First off, I had an extremely difficult time reading this article. As someone who doesn’t know how to code, the article was near impossible to comprehend. In addition, what I could understand was poorly defended. She argues that a computer is inherently racist but then doesn’t explain that peculiar claim well or even give her context for the politically charged words she uses.<\/p>\n
However, if we ignore the weaknesses\u00a0of this article and focus purely on her base argument, it does seem a question worth asking; why the humanities are so white. But, as McPherson points out, the question must also be why American culture studies aren’t more digital. There is a distinct divide between cultural studies and the digital humanities, which is perplexing since the humanities at their base are about culture and human behavior.<\/p>\n
To bring these two modes of inquiry together, I think, will not be difficult. I liked McPherson’s suggestion about adding hybrid practitioners, like activist-scholars and critical race coders. I believe this will take universities adding certain courses that address both issues. However, since I am one of those that believes that DH will be absorbed back into the humanities one day, I do think this might happen naturally as well since the humanities are definitely interested in cultural studies. What’s especially interesting is that we see these hybrid practitioners outside of academia. Hacktivists are basically activist-scholars using technology to create change. While I’m not encouraging scholars to go hack the CIA, it is interesting that the separation between culture and technology has been actively closed in the general public sphere. As a stepping stone towards intertwining the two studies in universities, there could even be an introductory course on how hacktivists are incorporating\u00a0the two to their advantages. It’s an\u00a0alluring\u00a0enough topic to get students interested and it has a genuine link to McPherson’s goal.<\/p>\n
This change might be a shock to DH, which seems to still struggle with their own identity. However, cultural studies is a more established field so I don’t think the integration would destabilize DH for too long. In fact, the combination could be exactly what DH needs to stop arguing about what their own field is. Then again, combining the two could either lead to more elitism or more inclusion. I’m reminded a bit of a Venn Diagram; blending cultural studies could lead to participation of the whole graph. Not everyone knows how to code or is familiar with the intricacies of the language surrounding “black” Americans versus “African” Americans but they could all work on projects together. On the other hand, the integration could result in only the overlapping section people feeling like they belong. It’s difficult to predict and if the fields became more involved with each other, they would have to foresee this potential problem and make sure that everyone feels included, or will get training in the field foreign to them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First off, I had an extremely difficult time reading this article. As someone who doesn’t know how to code, the article was near impossible to comprehend. In addition, what I could understand was poorly defended. She argues that a computer is inherently racist but then doesn’t explain that peculiar claim well or even give her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","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\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":734,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions\/734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}