Neoliberal Tools
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 In “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital humanities” Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia begin their essay by summerizing a complete description of how DH is promoted as “a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments” and the role it plays in facilitating “the neoliberal takeover of the university.” This description is associated with the the reason humanities has been attacked by many as an unnecessary field which is that the discipline is “relying on painstaking individual scholarship and producing forms of knowledge with less immediate economic application,” and that DH came as the rescue field that refuted the accusation of being less important than other disciplines. This, to an extent, I think may not be accurate because it was not supported by any sort of evidence in this essay. More than that, the introduction of the essay suggests that DH has the promise of “the promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing.” Therefore, in a way, they refures to DH as a fresh and more modern addition to the field of humanities, but also it sort of isolates reading and writing, as if they are secondary skills, which I think is problematic because both skills are essential to DH.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Moving on to the largest chunk of this essay, the center. Since I don’t think that we have discussed much history of DH in the course, I can’t judge all the history they have talked about in the essay like, Fredson Bowers and E. D. Hirsch. However, I think they have done a decent job in tracing the achievements of Jerome McGann, and in explaining the role of the two University of Virginia English Department conferences.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 In the last part of this essay, the “What Now?” part. I feel the writers have shifted the direction in which they were addressing the field. They sort of attacks DH as being a platform for white male builders. In my opinion, this concern is very reasonable because it is related to reality. DH scholars are mostly placed in this exclusive category, and the reading list for this course is a proof of it. A large portion of the readings we have done in this course are the craft of white male men, who are very familiar with computer programing and designing, such as Ramsey and Kirschenbaum. Also, I think part of why many of us had difficulties reading and comprehending McPherson’s essay “Why are the Digital Humanities So White?” is because the intense possibility that DH and cultural studies can’t be combined together, and they might need to stay seperate. So could that be used as a counter argument to the authors’ call of DH diversity? I don’t know!
I have a hard time understanding what you mean when you say that “This, to an extent, … may not be accurate because it was not supported by any sort of evidence in the essay.”
To start, I need you to specify your subject: what do you mean by “this”? If by “this,” you mean “the neoliberal takeover of the university” (as per the quotation that you use prior to this sentence), then I would argue that you are incorrect and that the authors, in fact, furnish this claim with plenty of evidence in this essay. Indeed, what follows from this statement is more or less a supply of nothing but textual evidence for this claim.
But maybe you’re talking about something else?