Identity CRISIS (for you JM) and my Soapbox Speech on the Humanities

In “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” Alan Liu poses the questions that are on a lot of humanists’ minds. What are the digital humanities exactly? How do we use them?? Liu describes charting the digital humanities “as something like a grid of affiliations and differences between neighboring tribes”—a cohesive yet fractious band of warring allies who have difficulty agreeing on what purpose the DH should serve and what it is (Liu 409). What we have then, is a crisis of identity surrounding and within the DH. Of course, whenever one hears the words “identity crisis,” one’s eyes should light up with the thought of, you guessed it, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde! Oh boy. The anxiety surrounding both cases of uncertain identity can actually be seen as drawing from a similar failure: the inability to create a “diaologic approach” between the two seemingly incompatible components of each fractured identity—quantitative data and semantics within the DH and Jekyll and Hyde within Stevenson’s novella (415). I’d like to explore how Jekyll and Hyde’s inability to be in dialogue with each other can mirror the situation within the digital humanities and then will attempt to expand my viewpoint, as Liu does, to the Humanities as a discipline.

Liu explores how meaning is created in a successful DH project through a case study analysis of an article by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac. He notes that the two were able to use a data-generating system called the Correlator to find word trends within a large database of texts. Basic data accumulation, right there. But, Heuser and Le-Khac needed a way to get “from numbers to humanistic meaning” (414), and eventually ended up cross-referencing their word patterns with the HTOED and thus “sowed their hermeneutical process with a coseed of humanistic semantic interpretation” (415). In making the two DH tools speak to each other, Heuser and Le-Khac were able to derive an argument, rather than being left with a neat array of data without signification.

Broadly, we can view Jekyll and Hyde in the same terms. Hyde, one might say, is the data gatherer, the selector of images. He travels through London, experiencing the “undignified,” reveling in the sensory data input of his roamings but without care or thought to the implications of his actions; even after murdering Sir Danvers Carew, he leaves the scene with a “song upon his lips,” the murder having been only another input of data by his senses. It is Jekyll, “project[ing] and share[ing]in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde,” who provides the judgment, the locus of semantic interpretation for Hyde’s actions (Stevenson 86). Initially “often plunged into a kind of wonder at [his] own vicarious depravity” (83), Jekyll becomes increasing more distraught as Hyde grows uncontrollably violent, eventually collapsing in “tears and prayers” (87).

The narrative progresses in Jekyll and Hyde to a breakdown of the “dialogic approach.” Hyde becomes the dominant character, creating an overabundance of data patterns with no database of “coeval conceptual origin” (Liu 415) with which to provide a sense of judgement to his actions.  Jekyll, “sadly altered” and “eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind” (91), simply doesn’t care anymore (“God knows, I am careless” he says) and thus refuses to disseminate, process, or judge the actions of Hyde. Hyde’s actions, “concern another than myself” (93). What collaboration they had, even if only stemming from a streak of self-preservation, disintegrates by the end of the novel.

What Liu's essay really shows us is that collaboration is the vital heart of the DH (indeed, it’s implied in its name) and the breakdown or absence of the “dialogic approach” between its various components is as damaging to its generation of meaning as the breakdown between Jekyll and Hyde. What role then should collaboration play in the current struggle of the Humanities at large? Liu argues that the “disciplinary identity” crisis of the DH is in fact only a registration of the larger concerns regarding the place of Humanities in our technology privileging society.  In a world that seems to increasingly devalue the work of humanists/meaning-makers and privileges the work of scientists/data-makers, we’ve used the Digital Humanities to say, “Look! We can do technology! We’re modern and relevant.” This is a mistake. If we do look to the DH in both its “functional and symbolic” aspects, to “serve as a shadow play for a future form of the humanities”(Liu 410), I would argue that it is to the spirit and the practice of collaboration the DH engenders that humanists should pay most attention to. The humanities will never be the sciences, attempting to become them is impossible and suicidal, but we should definitely focus on collaborating more with the sciences (and amongst ourselves). We should seek to find out how our work speaks to theirs and how their work speaks to ours.  The humanities are necessary because, very broadly, they can be the HTOED to the Correlator of the sciences—the humanities keep the dialogue open rather than making academia and the generation of knowledge a one-sided, boring, and ineffectual conversation.