Digital Humanities

After the discussion we had in class about the essay, I now realize that my attempt to address Mcpherson’s argument is broad and needed to be narrowed by perhaps focusing on a single aspect of her aspect. Maybe something like, whether or not we actually see the relationship she says exist between race and digital humanities, and whether or not we can limit that relationship in specific categories.

Another approach that I think could have worked here after reading some of my peers responses is, how would we change the layout of her essay, to make it more comprehensible? since some of us found it to be a little difficult to read through.

One way to go about satisfying McPherson’s concerns might be to have scholars who are interested in both DH / traditional modes of criticism take an active role in developing tools (like academic journals) in the field. McPherson, in fact, modeled this process through the founding of the journal Vectors, a publication venue that was designed to target a combination of DH methodologies and traditional critical modes of inquiry. But Vectors has been inactive since 2013, seemingly due to a lack of organized labor and investment in the project. Check out the Vectors project page for more info: http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=7

This quotation really gets at the heart of what McPherson is arguing in this essay, as it explicitly points to the ways in which “computational logic” (as David Golumbia calls it) structures contemporary culture, and the ways in which computational code, algorithmic structures, and protocols form a kind of basic, underlying social logic.

McPherson’s comments, for me, bring to mind Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School philosopher and social researcher who authored a lot of early writings on media and technological change in the 1920s. In his essay “The Author as Producer,” for instance, Benjamin argues (quite famously) that, as cultural critics, we ought to ask not “how does a literary work stand in relation to the relationships of production of a given time period” but, instead, we ought to ask “what is [the work’s] role in those relationships of production” — that is to say, what is the “work” itself (be it literary or otherwise) producing?

It’s clear, for example, that McPherson believes that “computational logic” — or the overarching, widespread systems of computation that include algorithms, protocols, and computational hierarchies — produce, in Benjamin’s word, certain kinds of expectations regarding isolation. They do not invent these conditions of isolation and alienation, but they replicate them by producing them anew.

As such, your questions here (asking how we go about bringing these “two modes of inquiry” together) are, indeed, very large questions. And it seems that any effort to do so must begin with a reading / interpretation / understanding of algorithmic and computational structures so that we may, in reading, understand what role a certain algorithm or piece of software plays in the (re)producing the “relations of production.”