April 15th Presentation - Andrew King & Naiara Leão
From Transformative Works to #transformDH
Alexis Lothian, “From Transformative Works to #transformDH: Digital Humanities as (Critical) Fandom”
Takeaway: Digital Humanities can be understood as a “critical fandom,” a community of excited interlocutors whose shared energies, enthusiasms, and skills work together to critically interrogate and expand the boundaries of this emerging field (or form) of scholarly and creative inquiry.
Questions:
- On pp. 376-77, Lothian states, “Not only the digital but all the humanities operate a lot like a fandom. How could one devote a life to study without an intense affective connection to an object of fascination--whether it begins in love or as anger, discomfort, a critical itch? ...Fandom is what gets left over when we parcel our scholarly selves into commodities.” Is Lothian correct to claim both that (a) there is a fundamentally affective/emotional motivation at the foundations of any scholarly or intellectual inquiry, and (b) that this affective/emotional content of our scholarly is left out of a conception of scholarly labor that sees it as analogous to the exchange of other kinds of commodities? Could one have another kind of relationship to one’s objects of study, one that does not have the characteristics of a fandom? And could there be ways to resist present forms of the commodification of knowledge so that, covertly or overtly, experiences like “love” or “anger” could again be established as acceptable parts of a life of scholarly inquiry?
- Lothian acknowledges the need for self-critique even among the digital humanists who agree that DH should be conceived of as a fandom. What might some of the risks be of adopting a conception of DH along these lines? Although intended as a form of critique, what might--or could--its blind spots be?
- What does eruthros achieve by montaging footage from the Indiana Jones films and setting this to the “Imperial March” theme from the Star Wars films? How is a critique formulated through visual media different from a critique stated in a more traditionally “scholarly” way? How does it problematize these latter forms of scholarship?
Doing Digital Wrongly
Takeaway: The article is a call to action. It incites the reader to risk doing - scholarship, art, public engagement – right or wrong, digitally or analogically. It questions the barriers imposed (self-imposed included) for producing knowledge within oppressive systems. It brings an important critique of the production of knowledge in the academy, in general, and in DH in particular “where tech-driven projects give the illusion of advancement based on specialized (often elite) expertise about a machine at the expense of people. ”(397) Therefore, doing digital wrongly is mainly about questioning the dynamics that disfavor oppressed communities' skills and modes of being in educational environments that perpetuate white elitist standards of production of knowledge.
Questions:
- "Wrongly is really tricky because as Blair said, rightly doesn’t really exist. As a teacher of flight in a system that does not teach students how to carry weight, or guides them to believe weight is inferior, I can feel wrongly as failure. What is so good about flying, after all? When it is time for education, knowledge that sits outside the system is what I trust, that is, if it’s a flying lesson.” (p. 401)In the article, the authors redefine the word “wrong” and question its negative connotation by asking: Wrong for whom? Against what standards is wrong defined in higher education institutions?
Considering that, can their effort be interpreted as a task of subversion and reappropriation of language? In which ways does it resemble feminist strategies discussed in our last in-person DH classes? Can you think of other examples in the article that adopt a similar strategy?
- On pp. 405-06, the authors describe some of their first studio sessions and the creation of a work method (or better said, a non-method) of making music that would work for them. In which ways can we think about using digital tools not only to enhance our current research projects but to create disruptive ways and narratives in our scholarship?
Toward Digital Ethnic Studies
Takeaway: Carpio, founder of the research seminar and multimedia site Race and the Digital, proposes that the same digital tools that may contain embedded racial disparities can be used by students to uncover and, hopefully, rectify these disparities, while advancing and broadening the range of applications for DH methods in the humanities.
Questions:
- How should we think of the relationship(s) between DH scholarship and pedagogy, whether in American Studies or another discipline that makes use of digital tools and methods? What possibilities for engaging students across diverse backgrounds does DH afford your particular discipline, and what obligations might your discipline have to train students to use and critique the new technologies that will shape scholarship in your field?
- How might we orient our pedagogy so that it encourages students to conceive of their training with DH tools not as applicable only in educational settings, but “beyond the classroom,” as Carpio puts it (614)? How can a pedagogical strategy that focuses on engagement “beyond the classroom” avoid reducing scholarly activity to that which is only considered useful if it also has some role to play beyond its role in helping students process, create, and critique knowledge? In other words, how can digital humanists inculcate in their students a practice that is responsive to social reality but not beholden to, e.g., market ideology?
Mapping Access
Takeaways:
- The anthropological concept of “thick description” can generate “thick maps”, which in turn thicken how we imagine, create, and use space itself. The same logic could be transposed to other fields if we think that the “thick data” generated in digital humanities projects can enhance not only the answers to the questions we ask but the questions asked in the first place.
- Critical access studies is an emerging field of inquiry that DH tools not only to track features of built environments (and to encourage thoughtful reflection on their features) relevant to disabled individuals, but to help articulate data-grounded arguments for reconceiving the assumptions undergirding modern approaches to disability itself and in particular for critiquing compliance-based approaches to disability inclusion.
Questions:
- What is Hamraie's critique of crowdsourcing strategies to map accessibility? How could mapping projects benefit from the contribution of expert researchers? In a broader context, how does the field of digital disabilities contributes to a humanistic view of spatial representation?
- Thinking of the quotation from activist Mia Mingus (pp. 459-60 of the article), how might DH tools contribute to the general public’s as well as scholars’ abilities to think productively of the experiences of disabled individuals in terms of difference rather than sameness? According to Hamraie, what is problematic or unsatisfactory about the kind of “sameness” that undergirds compliance-based approaches to disability accommodations and rights? Do you agree?
Nuestra Autohistoria
Questions:
- The article starts with a critique of how DH lost an initial inspiration and commitment to other insurrectionists disciplines, such as ethnic studies. What caused this distancing? In which ways can the Digital Humanities reclaim this affinity? Does the author give examples of how that happens?
- How oral history and digital humanities can work together to recuperate lost or understudied historical experiences?
The First
Days Project is an example of a collaborative digital archive, in which
immigrants can upload the stories about their first days in the United States. It’s
also possible to browse stories according to where they come from/where they
arrived in a digital map.
- How do the "First Days" project work as an information source about immigrants in the United States? Which contributions it can offer to scholars, artists and public policy makers?
Comments
Post a Comment