Toward criteria for the arguing model

The digital humanities (DH) is a material approach to humanities studies that embraces a wide array of media and analytical representations for interpreting texts and disseminating meaning.Digital humanities, practically, is a conglomeration of many thousands of coding hours, text enrichment, qualitative text analysis, and interdisciplinary cooperation.This amounts to a quiet, continuous revolution of the way scholars everywhere are interacting with humanities texts.Ramsey and Rockwell attempt, in "Developing Things: Notes Towards an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities," to mediate the discourse surrounding fundamental shifts in process that necessitate a greater dependence on intermediating artifacts for textual analysis.Using their quest for a "materialist epistemology sufficient to the task of defending building [intermediating artifacts] as a distinct form of scholarly endeavor" as a jumping-off point for my own exploration of DH, I will assess a claim made by Lev Manovich that a prototype, presented as a DH model, is capable of proffering an argument on its own (Ramsey and Rockwell 77).I will first define a number of oppositions that illuminate the sometimes-murky terrain of DH, specifying what I include in my assessment, and what I do not.Then I'll unpack a number of these concepts further and show how they can help us create a list of criteria for evaluating a model's capacity for argumentation.Finally, I'll look at a few