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ABSTRACT
In response to the latest “crisis” in the humanities, advocates have marched, rallied, fundraised, and—especially—argued. This essay contends that communication scholars can support the growing “case for the humanities” by analyzing argumentative strategies, and more specifically, by offering ethical argumentative strategies that avoid replicating structures of domination. In particular, we look to Mari Lee Mifsud's theorization of rhetoric as gift, which follows Henry W. Johnstone in conceptualizing argument as something other than winning over an adversary. We place Mifsud's theorization of the gift in conversation with the methods of the digital public humanities (DPH), which acknowledge and offer abundant resources for meaning-making. Through the methods of DPH, we offer a response to the humanities “crisis” that activates the humanities’ already broad constituencies by giving resources for humanistic inquiry rather than seeking to capture adversaries. Our case study is Photogrammar, a DPH project for organizing, searching, and visualizing the New Deal and World War II era photographs funded by the U.S. federal government. The project forefronts visual, nonlinear, and interactive argumentation in order to engage publics in generative humanistic inquiry. By enlisting participants and sharing expertise, Photogrammar shows how humanities advocates can deepen attachments to the humanities and build broad constituencies of collaborators and allies.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for extensive and generative feedback from Mari Lee Mifsud and the two anonymous reviewers. We also wish to acknowledge our colleagues in the University of Richmond Faculty Humanities Seminar, “The Practice of the Humanities,” convened in 2016–17 by Nicole Sackley, Mari Lee Mifsud, and Robert Nelson. We are also grateful to the University of Florida's Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, where Jordana cotaught a course on PH with Sophia Krzys Acord. The analysis in this essay is based on the first version of Photogrammar, created by the Photogrammar Team: Taylor Arnold, Laura Wexler, Peter Leonard, Stacey Maples, Ken Panko, and Trip Kirkpatrick. Photogrammar was made possible by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, which digitized and made accessible the FSA-OWI collection, and Curator of Photography Beverly W. Brannon, as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are thankful for their commitment to open culture.
Notes
1 On the discourse of “crisis,” Martha Nussbaum and Paul Jay offer two very different takes. Nussbaum begins Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities with “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance” ([Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010], 1). Jay, by contrast, challenges the language of crisis, arguing that current debates about the humanities are, first, nothing new and second, no sign of crisis (The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014]). Our focus, in this essay, is not the accuracy of the term, but its persistence and discursive effects.
2 For a strong articulation of this argument, see Stanley Fish, “Will the Humanities Save Us?” Opinionator (blog), New York Times, January 6, 2008, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/.
3 Throughout this essay, “us” and “we” refers to co-authors Jordana Cox and Lauren Tilton, unless otherwise specified. Especially generative for both of us was an interdisciplinary faculty seminar at the University of Richmond. Under the auspices of a Mellon-funded Humanities Initiative, which also funded Jordana's postdoc at the University of Richmond, we benefited greatly from weekly discussions on “The Practice of the Humanities.”
4 For example: Gordon Hunter and Feisal G. Mohamed, eds., A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Jay, The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies; Julie Klein, Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Nussbaum, Not for Profit; Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
5 Debates about the humanities “suggest that those who teach and do scholarship in the humanities are continually thinking in a productively self-reflexive way about what they do in the classroom and in their research.” Jay, The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies, 2.
6 Henry W. Johnstone, “Communication, Technology and Ethics,” in Communication, Philosophy, and the Technological Age, ed. Michael J. Hyde (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 48. We learned about Johnstone's work from Mari Lee Mifsud, who cites him extensively in Rhetoric and the Gift: Ancient Theory and Contemporary Communication (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2015).
7 In Mifsud's words: “Rhetoric and the Gift explores rhetoric not only at the level of the artful response but at the level of the call and response, or said another way, at the level of the gift and rhetoric prior to and in excess of art, not as some rudimentary system of relating that awaits systematic and philosophical development but as some thing, some event, some moment, other than art, other than techne, incommensurable even, meaning outside of exchange altogether, beyond exchangist figures, meaning other than signification, other than symbols, yet always already within and functioning” (Rhetoric and the Gift, 4).
