I’m going to be an idealist for a minute
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 Over the course of this semester, I’ve gone back and forth about what I think DH is or should be, and I haven’t fully settled on an answer. What I have settled on, however, is that DH seems to be something very different from traditional humanities and a better distinction should be made between the two. Coming from that perspective, I’ll start by saying no, it’s not the responsibility of DH to “save” traditional humanities. But I think they should probably try.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 The academy is fragmented, and each department seems inclined to hoard its resources and its time. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in understanding what academics are doing across the quad because most of us are too busy trying to keep afloat in our own bottomless ponds. Wendi Chun notes that the humanities have come to embrace quantity over quality, making “teaching a burden” and creating a divide between those who have “made it” and those still struggling to. I imagine that other departments experience a similar struggle.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Chun argues that DH seems so appealing because it promises a set of technological skills that will make students better able to find jobs after graduation, yet she warns that the “blind embrace” of DH isn’t the answer because a lack of technological skills is not want hinders graduates from finding jobs. Perhaps some departments do teach skills that are closer to “job training” like say accounting or engineering, but these graduates too need further training, usually first for exams and then years of closely-monitored on-the-job mentoring.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 The root of the issue isn’t with a single department, but the University as a whole and the way we’ve come to think about the function of a four year education. Richard Grusin points out that “the shrinking of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate, which has resulted in the sharp growth of temporary and part-time labor in the academy, has been justified by university administrators and state legislatures in terms of bottom-line economics and the need for higher education to train students for jobs not to read literature or study culture.”
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 2 This means that whether humanists are “doing” their work by publishing papers or building websites, they’ll still be caught up in a system that doesn’t see the value in humanities work (or really the value of a four year education in general). A university education is not job training and it never will be. All departments in the university should work toward reshaping how administrators and students view education, and this can only happen (as Chun alludes) once we start focusing on quality and not quantity. The goal of the university should not be to churn out graduates, it should be to graduate well-educated, hard-working people. And the goal of Academics shouldn’t be to churn out as many publications as their coffee-fueled non-tenured years can handle, but to create thoughtful and useful projects, digital or analogue, that contribute to the growth of the university.
Or at least they shouldn’t stand by while their colleagues suffer, right?
[What I have settled on, however, is that DH seems to be something very different from traditional humanities and a better distinction should be made between the two.]
What do you think are the benefits of having DH and “traditional humanities” as distinct? Should they be housed in independent departments? What if some projects have similar goals, where do they tap their funding from? I don’t mean to sound cynical I just mean to ask questions.
What pros and cons are there for [dramatic tone:] standing up against the neoliberal forces [end tone] by separating DH and traditional humanities? How would academics who need to place themselves on one side or the other react to that? What about those who are both?