The Five Families of DH: Errrr… Aka What the Heck is Digital?
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 (Yes, I keep referring to this guy as Gambino or Colombo in my head)
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¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 Golumbia’s claim that the success of DH comes from scholarship that looks suspiciously traditional is a valid one because all that changes when you compare the two forms are the ways in which you obtain information. Traditional scholarship to my mind conjures up a juxtaposition of that Macaulay Caulkin film from the mid- 1990’s where it is half animated and takes place in a library of books that come alive and terrorize him and an older dude that looks like a cross between Thomas More and Charles VII.
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¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 2 My point with this whacky digression is that traditional scholarship is extremely hands-on, there’s not the LED screened buffer zone between the scholar and the object they are studying. Travel is required unless you’re lucky enough to have everything you need at your fingertips, and the expectations for what constitutes it (scholarship) are very rigorous and practically a 10 on Moh’s Hardness Scale. Digital scholarship in the humanities, including use of the word “Digital” while not necessarily a catachresis (Love that word, stealing it for myself), does seem to be ill-fitting, but to my mind that isn’t because it is wrong. Like Golumbia points out, the debate over what exactly DH is, what it is comprised of, etc. -has been and continues to be- hotly debated over the last few years. When the debate over the WHAT refuses to die, it becomes damn near impossible to grapple with the other questions that have been plaguing us in the most pleasurable of ways all semester, WHO, HOW, WHY, WHEN, WHERE,etc. “Digital” can be used in the sense that we’re using Blackboard, Zotero, etc to aid us in our research endeavors, copious amounts of databases that house thousands of academic articles, films, etc, the actual building of software such as IVANHOE or website such as NINES. Even with all of this technological advancement, there’s still the glaring fact that the scholarship that is produced still looks the same when constructed under DH terms as traditional scholarship. This is why I think that ‘digital’ is just ill-fitting, not necessarily wrong.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 Further in the essay, Golumbia also argues that DH should be relabelled to more accurately reflect its methodological approaches since there seems to be a huge disconnect between DHers and non DHers over what exactly constitutes DH, how to use it, etc. Does a clear definition open up a problematic can of worms? Does the use of another word besides ‘digital’ carry the same weight and meaning? Should a word that isn’t so loaded be used instead?
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Unfortunately over the last few weeks-or fortunately depending on how you look at it!- I have more questions than answers, more unknowns than knowns and I’m unsure how to articulate and adequately grapple with them. The lack of a definition is what is stumping me, but as Sheila said in class at one point, a clear definition would open the floodgates of criticism and pointing out DH inconsistencies/flaws…
Is this The Pagemaster that you’re talking about? Haha