Digital Humanities

Like Cody, I also don’t “share your vision for how these subfields might be so easily united,” but that’s also because I don’t share your interpretations or understandings of the fields themselves. Cultural Studies is very much tied to what many of the writers we have reviewed already this semester term the “crisis in the humanities,” a fact which suggests that, contrary to your arguments here, it is not a “established field” that would be immune to “destabilization.”

But perhaps these insights will be better contextualized once we get into more material covering discussions of neoliberalism. I’ll be interested to see how these opinions of yours square with your reading of figures like David Golumbia a little bit further down the line.

You’re jumping to conclusions early on in this post. I’d rather see you spend some time working with the text, especially since you state that you had trouble interpreting it. I can’t help but notice, for instance, that your post doesn’t include a single concrete reference to the text; this suggests to me that you need to spend more time working with the text before you attempt to make claims about what you think it is saying.

For instance, McPherson is not saying that UNIX is “racist,” as you allege here; she is saying that UNIX, as an operating system, employs a system of “lenticular logics” (as she calls them) that compares to the way in which racial segregation played out in the later part of the twentieth century in the United States.

Do you see the differences between those two arguments? How might eliminating narratives or claims of causality alter your response to McPherson’s essay?

I suppose I don’t share your vision for how these subfields might be so easily united. Nor do I share McPherson’s vision for the necessity of their union. Then again, I tend to be critical of the assumptions that underlie certain theories in cultural studies. That’s a topic for a different course perhaps.

However, as long as the attitude in pushing together research interests and goals remains co-operative, there is no real reason to argue that disciplines shouldn’t interact. I think interaction between these disciplines would certainly create some interesting work, and, at the very least, help enrich perspectives of people in either camp.

Is DH not part of the humanities? That’s an interesting thing to say.

Some manner of hybrid practice could certainly be interesting. My concern is that politics and social theory might undercut other aspects in that amalgam, skewing things in an odd way. This may very well be an irrational fear, but it is one I have nonetheless. Does there seem to be any risk of that in your view?

I think this is a question worth asking, but it seems to contain within in some problematic assumptions, or at least assumptions that could be more self-aware. The question is more like “why is there a lack of diversity in DH?” Asking the question this way might help avoid that veiled value code that exists in McPherson’s title.

And I agree–it is strange that there is a divide between cultural studies and digital humanities, but it might be less strange if we consider the genesis of DH as more digital than humanities (at least in some ways), while cultural studies comes from macro-level cultural theory a la the Frankfurt School. Both subfields come from very different places with substantially different assumptions. It would be interesting and a worthy project tracing the differences between these disciplines, and more interesting still to explore further, as McPherson suggests, the places where they might intersect.

Like you, and most everyone else, I had a similar struggle. I had to really slow down in reading the sections where she was describing coding and how it developed. And when it came for McPherson to make that connection between coding and an invisible racial bias, it seemed that she was doing some rhetorical magic to stitch those things together.

I was very interested in the that idea that the “racism” that McPherson is talking about might not be literal racism, especially considering the inflammatory nature of her title, but it did seem that she failed to make her definition clear in any case.