A few months back I participated in my forth year of the humanities and technology camp at the Center for History and New Media. This year the conference ended with a bake off. Many of the definitions of the digital humanities hinge on the idea that digital humanists like to make things. It looks like they also like to bake things.
We don’t just make for the humanities, we just make
I don’t think it is a coincidence that Amanda French’s twitter bio explains that she is a singer songwriter, that Karin Dalziel of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities blogs about digital humanities work alongside gardening, cooking and photography, or that Jason Kucsma, director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, worked for years driving around the Midwest to promote a zine he helped create. One of the defining features of some of the best and the brightest in the digital humanities isn’t digital per-say, it has to do with a pervasive kind of scrappyness. It’s about having a do it yourself mindset.
The DIY technical education
Reflecting on my own experience, I think I can say that the most important digital skills and ability to carry things through did not come from my training in the history of science. It came from my attempts, from the age of 14-18 managing a band in Milwaukee Wisconsin.
- I learned HTML to build a band website. (which is sadly lost to the ages, although the terrible one I had created before that persists at the popup riddled .50megs.com)
- I picked up Illustrator and Photoshop when we wanted to get our CD pressed and the only templates the press offered were for Adobe products.
- Over those years I learned a ton about digital audio as we improved our microphones and upgraded from transferring from a real-to-real, to a 4 track cassette recorder, to a digital 8 track and ultimately to working with a all digital studio in the area.
More important than any of the specific tech competencies, I learned that when I needed to figure out what software and hardware I needed to accomplish a task, that I had the wherewithal to figure it out and make it work.
The Audacity of Doing it Yourself: Renting the American Legion Hall
More important than self taught hardware and software skills was simply taking stock of the fact that if someone was going to do make a given project happen it would be me. Further, that I was going to need to do this with the resources I had at hand. Generally, I think this translates to a lesson that in many situations it is valuable. There is a version of whatever it is that you want to do that you can do right now with only an investment of your time and energy.
There were, more or less, zero options for places to put on all ages shows in West Milwaukee. So I took cash out of pocket and rented an American Legion hall. I think it originally cost me $100. I made up some fliers on colored paper at kinkos, got four other bands to agree to play as openers and negotiated how we would cut any money. I bought a PA system and the bassist picked up lighting equipment circa 1970 at a rummage sale. We used our bassists van to get all of our equipment to the hall. We handed flyers to any and everyone who would take them in an effort to get people to show up and pay 5$ at the door. Our moms collected money at the door. It was exhausting. I was always sick to my stomach that no one would show up to the shows and I would be out the upfront money. But we got up and did it again, and again, and eventually made the money we needed to make to pay for studio time. That is until the band broke up and reformed without me.
The moral to the story is, that instead of waiting for something to happen, or someone to let us be musicians, we just decided we were and started making plans with the resources at hand. If you take a look at many of the most interesting things going on in the digital humanities a lot of them started with just that kind of scrappyness and tenacity.
The Tenacity of the Cockroach or: the Henry Rollins School for Digital Humanists
Part of the reason that there are so many DIY folk in the digital humanities is that making things came natural. I think another part of this is that many of us had acquired what Henry Rollins described as “The Tenacity of the Cockroach.” If you want to get your head in this space I strongly suggest reading the edited collection of Onion AV club articles which uses the quote as its title. Imho, the DIY part of this thing we call the digital humanities is the part that is keeping it interesting, lively, and innovative.
Required Reading for the DIY Humanist
Deep down, I think DIY and the web are inextricably linked.
Here the lesson from nerd-folk-rock-troubadour Jonathan Coulton, about finding and making your own niche is invaluable. QFT
We now have an entirely new set of contexts and they come with a whole new set of tools that give us cheap and easy access to all of them – niche has gone mainstream. It is no longer necessary to organize your business or your art around geography, or storage space, or capital, or what’s cool in your town, or any other physical constraint. And this is not to say that anyone can become a moderately successful rockstar just by starting a blog – success is still going to be a rare and miraculous thing, as it has always been. There are just a lot more ways to get there than there used to be, and people are finding new ones every day.
In the same vein, Robert Krulwich’s advice to aspiring journalists, that “some just don’t wait” is equally important for the aspiring humanist.
I’ve seen people, literally, go home, write a blog about dinosaurs (in one case), neuroscience, biology. Nobody asked them. They just did. On their own. By themselves.After they wrote, they tweeted and facebooked and flogged their blogs, and because they were good, and worked hard, within a year or two, magazines asked them to affiliate (on financial terms that were insulting), but they did that, and their blogs got an audience, and then they got magazine assignments, then agents, then book deals, and now, three, four years after they began, these folks, five or six of them, are beginning to break through. They are becoming not just science writers with jobs, they are becoming THE science writers, the ones people read, and look to… they’re going places. And they’re doing it on their own terms! In their own voice, they’re free to be themselves AND they’re paid for it!
Going from here
I would love to know if there are other DIY pasts in the closets of other Digital Humanities folk. Is this a general phenomena, or is this just about the company I keep. So if you have DIY pasts please share them in the comments. Further, are there other must read pieces you would suggest for the aspiring DIY humanist?
Trevor Owens 
Leave a comment