Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 266.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-10-17 08:14:53+00:00
From: James Smithies <jsmithies@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.258: an interdisciplinary common ground: not a factory floor
Dear Willard and all,
Thank you for the prompt. As I've long argued, I'm a fan of heterogeneity:
of institutional home(s), tools, infrastructure, methods (theoretical and
technical), people and politics. We could add public and private, open and
closed models too - we often overlook the presence of long-standing
DH-aligned activity in commercial spaces, for example.
We are still very early in our journey and should be thinking more broadly
still, even if it risks complicating things or making it more difficult to
articulate our value to management. The optimist in me senses that
experimental sentiment - with natural inclinations in one direction or
another - has pervaded DH from its inception(s). Circumstances usually
confound our best efforts but that's secondary to the more pressing need to
foster experimentation across the (epistemological, methodological,
organizational, infrastructural) spectrum. Any future success for DH - and
our claim for pedagogical, creative, and research value - lies in that
capacious experimental zone.
If that's the case the goal becomes how to enable that heterogeneity,
ideally through the dissemination of multiple viable models, inclusive
politics, and an acceptance of the profound (technical, organizational,
human) complexity of what we're trying to achieve. What works in some
places won't work elsewhere, and even failed or compromised models have
their value.
Best wishes,
James Smithies
Professor of Digital Humanities
King's College London
On Mon, 16 Oct 2023 at 06:05, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 258.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2023-10-15 11:11:30+00:00
> From: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.257: an interdisciplinary common ground
>
> Picking up on Willard’s lament about the absence of “old fashioned
> . . .debates”, I suggest that digital humanists explain why we continue to
> use
> IT tools to deliver/transmediate traditional “aesthetic” works as if they
> were
> information delivery devices. TEI/inline markup cum relational databasing
> has
> long been, as Willard long ago pointed out, a “dead end” for such work
> (Isn’t
> it?). Yet our factories keep pouring them out and, worse, sustaining them
> as
> such.
>
> Is that provocative enough?
>
> Of course such works ARE also information records. But primarily they are
> what
> Do McKenzie (also long ago) pointed out: that they are “records of their
> own
> making”. A very different animal.
>
> X
> Jerry
>
>
> From: Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org>
> Date: Sunday, October 15, 2023 at 1:54 AM
> To: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
> Subject: [Humanist] 37.257: an interdisciplinary common ground
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 257.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org<http://www.dhhumanist.org>
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> 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<http://www.mccarty.org.uk>
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