Kindle Book 47. A bit of a departure this, it's Debates In The Digital Humanities by Matthew Gold.
To be honest I'm not really sure what I made of this. I didn't finish it but i did read a lot. There's a lot to read. There were lots of moments where I felt the thrill of recognition across a disciplinary/cultural boundary. Like looking at an alien species and noticing that they also smile when they're happy. That made me feel like there were interesting things to pursue. But, lots of the time it just seemed alien. Maybe if i were 20 years younger this would be a world to explore.
Fragments follow:
"Whatever else it might be, then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active, 24-7 life online. Isn’t that something you want in your English department?"
"After much tension between media makers and media scholars, an increasing number of programs are bringing the two modes together in a rigorously theorized praxis, recognizing that the boundaries between the critical and the creative are arbitrary. In fact, the best scholarship is always creative, and the best production is always critically aware. The digital humanities seems another space within the academy where the divide between making and interpreting might be bridged in productive ways."
"Whereas the traditional humanities are text based and nontechnical and value solitary, specialized work resulting in a book, the digital humanities are collaborative and technical, value design, and are built upon shared information resources (“Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process”)."
"Ayers and Thomas initially included the word “experiment”—Two American Communities on the Eve of the Civil War: An Experiment in Form and Analysis (Ayers and Thomas)—in the title of their article for The American Historical Review, which tests how historians can “create or present new forms of scholarship and narrative” (Thomas, 415). However, reviewers rejected the article’s use of hypertext, since it “frustrated readers’ expectations for a scholarly article laid out in a certain way (Ayers, “The Academic Culture and the IT Culture”). When Ayers and Thomas’s article was finally published in the journal, it adopted a “much-simplified form” and took a new title that deemphasized its experimental approach"
"Failure is accepted as a useful result in the digital humanities, since it indicates that the experiment was likely high risk and means that we collectively learn from failure rather than reproducing it (assuming that the failure is documented)."
"“If an electronic scholarly project can’t fail and doesn’t produce new ignorance, then it isn’t worth a damn” (“Documenting the Reinvention of Text”)."
"Sometimes new tools are built to answer preexisting questions. Sometimes, as in the case of Hauksbee’s electrical machine, new questions and answers are the byproduct of the creation of new tools."