[Brian Croxall]

The (Im)Possibility of a DH Textbook

Session 743 at the MLA 2025 Convention

Panel Organizers: Diane K. Jakacki and Brian Croxall
Panelists: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Katherine D. Harris, Lauren Klein, Alan Liu, Kenton Rambsy, Stephen J. Ramsay

In December 2023, the (then) newest volume in University of Minnesota Press’s Debates in the Digital Humanities (DH) series appeared. What We Teach When We Teach DH (edited by the panel organizers) features essays that consider pedagogy and DH. One essay in the volume asks what we want from “standard core texts in DH.” In a parallel universe, the chapter might have been titled, “Why don’t we have an Intro to DH textbook?”

In response to this alternate title (and as fans of the multiverse), we propose a roundtable on this as-yet unrealized object: the DH textbook. What would it look like? What should it not look like? How could it be used, in what context, and to which audiences? How (or why) would we incorporate it into our teaching, when almost everyone in DH learned to do (and teach) it without a traditional textbook? Would a DH textbook even be a good idea?

The roundtable will echo a similar (and legendary, in DH circles) panel at the 2011 MLA Convention: “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities.” Indeed, we draw parallels to that session by including four of its speakers—Fitzpatrick, Harris, Liu, and Ramsay—to offer their thoughts on the (im)possibility of the DH textbook. These four scholars continue to be leaders in DH research and pedagogy, and any press undertaking an “Intro to DH” volume would likely consider them as peer reviewers. We have rebooted this historical panel with two additional scholars—Klein and Rambsy—who will help us think about issues such as data science, race, feminism, and visualization. While the parallel between two sessions, 14 years apart from one another, may seem a bit unusual, we anticipate that the 2025 panel will have a similarly outsized effect on the field as the 2011 session.

Each of the six speakers will deliver a provocative position statement that will be strictly limited to three minutes. These talks, along with brief introductions of the purpose of the session as well as the speakers, will take no more than 25 minutes of the 75-minute session. The rest of the time will be dedicated to discussion among the panelists and the session’s attendees.

How would our panelists address these questions about this as-yet unrealized object? What would it look like? What should it not look like? Liu suggests in “Teaching Digital Humanities for the Post Liberal Arts University” that it would need to be positioned in a larger ecosystem of readers, anthologies, and casebooks designed for today’s functionally post liberal art students hungry for applied modes of knowledge but also, in the spirit of the older liberal arts, yearning to know more expansively what “application” is actually for. Fitzpatrick argues that the lack of a sufficiently agreed-upon disciplinary core to DH means that a textbook would need to be more multiverse than canon, which, she acknowledges, is likely an impossibility. How would we incorporate it into our teaching, when almost everyone in DH learned to do it without a textbook? Ramsby questions the role of a textbook in a field where learning often occurs through hands-on experience and collaborative exploration, urging careful consideration of its potential benefits and limitations in fostering critical engagement with digital methods and tools. He also demands that a textbook incorporate perspectives from marginalized communities. Would a DH textbook even be a good idea? Harris wonders whether it wouldn’t be too restrictive at this point when we’ve burst through all of the remaining gatekeeping about who’s in/who’s out of DH? Klein further wonders what it should include if, according to some, DH has fully run its course. And Ramsay returns to his comments at the 2011 MLA—that digital humanities cannot not be involved in gatekeeping since that is precisely what disciplines do—and argues that such (inter)disciplinarity is not reason enough to conclude that a DH textbook cannot exist.

• This topic was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by Brian Croxall.
• This topic was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by Brian Croxall.
• This topic was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

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