McPherson Prompt Response
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 In order to bring together digital humanities and race, I would first suggest an evaluation of the structures of both areas. By bringing together “two modes of inquiry”, digital humanists can evaluate the good and the bad of both modes. When looking at two separate things and trying to bring them together, it helps to analyze the elements and determine where the similarities and differences are.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 2 One method of bringing these two inquiries together is to allow postings to be anonymous to the public. By not allowing the public to make a judgment based on somebody’s name (and subsequently, race), the focus becomes on the scholarship itself, instead of the person. By posting articles online and semi-anonymously, the supposed “color-blind” will actually become color-blind. This method will probably not ever be widely used because of the current structure of academia and its emphasis on proper accreditation in order to advance a career, which is a problem relating to DH that we talked about earlier in the semester. The structure as is does not allow for projects like The NINES Project to work, and it wouldn’t allow this to work either. However, by having these postings not be associated with a name or picture, it would allow scholars to have their work be more widely published. Some scholars may not have their pieces be as widely read as somebody from, for example, the US, because they are not in a highly populated area or are not in an area where they can have easy access to the Internet. This method wouldn’t fix the internet problem, but it would fix the other problem.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Hopefully by adopting this method of scholarship, all members of a field could get their work as widely read as possible, in order to further the discussion on many topics, including digital humanities. Maybe somebody from a sparsely populated country has the end-all be-all of definitions for the digital humanities and scholars in the field can finally stop talking about it.
I like it, kind of like a pros and cons list eh? I think it would really help that before you bring these two together, you have to look at them separately and evaluate each for itself. Do you know what kind of elements you would look for and determine if there are similarities or differences? Because you can only go so far in analyzing them before you reach “This Macbook is white, so am I”.
I’m not sure what you mean by “an evaluation of the structures of both areas” — this is vague. Are you summarizing McPherson’s strategies in this essay, or are you suggesting that she adopt these strategies? And what, exactly, might those strategies entail?