McPherson Response
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 3 As several others have mentioned within our discussion on Monday, I was not expecting the direction McPherson went based on her title as well as struggling to maintain a steady pace throughout her essay. I found myself losing my place and finding it very difficult to read the essay all the way through in one go. Additionally, many of the terms and organizations McPherson referenced within her essay, are topics I am largely unfamiliar with. Up until this class, my exposure to the academic components and theories of the Digital Humanities were subjects I had not come into little to no contact with before. I definitely felt that this lack of prior knowledge attributed to my overall confusion and made this essay considerably overwhelming for me. This lead me to the challenge of trying to decipher the main points McPherson was explaining to me amidst much of the jargon I am unfamiliar with.
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¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 What I was able to discern from McPherson’s essay is that the history surrounding the issue of race and ethnic inequality, not so much the issues of race and ethnic inequality themselves, have a direct correlation to technology and the uses it provides. Under “Fragment Two,” McPherson talks about how much of the history she refers back to under “Fragment One,” is well known to coders and ‘computer’ geeks because “Numerous websites archive oral histories, programming manuals, and technical specifications for MULTICS, UNIX and various mainframe and other hardware systems.” What this sentence tells me, is that the methodology and technicality of producing the programs that display the detailed history of racial and ethnic inequality, is important. Not the racial and ethnic issues themselves as mentioned above. In my opinion, this has little to do with combatting or addressing these issues. It doesn’t bring much light towards the history either, instead, it surrounds more of the technical components and the connections it makes with Race that way. I think this is one of the reasons, the steered me in a more confusing direction.
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I too felt lost, coming from the computer science side I didn’t see the connection between UNIX and racism.
Why might your computer science background, Jason, prevent you from seeing that connection? Are we talking about a wholesale disciplinary divide here (or do our assumptions about the differences between humanities and scientific disciplines end up creating the illusion of a divide that we, as practitioners, feel compelled to reinforce)?
I appreciate your candid reaction here, Maia, though I need some more specifics in order to keep pace with your logic in this response. What kinds of “terms and organizations” were unfamiliar to you? And were you able to use context clues in order to interpret what / who they are, or what they mean (as humanists are so often taught to do)? Or did certain aspects of McPherson’s writing style prevent you from using context to aid in the task of interpretation?
I could use some more explanation of these and related issues.