Responding to McPherson
To start, I did not think McPherson’s essay was all that bad. I had trouble understanding her sections about coding just like anyone else, but I do not think the point was for the reader to fully understand it all; rather, her goal was to give us some background knowledge on UNIX and then show us how “code and race are deeply intertwined” (155). After reading the essay, I understood that her main argument was about how the separations in coding reflect the ideology of separating (or segregating) people of different racial backgrounds. She added that this separation is also present in our discussions of coding and race because we do not discuss them together or see the connections, which she sees as a problem.
Part of the issue that I see here is our current culture of education, which McPherson also discusses in her essay; we are typically encouraged to focus on one subject field rather than make connections between a number of fields. “Many now lament the overspecialization of the university; in effect, this tendency is a result of the additive logic of the lenticular or of the pipeline, where “content areas” or “fields” are tacked together without any sense of intersection, context, or relation.” (150). When she mentions the idea “overspecialization,” I think of how universities such as our own force us to choose a ‘major’ such as Engineering or Education instead of studying the traditional liberal arts. In the liberal arts, students gain a broad field of knowledge through studying the seven subjects laid out by the ancient Greeks: grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astrology. Surely a student well-versed in a number of subjects, instead of one or two, would have an easier time making the connection between coding and race that McPherson argues is important. However, my argument here is not that the problem will be solved if everyone gets a traditional liberal arts education (specialization does have benefits); I simply bring this up to show why we are so accustomed to separating our subjects and lines of thinking today.
What can we do to move forward in changing the compartmentalization of our ways of thinking? In all honesty, I do not think McPherson offers any promising suggestions in her article. As Professor Liming pointed out in class, one of the projects that McPherson attempted as a solution to her issues did not work out. I cannot think of any worthwhile solutions on my own, either, because this is a complex problem that goes far beyond the field of Digital Humanities. I think this raises the question: do the Digital Humanities need to solve all the world’s problems? Again, I liked McPherson’s article and the notion that race needs to be included in our discussions of the digital, but is it really the responsibility of the DH field to solve this issue? Isn’t this an issue that should be addressed by humanities as a whole, or our education system, as I discussed earlier? If the changes that McPherson suggests can occur on the broader scale, they will naturally shape DH too.
I agree that today’s education is setup in such a way that students and scholars typically focus on one field. This is seen as a problem in regards to broadening horizons in the DH as well as other fields of study, but would you otherwise say that this model of education has positive effects? In general, if one wanted to move forward with a particular field of study, wouldn’t they want to put all of their focus on that field? Maybe the reason that this education model is set up in such a way is because in aged disciplines, corresponding fields of study have already been identified and are already being grouped together in education. If this is the case, it would make sense that relatively new fields of study get pushed to the side and not grouped with anything else.
The question of whether or not the DH, “need to solve all the world’s problems” is a solid point to bring up. Like you say, it’s probably something that the education system needs to address. Although not solely the responsibility of the DH community, I think digital humanists and other fields in the same boat need to collaborate in order to put some pressure on the education system to make that change. Easier said than done, but if nothing is done, nothing will change. What do you think can be done by digital humanists to push the education system, or at least push others, to start making these changes?
You do a great job of working through and interpreting McPherson’s “goals,” as you call them, in the first two paragraphs of this post. That interpretation is important to do, because it helps to contextualize her arguments. And I think you’re right: McPherson does not appear to expect her reader to “get” the discussion of UNIX. Rather, it seems that she wants to introduce some of the key concepts that shape this discussion to a discussion of “lenticular logics,” as she calls them, or ideologies of division and constraint.
Your discussion of “compartmentalization” in the third paragraph really gets at that point, though it is dispiriting to think that McPherson’s efforts to stem the tide of “compartmentalization” might not have been successful. But a number of factors likely contributed to that success (or lack thereof …), of course.