Performing Complexity, Uniqueness, and Sustainability in the Digital Humanities
Glen Layne-Worthey
HathiTrust Research Center, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Tuesday, 25 April 2023
3:00–3:30 pm
Abstract: The perpetually recurring set of tensions in Digital Humanities (DH) work, both in the field at large and in many and diverse individual DH projects and organizations, consists of a difficult and often hidden balancing act between seemingly irreconcilable opposites: single use and custom-made interfaces versus generic and reusable ones; techniques that reduce complexity as opposed those that celebrate and highlight it; projects that separate and strongly distinguish between the supposedly “technical” work of writing code and wrangling data, and the supposedly “intellectual” work of subject knowledge and critical thinking; the hard-coded, binary nature of digital media against the fluid, multifaceted, and often paradoxical and ambiguous nature of human culture. The “Noh as Intermedia” project, conceived and created at Stanford University with the collaboration of people across the Pacific, grappled happily (and, we believe, successfully) with all of these challenges at practically every stage of work. This project will offer an inside look at these dichotomies and at how the project team tried to reconcile them.
About the presenter: Glen Layne-Worthey is Associate Director for Research Support Services in the HathiTrust Research Center, based in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences. Formerly, he was Digital Humanities Librarian at Stanford, 1997-2019, and was founding head of Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), where he was technical lead on the “Noh as Intermedia” project. He has held many roles in the international digital humanities community and is currently Chair of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Executive Board. His graduate work was in Russian children’s literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
