Sitting on a Spikey Fence…

October 31, 2016

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 As my title indicates, I’m in a very uncomfortable spot right now… Hehehehehe. On one hand I identify very strongly with those derned, snobby luddites, while on the other I realize the importance of embracing new technology and by extension, new ways to conduct research.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 2 The main thing that prevents me from jumping on board with all of this is the immediacy which we are supposed to address for today. Historically like Brit said, like we’ve all insinuated, good scholarship has taken anywhere from months to years to craft and hone into something that if it isn’t publishable yet, at least it is presentable at a conference or something. Although we have all of these online tools at our disposal ( Zotero and I are celebrating a year together in a few days), I have not noticed any decrease in the time it takes me to do scholarly exercises. If anything, given the vastness of just the light web alone – the Dark Web is another story which I won’t go into!- it seems as if it takes me more time and the process produces an amount of almost crippling anxiety because of the amount of stuff I have to wade through. Amassing everything in one place may seem like a good idea, but instead of having to wade through a few hundred things, that number has increased by thousands, if not millions. Add up the time you spend filtering things, going to one website after another because Chester Fritz is frustrating as all academic libraries are fast becoming due to funding and budget cuts, and I’m venturing to guess that it would be the same amount-if not slightly more!- than something that you had researched in the traditional way. The sheer amount of stuff limits when it should expand…

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 I think DH tries to privilege immediacy, but falls short because it overlooks the joy of holding physical objects in your hand, of going to conferences and interacting with other smart people. With technology there comes not only a research change, but a moralistic one as well. We consider the use of a cell phone during class or a conference to be rude when technology and the pace of the world say that it isn’t. We are operating on a 1950s paradigm in a 21st century world. (Okay, maybe not the 1950s, but some era when this new technology wasn’t common and all you had to distract you was your big, clunky Walkman with the huge uncomfortable headphones.) In order to embrace this immediacy effectively, I think we need to put the same guidelines in place for social media that we do for the academy. UNL’s DH program has started something like this by updating their T&P criterion….

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 Overall, I think the move to social media is ultimately a mistake because those platforms are not meant to be forums of intellectual discourse given how quickly mudslinging transpires.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 I’ll ramble forever, so I’ll desist now.

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1 Comment on paragraph 1

sliming November 9, 2016 at 10:52 pm

Interesting: I appreciate your willingness to occupy this middle space, and to think through its implications here.

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2 Comments on paragraph 2

Lloyd Norstedt November 2, 2016 at 2:13 pm

I see your point here. The expansion of materials scholars are able to use now can lead to a sense of anxiety as they have to pick and choose exactly what they think will fit best for what they are working on. The increase of these materials means the ability to choose more, and that is not necessarily a good thing. If some people are at a frozen yogurt restaurant and there are 15 different flavors of ice cream and 20 different toppings they will have a much harder time deciding what they want than if there were 3 different flavors and 5 toppings. However, I would argue that (like most things) that can be a good and a bad thing. The wider availability of these materials could hopefully lead to a better use of the materials because you are able to choose one that fits exactly what you need. This shift in material availability allows for somebody who has never left their small town in a rural state to decide if they want to travel to London, France, Sydney, Tokyo, etc. Broadening horizons is a good thing to me.

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sliming November 9, 2016 at 10:53 pm

You bring up a lot of interesting points here, but many of them feel like tangents. What, specifically, are you responding to from Gannon’s / Anonymous’ essays? I’d like to see you get down to specifics by quoting directly from each and by addressing concrete claims / positions.

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2 Comments on paragraph 3

Lloyd Norstedt November 2, 2016 at 2:17 pm

In some areas the world has advanced to new, forward ways of thinking and in many ways it is still thinking the way it did many years ago. This is a problem, not just in DH, but in political and social values as well. The intermingling of worldviews can lead to everything slowing down as the opposing sides have to argue about what they can compromise on. Universities updating their teaching methods should be able to counteract or at least influence some of this gridlock, as they teach students to effectively empathize with the opposite side and work towards problem solving.

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sliming November 9, 2016 at 10:53 pm

Interesting. Lloyd said a similar thing in his post, pointing out the way in which DH appears to push us towards expectations of “immediacy.” How are you interpreting this word, and how do you see the concept of immediacy coming to bear upon our standards for scholarly production, etc.?

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1 Comment on paragraph 4

Lloyd Norstedt November 2, 2016 at 2:21 pm

I do agree it seems to degenerate into “mudslinging” on social media a fair amount of the time, but I think that is also a people problem, not a tool problem. For example, if reading something inflammatory towards them, a person could wait 10 minutes and cool down before responding to make sure they won’t just resort to name-calling. But often times they don’t, because we are so quick to want to retaliate when we view somebody as being “stupid” or “annoying.” If people could train themselves to be less reactionary social media wouldn’t degenerate into mudslinging as often.

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