Over the course of this semester, I\u2019ve gone back and forth about what I think DH is or should be, and I haven\u2019t fully settled on an answer. What I have settled on, however, is that DH seems to be something very different from traditional humanities and a better distinction should be made between the two. Coming from that perspective, I\u2019ll start by saying no, it\u2019s not the responsibility of DH to \u201csave\u201d traditional humanities. But I think they should probably try.<\/p>\n
The academy is fragmented, and each department seems inclined to hoard its resources and its time. There doesn\u2019t seem to be much interest in understanding what academics are doing across the quad because most of us are too busy trying to keep afloat in our own bottomless ponds. Wendi Chun notes that the humanities have come to embrace quantity over quality, making \u201cteaching a burden\u201d and creating a divide between those who have \u201cmade it\u201d and those still struggling to. I imagine that other departments experience a similar struggle.<\/p>\n
Chun argues that DH seems so appealing because it promises a set of technological skills that will make students better able to find jobs after graduation, yet she warns that the \u201cblind embrace\u201d of DH isn\u2019t the answer because a lack of technological skills is not want hinders graduates from finding jobs. Perhaps some departments do teach skills that are closer to \u201cjob training\u201d like say accounting or engineering, but these graduates too need further training, usually first for exams and then years of closely-monitored on-the-job mentoring.<\/p>\n
The root of the issue isn\u2019t with a single department, but the University as a whole and the way we\u2019ve come to think about the function of a four year education. Richard Grusin points out that “the shrinking of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate, which has resulted in the sharp growth of temporary and part-time labor in the academy, has been justified by university administrators and state legislatures in terms of bottom-line economics and the need for higher education to train students for jobs not to read literature or study culture.”<\/p>\n
This means that whether humanists are \u201cdoing\u201d their work by publishing papers or building websites, they\u2019ll still be caught up in a system that doesn\u2019t see the value in humanities work (or really the value of a four year education in general). A university education is not job training and it never will be. All departments in the university should work toward reshaping how administrators and students view education, and this can only happen (as Chun alludes) once we start focusing on quality and not quantity. The goal of the university should not be to churn out graduates, it should be to graduate well-educated, hard-working people. And the goal of Academics shouldn\u2019t be to churn out as many publications as their coffee-fueled non-tenured years can handle, but to create thoughtful and useful projects, digital or analogue, that contribute to the growth of the university.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the course of this semester, I\u2019ve gone back and forth about what I think DH is or should be, and I haven\u2019t fully settled on an answer. What I have settled on, however, is that DH seems to be something very different from traditional humanities and a better distinction should be made between the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1058,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions\/1058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}