Creating Dangerously: Bridging Anthropology and Digital Humanities

An essay on my work and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Creating Dangerously: Bridging Anthropology and Digital Humanities

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

–Edwidge Danticat

Exposition

Writing a public essay is challenging, especially when it’s one of your first formal interactions with a subject you care deeply about. My name is Horvey, and I am a LatinX queer scholar in the United States at an R1 research program studying biomolecules in the context of human history. Immediately this introduction to me is weird, right? I would be shocked if you weren’t at least curious about why a molecular scientist is writing about the intersections of digital humanities and evidence-based anthropology. I am not exactly sure, but I will do my best to explain why in the coming narrative.

I think growing up, I always wanted to be an anthropologist. However, I didn’t always use that word to describe what I wanted to do– sometimes, I still don’t think it’s precisely the right word. But nonetheless, I was always interested in history and science; I excelled at both and always thought it was interesting when they combined. Interestingly, anthropology has the power to connect these as a discipline that encompasses research on biological, cultural, and historical data that aims to illuminate the human condition in all its wondrous forms. However, though its history of borrowing methods from nearly every discipline imaginable is robust, its application of the methods and their consequences to humanity has not always been positive. The settler-colonial history of anthropology still plagues us today. The case has even been made for anthropology to burn https://www.americananthropologist.org/commentaries. It never was and still isn’t helpful to the communities we claim to serve. If it is to ever indeed be useful, it must change into an equitable and ethical discipline that reconstructs the face of anthropological knowledge and combat the very past that still bears its face in our contemporary scholarship.

And– of all the current fields of anthropology, nowhere are those sentiments more true than in the study of ancient and contemporary biology. Molecular, bioarchaeological, and bioanthropological research has time and again proven that it has the potential to ignite racial, ethnic, and biologically deterministic agendas through the scholarship that we produce. Though we do not make racist science (most of us anyway), the conclusions we arrive at when interpreted through hateful lenses can bolster the counternarratives we try to deconstruct. Though there are several reasons why this happens, one startling finding is that anthropology has an outreach problem. We do not know how to convey our information to the public through meaningful, constructive, and engaged platforms. Now, that isn’t to say that ALL of anthropology doesn’t know how to do this, but rather that the entire discipline has not yet reached this sort of dynamic approach to research, theory, and, most importantly, science communication.

Queue in digital humanities, a relatively new discipline but similar to anthropology in that it will borrow substantively from archival studies, science and technology, linguistics, art, computer science, and philosophy, to name a few, and combine them into a synthetic approach to examine data related to the human condition through a humanistic lens. This sounds eerily similar to certain parts of anthropology. I could now imagine a cultural anthropologist using resources related to these in their work on a specific subject. Or an archaeologist trowel deep into an archival fellowship looking at historical documents pertaining to their site or artifact class. However, the critical difference in seemingly similar approaches to scholarship is only surface deep. Digital humanities arose with the explicit intent to engage the humanities beyond the archive and into broader spaces of public view through digital methods. It turned the humanities on its head, expanded its reach to general audiences, new researchers, and created a discipline that, by its very foundation, must collaborate to thrive.

The digital humanities are by no means perfect. Though I know I paint a pretty picture of its contribution to scholarship, it must still contend with serious ethical debates about the nature of public scholarship, visualization, and deconstructing barriers to access. Though these are a subject for a later essay. But I want to take a moment to imagine what it would mean for anthropology to borrow the practices of digital humanities into its toolkit. Some anthropologists are doing this, but scholarship is sparse. We are not consistently crossing over to imagine the possibilities of what integrating more fully with digital humanities could mean for our discipline. This is what I have chosen to tackle for my very first introduction to digital humanities course and the foundation for the rest of this essay. For each section, I will describe either a component where the two disciplines have collided or where I see room for their collaboration.

