To the Editor:
There’s much to say about Nan Z. Da’s recent polemic “The Digital Humanities Debacle” (The Chronicle Review, March 27) and its companion piece in Critical Inquiry. Da paints a harsh portrait of the subfield she calls computational literary studies (CLS) and generalizes that CLS findings are “either banal or, if interesting, not statistically robust.” A Critical Inquiry online forum continues this conversation, and I suspect that educators will say more about this subject in the coming weeks and months.
Statistical robustness is a complicated subject, and I’m honestly gratified that scholars of English are talking about it all, even if most of us would be hard pressed to explain the difference between a p-value and a Poisson distribution. I do worry that my colleagues will adopt Da’s positions without giving sufficient attention to the statistical concepts she discusses or the complexities they raise, but that’s not why I’m writing this letter.
Instead, I want to focus on another aspect of Da’s work that I find disconcerting. Da states repeatedly that CLS scholarship is caught between two extremes: a failure of statistical robustness and a failure to be interesting. Critiquing statistical validity and rigor, where appropriate, makes sense to me. Scholars using digital methods ought to maintain high standards for research design, transparency, and reporting results.
In the meantime, however, I hope we don’t concede the issue of what’s interesting. Novelty often inspires interest, as do nuance and complexity. But what’s ultimately interesting to whom depends a great deal on subjective preference. It is shaped by socially constructed notions of quality and credibility, which inevitably change over time. It is shaped by ideology and power. Even relatively small groups of artists, philosophers, or scholars can have radically different concepts of what we ought to care about. Da, I believe, gives these complexities insufficient rhetorical consideration, and this weakens her argument.
Digital methods, despite their limits, have tremendous potential to help us reconsider our interests and redirect our attention. They can help us describe norms and highlight exceptions to the rule. Allowing room for such methods to enrich literary studies sounds quite interesting to me.
Matthew Lavin
Clinical assistant professor of English
Director of Digital Media Lab
University of Pittsburgh