Hail the rise of digital humanities

…and no, it's not just a geek invasion of humanities

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are hard at work, using mathematical techniques to unravel which author contributed what to the Hebrew Bible, a composite text compiled over hundreds of years. These researchers believe a machine learning-based tool that ascribes specific authors to each sentence of this Bible will help literary researchers understand the text in greater depth.

Researchers at the University College London are using similar mathematical techniques on digital collections from European libraries with large repositories of digitised newspapers and periodicals. They believe that using text- and sentiment-mining techniques will unravel “the history of mentalities, allowing researchers to discover long-term developments and turning points in public debates”.

But if these examples lead you, dear reader, to conclude that digital humanities is something that only grey-haired, bearded academics labour over in their corner of vast university libraries, here are some examples to convince you otherwise.

Using mathematical methods to extract emotions in news headlines and social media posts has become central techniques in use by smart stock market traders in Wall Street and other financial markets, though not referred to by them so far as “digital humanities”. Many researchers are reporting that a mathematical analysis of underlying emotions about a stock can often reveal where it is headed to on the markets.

The term “digital” attached to any word evokes images of computer programmers banging away at their keyboards, weaving their way through complex “algorithms”, and, if you are a “normal” human being, a humanities graduate, for example, you may have started wondering how these two apparent contradictions — “digital” and “humanities” — could ever combine to produce anything meaningful.

This quote from the British Academy of Sciences will show how: “As part of their work, digital humanists have developed new methods, such as computer-based statistical analysis, search and retrieval, topic modelling, and data visualisation. They apply these techniques to archives and collections that are vastly larger than any human researcher or research group can comfortably handle. These methods enable ambitious projects with large interdisciplinary teams to work on difficult or complex projects. Digital humanists are transforming the idea of what a humanities research project can be, giving us new ways of seeing past and present cultures.” (1)

Illustration: Ajay Mohanty

I cannot help but wonder how this new revolutionary turn of intellectual events will be greeted and dealt with in the academic world, particularly in India. To start with, even relatively minor updates of curricula are greeted with temper tantrums by the teachers concerned, even at IIM level, let alone at the typical university. In part this arises because such changes require professors and lecturers in their late 50s and early 60s to unlearn and relearn new concepts. Their usual reaction is anger: “Are you saying that what I am teaching now is out of date???!!” 

Why more so in India? Because I have noticed that in India, at a very early stage in their student life, people are separated into those who like mathematics or are comfortable with it and those who do not like it or are not comfortable with it. The latter adopt “humanities”, subjects like English literature, history, and philosophy at high-school level and continue in that world through their bachelor’s or master’s levels. The ones ensconced in humanities view the maths types as geeks and the ones who embrace mathematics with fervour view the humanities types as those somewhat lacking in intelligence.

I remember in the 2000-2010 period, when the Internet and the World Wide Web started to make their presence felt in consumer marketing, senior executives in FMCG companies and advertising agencies, and marketing professors in business schools looked the other way at the role that search engines were starting to play in influencing consumer purchases apart from accepting that e-commerce was on its way to eliminating grand departmental stores and physical outlets. It took another decade before marketing curricula even in the IIMs took on the challenge of including these topics in their study courses.

Of course, in India, we have to face the additional challenge of edtech companies and the tutorial industry (such as those factories in Kota, Rajasthan, training IIT aspirants on how to beat the entrance tests), converting the still nascent concepts in digital humanities into learn-by-rote formulae, which will block any Indian participation in this new intellectual revolution which is under way.

Major Western universities have started setting up digital humanities departments and research centres. Some examples of these are: The Digital Humanities Center at Berkeley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Humanities and Literature Research Initiative; University of Cambridge’s new MPhil in digital humanities, and Oxford University’s MSc in digital scholarship.

In India, Ashoka University has initiated foundation courses in digital humanities and seminars for exploring critical thinking and opportunities for interdisciplinary majors. IIT Jodhpur, Mumbai University, and Jadavpur University are examples of Indian universities quick off the mark with post-graduate diplomas in digital humanities. The Centre for Internet and Governance in India, Bangalore, is also playing a pioneering role in spreading the word.

A key element in spurring growth in digital humanities is the collection and digitisation of large datasets that will enable researchers to experiment. One Indian example is Jadavpur University’s Bichitra project, which has assembled digital versions of 47,520 pages of manuscripts and 91,637 pages of printed books and journals relating to Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali with English transcription. Another example of a valuable dataset on an Indian topic, but this time from the University of Scotland, is 22 million words covering the years 1850-1950 on the medical history of British India.

This is just one of the many examples of pioneering work underway but you can see how deeply all this will revolutionise subjects like history and cultural studies and all of humanities.

(1). thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-are-digital-humanities

The writer is an internet entrepreneur (ajitb@rediffmail.com)