The anxieties about DH brought to light by the anonymous blogger from the Guardian and several commenters responding to Kevin Gannon\u2019s response to anonymous seem to be reiterated here in the piece by Golumbia, Brouilette, and Arlington: the university is being taken over by administration and they\u2019re using DH to help them do it. (That sounds a bit dramatic, so let me expand).<\/p>\n
Anonymous et al argue that this \u201ctake over\u201d manifests in new requirements (implicit or explicit) that scholars engage with social media, and that they do so for the University\u2019s sake. This means that they are expected or encouraged to not just engage for their own networking purposes as many like Gannon do, but engage in such a way as to promote the University and help increase its public profile. A university with a higher public profile is going to attract more students which means more tuition dollars coming in. So it would make sense that administrators want to throw money at DH because its products, so to speak, brings that money and more back into the University.<\/p>\n
In this sense, yes, Golumbia et al\u2019s anxieties about these shifts in the University are founded. However, I think Golumbia et al are selling DH short and only looking at one aspect of it. Individuals who are truly passionate about DH and use it for self-promotion and networking (and are not subject to pressures from their universities to do so) are often accomplishing things for themselves that might not otherwise be possible (reenter Gannon\u2019s argument). This is the side of DH that opens the scholarly forum to greater and more diverse populations which seems undeniably like a good thing. I have to wonder under what authority Golumbia et al can claim definitively what DH is and what it is not, particularly when that debate has been raging among the DH community for years and yet remains nebulous. I think for the sake of argument they are pinning down what they think it is\/isn\u2019t so they can more easily illustrate the \u201cneo-liberal takeover\u201d ushered in by DH. I don\u2019t think this is entirely fair.<\/p>\n
DH, like anything anywhere ever, is going to have its drawbacks and discussing those drawbacks is just as important as looking for the potential good. Personally, I\u2019m leery of the new University model that\u2019s bloated with overpaid administrators and reliant of cheap labor; therefore, anything getting into the hands of administrators rather than educators is going to sully that thing to a degree, and that seems to be what\u2019s happened with DH. But we have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The anxieties about DH brought to light by the anonymous blogger from the Guardian and several commenters responding to Kevin Gannon\u2019s response to anonymous seem to be reiterated here in the piece by Golumbia, Brouilette, and Arlington: the university is being taken over by administration and they\u2019re using DH to help them do it. (That […]<\/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-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","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=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":955,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions\/955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}