Into the laboratory

Critics and scholars are perhaps less imaginative beings [than artists], but even we needn’t commit ourselves only to imagining what we already know.

Jerome McGann

The new spaces of humanistic inquiry

Since it is commonplace to associate laboratories with science, it may appear unusual to start a book on the humanities – however transformed when prefaced by the word “big” or “digital”  – with the chapter title “Into the laboratory.” By starting this book with the new spaces of humanistic enquiry, my goal is to think not just about changes in methodology or approaches to humanistic study, but also to explore the transformation of humanistic disciplines at a deeper level. Such a transformation is happening because of the computing revolution and the new world of big data and lab-based humanistic research; such scaled-up activities, Crane (1998)argues, need “new research that does not look like old research” (9); in other words, “we desperately – desperately – need experimentation as we explore and seek to understand a radically new space” (15). Crane, one of the

founding architects of an important digital humanities resource called Perseus, argues that “Rebuilding the Humanities involved both a theoretical and an applied component” and further “that the best work includes both” (15). I will argue that the shift to lab-based hybrid humanistic/ scientific research practices, and the accompanying selfreflexivity and theoretical engagement, does have the potential to not only “rebuild” the otherwise declining arts and humanities (declining in terms of funding and student numbers, as well as the decreasing public respect for an apparently obscurant humanistic discourse), but also produce “the best work” to use Crane’s phrase. But why have I prefaced both “digital humanities” and “digital laboratories” with the phrase “the Big Humanities”? This phrase is indicative, in my opinion, of a new phase of humanistic operations, one which creates analogous research structures to those of “Big Science.”