Beyond Territorial Disputes: Toward a “Disciplined Interdisciplinarity” in the Digital Humanities
Excerpt: Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Ed. Jim Ridolfo and Bill Hart-Davidson. 2015.
Abstract: This chapter suggests the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to serve what Charles Bazerman calls "the disciplined interdisciplinarity of writing studies" (RTE, 2011), providing unprecedented access to multiple disciplines for answers our field's key questions about writing and writers. Identifies two DH approaches, insisting the most common one (DH as situation) is also the one least compatible with this objective; challenges rhetoric and composition to instead approach DH as a situation enabling Bazerman's disciplined interdisciplinary. Concludes with an extended treatment of their NEH ODH-funded project "Remixing Rural Texas" as a concrete example of the latter approach.
Keywords: disciplined interdisciplinarity, territory, postcolonialism, writing research
If we choose the path to disciplinarity of narrowing the acceptable data, method, or theory, we are in danger of misunderstanding or even distorting the processes, practices, and products of writing. Rather . . . we should choose a path that finds discipline in our questions and goals, allowing us to draw on the resources of many disciplines.
–Charles Bazerman, “The Disciplined Interdisciplinarity of Writing Studies”
A near constant media presence in recent years, the digital humanities seem poised to either save the humanities or destroy them, depending on your perspective. We would like to think a successful rescue is underway, yet we are far more concerned with our discipline’s contributions to those rescue efforts. In this chapter, we draw upon what Charles Bazerman calls the “disciplined interdisciplinarity of writing studies” to suggest we concern ourselves first with DH’s potential contributions to our field’s key questions and goals. What do we want to know, as a discipline? What do we want to teach, as a discipline? How might the DH help us reach these goals?
In his recent retrospective, Bazerman argues “we should choose a path that finds discipline in our questions and goals, allowing us to draw on the resources of many disciplines.” We suggest the digital humanities offers rhetoric and composition rich avenues through which to “draw on the resources of many disciplines” to answer our field’s key questions about writing and writers. However not every approach to the DH is equally compatible with these goals.
Where DH is framed as a territory to be colonized, for example, our discipline’s contributions to DH seem limited, as are DH’s potential contributions to our own disciplinary goals. Instead of making new knowledge in our field, approaching DH in this way lends itself to territorial disputes, as we draw boundaries around what we claim as rhetoric and composition’s key concerns and everything else. To determine citizenship and map territory, we are forced to look inward rather than forward, feeling compelled to stake our claim over questions increasingly present across the digital humanities, arguing we were here first and that this is nothing new. Instead, we suggest we might more productively draw from our strengths, the key questions that align us as a discipline, asking what other disciplines and resources might have to offer us in our attempts to understand and communicate how writing works. For us, this very “disciplined interdisciplinarity” is the promise of the digital humanities.
We begin by acknowledging the significant ways the territory identified in recent years by digital humanists as “uncharted” (Rowe 2012) has, indeed, been inhabited by generations of rhetoric and compositionists, especially those in computers and writing. Next we read these tensions emerging from territorial disputes through a lens provided by Bazerman’s disciplined interdiciplinarity (hereafter “DI”). We suggest that metaphors more compatible with this approach are DH as situation (Alvarado) and instrument. To illustrate, we conclude with an extended treatment of this concept through the concrete example of our current interdisciplinary project “Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts,” funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities.
Part I: DH as Territory
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. . . . [I]t is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” –Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Digital humanists often present the “territory” of the digital humanities as “uncharted” (Rowe 2012) or, at the very least, an isolated frontier recently populated by small settlements brought together under the “big tent” (Davidson 2013 , Kirschenbaum 2010, Pannapacker 2011) clearly identified with the markings that represent the “right kind” of digital humanist (HASTAC, for example). Yet much of the territory claimed by digital humanists was inhabited by rhetoric and composition long before DH arrived. In her contribution to the much-cited TechRhet listserv thread “Are you a digital humanist?” (April 2010), Cheryl Ball puts it this way: “We’re still the outliers there. And, yes, I relish a little in knowing that this field was DH before their ‘DH’ was ever born. And that we have a lot to offer. And that other fields are coming to realize that rhetoric is at the center of everything.”
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