When I read Terras\u2019 article, I noticed that her\u00a0approach seemed very analytical, using data tables and list to describe from a distance what seems to be trending in the humanities. Though I didn’t know her scholarly position at the time, I had the impression that she was an outsider looking in.<\/p>\n
However, as a pro-digital humanities scholar, Terras seems to be after the same questions as some of the other scholars we have read: What defines a discipline? Do methods matter more than community? Where is the digital humanities and where is it going? While literary scholars are more likely to rely on logic, argument, and anecdote to answer these questions, Terras answers them by using \u201cFigure 4.1\u201d which is a data chart totaling commonly used words of abstracts at a conference and by breaking down qualitative data into a list of general observations (p. 80). Her approach isn\u2019t exactly the same as a literary scholar, but it\u2019s akin. For example, literary scholars are trained to pick up on ubiquity and derive information based on repeating patterns. Isn\u2019t that what Terras is doing by discussing why the word \u201ctext\u201d is the most common word, by far, in the conference abstracts? Though her piece struck me as somewhat foreign to the humanities, upon closer exam, she’s doing the same kind of work. Doesn’t that make her part of the community?<\/p>\n
Teresa seems to be defending the emergence of the DH\u00a0field, and her outsider status might be seen as a disadvantage to her ability to make that argument. However, I see it as an advantage. Engineers were likely less resistant to the digital take-over because their work isn’t on paper–it’s in the physical things that they create. A move away from draft board to software like CAD was perhaps more readily welcomed and made their work much more efficient–much in the same was that library databases and search engines make work in the humanities easier.\u00a0Humanities scholars are coming \u00a0to this realization but because our work is texts rather than something physical like what an engineer might be creating, we\u2019re perhaps much more reluctant to let go of the old ways.<\/p>\n
In that sense, interdisciplinary collaborating is very useful because other departments have already gotten there, so to speak, and they can help the old fuddy duddies see the benefits of moving forward and embracing technology.\u00a0It might be harder for that argument to happen solely from within our own discipline because we haven\u2019t yet fully realized the potential of digitization like other departments have. In that sense, Terras’ outside perspective might give reluctant scholars just that–perspective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I read Terras\u2019 article, I noticed that her\u00a0approach seemed very analytical, using data tables and list to describe from a distance what seems to be trending in the humanities. Though I didn’t know her scholarly position at the time, I had the impression that she was an outsider looking in. However, as a pro-digital […]<\/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-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460","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=460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}