The recent New York Times story on Franco Moretti’s & Matt Jockers’ Stanford Lit Lab presents two classic criticisms of the Digital Humanities: that it is scientism at worst and, at best, using computers to do what humans can already do. To be clear, the author doesn’t simply dwell on the negative, but the outrage is simply too visible to ignore. As opposed to the generally positive response to digital humanities work that deals with geography and history, journalists take a dim view of the digital humanities when it approaches traditional literature studies. Bringing sophisticated digital tools and techniques to bear on Walt Whitman’s Washington? Good. But any attempt to do more than catalog the poet’s work and you’ll likely receive the same worried remarks as Kathryn Schulz directs toward Moretti’s paper on networks in literature:
Reading the paper, though, I mostly vacillated between two reactions: “Huh?” and “Duh!”
But Moretti is no stranger to this kind of treatment. His earlier work has been assailed both by young statisticians and old literary critics and everyone between.
Moretti, a mythopoeic figure, generates around himself a dense network of folklore and apocrypha. Franco Moretti, it is said, has hired five graduate students to retype the first paragraphs of every Victorian novel ever written; Franco Moretti is coauthoring a book on morphology with a team of Canadian ornithologists. Franco Moretti, who “doesn’t believe in” word count, prefers instead to calculate the average number of characters per word in his students’ papers, and anyone with an average of six or higher gets an F.
At Stanford, I once overheard two of my classmates at a department party, drinks in hand, debating the question of Moretti’s office hours. “I wonder whether he’ll be in this Friday,” mused the first student. “I need to show him my reading list.”
“I happen to know,” said the second student, a bit importantly, “that he’s going to be on campus at midnight on Wednesday, to be teleported to Sweden.”
Elif Batuman – “Adventures of a Man of Science: Moretti in California”
It’s unlikely that one will find similar language and high profile criticism directed toward, for instance, Peter Bol, whose work and forceful personality is similar in scope to that of Moretti, except directed at Chinese historical geography and not Shakespeare. The primary reason for this is obvious: culture as represented by popular journalism simply has more familiarity and investment with story in general and the Western canon in particular than it does with political geography and, specifically, the historical political geography of China. You can still find folks that have issues with digital maps “replacing” traditional historical scholarship both related and unrelated to historical China, but they tend to academic and make their critiques without reference to how the scholar treats graduate students. The attention, and especially the level of emotion as seen in the comments section of another recent NYT article on the Lit Lab, is a signal to do more of this work, to engage with it more extensively and promote the adoption of these techniques among young scholars and students in the academy. Whatever the Digital Humanities may or may not be is still an open question, but if popular opinion is any gauge, then one thing is sure: the Digital Humanities is important.