Beginning this year, the annual Modern Language Association convention will be held not in December, but in January; and after the biting cold and pervasive sense of despair of the 2009 MLA convention in Philadelphia and the elusive MLA 2010, “the best conference that never was,” many scholars are looking forward first to a holiday week free from conference travel and then to the 2011 MLA convention in sunny Los Angeles. In addition to providing a forum in which the slowly recovering job market can test its growing strength, the convention will host a remarkable number of panels dedicated to the digital humanities.
On his blog Sample Reality, Mark Sample, Professor of Contemporary American Literature and New Media Studies at George Mason University, recently posted a list of the more than forty such panels. Taken together, the sessions provide a compelling picture of the myriad ways in which digital technologies are shaping the humanities.
Several panels consider the changing models of academic publishing in the context of collaborative work on digital projects. For example, the roundtable “Labor in the Digital Humanities,” whose discussants include Kathleen Fitzpatrick, co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, will address labor issues involved in digital collaborations. Panels 29: “The Brave New World of Scholarly Books: Publishing in Tempestuous Times,” 596: “Will Publications Perish? The Paradigm Shift in Scholarly Communication,” and 617: "Implementing New Knowledge Editions and the Scholarly Edition,” focus on electronic publishing and recent experiments in open review like those my colleague Jeff Rogers describes in the November/December Townsend Newsletter.
Other panels, including 19: "Digging into Data: Computational Methods of Literary Research," 431: "Textual Scholarship and New Media," 521: "Close Reading the Digital," and 743: "What the Digital Does to Reading," grapple with new modes of scholarly inquiry made made possible by digital technologies, such as data mining, computational alalysis, and "distant" reading.
In addition to interrogating the new methods production and distribution of scholarlship, a series of panels explore innovative digital tools for instruction and the resulting reconception of a teacher's role in the classroom. (See, for example, 639: "Where’s the Pedagogy in Digital Pedagogy?," 462: "Foreign Language Cultural Literacy and Web 2.0," and 140: "What Is 'College Level Writing' in the Twenty-First Century?"). Like the role of teacher, the roles of professor and public intellectual are under study in a series of panels that analyze the novel forms of self-fashioning available to academics and the professional narratives they produce. (See 331: “The Open Professoriat – public intellectuals in the social web,” and 48: "Hacking the Profession: Academic Self-Help in an Age of Crisis").
If in flux in the age of digital technologies are the roles of instructor and intellectual, and the methods and formats of scholarlship, so too are the very objects of study. Panels such as 349: "From N-Town to YouTube: Medieval Drama on Film, Video, and the Web," and 141: "New Thresholds of Interpretation? Paratexts in the Digital Age," set out to explore and define these new texts and formats.
Along with this spate of panels dedicated to changing definitions of teaching, research, intellectuals, and texts, one panel stands out by focusing on changing definitions of definitions. 248: “The Dictionary in Print and in the Cloud,” will tackle the ways in which Dictionary.com, Wictionary, le-dictionaire.com, and Google's "define" function produce standardizing effects that bear national implications. (Abstracts are available here.)
Several panels reflect broadly on what the digital means for the humanities and what the digital humanities mean for the University: 309: "The History and Future of the Digital Humanities," and 436: "The Institution(alization) of Digital Humanities." Taken together, the panels point to some central questions not just in the emerging field of the digital humanities, but more broadly, in the future of the humanities-- which will undoubtedly be digital.