MLA is definitely more “digital humanities” than “new media” but to the extent the latter is lacking it’s largely because people aren’t submitting the special session proposals or otherwise leveraging the conference structure. I ran a session on virtual worlds for the Media and Literature discussion group, for example. It was well attended. Discussion groups and allied organizations give you almost complete freedom to shape panels around any topic you like.

I’m not so sure I agree with Lev’s assessment that DH is ten years behind industry. I think that’s an apples and oranges comparison. The contexts are entirely different. A bunch of us went to Google Books a couple of years back and they were genuinely impressed with some of the text analysis work this community has produced. It’s not that they don’t have smart people capable (in theory) of doing the same things there of course, they just didn’t anticipate the audience for (say) TAPoR.

Unfortunately, this tenure bid has to come into the discussions about digital-ness. The institution judges us and if we want to keep going, we must please them in some way. I attended the last hour of the Workshop on Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure Review. My dossier was one of the test cases. Now, in my pedagogy, I’m must more digital than in my research. I run an “archive” that’s more textual studies than digital humanities. In other words, I’m still assessing the cool new tools rather than embarking on discussions about using social networking in my classroom. (After all, pedagogy scholarship does not get one hired for a research position.) The discussions, though very helpful, really focused on how to evaluate the scholarship using old standards. In other words, it was the start of a conversation and not necessarily the resolution. Some of the admins in the workshop were perplexed about how to evaluate if there were no departmental standards. Departments are loath to construct these standards for fear of boxing in candidates or worse leaving some out.

I ran into Lev Manovich at one of the Digital Poster Sessions. And, without knowing who he was, we struck up a conversation about the MLA’s lack of real New Media panels — this is where the MLA has not yet broached its full digital potential. We discussed the deep mark-up that Laura Mandell is committing to some of our poems in the Poetess Archive. In his booming, Russian accent, Lev offered some help (tentatively) to automate some of this work — or at the very least, automate marking up the images. He also made very clear that as Digital Humanists we are 10 years behind the technology industry.

So, all of this is to say that there is much, much more to mine in the MLA. Their recognition of digital-ness means that they are taking notice of its institutionalization, e.g., Brett Bobley’s magnificent initiatives and the DH office. Perhaps this means that we will gain further resources and REALLY begin to collaborate on projects in the way that the Humanities is going to have to embrace (or suffer some awful death).

I’m astounded at how many people from my alma mater (The Graduate Center) are on this bleeding edge, and I’m excited to be dragged into it. Now, if only I had the resources to drag my “hypertextual archive” into this era — yes, it’s still in frames and hand-coded HTML; someone save me from this fate. I’d like to scrap it for a better architecture but still retain the contextual relationships among the textual objects. (Then, can I have 2 courses releases every semester to effect it?)

BTW, can we come up with a better phrase/word than “scholarly edition” or “archive?” Ken Price mentioned that he’s written an article about this for DHQ but it’s not yet out. Our critical language still has to catch up as well!

So, Matt rock on. I’m looking forward to seeing more of your work. You might also solicit publication of your panel’s papers for the new journal, Journal of E-Media Studies, run by Mark Williams (Darthmouth).

As you point out, there is a rich history of work in this field — people, including you, who were doing the digital humanities before it was the Digital Humanities. One of the questions we now face — and it’s a question that was raised in a panel on Technology and Composition that I’ll blog about soon — is whether, in the newfound drive to harness the power of new media, traditional fields wind up bastardizing/cannibalizing new media. We shall see, but again, more about that soon.

@Gardner Thanks for visiting and commenting. I appreciate being called on the identity politics/new media analogy, one that is problematic in all sorts of ways. Indeed, I think that criticism can be extended much further: the path that a white male working in new media walks towards “legitimacy” is much different than, say, the path of an af-am scholar working on black nationalism — especially in the era before af-am studies was considered a legitimate discipline.

And yet, a kernel of similarity does exist, at least in the way that important work by rigorous scholars has been dismissed too easily by established scholars. And that’s all the more reason why the work that you and Matt K. have been doing is so important to those of us just entering the field.