Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 257.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-10-12 08:25:14+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: maintaining an interdisciplinary ground

David Graeber, in "Radical alterity is just another way of saying
'reality'"*, begins with the following lament:

> Old fashioned anthropological debates, of the sort made famous by,
> say, Edmund Leach or David Schneider, were once one of the most
> dramatic—and entertaining signs of the vitality of the discipline.
> They don’t seem to happen much any more. Perhaps this is the
> inevitable result of fragmentation: we no longer share enough of a
> common ground even to agree on what there is to argue about.
> Certainly, when anthropologists do engage in polemics nowadays, they
> more often than not seem to be talking past each other. If not
> shouting.

In our case, I would translate Graeber's "fragmentation" as the tendency
of digital humanities to be absorbed by the disciplines of those who
take it up, hence to lose its interdisciplinary standing point. For a
field that is intrinsically interdisciplinary (as I argue), this results
in a great loss for everyone--a loss of the conversation across
disciplines of which there is already too little.

As an economic necessity for the individual, yes, the dive into whatever
department has its doors open is simply what one may have to do. But it
is also an imaginative failure not to use a digital/computational
perspective to expand one's discipline of origin into as many others as
possible. (I paraphrase Northrop Frye, from On Education.)

One would think that the creation of academic departments in the field
would guarantee that other disciplines did not swallow digital
humanities whole. There are examples that suggest the contrary. Where,
then, is the best place--the best institutional form--for digital
humanities? Should we not be asking what's unique as a starting point?
Is the lab the (or an) answer?

Comments?

Yours,
WM

-----
*(HAU, Journal of Anthropological Theory 5.2 (2015): 1-41
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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