Development In Three

The first area that I want to highlight in this essay is metadata. Understanding the history of anthropology and its relationship to our communities of practice could be considerably advanced by using archives and digital humanities tools. However, many anthropologists though aware of critical archival and social theory, frequently lack the practical toolkits required to peer back into our own history through this skill set. This is mainly because anthropologists are not regularly cross-trained in the assembly and description of archives or the textual tools required for this analysis, even though they frequently need sources from these repositories. Understanding the history of anthropology through the incorporation of digital humanities opens a new stream of research questions about the discipline broadly that, without digital humanities tools, would be nearly impossible to interrogate. What themes do anthropologists think the field was concerned with during the 1950s? What was published and cited most frequently in the 1940s? How many times have debates on biological determinism popped up in the history of the discipline? When did critical indigenous perspectives first appear, and when did they become popularized? From what institutions are the most significant debates in anthropology emerging? These questions could benefit from a meta-analysis that digital humanities tools can bring to our work. Understanding the tools and the theories that gave rise to their development creates better partnerships between anthropology and digital humanities that will, in turn, generate new and more ethical approaches to the shared decolonizing practices of the discipline and increased accessibility for researchers interested in that work.

Narrative Example: The issues of 1956 for the American Anthropologist, a leading journal in the discipline was an interesting case to consider how text or meta-data could inform our anthropological analysis. This year within the archives of the journal saw 7 volumes and 50 articles. Interestingly when one of these volumes is analyzed through Voyant a few interesting themes emerge. The first was a preoccupation with kinship. This may have been expected since kinship networks and studies of familial relationships were abundant in the middle part of the 20th century. However, a surprising addition to my knowledge of the time was a preoccupation with music. A little more research into the use of the term through the contexts and correlations tools showed me that frequently the term appeared with near society, musicology, and anthropology. This led me to look more into the history of the 1950’s and learned that this pattern was actually pointing out that in the journal during this time numerous articles were being published on the contribution of music, linguistics, and anthropology which later in that same year came to be called ethnomusicology. Now

Public engagement is likely one of the most important contributions that anthropology can learn from the digital humanities. Without a communication revolution in anthropology, we will continue to suffer from the historical narratives that are still being replicated. The information that we gain from anthropological analysis is important, but understanding how to share, publish, and interact with it requires very specific attention to detail. Researchers frequently just publish in academic journals because the institutional requirements of tenure make it a necessity. At the same time, those institutional requirements frequently disincentivize researchers from science and public communication efforts by rewarding academic publications at a higher rate than any other scholarly or activist contribution. However, by and large, the stakeholders we work with will never read these articles, even assuming they are published in a language that they can understand. It is no longer enough to just publish in a journal for reputation’s sake; it takes more to create ethically engaged research that is not just IRB cleared but rather is actively mutually equitable to all stakeholders involved in research. One of the ways in which we can do this is by making our data and research projects accessible in digital repositories with accessible language that interprets the results for the communities we work with. It invites the researcher to understand the subjectivity of their partners and actively co-construct the broader impact of their research with communities of practice that care and are invested in the success of research– and what it will mean to them.

Narrative Example: Molecules Destabilized is the website I created while taking this class. The original idea for the site stemmed from wanting to update my blog, which I had to revitalize for this class and some of its requirements. As a reflection, building a website from scratch is no small task. It required knowledge of java, HTML, git, GitHub, and markdown to just begin the process. I chose to build it informatically because these are skills I will need either way and doing it through classwork seemed to work better with my ability to get it done. The advantage of coding is that I get complete control, almost indefinite, of the status of my website. However, I want to talk about what the website has to do with my project’s conceptualization. Many academics have websites as “vessels of outreach,” but few of them are actually about their research and instead are living and consistently updated biographies about the researcher. Now, this is true of mine; in it, you can find my teaching experience, a CV, and many links that will point you to other landing pages about me. But its landing page is explicitly about the work that I hope to do and what this website and blog are meant to contribute. I hope, in some way, this website becomes a living repository of science communication and engagement for communities I work with and reach out to. While a lot of work remains to be done on that score, the backbone of the website is complete and will provide me the infrastructure I need to digital interact with my research and make publicly available the scholarship I work with (when appropriate). This is one component I hope to engage with more and more as I complete and publish research in my field. Increasingly digital humanities is also becoming a field I am specializing in, and who knows what this website and my interactions in DH will bring. I look forward to exploring those further.

