Monia Haddad graduated in political science at the Institute of political studies in Grenoble. As part of her Master's degree, she wrote a dissertation on the French movement for the promotion of Digital Humanities in Academia. She is now undertaking a PhD in sociology on the conditions of development of DH in Academia both in France and the United States.
Hackademia : Are Digital Humanities an extension or a subversion of academic worlds ? A comparative study between France and the United States.
Digital Humanities emerged in academic worlds in early 2000. The Companion to Digital Humanities was the first book to introduce this notion in 2004. According to it, DH particularly refer to the digitization of research practices through networked practices, data extraction or storage. In that regard, the literature dedicated to DH mainly revolve around attempts to define its paradigms.
But Digital Humanities also have to do with specific values such as openness, unity and free access. Those values are included in various Manifestos – as well illustrate the Californian Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 published in 2009 and the French Manifeste des Digital Humanities in 2010. Similarly, hacker-inspired unconferences, the Humanities and technology camps (THATCamps), are organized following a form of “do-ocracy” where participation is not conditioned by any status, but only by a shared interest and each members’ skills.
Therefore, the goal of this research project is to find out if Digital Humanities are an extension of academic worlds to new objects or a form of subversion of well-established ways of working, building of academic careers and assessments.
The hypothesis guiding this research suggests that academic contexts, including research funding systems, especially since the 1990s, have an impact on the way projects are led, but also on the way actors invest those projects as members of a competitive academic world.
To carry out this research, a comparative study between France and the United States will be led in order to highlight how Digital Humanities develop in those countries, as well as to put forward regularities underlying such development.
