Golumbia Response
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 This series of questions makes me want to reevaluate all my thoughts before on DH. So good job on the questions!
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 How does DH use the word digital? It took me a while to think about it and to realize how but the more I think about it, the more I realize that a lot of DH scholars that we’ve read has been published through books or blogs, which is basically like any other scholar that you can find. You can argue that they use digital tools to build their websites or blogs, but do other traditional scholars do that as well? Just because you can build a website and post on, does that mean you’re a digital humanist?
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 I don’t think that they use the word digital in the wrong sense, as most find their texts on the digital word, but I mean, so does everything else. I don’t think that the word is inappropriate for the scholarship by any means, but I think that people do get confused on what it means to be digital in the DH world. There needs to be a word that has the same definition as digital, but then has another addition. Digital for DH can mean “expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity such as voltage or magnetic polarization”, that you have then created yourself. A big argument that we have discussed all year is that DH may require you to create, and only reading this digital world and understanding it, is not enough. You have to do something with it too. Ramsay makes that distinction being written scholarship and “building” scholarship. Golumbia then makes the argument that building scholarship is not literary scholarship, but why can’t they be one in the same? Is DH not part of the literary world?
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 The big distinction is the creative side, the innovative side, and I’m still with Ramsay on this, much to our class disagreement. There’s a difference between coming up with a difference thesis paper and coming up with a different way to present your data through an innovative and interactive web database (or something of the like). Traditional scholarship is when you express your ideas and opinions on the subject and the DH community does something inventive with that idea. As Golumbia points out, DH is not a theory and does not work like theory subjects. But it is a practice. A that incorporates the digital world in what it presents and how it functions.
I assume you’re speaking to Mekayla, here, but it might help to specify which series of questions you’re talking about.