The last of these contributions that I see is what I am going to call the “Molecular Humanities.” I know, I know, how pretentious, yet another scholar coming up with a new phrase that will have to be theorized and problematized for years to come. That is not what I am trying to do here, but rather I hope to present two words that look almost strikingly in opposition to each other but that, to me, work exceedingly well together. The idea that the humanities have anything to contribute to the world of molecules might be a non-starter for both molecular scientists and humanists. The scientist has little affection for theory, and the humanist wants you to keep your biomolecules to yourself. But what if, instead of perpetuating this narrative, you allow me a moment to consider what it would look like to integrate an approach that held high regard for both science and humanities. How can scientific data exist with humanistic approaches to the human condition? Perhaps one can imagine a synthetic project that combines illness narratives with data from one health. The union of these two ideas could highlight the way systemic oppression creates negative health outcomes that frequently create suffering both biologically and culturally. Or perhaps a project on inequity that identifies how disproportionate access to health care and resources creates cultural imaginaries of disease and illness which concurrently embed themselves into the bones of the oppressed. The possibilities are endless if only the right questions and the right methods are employed. Molecules, much like text analysis, have a tremendous quantity of information to share about people, not just biology, and the issues, both cultural and physiological, that affect their livelihood. So great we now have the new field of Molecular Humanities. Now what? What sort of questions could be asked in this domain? I suspect that I could spend an entire career attempting to answer this question. But instead, I want to put it immediately into practice by framing a part of the very first assignment I did in this class from this perspective.

Narrative Example: Using the ngram viewer this semester proved to be far more interesting than I first thought. Though not nearly as sophisticated as the examples I gave above, I used the search tool to look through Google’s digital collections for the words genomics, metabolomics, and proteomics. Each of these three methods are billion-dollar industries in both private and public sectors, and understanding their development through text is an interesting exercise. The image you see below presents limited results from which some initial conclusions can be drawn. The first one I see is that genomics appears as the earliest of the three, especially with the onset of the Human Genome Project and its success in the 1990s. The second is that the three terms appear in successive fashion, and this coincides with scientific advances that have allowed each of these disciplines to advance. The latest example of this is metabolomics which is growing more and more as researchers compile data. The other one is “multi-omic,” the convergence of the three terms which has only, within the last three years, gained traction in the literature. A tool like this might be a great filter to understand what components of the history related to scientific development and the birth of disciplines might be interesting to look at with a more refined search tool.

Coda

I want to end on an intimate note in the way that I think an essay should. I once thought of this project as just a class assignment, but it has instead transformed into a key component of how I view my scholarship and its contribution to society. I never thought as a child, and especially not as an undergraduate, that I would be chasing dreams turned into ideas the way I am now. After all, dreams had been deferred by me, my parents, my roots, my ancestors, and everyone who once may have considered what it might look like to become. Well, I am becoming. And while that is scary, it is also exciting to do something that brings the passions I grew up idealizing into a synthesis that matters beyond just the research and hopes to affect the communities I work with now and in the future. Finding your way as a researcher is no easy task; even with the greatest possible support, understanding your niche and its relationship to you and your community takes a lifetime. But I like to think that life is, in essence, a slow trek to discover the few moments that contribute to who you are and being a researcher (for now) must be one of them for me.

The molecular humanities might not turn into anything… ever. But the ideas that buttressed its conception– that the anthropological, molecular, and humanistic disciplines can inform and converge upon wicked problems are strong within me. Digital humanities and anthropology bring together two similar approaches to research that, when combined, affect the scope of research in each discipline exponentially. Each of them also addresses deficiencies in each other that make their union a stronger practice toward the ethical and equitable investigation of patterns that can sustainably contribute to the shared decolonial efforts of contemporary scholarship and invest in a collaborative future.