Response to Terra
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 One of the main differences that can be seen between Terra’s essay and the other authors that we have read so far this semester is her use of numbers and visual representations. When discussing the ACH/ALLC 2005 conference, she uses graphs and spreadsheets to present her findings. From what I know about engineers, they need a visual representation to go with their findings to fully develop and explain their theories. As a student in the humanities, I do not feel the need to have these visual representations and would rather would have a written explanation, which I guess is another discourse between the two fields.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Another difference between the essays is that Terra’s essay reads like a science experiment. There’s an introduction, her observations, measured data, the experiment (ACH/ALLC) and her conclusion. This is not to say that the essay wasn’t up to humanities standards or something, it just took a different approach. Her conclusions are that “further studies need to be carried out to further analyze and define the Humanities Computing discipline, field, and community.”
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Terra has a unique perspective compared to the previous authors discussed in class, as she also understands the computer science side of digital humanities. While McGann spoke more about why digital humanities needed to be integrated into everyday humanity teachings, Terra focuses more on the concerns of digital humanities and why it may not be in the humanities curriculum.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 One of her main concerns is “whether this is an academic endeavor” and this concern comes from one of the other rising seven issues she mentions. Most of these issues have to deal with being a broken link between Humanities Computing and the Computer Science Department where the computer science scholars will think that this type of computing is too simple to be considered an academic endeavor in computing, and the humanists scholars might believe it is too hard and that the computer science department might not fully understand what it is to be a scholar in the humanities.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 I think that both computer engineers and English scholars are aiming towards the same goal: digitizing the humanities and making it interactive with an aim to make it an academic endeavor. I just don’t think they are going about this goal in the same way. English scholars will focus more on the context of digitizing texts, while the computer science engineers are focusing more on how to make the program itself. These narrow focuses and paths for each department is “so insular” and “shielding itself away from further developments”.
Yes, though I’ll offer the same caveat here that I offered to Brittney C.: these “differences” (between Terras and the other authors we’ve read so far this semester) are only skin-deep. After all, DH is, as a discipline, organized around a push for the use of data and quantitative methods in humanities scholarship. We just haven’t seen much of that yet because we’ve been reading essays about DH, as opposed to essays that do DH.