Golumbia\u2019s essay almost feels like a conspiracy theory.\u00a0 This becomes apparent when he starts talking about Hirsch\u2019s writing and the influence it has had, \u201cconservative commentators nonetheless have converged on the view that readers shouldn\u2019t interpret and evaluate texts for themselves, especially with regard to politics\u201d\u00a0 (Golumbia 6).\u00a0 Golumbia uses Hirsch\u2019s constraining of the focus on textual evaluation as ammunition to claim that Digital Humanities is \u201canti-interpretive\u201d (golumbia 6).\u00a0 He drops this bomb without citing any evidence to back up his claims.\u00a0 Golumbia also brings up a five-year hold quote from Alan Liu complaining that Digital Humanities doesn\u2019t do much to critique it\u2019s own field (Golumbia 20). Dredging up a five-year-old comment makes it fell like he\u2019s struggling to find current problems with Digital Humanities and has to dig up old dirt.<\/p>\n
I think Kirschenbaum did an excellent job refuting much of Columbia\u2019s essay.\u00a0 He managed to accomplish this by publishing a personal essay the highlights his career and some of his education and professional choices.\u00a0 This is a response the dark Golumbia used in his essay, which made Digital Humanities out to be a cabal-like organization trying to steal the humanities as he knows them from his grasp.\u00a0 It\u2019s much easier to hate or dislike someone you don\u2019t know, but by telling his personal story, it makes it much harder to believe that he and people like him are some nefarious group out to change the humanities to serve their corporate masters.\u00a0 One of the charges has being leveled at Digital Humanists is their belief that programming languages should count as credit towards foreign language requirements.\u00a0 At least in Ksdf\u00a0 case he had a practical explanation why he used Perl as a foreign language credit.\u00a0 \u201c Yes, I \u201cused\u201d Perl for one of the two foreign language reading requirements, an ad hoc request granted by Eric Lott, then DGS. The motive was pure practicality: I knew Perl and had the requirement to fulfill\u201d (Kirschenbaum 5).\u00a0 We see that he wasn\u2019t trying to change any system, Kirschenbaum just figured why not try to get credit for knowing Perl.\u00a0 Although he never said it, I\u2019m sure he would\u2019ve take another foreign language if his request was denied.<\/p>\n
I feel as though Golumbia\u2019s take on the Digital Humanities is highly inaccurate.\u00a0 He has some legitimate complains but they get lost in his rhetoric.\u00a0 He blames so many thing things for the rise of Digital Humanities and what he feels is the lack of focus on literary study that it is hard to think of him other than a conspiracy theorist.\u00a0 I realize that he\u2019s probably not one, but when you blame so many people and organizations it’s tough to shake that feeling.\u00a0 I\u2019ll admit that perhaps I am way off base.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a student of the Humanities department, so I may be missing a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Golumbia\u2019s essay almost feels like a conspiracy theory.\u00a0 This becomes apparent when he starts talking about Hirsch\u2019s writing and the influence it has had, \u201cconservative commentators nonetheless have converged on the view that readers shouldn\u2019t interpret and evaluate texts for themselves, especially with regard to politics\u201d\u00a0 (Golumbia 6).\u00a0 Golumbia uses Hirsch\u2019s constraining of the focus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","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\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":984,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions\/984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}