in all of these projects.

Yet if our older ways of thinking about scholarship and pedagogy are to be subsumed into the lineage (and future) of print media as John Hartley describes, a paramount consideration must be the technological obsolescence that has radically transformed this genealogy and our study of media. Will new platforms be robust and scalable enough to face future technological permutations and what Borgman calls “data deluges”(6)? The preservation and migration of data will be key factors in reassuring fellow scholars that their work will outlive their bodies. In the end, it will be interesting to witness if future innovations will ameliorate the inherent “scariness” of the of digital humanities (design, audience, futures); or if these current innovations/experiments will drift away like Betamax, making room for a whole new technological frontier.