Emma G - Ruberg’s Intervention and their Reticence to Define

A)  Perhaps the best summary of Ruberg’s tripartite intervention occurs on pg. 419, when they state that,

“The intervention that I am staging here is…[1] proposing queer indie games specifically as a form of digital humanities and American Studies scholarship…[2] arguing that that these particular games and their creators model counter-strategies for cultural critique that can point us toward an alternative vision of the digital humanities that is political, personal, playful – [3] one that operates as much in practice as in theory.”

In other words,

1)    We (scholarly readers) should view queer indie game makers as existing DH/AMST scholars – their creations and the discourses surrounding them are evidence of the work ‘official’ scholars in these fields produce.

2)     Queer games are cultural texts that urge future DH scholarship to critically ‘play with’ identity politics – e.g.: the personal is/as political (but not in the second wave white feminism type of way from which this phrase derives) – of historically marginalized groups by positioning members of these groups within the field

a.     See p. 420: “…one aim of this work is to expand and diversify the network of stakeholders invested in the digital humanities”

b.    See also 422: “One of the key goals of arguing for queer indie game making as a form of [DH] scholarship: to recenter the lives of queer folks and the works that they create within a field that often continues to marginalize LGBTQ perspectives”

3)    And that, for these creators, ‘playing with’ personal(ity) principles and political person(a)s means both to theorize and create (denoting that the two are co-constitutive.

a.     See p. 423: “These game makers are themselves engaged in rigorous critical ‘scholarship,’ loosely defined, through their video games” and “the spirit of cultural critique runs through their work”

In order to offer some guidelines for a description of the Digital Humanities and DH work, Ruberg conceptualizes “DH as a ‘constellation’ of existing work (and potential future work) grouped around a shared interest in the place where culture meets the digital” (pp. 420-421). In other words, they are disavowing a strict (structuralist) definition, beginning with a caveat:

B)   “There is no single, static definition of DH, yet proceeding without such a definition would enact a kind of gatekeeping, inviting only those already familiar with the standards and debates that surround the ontologies of DH into this discussion of queer video games” (p. 420).

Ruberg is also careful to point out that, “the work most often deemed questionable or simply not-DH has been the most expressive in its form, radical in its politics, and explicit in its investment in the work and lives of women, queer people, people of color, and other marginalized subjects” (p. 420)

So they expand upon their definition by saying,

“This work may use digital tools to augment the work of the humanities, or use humanities frameworks to enrich the study of the digital…[it]… brings together the digital and the human in order to understand one, the other, or both in new ways. [It is] a set of meaning making practices in which culture and its products stand in intimate relation to technology…there is no hard boundary and the edges of DH…by looking at the stars in the night sky of DH from different angles and with different patterns in mind, one can welcome additional points into the constellation…The downside and upside of this approach to DH are the same: that by being broad, inclusive, permeable, and open to interpretation, the parameters of the digital humanities become potentially endless and intentionally unclear” (p. 421).

The question I pose is generated by a juxtaposition of Ruberg’s ‘constellation’ with James Carey’s discussion of map-drawing in his monograph. In a discussion regarding space, he writes:

“Space is made manageable by the reduction of information. By doing this, however, different maps bring the same environment alive in different ways; they produce quite different realities. Therefore, to live within the purview of different maps is to live within different realities” (p. 22).

My Question:

Based on Carey’s description of the diminutive drawing of maps, what about DH being “potentially endless and intentionally unclear” might be favorable/ unfavorable, valuable/destitute, revealing/concealing, etc.?

I hope you're all well!

Best,

Emma