What DH Means to Me: Matt Handelman
I am associate professor of German, core faculty in the Digital Humanities, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in LiLaC, and Interim Chair of Digital Humanities. This might sound like a strange combination of interests, but it goes to the heart of what DH means to me. I started my undergraduate majors in mathematics and German literature with little sense that the two subjects had anything in common. However, as my studies in both continued (and as I encountered more mathematical theories named after Gauss, Riemann, Hausdorff, Weierstraß, etc.), I became more and more convinced of the overlaps between German culture and theories and practices of mathematics in the early 20th century. Indeed, as I learned as a graduate student, mathematics had originally been housed in the “philosophical faculty” in German universities, along with philosophy and literary studies. Their separation into STEM and the humanities as we know them today started to appear more as an ideology we imposed on these areas of study—one that covered up their deep and shared interest in language, the nature of reason, and the logical underpinnings of the world. I see DH as a way of bringing them back into productive conversation.
What DH means to me is in a sense interdisciplinary study that better reflects the mix of language, culture, technology, and algorithms that makes up our current reality. This doesn’t mean that we should give up on any of these individual subjects, but rather that a more complete image of knowledge includes both what we may learn in a German and mathematics courses as well as what is revealed by their often surprising and sometimes odd combinations. For instance, the German-Jewish mathematician Felix Hausdorff, considered one of the founders of the modern study of topology, wrote aphorisms and experimental literature inspired by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche under the name Paul Mongré. If, for Hausdorff, the combination of philosophy and literature helped question the legacy of metaphysics around 1900, how might knowledge of Germany in the 20th century (and the role of technology in propaganda) inform how we deal with the problems of algorithmic bias and hate speech on the internet today?
I attempt to model these interdisciplinary ways of thinking in my DH work and teaching. Network analysis, for instance, has provided me with new insights into how German-Jewish intellectuals organized themselves socially between the World Wars and how ideas spread throughout the social networks they created through their exchanges of letters. In my DH courses, I have students explore the origins of “the digital” in the 1940s and 1950s as well as collaborate on semester-long projects that work to analyze and make accessible materials in MSU Library’s Special Collections. In all of these endeavors, I see DH as helping makes visible otherwise hidden connections in the same ways I experienced as an undergraduate major in German and math.
–Dr. Matthew Handelman (Associate Professor)
Interim Director, Digital Humanities
Faculty: Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, Digital Humanities, Jewish Studies, German
The following piece was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the October 14, 2024 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
