Who are you? What do you do?

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As if the Cheshire cat beckoned from Carroll's tree, we hear the question, "Who are you?" Except that in the world that I'm about to describe, academia (the tree) and the humanities (the invisible, interrogatory, and specular cat), the question tends to render as, "What do you do?"

Who you are and what you do are synonymous enough in this tree, as in "I'm a British modernist," or "I'm a medievalist." Sadly the conjugation, I'm a digital media-ist doesn't work and has slipped about to become, I am a digital media humanist, and I am a digital humanist. If we want to get rather technical about the fact, anyone working in humanistic studies today is a digital humanist with her computer, digitized library holdings, digital course management and administrative systems. And in fact, those of us who might assume the title, digital humanist, are not in agreement about this nomeclature. Some of us, myself included, aren't as comfortable reassuming the "humanities" mantle with digital as a modifier.

These larger idealogical issues aside, within our unruly band, this term "digital humanities" has begun to take on a rather particular meaning. It describes that which, from the non-digital humanities, is perhaps the most legible, most companionable work in our heterogeneous field(s): digital archivism, manuscript studies, resource databasing, and the associated work of annotation and commentary. Fundamentally the roles are bibliographic and critical. And to this list we must add the most renowned group, those who work with Elit, electronic literature, or to use my preferred term, borrowing from John Cayley, literal art. More often than not, this descriptor, digital humanist, does not refer to media makers, designers, and "studio" practioners who once clustered together under the temporally impaired descriptor, new media "specialists" who use digital technology "creatively." The third group, the most maligned in earlier days, were the "techies", developers, programmers, multilingual "specialists" who talk to machines, in machine languages. While digital media specialists have just recently begun to find their way into the tenure-track streams of faculty rosters, those who write machine code were and continue to be seen as "support staff."

So we do in fact have a deeply troubling issue within our strange heterodox field that deeply resonates with the problem we face in institutional engagements with those who are not. Those of us who work in digital media in the academic domain come in three digital flavors: scholar, maker, and coder. And not unlike the disciplinary fervor striating all fields of study, this creates an institutional power grid hierarchalizing the work we do. However, unlike other fields of study that generate specialization via focalization or subtraction, our modes of specialization have in fact worked to expand these modes, scholar, maker, and coder. It is simply not sufficient to work critically in a field and not know its modes of production or languages. In some ways, this has deeply challenged many who work in the digital humanities and criticism, who in the 1990s and early 2000s drove much of the humanities-wide discourse on the field. They wrote about, critiqued and promoted the digital work that was being made by "artists" who oftentimes worked with a credited or non-credited "technician" or programmer.

This is no longer the state of the field. The expectation that folk who work "on" digital media must now also work "in" digital media, with a full range of digital and visual literacies, procedural rhetoric, analytical, critical, and creative multimodalities. This blurring of T.S. Eliot's famously articulated cleavage of the creative from the critical unhinges most the generic conventions upon which work in the humanities is predicated. This effects a profound destabilitzation of cultural studies, aesthetics, narrativity, historicism, method, and even the composition of disciplines themselves. (I will return to this issue below). So if we work in digital media (who are you?) then we are, in a wide distribution of ratios and parametrics, scholars, makers, and coders (what do you do?)

Who are you? Audience and digital media studies

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An absurdity lurks in the rhetorical position of this "essay," this Montaignian attempt to flesh out the digital in the humanities, in the arts and sciences, in the academy. The real question is not actually "who am I?" but rather "who are YOU?" Who is the audience for a discursive, cold-mediated account of a field that distributes itself across various modes of scholarship, production, and technicity. As Joddy Murray puts it rather aptly, "rhetoric has always had a problem with delivery." And this is no less true for the digital in terms of distribution and performance. Who reads the conventional scholarly forms about digital media: the allographic if not print essays, articles, and books? To clarify, a word-processed or digitally imaged document is a digital media artifact. However, we have laboriously regenerated our typewritten skeuomorphs (.docx, .pdf, .txt, .rtf) for several generations, deeply committed to the design and constraints necessary for rendering our digital objects to look as if they were just pulled sheet by sheet from a 1954 Smith Corona. Global allographophilia. And this just scratches the surface at document design, for genre, citational formats, and disciplinary conventions cascade through our documents. Allographia under naturalized constraints. Enormous loads of labor and effort to reproduce our thinking, making and processes in simulations/emulations of 1960s technics and generic standards and conventions. Lest I be misunderstood, this is not a euphoric heralding of the developmental grand narrative of salvatory technology, but it is, rather, a descriptive observation about conservation and knowledge work.