8 HULA Research Team, Project Zero, Understanding the Contributions of the Humanities to Human Development: A Methodological White Paper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, May 16, 2016), https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/danielleallen/files/hulawhitepaper2.pdf.
9 Yolanda T. Moses, “Humanities and Inclusion: A Twenty-First Century Land-Grant University Tradition,” in A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education, ed. Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 72–85.
10 Taylor Arnold et al., “Uncovering Latent Metadata in the FSA-OWI Photographic Archive,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2017): http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/2/000299/000299.html.
11 Robyn Schroeder, “What Is Public Humanities?” April 2017, https://dayofph.wordpress.com/what-is-public-humanities/.
12 Elizabeth Lynn and Peter Levine, An Ongoing Experiment: State Councils, the Humanities, and the American Public (Washington, DC: Kettering Foundation, 2013), https://www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/product-downloads/An-Ongoing-Experiment1.pdf.
13 For analysis of a recent survey of perspectives on the public humanities, see Matthew Wickman, “What Are the Public Humanities? No, Really, What Are They?” University of Toronto Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2016): 6–11.
14 The definitional debates about digital humanities continue to flourish. See: Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 12–15; Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds., Defining Digital Humanities. A Reader (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2013); Sheila Brennan, “Public, First,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 384–90, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/83.
15 Geoffrey Galt Harpham defines the humanities as “The scholarly study of documents and artifacts produced by human beings in the past enables us to see the world from different points of view so that we may better understand ourselves.” He elaborates that the humanities have “text as their object, humanity as their subject, and self-understanding as their purpose” (“Beneath and Beyond the ‘Crisis in the Humanities,’” New Literary History 36, no. 1 [2005]: 23).
16 Julie Ellison, “The Humanities and the Public Soul,” Antipode 40, no. 3 (2008): 463–71. Ellison defines “public” as “work conducted in a deliberately democratic fashion by peers impelled by diverse interests and a common public purpose” (113).
17 Patrick Svensson, “Humanities Computing as Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3 no. 3 (2009): http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000065/000065.html.
18 Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally.”
19 Lauren Tilton and Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Participatory Archives,” Archive Journal (August 2017): http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/participatory-archives/, accessed February 8, 2018.
20 Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3–11.
21 Brennan, “Public, First.”
22 The Photogrammar project team is currently in the process of adding the life histories produced by the Federal Writers’ Project. The new version should be available in fall 2020.
23 For more on the New Deal, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996); David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Thomas Benson, ed., American Rhetoric in the New Deal Era, 1932–1945: A Rhetorical History of the United States, Vol. 7 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2006).
24 For more on social documentary, see William Stott, Documentary Expression in Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mary E. Stuckey, “FDR, the Rhetoric of Vision, and the Creation of a National Synoptic State,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 3 (2012): 297–319.
25 Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935–1944 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 40.
26 Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life.
27 For Gordon Parks's account of his art and work, see A Choice of Weapons (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2010); “Oral History Interview with Gordon Parks,” December 30, 1964, Archives of American Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution). On Walker Evans's focus on form, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 281–322; Trachtenberg, “A Book Nearly Anonymous,” in Reading American Photographs, 231–86.
28 Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2015): http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html. Kathleen Fitzpatrick theorizes generosity for humanities advocacy, writlarge, in “Generous Thinking: Why We Need the Humanities, and How to Save Them,” (lecture, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, February 4, 2016); “Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good,” Humanities Commons (2019), https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/; BoatwrightLibrary, “Kathleen Fitzpatrick: ‘Generous Thinking: Why We Need the Humanities, and How to Save Them,’” YouTube.com, February 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZmn_XTK3OY http://kfitz.info/generous-thinking-the-university-and-the-public-good/.
29 See John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of 1930s Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), ix–xiii.
30 Taylor Arnold, Peter Leonard, and Lauren Tilton, “Knowledge Creation through Recommender Systems,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32, no. suppl_2 (2017): ii151–ii157.
31 Here, we are inspired by Mifsud's reading of Aristotle, in which she tracks his copious references to Homeric gift-giving and identifies a “politics of appropriation” that plays out in Aristotle's “particular choices about how to receive what Homer gives” (Rhetoric and the Gift, 16, 54–94).
32 The last several years have seen a shift from narrative maps that force users to follow an animation (usually along the axis of time) to interactive, “choose your own adventure” style maps.
