Christopher Ohge

Innovation may seem like a new idea, but it is a sixteenth-century term that was first recorded during an era of scientific revolutions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it firstly as ‘The action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms’ (s.v. ‘Innovation, n.’). But it also includes an obsolete sense of ‘political revolution; a rebellion or insurrection’ exemplified by Shakespeare’s King Henry IV’s warning about the ‘discontents’ who ‘gape and rub the elbow at the newes / Of hurly burly innouation’ (Henry IV, Part 1, v. i. 78). Nowadays many people would think of its most common usage of bringing a new product into the market, but the first sense of ‘novelty’ and ‘new forms’ speaks to the ethos of many digital researchers. That lingering sense of revolution may also suggest another reason why it is so congenial to technology, whether it was the ‘revolution’ of print in the fifteenth century (as Elizabeth Eisenstein put it, which has since rightly been reconsidered as overly sweeping) or the digital revolution of the past few decades (Eisenstein 2012; Johns 2000; Baron et al. 2007). When resources are scarce, though, it might also seem attractive to a humble humanist to claim that they are revolutionaries now, too. (King Henry IV might suggest danger.) This relationship between innovation and revolution brings me to the core question of this polemic: is it a failure to innovate in digital humanities (DH), or a greater failure not to innovate? Or, better yet, under which conditions should we innovate when the idea itself seems to partake of growth-economy logic that has perpetuated the climate crisis? Should innovation be about newness as such, or about ‘making it new’ (namely, making something new out of tradition, or what has worked well before)?

The fact that ‘Innovation’ was a criterion for acceptance into the Association of Digital Humanities convention in 2023 shows its importance as a working principle in DH, even though there is still no consensus on what the term means. If innovation is about novelty, or about engaging in a logic that supports neoliberal hype, then it can become an albatross for a DH researcher or team. Innovations in DH have led to some important benefits (e.g. IIIF n.d) as well as failures (e.g. Project Bamboo), but the albatross is usually the resources required for maintaining the project (Dombrowski 2014). Yet some of the greatest achievements of DH tool-making are not ‘innovative’ in the sense of being sophisticated or flashy – like AntConc (Anthony n.d.) or Voyant Tools (Sinclair and Rockwell n.d.) – but simple and very useful and are nonetheless impactful and widely used.

As I worked as a coordinator for the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition Toolkit (Baillot et al. 2024), it became clear that an unthinking loyalty to innovation-as-novelty contributes to an increased carbon footprint. It also betrays the dual calamity of the climate crisis and precarity – precarity, in that many institutions simply cannot afford to be innovative, and that the people required to do this work are operating under the realities of insecure university staffing.

Given these considerations – the vexed implications of innovation, the environmental costs of innovation and precarious resources and labour conditions – innovation should be framed in pragmatic terms. By ‘pragmatic terms’ I mean making things that work and that help us cope better with the conditions of our research.¹ (This goes against a capitalist logic of innovation which valorises novelty and return on investment.) I can think of no better example of this in my own digital work than the development of a manuscript editor for the Herman Melville Electronic Library (hereafter, MEL).² When I started contributing to this project, in 2010, one of the project’s main focuses was to develop an XML editor, called TextLab, initially to encode the complicated surviving manuscript of Billy Budd. Developed by Nick Laiacona, who had previously worked with Jerome McGann on the Juxta Commons platform,³ TextLab was as innovative a manuscript editor as one could imagine: it matched TEI XML-encoded transcriptions of a manuscript to the coordinates of the manuscript’s facsimile, allowing for a granular examination of inscriptions and revisions. It was also multilayered: it could view a diplomatic transcription (with mouseover pop-up notes that showed the TEI encoding), a base text (a cleaned-up version of the diplomatic text), as well as ‘revision narrative’ notes to explain how the text changed.

This all amounted to a technical implementation of John Bryant’s theories in The Fluid Text, which argued for a new way of presenting all versions of a text in a digital interface (Bryant 2002). TextLab was brilliant: by 2019, the editors had completed a fully encoded digital edition of Billy Budd.

TextLab presented some serious issues, though. The first is that it was developed for one project, the Melville Electronic Library, rather than being built as a general-purpose tool. It was also a dynamic app, hosted on Heroku, that cost several hundred US dollars per month just to maintain. Then MEL lost its support from its funder. Then the director of the project, John Bryant, retired, and his former institution chose not to support the project, and its supporting research centre. MEL became the orphan that Ishmael describes at the end of Moby-Dick.⁴ But we also faced the dilemma of innovating without being able to pay for it in the long term. By hosting a dynamic app on a third-party site, we were also not harbouring a sustainable, environmentally friendly tool. This is not the fault of anyone in particular: these were the conditions of innovation under which we were operating – conditions which were incentivised by the funding environment at the time but not supported for the long term. Like many projects that benefit from a windfall, MEL created cutting-edge tools that directly contributed to its obsolescence.

Even though we learned these lessons the hard way, we continued our conversations and collaboration with Nick Laiacona, who has since founded Performant Software to support digital humanities projects and develop tools. We agreed that what was needed was a general-purpose tool similar to TextLab but that could make use of existing innovations (such as IIIF) while also making use of minimal computing principles to ensure sustainability.⁵ By combining features of MEL’s TextLab with another project’s lightweight manuscript interface, at the Making and Knowing Project, Laiacona released EditionCrafter in 2023.⁶ Owing to the stable TEI XML source data at the Melville Electronic Library, we were able to facilitate the replacement of the TextLab software with EditionCrafter to display the Billy Budd manuscript.

By innovating in this pragmatic and responsible way, and with much heroic effort by Laiacona and other colleagues, we were able to build on a previous failure to ensure the stability of the project and to support a more responsible digital tool.⁷ By doing so, we were also setting an example to reduce the carbon footprint of our project.

I rather like the organic metaphor of innovation, used in botany, to describe the growth of a new shoot at the apex of a stem or branch. It reframes innovation as a process of ‘making it new’, or branching off from the whole – to push the metaphor further, it could entail that innovation is a new branch of the discipline which is dependent on its roots. Innovation can strengthen that which remains. What this would require, in theory, is that we innovate by branching off from what is already useful, and to think of more efficient ways of promoting healthy growth. I would hope that if we undertake the much harder work of changing our culture of innovation in digital humanities, we might see more innovative thinking instead of techno-utopian promises that contribute to the further degradation of the natural world. In practice, this would mean putting the focus on doing things well (and responsibly) rather than novelty for novelty’s sake (making new things), without pressuring ourselves to introduce novelties into technology that are unnecessary to promote the core enterprise – the work, the research.