Digital Humanities

“This will help extinguish the prejudice the Humanities currently face: that our field is less important than STEM.”

How, in your view, will the absorption of DH practices into regular humanities scholarship accomplish this? You are essentially making a messianic argument here (of the precise kind that Stanley Fish warned about the mocked in the essay that we read at the beginning of the semester). And messianic arguments are dangerous, because they simplify the overall complexity of a given issue by locating our disciplinary “salvation” in one, particular idea. DH is not going to “save” the humanities; if the public has no appreciation for the kinds of questions that the humanities ask, then no amount of “new methodology” or “new study topics” — however flashy — will succeed in making them feel otherwise.

Hold up, here: you’re conflating Forcier’s writing with Cody’s summary of Forcier’s writing. Cody, in his blog post, is not necessarily claiming that Forcier is right, or voicing support for his positions; rather, he’s using them as a spring board for our discussions of DH.

You need to tie your claims here more concretely to textual evidence (either from Cody’s post or from Forcier’s text). Also: since you don’t know Eric Forcier personally, you should refer to him by using his last name (standard academic / professional practice).

To be fair, though, Forcier (when he makes this claim) isn’t talking about people in general; he’s talking about humanists. And just as the Internet, in Nicholas Carr’s view, has fundamentally changed people (biologically, neurologically, socially, culturally), I think it is entirely fair to argue that digital methods and tools have fundamentally changed the work that is being done in the humanities. So I don’t see the logic of your point that DH “does not take people who were fundamentally one way and make them another”; I think a lot of what we have reviewed so far this semester indicates otherwise.

Perhaps, though, the inconsistency has to do with the way that you, in particular, are defining DH. If you define as a set discipline that appears to attract and repel people (as you indicate here), then it might be harder to see and to track instances of “fundamental change”; if, on the other hand, one views DH as a set of practices and tools — like the Internet, generally speaking, but also like Word Processing, searchable databases, digitized archives, remote access, and digital collaboration — then it is hard not to see how “fundamental change” to humanities scholarship has resulted from the use of those tools.

Transitional state to what? I think this is the word that the fundamental idea is built on, that DH platform is the transition to changing a person after they use and/or master it. You say transitional stage, and I’m curious from what to what you’re transitioning from . . . Is this in relation to the previous paragraph, where we are transitioning from simplicity to the new world of DH?

This is more like it. I wonder why they had to go as far to say that people are changed fundamentally, rather than, how you say, “revolutionizing the landscape of academia”, because it is through this fact that people are changing. We change with change, AKA, as our world and field change, we must keep up with it and learn new ways to perform our tasks–this requires new ways of thought, but doesn’t mean it will reach us in our core part of who we are in order to change us fundamentally.

I agree with this, actually. I regret not going into this debate in my own response, but I think that’s very true, that just because you practice an art in DH doesn’t mean you changed as a person because of it. What is something you believe would change people fundamentally? Is there a study, group, or other part of the humanities that would have this effect?