This summary is from Benjamin Walton's 2015 article "Quirk Shame," read for the class Readings in Musicology. The article was talking about how sources are found, used, and how contextual historicism is considered in the modes of digital Musicological practice.
How can the Digital Humanities pry itself away from its sectarian ideology around research and posit digitalization as an enriching process towards diversified methodologies, rather than a discursive, polluting influence?
Further, is there indeed any value in defending traditional, more protracted forms of research if their digital alternatives provide quicker turn-arounds for those among the mire of Academic life? The “quirk shame” phenomenon has developed from such inquiries, where the antithetical feeling of distrust of simplicity has caused Scholars to reexamine how they do research..
In Benjamin Walton’s 2015 paper on the contemporaneous, scholastic trend he calls quirk shame, defined as the “deracinating” [uprooting from context] of archival and historical objects in the wake of gross digitalization, he argues for a more intrinsic reassessment of how scholars go about actually gathering and collecting research now that online archives like Google Books have radically altered what “archival research” functionally entails. No longer are archival documents and historical objects bound by the rigidity of their base form now that “searchable databases” [composite sites of archival/non-archival materials] have pluralized the methodological landscape. However, Walter notes that the “familiar acts of potential shame and normal scholarly practice,” an unnecessary schism induced by the inflexibility and disparagement of many career Academicians to the blooming popularity of the “digital” in Digital Humanities, has caused the growth of quirk shame.
The shame component is said to come from the more user-friendly monolinearity of digital research, described by Walton as the result of “ease of discovery and the ability both to tickle the audience’s fancy and to fulfill their expectations.” In other words, when the difficulty of sourcing information is reduced, there stands the potential for quasi-embarrassment on the part of the researcher in having found their ‘Holy Grail’ through nothing more than a series of well-timed clicks. In a rather candid tenor Walton states, “the hard-won quirk will only temporarily seem more deserving of attention than the Googled quirk.” Despite the Scholar’s work to find the “Holy Grail,” he notes that the Grail will be the only thing your audience sees, so the way one gets there may not matter in the long-run.
To quell this oblong reality, Walton posits that's what’s needed is neither methodological asceticism or puritanical digitalization. Instead, the palpable feeling of shame Walton felt in his utilization of Google Book’s preview feature during his work on opera in Calcutta as opposed to his ethnographic visit to India to see the exact source in the flesh, marks the “transitional stage” from one modality to the next. The contemporary Digital Humanitarian, along with their other disciplinary brethren, are encouraged to redress and reframe the non-digital collection as not the antithesis to its digital alternative, but an instructive accomplice striving for the same goal, that being a comprehensive historical intimacy with the researcher’s designated theme and temporal-spatial parameters.
So while potentially beneficial in the pursuit of the democratization and feasibility of information accrual on behalf of students, scholars, and laymen alike, Walton notes that decreasing the time-built kinship of the researcher to their research via expedited, quirky processes may be less helpful overall. To this, he proposes that the field of Digital Humanities work towards normalizing a more introspective approach when engaged in all aspects of research, continuously assessing how digitalization is coloring our comprehension of music history and its living stories.
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