To start, I did not think McPherson\u2019s essay was all that bad. I had trouble understanding her sections about coding just like anyone else, but I do not think the point was for the reader to fully understand it all; rather, her goal was to give us some background knowledge on UNIX and then show us how \u201ccode and race are deeply intertwined\u201d (155). After reading the essay, I understood that her main argument was about how the separations in coding reflect the ideology of separating (or segregating) people of different racial backgrounds. She added that this separation is also present in our discussions of coding and race because we do not discuss them together or see the connections, which she sees as a problem.<\/p>\n
Part of the issue that I see here is our current culture of education, which McPherson also discusses in her essay; we are typically encouraged to focus on one subject field rather than make connections between a number of fields.\u00a0\u201cMany now lament the overspecialization of the university; in effect, this tendency is a result of the additive logic of the lenticular or of the pipeline, where \u201ccontent areas\u201d or \u201cfields\u201d are tacked together without any sense of intersection, context, or relation.\u201d (150). When she mentions the idea \u201coverspecialization,” I think of how universities such as our own force us to choose a \u2018major\u2019 such as Engineering or Education instead of studying the traditional liberal arts. In the liberal arts, students gain a broad field of knowledge through studying the seven subjects laid out by the ancient Greeks: grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astrology. Surely a student well-versed in a number of subjects, instead of one or two, would have an easier time making the connection between coding and race that McPherson argues is important. However, my argument here is not that the problem will be solved if everyone gets a traditional liberal arts education (specialization does have benefits); I simply bring this up to show why we are so accustomed to separating our subjects and lines of thinking today.<\/p>\n
What can we do to move forward in changing the compartmentalization of our ways of thinking? In all honesty, I do not think McPherson offers any promising suggestions in her article. As Professor Liming pointed out in class, one of the projects that McPherson attempted as a solution to her issues did not work out. I cannot think of any worthwhile solutions on my own, either, because this is a complex problem that goes far beyond the field of Digital Humanities. I think this raises the question: do the Digital Humanities need to solve all the world\u2019s problems? Again, I liked McPherson\u2019s article and the notion\u00a0that race needs to be included in our discussions of the digital, but is it really the responsibility of the DH field to solve this issue? Isn\u2019t this an issue that should be addressed by humanities as a whole, or our education system, as I discussed earlier? If the changes that McPherson suggests can occur on the broader scale, they will naturally shape DH too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To start, I did not think McPherson\u2019s essay was all that bad. I had trouble understanding her sections about coding just like anyone else, but I do not think the point was for the reader to fully understand it all; rather, her goal was to give us some background knowledge on UNIX and then show […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735","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\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":738,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions\/738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}