Have you seen the film Wayne's World? It's pretty funny. One of the film's famous scenes takes place in a guitar shop. Wayne walks in, takes a look at a guitar, and he begins to play the riff from Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." The clerk immediately stops him and points to a sign: "NO Stairway to Heaven."

Seeing this film in my early teens, I did not actually understand the joke. I hadn't grown up on a diet of classic rock, so, while my friends guffawed, I was wondering to myself, "Have I ever even heard 'Stairway to Heaven?"

"Stairway to Heaven," for those of you like me, was released in 1971 off of Led Zeppelin's fourth album. Easily the band's most famous song, it was voted the #1 Guitar Solo of all time in Guitar World Magazine.

I suppose the joke is that so many people were coming into the guitar shop and playing "Stairway to Heaven" they decided to place a sign and ward off the practice.

Why do i bring this up? In his recent position paper on Inside Higher Ed, also cited in our previous lab blog entry, "The Case for Software Studies," Noah Wardrip-Fruin writes, discussing a jointly funded workshop between the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, "why doesn't the digital humanities have more of a seat at the table? Why is there the stereotype that, while computer scientists and digital artists have much to discuss, digital humanists only want to talk about data mining with the former and data visualization with the latter? I believe it is because the perception has developed, helped along by many in the field itself, that digital humanities is primarily about data."

In other words, "Stairway to Heaven" is to Guitar shop riffers as data mining and data visualization is to digital humanists. It's not the extent of the field, but it has become, for better or worse, the go-to for researchers.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with data mining and data visualization, it's a very limiting métier for an entire field. And, as Wardrip-Fruin argues in his essay, it's not properly exhaustive of what the humanities has to offer "computer scientists and digital artists;" it never has been.

In his article, as in our lab blog post from last week, the case is made for "software studies"--a method for understanding not only the data, but the digital programming that enframes it. Wardrip-Fruin writes, "In software studies, humanities methods and values engage with the specific workings of computational processes. This sort of approach has the potential to become an exciting point of connection between the humanities and computer science, both pedagogically (as a route to the 'computational thinking' that is increasingly being put forward as a key component of 21st-century general education) and as a critical and ethical complement to the models of interpreting processes found in most computer science." 

While I agree with our previous lab blog entry that, moving forward, we should think of ways to engage students interested in digital humanities with the basics of program language and digital methodologies, I do not think this is the only path available in the immediate. I do not believe that those unfamiliar with programming language aren't valuable to enlarging the scope of digital humanities.

To that end, let me offer one small additional riff to last week's lab blog post.

In any form of cross-disciplinary work, there is a necessity for some form of give and take. One side must present, in a legible manner, their work's field so another can provide some form of interlocution. The case is no different in digital humanities or, for that matter, "software studies." I am not an expert on programming language and digital media, but I firmly believe my humanist training can provide both computer scientists and digital artists newfound insights if they are willing to meet me halfway in discussing our interests. "Computer scientists and digital artists" cannot exist in a vacuum; we must both lean towards one another to meet minds.

I, for one, will not come to the table set on data mining, and I would like for them to do me the same favor. Rather, I'd like for us to spend some time speaking of our thoughts on what we do and, through this engaged conversation, finding where our interests can produce something.

Humanists have much to offer both "computer scientists and digital artists." What needs to happen is something very rare in the academy as it is currently structured: conversation leading to collaboration. When we think of work in the academy--certainly as it is done in the humanities--we imagine things like lone thinkers pondering texts in solitude or a lead researcher publishing findings. The structure of academic work and reward is set up to reinforce this obsession with authorship. 

Perhaps, in order to foster new, invigorating work in digital humanities, we should seek to expand our concept of acceptable authorship. I am suggesting, in addition to creating training guidelines for future scholars, creating hubs of real collaboration and venues via which this collaboration can be disseminated and given praise. In addition, I am suggesting we rethink the power and advancement system our current process of authorship engenders.

Perhaps, dare I say it, we might even see a rise in jointly-authored dissertations, papers, volumes, etc. Ideas oftentimes come not because of one person's insight, but because of the space between two thinkers in conversation; I do not think we should fear the possibility of novel thinking and insight that is attributable to a consortium as opposed to an individual.

And, if we still want to riff on the familiar, digital tools of recording and tracking can still document the ways insight developes. I'm thinking, for example, of a project where, in addition to final results, the various structuring emails, notes, etc, of the participants is made available. It will show the processes of collaboration at work in addition to presenting potentially viable end results.

In this data-rich moment, why not?