How to Fix DH
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 I think that in order to fix this “DH problem”, some changes are going to have to be made, and they can’t just continually be small, slow ones, like the steps that we’ve been studying all semester. In order to respond, or retaliate, against what they are viewing as DH’s downward spiral, the scholars and practitioners are going to have to take a stand. They can no longer dilly dally in writing essays debating what DH is and isn’t, or who it belongs to and who is allowed “in”. The scholars, the ones who practice in the field willingly, are going to have to be the ones to make the change, and it is their responsibility alone. If scholars of DH can’t get themselves to care enough, or to learn the knowledge and creativity, to pull DH away from becoming neoliberal, why should we? Why should DH even be a practice or field, if nothing can be done to further it from becoming a field with a University logo? Let’s go through a few fields and see how they came to be. English – important. Literature, research, theory. Professionals worked hard to not only become professionals in the first place, but to keep the study of English going other than just being in education. The same goes for the sciences. Just because the university tells an employed professor that he/she needs to publish however many articles a year, to help the school or to build reputation or whatever neoliberal reason it may be, doesn’t mean that English and STEM fields are stemming from the universities. No, scholars have put in work to make these fields worldly, and not just fields that can be studied as a professor after graduate school. They are a part of our world and integrated into even a measly little high schooler, undergraduate student, or single mother of three’s lifestyle. The Digital Humanities need to be like this, too, because our world is becoming all the more digital as we speak (type, read). So, as the prompt asks, how do we, or the scholars in the field, make DH more than just a University stamp?
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Just look at this roundtable for example. Chun, Grusin, Jagoda, and Raley all got to together to discuss something they care about and are educated in. That’s a great first step! Communication is going to be the first step in fixing this problem. DH is a boat in the ocean. The deep water is neoliberism, where if the boat were to sink down into it fully, into a pit of complete control by the University system, it would be almost impossible to get it to resurface. If scholars keep living on this dark side of neoliberal standpoints, that is soon enough going to be the way it is forever, and DH is going to be known as a liberal field, rather than the creative one that it should be. Chun et al are looking to help the boat from sinking–right now it is floundering in the sea. Communication, meetings, essays written by each other for each other, rather than at each other, these are all things that will help in the development of DH into the field they believe it should be.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Chun suggests that “This dark side also entails taking on our fears and biases to create deeper collaborations”–yes. Obviously what has been done in work up to this point is not working, or is at least moving too slowly. Chun says that these collaborations should be with the STEM fields. The sciences and engineering are obviously successful. They have solid groundwork laid down and now the scholars in those fields are free to do whatever they want without having to explain themselves or explain their field or, the worst, struggle to find a definition for everything they’ve studied ever. By collaboration, they can be a lending hand that the sinking boat needs. Chun goes on to say “realizing that the humanities do not have a lock on creative or critical thinking and realizing that research in the sciences can be as useless as research in the humanities—and that this is a good thing”. What I get from this quote is this: DHers need to broaden their horizons. Now that “digital” is in the picture of the humanities, it can no longer just be thought of as the creative people with critical thinking skills, but it needs to take ideas from other successful fields, like the sciences. Up to this point, it seems like everything we have read in DH essays has been a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Trying to find a definite definition, blog battles, the going back and forth between scholars. Honestly I think the best and my favorite actual work of Digital Humanity was Twitter!!!!!! Twitter was totally, and is totally, the perfect example of utilizing digital humanities. It’s writing, and it’s online, and it’s communicating with the world. What three things go together better to describe DH? Scholars can utilize this tool, along with other social media platforms. Communication, people, and not just jibber jabber mumbo jumbo waste of time. Get to work.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 What this indicates, then, is that both DHers and non-DHers are concerned about the link between digital humanities scholarship and the encroachment of corporatized logic within the university. My question for you, then, in this last blog post of the semester has nothing to do with the logic of true / false or agreement / disagreement. Rather, I want you to think about what can and should be done in order to sever the ties between the digital humanities and the neoliberal gutting of the traditional university. What can DH do, as a field, to respond to and perhaps even prevent increased corporatization within the university? How can DH scholars and practitioners disrupt or complicate the relationship between digital methods and neoliberal practice? And should they — is it their responsibility to do that?
I see your point about communication and collaboration, but the danger lies in what we’ve been afraid of all semester, that things are starting to look too much like STEMistic humanism if such a thing is possible. It might be the traditionalist in me, but I don’t think Twitter is the way to effectively and rationally collaborate. Although I understood the point of the Twitter essay and how it applies to DH, I was actually a little appalled. Again, I am a luddite, so it will take more than a tweet declaring a tweet is scholarship and the introduction of personal life details into your work to sway me.
I do think something that has a “Bring it On”esque flare to it would be useful because I think that all humanistic disciplines need to give themselves a facelift to be more attractive to incoming , malleable minds. Just our saying that the humanities, and by extension, DH are relevant because of X,Y,and Z. Isn’t enough for the world or university at large. To my mind, DH and its potential collaboration with outside disciplines is like letting a band of mercenaries into your country and not expecting them to try and take it over if they get the opportunity.
I feel like every discussion winds up being circular and returning to the overall fear that STEM will swallow DH. That fear is a real one and I’m not sure it can be prevented. Much like I’m not sure if anything we’ve discussed this semester has an easy, tangible solution.
But… “Bring it on [anyway] baby!”