When we choose not to invest in our own infrastructure, we choose not to articulate a different possible version of the world. In fact, this state of affairs is already very well-documented for edtech. And for all of the excitement about grant funding opportunities and enthusiastic administrators, the actual state of DH funding is less flush-with-cash than boom-and-bust.
People were tired of piecing together grant funding to keep it lurching along. Last year, UCLA announced an app competition. But this is not support. This is not research support. How long does it take to build an app? How many people does it take? How is the app going to get updated once the contest is over? What message are we sending our students by telling them they should work for free? Has anyone thought this through? We want to believe that we can be agile and innovative, like Silicon Valley says it is, by making DH run with short-term grants, app contests, and temporary labor.
We want to have a sort of Uber-style sharing economy for DH-research. But this is not how one supports careful, enduring scholarship and teaching. Why does digital humanities look the way it does right now? If we want to produce truly challenging scholarship and keep our best scholars from burning out, we need to pressure our institutions to, frankly, pay up.
You can optimize, streamline, lifehack, and crowdsource almost everything you do — but good scholarship still takes money and time. Skip to content Here I am, still blogging like some kind of caveman. Rethink the final assignment. And I worry about the groups getting the attention they need to complete this very complex project when there are so many people to check in with. The alternative that makes sense to me is some kind of digital portfolio, in which students create their own examples of multiple kinds of digital work and surround it with critical commentary.
Undecorate the Christmas tree a little bit. I think I could cut the blog post assignments down to just a few and simplify the final project a lot. Think about asking students to complete technical modules at home. On a few occasions, I had students walk through very carefully written tutorials themselves at home , and they seemed to do OK.
Get a different classroom! This seemed to work really well. Students took to network analysis more than they have in years past, perhaps because a number of them were simultaneously taking an SNA class in the Sociology department. The DataBasic suite really helps with this, but I think they could use step-by-step instructions to get started.
I convened an evening meeting to which each group had to send at least one representative and checked in with each group that way. Then, at the same time every week, I invited each group to sign up for dedicated help with me. It worked well and allowed me to work intensively with a few groups.
You probably guessed this, but with a lecture this size, you need to make every announcement multiple times and send email followups, and even then, students will plead total ignorance. They really struggled to understand Trouillot, but it seemed to make an impression on them, too.
Also, partly because so many of my students are people of color themselves, they appreciate it when I can pull in projects from and about other people of color. In my own work, I embrace curation as a means of reweaving and reintegrating theory and practice in history. I seek to interpret space, place, and identity in a multi-sensory way. I fail more often than not. But the digital humanities is like jazz in that it is about process, as well as outcome. I think digital humanities, like social media, is an idea that will increasingly become invisible as new methods and platforms move from being widely used to being ubiquitous.
For now, digital humanities defines the overlap between humanities research and digital tools. But the humanities are the study of cultural life, and our cultural life will soon be inextricably bound up with digital media. A term of tactical convenience. It is both a methodology and a community. The Digital Humanities is both a field with a discernable set of academic lineages, practices, and methodologies and a vague umbrella term used to describe the application of digital technology to traditional humanistic inquiry.
Ultimately, what sets DH apart from many other humanities fields is its methodological commitment to building things as a way of knowing. Roger Whitson acknowledges the blind spot in a recent post , after attending the Computers and Writing conference, as well as being schooled himself on Twitter. But Roger also gets at, I think, is one of the reasons I contend that DH needs to be open and respectfully appropriate what has been done before and for a long time :.
I, too, was swayed when Derrideans made claims that there were no real separations between theory and praxis or between constantive and performative utterances.
And yet, what did those arguments actually accomplish except to keep us doing exactly the same thing? There needs to be a change in how we do things in the humanities. And certainly using technology, even mindfully and critically, can just recreate old patterns in bigger and faster ways. Less innovative, perhaps, but if the conclusions are equally insightful and revealing, then why knock it? This is why I think the big tent, or as I call it, the DH collective, is so important.
We need people who can do all kinds of different things innovate, built, create, critique, tweak, and disseminate, among other things. They say if you love something, you need to be prepared to let it go.
But I have responsibilities on the ground, too, to the people in my immediate community. And of course, the nice part is, that can only make DH as a whole stronger, and weirder, and more durable.
Your email address will not be published. You are a disruption in the force. Go to coffee with one new person every week. Promise nothing. Obtaining server space is the hardest computing problem in the world. Work with the existing culture. Nobody comes to workshops. Their efficiency works against them. You have to get the dataset, clean the dataset, put it somewhere people can find it, troubleshoot the software, plan out the steps, etcetera, etcetera.
You have to do this if you want to get through all the material in an hour. But guess what? All that garbage prep work is what we spend most of our time doing. This seamless processing of data is a fantasy world!
Most people are basically interested in other people. Most people at a university are kind of desperate for a low-stakes way to get to know and hang out with people.
Go where the deals get made. Survey sparingly and with skepticism. Beware the flash. Pingback: » Digital Frontiers Anna E. Pingback: Thomas Padilla. Pingback: dh blog post response — here and there poor cate.
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