33 Here, we draw on Henry W. Johnstone Jr.'s distinction between the (generative) creative and the (instrumental) technical possibilities of rhetoric: “a process is technological in the sense when it is a series of steps in which either a given step or the project as a whole determines the sequel to the given step, or else when the question whether the successor is fitting to its predecessors does not arise” (qtd. in Mifsud, Rhetoric and the Gift, 11). In this sense, Photogrammar leads to a provocative contradiction: it is technological, but it also exceeds the technological.
34 The one exception is the source code for Carto, the mapping engine. Carto is open source software and users can use their own instance of the software.
35 Michael Eisen, “The Open Access Movement in Scholarly Communication,” in Emerging Visions for Access in the Twenty-First Century Library (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2003), 56–65, https://clir.wordpress.clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/pub119.pdf.
36 James E. Porter, “Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric,” Computers and Composition 26, no. 4 (2009): 216.
37 See Bess Williamson, “Access,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 14–17.
38 Peter Suber, “Promoting Open Access in the Humanities,” Janusry 3, 2004, http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/apa.htm.
39 We know users are engaging with the site for long periods of time. The bounce rate is 37%, which means 37% of users look at one page and then leave. Their time on the site is very short, often just seconds. As a result, for an average duration on a site to be almost five minutes, it means a significant number of users are also staying on the site much longer. It is also worth noting that Google Analytics does not know how long a person stays on a page if they only visit one page on the site. As a result, a user might have a direct link to the page they want to visit and remain there for several minutes; this is not captured in the average session time statistics.
40 On the relationship between Veblen's use of the term and Burke's, see Erin Wais, “‘Trained Incapacity’: Thorstein Veblen and Kenneth Burke,” KB Journal 2, no. 1 (2005): https://www.kbjournal.org/wais.
41 We can also see this kind of humanities work being led by scholars on Twitter. For example, Matt Delmont posted each day for a year a tweet about black daily life from a black U.S. newspaper. The project is called Black Quotidian (http://blackquotidian.com/anvc/black-quotidian/introduction?path=index).
42 McKenzie Wark, General Intellects: Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2017), 2.
43 Ibid., 11.
44 Danielle Allen, “The Civic Knowledge Project: Grounding Ideas,” The Civic Knowledge Project (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008), 2, http://civicknowledge.uchicago.edu/files/Origins.pdf. For other theorizations of the public in public humanities, see Cara Krmpotich, “Public Humanities as Third Space: Memory, Meaning-Making and Collections, and the Enunciation of ‘We’ in Research,” University of Toronto Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2016): 82–92; David R. Shumway, “Why the Humanities Must Be Public,” University of Toronto Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2016): 33–45.
45 Jennifer Harrison Newman, The Geneva Project: A Dance and Multimedia Performance (dance and multimedia performance, Public Humanities at Yale, American Studies, and Photographic Memory Workshop, Educational Center for the Arts, New Haven, CT, April 10, 2016). See also “Geneva Project and Photogrammar,” (Yale Public Humanities Symposium, New Haven, CT, 2015), https://campuspress.yale.edu/phsymposium/geneva-project-photogrammar/.
46 “The Geneva Project Description” reads, “An inter-disciplinary dance work exploring history, blood memory, and the traces of an ancestral past, The Geneva Project examines what is hidden and what is revealed, by bringing light to that which was once buried.” “Geneva Project and Photogrammar.”
47 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 14.
48 Ibid., 15.
49 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
50 For more on the circulation of FSA-OWI photographs, see Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2003); Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “The Borders of Genre: Migrant Mother and the Times Square Kiss,” in No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 49–92.
51 Hariman and Lucaites analyze this iconic photo and its circulation in “The Borders of Genre.”
52 Disidentification describes the interpretive strategies of minoritarian subjects who cannot/will not identify with dominant ideologies. See José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4–11.
53 We are indebted to Ralph Cintrón for the generative idea of citizenship enacted through presence rather than legal status. See Ralph Cintrón and Jason Schneider, “Things of the World: Migration, Presence, and the Arts of Presencing,” Philosophy & Rhetoric (forthcoming); Ralph Cintrón, Democracy as Fetish (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, forthcoming).