No Greater Zelot
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 I think part of the problem is Digital humanities is rarely an independent discipline within the humanities at many universities. Let’s say someone is a tenure-track professor at a university without a dedicated DH program but is interested in DH. They have no choice to pursue their career advancement through traditional means. This means that a lot of digital humanists have to things traditional humanists do because it’s the only way for them to advance their careers. I do agree with Golumbia that it is strange that DH wants to use projects instead of papers as examples of scholarship (Golumbia 160). I speak for personal experience that my field, computer science, requires both. If I build a tool I also have to write about the process and how it works. I don’t understand why some digital humanists think they are special in academia and don’t have to write. I would think that being humanists that they would love the world to see their projects and also want to write about the experience and rational behind their projects and how it would help the humanities in general.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 2 Golumbia also appears to be threatened by Dh. “DH recommends the demotion of interpretive close reading as the hallmark of literary study” (Golumbia 160). This seems similar to the arguments that occurred when close reading advocates determined that is was the best course for understanding. Digital humanities has been producing tools that allow research into things that have been impossible before. There are many computational tools that allow for new insights, but computers cannot at least for the moment close read works of literature. So instead they are used for other analysis of literature, usually comparisons of very large sets that would be impossible for humans to compare. I find it strange that someone from a software background could seem so blind to the possibilities that software could create for possibly creating insight into literature. Perhaps there’s no greater zealot than a convert.
“zealot” has an ‘a’ in it