I read my article printed out from the LARB website directly, not from your PDF, so I apologize if our pagination is off.<\/p>\n
Toward the end of the essay the authors note an aspect of the kind of backlash they expect to receive.\u00a0 \u201cWe know we will be read as outsiders\u201d [18].\u00a0 They say this right before turning to Alan Liu, which is a move that does three things.\u00a0 One, it supports the claims they make about funding agencies and neoliberal or corporate structures. Two, it shows that they do <\/em>know what other Digital Humanists are saying.\u00a0 Three, it looks just like we expect scholarship to, building [in the metaphorical sense] on one another\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n What makes \u201cNeoliberal Tools\u201d so different as a piece of DH scholarship is its willingness to engage with the political.\u00a0 As classmates you likely all can tell how I\u2019ll side on this part of the debate: I agree that literary analysis is political and that is okay and that it is valid.\u00a0 I think almost every kind of scholarship is political.\u00a0 Even if the results of research seem benign, they exist within [and even for] a University, an openly political body.\u00a0 When we think of DH as something that is engaged in conversation of University structure, critical debate, and political power, it is easier to imagine being \u201cafraid\u201d of it.\u00a0 All semester we have poked empty fun at imaginary luddites who are afraid of DH in the way our grandparents are afraid of iPads [see what I did there?\u00a0 It\u2019s so easy, to imagine this scared people.]\u00a0 These imaginary people are not afraid in the same way Golumbia et al are afraid; they are concerned about a larger trend in the university structure.\u00a0 The authors may at worst seem a bit conspiratorial, particularly on page 16.\u00a0 \u201cWhy these funders [NEH and the Mellon Foundation, as examples] choose to do this remains something of a mystery.\u00a0 To find precise explanations, we would need to have access to private conversations and communications, though it is remarkable that such an epoch-making shift can be so lacking in explicit justification.\u201d<\/p>\n Is this a factual account of DH\u2019s rise as a discipline?\u00a0 I\u2019m inclined to believe Golumbia and friends as much as I am anyone else.\u00a0 If there is anyone here who is an outsider, I would throw that label at myself before any of our authors.\u00a0 Sure enough, Golumbia has a twitter.\u00a0 He\u2019s on a number of twitter \u201clists\u201d related to academia, media, and digital technology.\u00a0 People like Kirshenbaum might say that\u2019s the threshold it takes to critique DH, so that shouldn\u2019t be the issue then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read my article printed out from the LARB website directly, not from your PDF, so I apologize if our pagination is off. Toward the end of the essay the authors note an aspect of the kind of backlash they expect to receive.\u00a0 \u201cWe know we will be read as outsiders\u201d [18].\u00a0 They say this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976","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\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/976\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}