11/07 post
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 While this isn’t the first time we’ve been asked to identify how important or significant the “Digital” part of DH is, it is the first time a scholar has asked us to consider if DH has a claim to being a part of the Humanities as we are familiar with them, rather than a DH perspective regarding their assumed place in that context. I think that the way DH uses the term digital is a signifier of how we use technology to enhance our existing tools and practices in the Humanities. Machine reading instead of close reading yields difference insights that can be used in addition to traditional scholarship, but aren’t a replacement.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 3 In first thinking about Mekayla’s post I thought I would disagree with Golumbia’s assertion that the Digital part of DH was a catachresis. Yet a lot of the examples in the text he uses I found I agree with. I think he makes a lot of valid assertions about the field; for example, I don’t believe in a traditional English degree track that programming language should be an acceptable replacement for taking a foreign language. As Golumbia says on page 165, “… no scholar in any of the relevant fields endorses the view that programming languages are, in any sense, the same things as natural languages”. The benefits of taking a foreign language are not realized by learning a coding language, no matter how useful or beneficial that may be in and of itself.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 I think what we discussed in class is the most important way to sort through the argument. Even those that call themselves diehard DHers still succeed on the academic track through means of traditional Humanities scholarship. The way they use DH serves primarily to distinguish them as true DH disciples but doesn’t really succeed in liberating them from the scope of traditional work. As Golumbia says, “…we continue to look for transformative possibilities to a subdiscipline that has had by far more money and, arguably, at least as much effort put into it as any other innovation in literary studies and yet has produced very few result that can be seen as influential or transformative with regard to the field as a whole”. (172) While that is certainly a bold statement it is hard to argue with the trend of grant money flowing towards DH. As witnessed anecdotally in class, even professors in the English department here are encouraged to add a digital component to projects when looking for grant money. There’s also the issue of all the projects we’ve looked at that lay abandoned. It does seem they aren’t a self-sustaining endeavour, and previous to this article my attitude was sort of a wait and see, not yet approach to a lot of the projects. As in, if DH continues to perpetuate itself, inevitably these projects will be recognized as valuable and get more reliable funding. That’s not overly optimistic, but we shall see.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 2 There’s also the issue of all the projects we’ve looked at that lay abandoned. It does seem they aren’t a self-sustaining endeavor, and previous to this article my attitude was sort of a wait and see, not yet approach to a lot of the projects. An interesting question is how we contextualize Ramsey’s “If you’re not building, you’re not a digital humanist” rhetoric. If you ARE building, but no one is using your tools, can we consider that a sort of predecessor to the golden age of DH? IF DH continues to perpetuate itself, will these projects will be recognized as valuable and get more reliable funding?
Wasn’t the computer programming as a foreign language a crazy concept? Kirschenbaum advocated for his own foreign language to be computational… and that is just strange to me. Anyway.
This was interesting to me as well, namely because as you mentioned, Kirschenbaum’s foreign language requirement was computational.
From these statements, it would appear that you agree with Golumbia’s points regarding language education. But I’d like to hear more about the basis of that agreement. Why are coding languages an unsuitable “replacement” for natural languages in humanistic / literary study? And what do you make of Golumbia’s very charged language when he says that “no scholar … endorses the view that programming languages are … the same things as natural languages”?