Response to McPherson
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 McPherson, in her essay “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White”, took a different approach to comparing race and the DH than I expected. When I read the title, I expected her talk about just who was responsible in establishing and developing DH as a movement and study, but what I came to find was, well, I’m not entirely sure. McPherson relates to Melissa Terras in that I, as a blurred-lens-English-major, found it difficult to follow and understand what is being discussed. McPherson is a professor at USC in the Cinematic Arts department, which means that she, on the “spectrum” of DH that we’ve been talking about, is more on the digital, tech-savvy side than the text-based, literary side. She uses words like UNIX and MULTICS and I’m just reading trying to find the parts where she talks about the race comparison.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 What I did eventually find, however, was this: in Fragment Two, McPherson says UNIX “embraces multiple languages, open extensible systems and customization hooks everywhere,” reading much like a description of the tenets of neoliberal multiculturalism . . . UNIX’s intense modularity and information-hiding capacity were rein forced by its design—that is, in the ways in which it segregated the kernel from the shell.” And it is in this quote that I believe I found the semi-point. She is comparing the 1960’s look on African Americans, in segregation and multiculturalism and the “shell” of them, to the art of DH. Sure, I get this. What I like most is this idea of the shell. On the outside, it is one thing, but that doesn’t mean that the inside (no matter how cliche and cheesey this is) is anything to be worried or frightened about–like the Digital Humanities. The idea of this merge between digital media and literary text is new and unnerving, but the inside workings of it are things that we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, in this day and age, live without, being that they have become such a vital part of our world. I do like this analogy to the 1960’s problem of race, because in the few times she actually gets to the point in picking it a part, makes great points that DH is like the idea of race in this time period. With new political standpoints and new laws and new outbreaks of character from non-whites, came this new, challenging figure that competed for dominance in the world. DH is like this in that it is challenging everything we know, and making our seemlingly simple world of text and traditional customs to grow into something new and something bigger.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 I feel like now that I have a grasp of her comparison, the question is, OK, now what? So what, that DH is reflective of 1960’s race movements and deserves to be included in comparison with it. What now? How can this comparison and understanding of it now launch us into doing something, or not doing something, about it, and why is this, or isn’t it, relevant?
I, too, noticed similarities between McPherson and Terras’ essays. I was also expecting McPherson to talk more on the inclusiveness of other races/countries like Terras did by mentioning the large DH conventions in the US lacking in diversity.
I like the candidness of your response here. How else did McPherson’s writing defy your expectations? And how do you see her as, in fact, contributing to or establishing those expectations in the first place?