Gaudy Night

Historians? Do analysis? Well. I. Never. Of course that’s precisely what we do. But it’s more than that. What we analyse is profoundly alien to the modern world, which means we are forced – effectively – to analyse in the abstract. And so, for exactly this reason, the skills of a 6th century historian are probably more useful to the 21st century than those of a modernist... The trouble is, there’s no guarantee that the skills we need today will still be relevant in 2036, or even 2026. The world is changing. Fast. If you can learn to analyse the distant past, then this explicitly makes you comfortable with the unfamiliar. And if there’s one thing we’ll need to get familiar with in the coming decades, it’s the unfamiliar.

I’m not concerned about [public] recognition of the term [DH] or even a lot of reflection on our projects as DH projects. I’d rather people get excited about the humanities content itself — the historical datasets they can explore, the art that they now have direct access to, or the new discoveries and fascinating methods that they hear about in the press. We’re finding new archaeological sites, reading manuscripts that were thought to be illegible, discovering historical trends in art and literature, and just plain putting things online for straightforward reading and enjoyment or for data analysis in ways never thought possible before. I’d much rather people (and by people I mean everyone from my kids’ age to my grandparents’ age) start thinking about how to apply digital humanities methods to problems or histories that matter to them, personally. And that’s happening.

The very success of the conversion of the nineteenth-century press into searchable online surrogates has heavily weighted those calculations in favor of digital resources and against modes of research that require more time and money to accomplish and whose ultimate yield is often uncertain. Put another way, if serendipitous discovery is going to happen, it will happen faster and cheaper online than in a physical archive. The time available to write one’s thesis, article, or book is always a scarce resource, and the money required to accomplish the underlying research is even more limited. In such circumstances, it makes sense to design the research project from the beginning in the most cost-efficient way possible. This is not laziness or sloppiness but a clear-eyed recognition of the hard choices facing every researcher.

It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories are concocted by error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.

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