Founded Anxieties and Giving Credit Where it’s Due
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 The anxieties about DH brought to light by the anonymous blogger from the Guardian and several commenters responding to Kevin Gannon’s response to anonymous seem to be reiterated here in the piece by Golumbia, Brouilette, and Arlington: the university is being taken over by administration and they’re using DH to help them do it. (That sounds a bit dramatic, so let me expand).
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Anonymous et al argue that this “take over” manifests in new requirements (implicit or explicit) that scholars engage with social media, and that they do so for the University’s sake. This means that they are expected or encouraged to not just engage for their own networking purposes as many like Gannon do, but engage in such a way as to promote the University and help increase its public profile. A university with a higher public profile is going to attract more students which means more tuition dollars coming in. So it would make sense that administrators want to throw money at DH because its products, so to speak, brings that money and more back into the University.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 In this sense, yes, Golumbia et al’s anxieties about these shifts in the University are founded. However, I think Golumbia et al are selling DH short and only looking at one aspect of it. Individuals who are truly passionate about DH and use it for self-promotion and networking (and are not subject to pressures from their universities to do so) are often accomplishing things for themselves that might not otherwise be possible (reenter Gannon’s argument). This is the side of DH that opens the scholarly forum to greater and more diverse populations which seems undeniably like a good thing. I have to wonder under what authority Golumbia et al can claim definitively what DH is and what it is not, particularly when that debate has been raging among the DH community for years and yet remains nebulous. I think for the sake of argument they are pinning down what they think it is/isn’t so they can more easily illustrate the “neo-liberal takeover” ushered in by DH. I don’t think this is entirely fair.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 2 DH, like anything anywhere ever, is going to have its drawbacks and discussing those drawbacks is just as important as looking for the potential good. Personally, I’m leery of the new University model that’s bloated with overpaid administrators and reliant of cheap labor; therefore, anything getting into the hands of administrators rather than educators is going to sully that thing to a degree, and that seems to be what’s happened with DH. But we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You put this perfectly, because you really do call it like it is: a job. The umbrella of authority is the university, and the DH scholars are standing under this umbrella, forced to dance like puppets whenever the university says to write a new essay or teach a new class or write up a new grant for this and that in the DH program. And isn’t it so funny that in none of the essays we have read this semester, that truth has shone through? I love that we saved this essay for almost last in the semester, because now we can look back on every scholar that we have studied and quoted and glorified for being such honeybee workers in the DH, and now we see the truth: that they weren’t even writing for themselves or writing for the good of DH, but because the university needed them to.
What I’d like to question about this, however, is that, is it a bad thing? Because in any other discipline, take English for example, what do the professors at a university write for? I’m guessing that a lot of the time, the research and/or creative writing side of their job is not the most favored. Is this true, Brittney and Sheila? I assume that the research and essays the University “makes you do” are the downside of the job, while teaching and being in the college setting is the fun part. So why is this such a hassle for DH scholars like Golumbia, Brouilette, and Arlington?