Melissa Terras Response
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 Terras and her writing are different from the previous scholars we have read due to her focus on measurable data. Terras centers her arguments and observations around the data that she observed as being present in “Humanities Computing” or the digital humanities. The style of writing itself was different due to Terras’ background in engineering. The article we read was broken up into sections in bold headings, with some subsections. Due to those sections and subsections, it read more as a presentation of findings in an experiment than the other scholarship we have read. Terras is concerned with first defining humanities computing, then establishing whether or not humanities computing is a discipline. She moves on to studying the institutionalization and curriculum of humanities computing, and finding out who the members of the humanities computing community are. Terras’ concerns lay with figuring out the whole scope of humanities computing and find out the elements that make up the field, which is different than the other authors we have read. They weren’t as concerned with details like how many members are in certain humanities computing journals.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 Instead of making a long, solely critical thinking argument, Terras actually measured different statistics and drew a conclusion based on the evidence she found in her measurements. For example, when she asks the question, “Is Humanities Computing a Discipline?” in one of her subsections, she goes straight into the opinions of different scholars she interviewed on that subject, and their opinion was split. She uses their opinions as a jumping off point to make the claim that “Humanities Computing would seem to display many traits that are associated with being a discipline, apart from being institutionalized as a ‘proper’ academic subject” (76). Throughout the article, Terras draws conclusions based on the data she is seeing, which is where her engineering background comes through. Engineers have a scientific background, and in science they focus more on data and measurable outcomes than the humanities. However, Terras is trying to combine the two in this article in order to show that humanities computing can work well with both the sciences and humanities disciplines, “rather than being an insular community” (81).
I like that you compare her writing to an experiment, very true. If an English scholar was to write an essay with bolded section headings and subheadings, though, it would come off differently, like a scholarly article from an organized literary work rather than an experiment. I wonder if we would come to the same conclusion about Terras’s writing had we not known her job title and history? I think it would still be pretty obvious that she takes a more logical approach.
Did you appreciate / prefer Terras focus on “measurable data,” as you call it?