Neoliberal Tools
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 It’s hard to determine which aspects of the LABR text to consider thoughtfully and which to ignore, because with a new take on the DH such as this one, the truth of the matter is difficult to decipher from the falsities, such as the claim that DH is established and run by administration. If that’s the case, an entire new article can and should be written about it, since everyone is working so hard to expose DH for its real purpose and truth, but how could we have been reading essay after essay all semester, and not even know who truly “controls” the whole study? Or how about the comment, “By providing a model for humanities teaching and research that appears to overcome these perceived limitations, Digital Humanities has played a leading role in the corporatist restructuring of the humanities”–has DH changed humanities? Can it change it? Digital Humanities is a whole ‘nother study set apart from humanities and the digital world, hence why they coined a whole new name for it by joining them together. I don’t know if DH has had such a huge restructuring of the humanities department, because until this semester, as a humanities student myself, I’d never heard of it. Claims like these two are the first couple in the essay that highlight that Golumbia, Brouillette, and Allington may be being a little dramatic. By amplifying all of DH’s “problems” as the authors do, they are making the deal of panic and stress of the DH movement more of an issue than it should be or ever has. Are the dramatized fears warranted? Maybe, because you can be scholars in a subject for so long before an essay like this arises.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 If DH would have been defined, or could have been defined, in the beginning of its time, these three scholars wouldn’t have to be writing such an article, in which they express their fears and anxieties about the future and stance of DH, but they are, dedicating an entire article to the focus of these neoliberal tools. In a chapter discussing Computing in the Humanities, Golunbia et al report, “Such work required tremendous amounts of primary scholarship. But it also required new forms of technical infrastructure”–but why does everything in DH take so much “tremendous work” and require “technical infrastructure”? I thought at first that Golumbia, Brouillette, and Allington are finding themselves in quite the unnecessary panic, but how unnecessary is it, when your entire study and field requires so much work just to get started in a new topic, such as the computing branch of DH? So yes, it describes DH factually, because when stuck in such a rut like the DH scholars, this is exactly what DH has come to be, a field of anxiety and explanation and argument.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 I think that the future of DH, with the help of this article, is that it’s going to have to pick a side. Is it digital, like computer science, or is it humanities, like the writing side of the spectrum? I think that is the underlying fear of these scholars, because they just want a name and a title and something TANGIBLE to call theirs, rather than fighting for it and about it all the time. DH is having such a hard time being directly in the middle of everything when really, maybe it just can’t stand on its own. While at first I was surprised that these three authors paired together to make this daring public statement of the “truth” behind DH, I now think that it was so wise and imperative to the movement of DH forwards instead of always static. I do wonder what they needed to publish it on the LABR front for, however. Because why would Golumbia et al need to publish an essay such as this for the public–what could we, if we were not in an English 428 Digital Humanities class, understand about this? I don’t know if they succeeded in making these DH problems a case of matter for the public, because I don’t see why we should care if we can’t do anything about it. It’s almost like Golumbia et al is just making a news report for the public about the DH. They’re saying “This is what’s going on and this is what sucks and this is the argument that we, the scholars IN the field, are involved in. And this is just a heads up about it for you guys watching us, not that you can do anything about it, but just a heads up!” Which is just silly. I think that essays like these are more conversations, like rappers when they’re mad at each other and they make a song for the public that’s really aimed at the other rapper, but they want the public to support them and be aware of this rap fight. So thank you, Golumbia et al, for lettin me know.
It’s LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books), not LABR. Try to pay a bit more attention to detail here.
Regarding your comment that “I don’t know if DH has had such a huge restructuring of the humanities department, because until this semester, as a humanities student myself, I’d never heard of it” — this is interesting to hear.
Of course, UND isn’t exactly on the “cutting edge” where new academic trends are concerned. But there has been a concerted push within our University to embrace digital methods and tools, and I think that has been happening for some time now. Yet, as a student in the English Department, you’ve likely taken the bulk of your courses with older professors who earned their PhDs many decades ago. This amounts to a kind of generational distance: young professors (like me) see DH as a fact and a condition of life in the modern university because we were trained to think that way. But older generations of professors were not, and so do not.