In “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital humanities”\u00a0Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia begin their essay by\u00a0summerizing\u00a0a complete description of how\u00a0DH is promoted as\u00a0“a corrective to the \u201ctraditional\u201d and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments” and the role it plays in facilitating “the neoliberal takeover of the university.” This description\u00a0is associated with the\u00a0the reason humanities has\u00a0been attacked by many as an\u00a0unnecessary field which is that\u00a0the discipline is “relying on painstaking individual scholarship and producing forms of knowledge with less immediate economic application,” and that DH came as the rescue field that refuted\u00a0the accusation of being less important than other disciplines. This, to an extent, I think may\u00a0not be accurate because it was not supported by any sort of evidence in this essay. More than that, the introduction of the essay suggests\u00a0that\u00a0DH has the promise of “the promotion of project-based learning and lab-based research over reading and writing.” Therefore, \u00a0in a way, they refures\u00a0to DH\u00a0as a fresh and more modern addition to the field of humanities, but also it sort of isolates reading and writing, as if they are secondary skills, which I think is problematic because both skills are essential to DH.<\/p>\n
Moving on to the largest chunk of this essay, the center. Since I don’t think that we have discussed much history of DH in the course, I can’t judge all the history they have talked about in the essay like, Fredson Bowers and\u00a0E. D. Hirsch.\u00a0However, I think they have done a decent job in tracing the achievements of Jerome McGann, and in explaining the role of the two University of Virginia English Department conferences.<\/p>\n
In the last part of this essay, the “What Now?” part. I feel the writers have shifted the direction in which they were addressing the field. They sort of attacks DH as being a platform for\u00a0white male builders. In my opinion, this concern is very reasonable because it is related to reality. DH scholars are mostly placed in this exclusive category, and the reading list for this course is a proof of\u00a0it. A large portion of the readings we have done in this\u00a0course are the craft of white male men, who are very familiar with computer programing and designing, such as Ramsey and\u00a0Kirschenbaum. Also, I think part of why\u00a0many\u00a0of us had difficulties reading and comprehending\u00a0McPherson’s essay \u201cWhy are the Digital Humanities So White?” is because\u00a0the intense possibility that DH and cultural studies can’t be combined together, and they might need to stay seperate. So could that be used as a counter argument to the authors’ call of DH diversity?\u00a0I don’t know!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital humanities”\u00a0Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia begin their essay by\u00a0summerizing\u00a0a complete description of how\u00a0DH is promoted as\u00a0“a corrective to the \u201ctraditional\u201d and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments” and the role it plays in facilitating “the neoliberal takeover of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","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\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1007,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions\/1007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}