Digital Humanities is Exactly Like The Real Housewives

In 2020 during lockdown, I developed a surprising new interest: reality TV. I never watched reality TV growing up but suddenly I had unbridled time to watch all forty seasons of Survivor in about six months. As my reality TV journey has led me to many different shows since then (Big Brother, The Traitors, and Love Island USA), I’ve now settled on a new project of conquering all twelve installments of The Real Housewives. With this ongoing and all-consuming project in mind, I’ve discovered that Digital Humanities is nearly indistinguishable from the concept of The Real Housewives.

1. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives were invented around the same time. As I learned during one session of Praxis, DH was originally called “humanities computing” until the book A Companion to Digital Humanities was published in 2004. This circumstantial rebrand wound up having long-running effects on how the field thinks about itself. The first season of The Real Housewives premiered in 2006, only two years later (causal relationship?).
2. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives both have misleading names. As we’ve learned throughout the semester (and from Oriane’s blog post), there are no restrictive rules around what is and what is not a DH project. Our DH workshops didn’t even involve working with digital tools, but instead introduced participants to different interdisciplinary methodologies. Similarly, The Real Housewives is a misnomer because its stars are generally not housewives. They’re often successful businesswomen and sometimes aren’t even married. Being a “housewife” is a very loose term that encompasses a lot of different types of people.
3. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives are both people-centric. If you haven’t watched The Real Housewives before, every episode basically consists of wealthy women having conversations in different locations and at varying volumes. The most compelling part of the show is how the women solve (or fail to solve) complex interpersonal conflicts. I too have complex interpersonal conflicts with people in the Scholars’ Lab (Jeremy Boggs)¹ but that isn’t the point… Digital Humanities is also about drawing connections between critical humanities questions and digital tools/methods. DH work is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and dialogic.
4. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives defined my second year of grad school. This year has been really tough for me academically: I had to submit my Qualifying Paper back in November and this month I will take my comprehensive exams. I use my brain all day long for really hard things so the last thing I want to do is watch TV that uses it even more. The Real Housewives is the perfect show to watch to escape the horrors of grad school. I feel the same about Digital Humanities… the projects that we worked on in Praxis were so different from what I was doing in my own research that it felt like an exciting and stimulating relief from my other academic pressures. Praxis meetings quickly became the highlight of every week… as did my Real Housewives of Salt Lake City study breaks.