9/26/2016
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Taking my own stab at defining different roles of scholarship and production in the Digital Humanities, I would loosely define three categories; builder, collaborator, and scholar. These are arranged in order from the most tightly married with digital mediums and tools and the process of creating those very things, to the scholar, which I use as a catchall for anyone that associates with DH tools or practices but mostly as a compliment to traditional Humanities. I think you could organize them in a pyramid type structure with less people fitting in the role of builder, and a great many fitting in the field as scholars.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Beginning with Builders, this is exemplified by the likes of Ramsay. As one would guess from reading his essay “Who’s In and Who’s Out” featured in our text, it is the top of the pyramid in my attempts to categorize DH. Only people who know how to code and actually create the digital tools they work with fit into this category. As Ramsay says, “If you are not making anything, you are not…a digital humanist”.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 For Collaborators, I’d point to McGann’s essay as an example of how to define the term. Since reading her essay “Information Technology and the Troubled Humanities” I’ve continued to think about a line from her conclusion on page 63. “For some of us, this will be a road not taken. Fair enough. But whether we choose to or not, we should all be clear about the slow train that’s coming and that won’t be sidetracked”. I use her to emphasize this category because I think more and more people in traditional humanities will need to use DH tools. The distinction I make with Collaborators instead of builders is that I think in the middle of the pyramid, people will not be making those tools themselves. Here, it’s good enough to partner with someone from someone who can build and code for you, with a distinct tool or end result in mind.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 And finally, we have Scholars. I left this last category intentionally vague, because I think it involves the greatest amount of people. These are people in academia that use digital tools in their work and perhaps will make some foray into the DH toolset. They don’t read theory and heated blog posts about DH, they simply want to keep up in an increasingly digital field. One of the reasons I organized these three as a pyramid is that I see it as a sort of upsidedown funnel. I see a natural progression from Scholar in DH, to a Collaborator, to eventually Building things. Not everyone will chart this course, but I see it as a fitting description of the field.
Your post was among the few to specifically mention labor, or issues of work / training / skill accrual / etc. Given this angle, I think it’s interesting that you use the model of a “pyramid” to describe your version of the DH spectrum. How might those pyramidal categories alter or change if we take labor directly into account? Who (or what group) is responsible for carrying out which forms of work, labor, activity, etc.? And how do those at the top stand to benefit from that labor?
For instance: a lot of the DHers (Ramsay, specifically) argue against reading in favor of “creating” or “building.” Yet the labor of reading must continue to take place if these digital projects are going to be worth anything. So aren’t those at the bottom of the pyramid, by this logic, still performing an important kind of labor, for the benefit of those at the top?
(This also suggests varying hierarchies of labor, of course.)