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"Humanities students should be more like computer-science students.
I decided that as I sat in on a colleague's computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I've been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride."
"What constructing ought to denote, but perhaps never will (hence Levi and Latour's calls for a new term), is that the knowledge we produce is another object in the world, made from other objects in the world (including us). As one object among many, the knowledge we produce does not capture/represent in some pure way other objects in the world. It isn't "true" in that sense. As academics we already accept this across the campus. However it also isn't "untrue" or operating in a separate, noncommunicating realm from other objects. It isn't purely discursive or purely social. "
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But I can't believe that. I can't afford to believe that. If we believe that as humanists we cannot produce knowledge of real value with the strength to make changes in the world, then what would we be doing as teachers or scholars? We would be engaged in some kind of self-pleasuring activity, perhaps with the idea that our performances might instill in others (through some quasi-magical, sympathetic incantation) a similar practice of finding self-pleasure (or aesthetic appreciation) through a purely subjective/cultural/discursive encounter with the objects we study. No doubt there is a strong strand of such thinking in the humanities, especially in English, that goes back at least to Matthew Arnold (though in his case the self-pleasure was imbuded with a chaste religiosity rather than the psycho-sexual implications one probably sees here). However, no one would imagine self-pleasure as the sole goal of humanistic study. We must be able to produce knowledge that has the strength to make changes. And that requires an understanding of how knowledge is constructed and operates in a world that isn't divided into natural, social, and discursive realms. And this is as true for our research and teaching as it is for assessment.
"In thinking about these eschatological questions, I start from Matt Kirschenbaum’s observation that DH is not a single intellectual project but a tactical coalition. Just for starters, humanists can be interested in digital technology a) as a way to transform scholarly communication, b) as an object of study, or c) as a means of analysis. These are distinct intellectual projects, although they happen to overlap socially right now because they all require skills and avocations that are not yet common among humanists. "
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So DH has no future, in the long run, because the three parts of DH probably confront very different kinds of future. One will be generalized; one will likely settle in for trench warfare; and one may well get absorbed by informatics. [Or become a permanent trade mission to informatics. See also Matthew Wilkens' suggestion in the comments below. - Ed.] But personally, I’m in no rush to see any of this happen. My odds of finding a disciplinary home in the humanities will be highest as long as the DH coalition holds together; so here’s a toast to long life and happiness. We are, after all, only eleven.
"The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter."
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They go on to argue that this hyper-competitive system does not, in fact, produce the best possible science because scientists choose projects based on their likelihood of increasing their payoffs within these narrow domains (more grant dollars, more high profile publications, etc.), rather than on their likelihood to produce genuine scientific progress. In short, scientific progress only sometimes aligns with ambition, politics or funding priorities, but behavior almost always well, eventually.
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Continuing the above theme, Carpenter writes about particular issues within Psychology. The problem is known as the "file-drawer problem" in which negative results tend not to be published. Combine that with noisy results from small sample sized experiments and you have a tendency for statistical flukes to be published in high profile journals as if they were facts.
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"If we are going to be serious about helping the academic humanities survive into the 21st century, we need to make the dissertation (a little) less rigorous, but make graduate schools harder to get into, by cutting the number of slots, even of entire departments. That way, only the very best students (ideally) will pursue PhDs, but those who do will likely finish and may actually have tenure-track jobs awaiting them. The most committed and most talented students will get a greater proportion of the financial and faculty support universities can provide. Fewer students will be around to teach, but since there will be fewer programs, they will congregate around top faculty, creating very high level intellectual communities. Yes, it’s elitist and “meritocratic,” insofar as any of this is meritocratic and not purely subjective (another debate altogether). But I can’t think of any other good solution."
" The initial 2012 conference will be based on an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IATDH) sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the UNC Charlotte Complex Systems Institute this past year that was dedicated to computer modeling in the humanities and social sciences. In keeping with the theme of the IATDH, the topic for our first conference will be: Modeling Complexity in the Humanities and Social Sciences."
"The students who come out of school without jobs aren’t, for the most part, starry-eyed liberal arts majors but rather people who thought a degree in business, graphic design or nursing was a practical, job-oriented credential. Even the latest target of Internet mockery, a young woman the New York Times recently described as studying for a master’s in communication with hopes of doing public relations for a nonprofit, is in what she perceives as a job-training program.
The higher-education system does have real problems, including rising tuition prices that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won’t be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers.
That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad."
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Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?
" A study from the National Bureau for Economic Research says that the income gains from specifically vocational majors (as opposed to liberal arts majors) peter out relatively early in life. By midlife, the liberal arts majors are actually out-earning the vocational majors, on average. The most dramatic fades occur in apprenticeship programs."
"In this environment, Grafton and Grossman write that the idea of working outside academe needs to be basic to all discussions with graduate students, from the time they look at programs to their dissertation defenses. But history departments also need to consider "bigger" changes than just talking about options, and those changes, the statement argues, should include adjustments in the doctoral curriculum."
"The grand vision that defenders of a purer humanities enunciate, if it has existed at all, existed vigorously before the university systems of today, before the comfortably professional and middle-classness of professorial lives today, and might reasonably be expected to exist in some other form after them, if they should disappear or markedly transform."
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I think we can learn a lot from recognizing that many admirable humanist intellectuals have carried out their work outside of or at a distance from the norms of contemporary disciplines within the humanities. The lesson in that is not that the humanities in the academy are disposable, absolutely not. It might be, on the other hand, a sign that the contemporary disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practice of humanists in the American academy isn’t a necessary condition of vigorous, challenging and desirable humanistic work within contemporary universities and colleges. There are other ways to skin that cat. It might even be that intellectual work by humanists as my more traditionalist friends defend it is best served by much looser structural and organizational practices than in other divisions of academic work, that this would bring the practice of humanistic scholarship inside of the academy more in line with the deeper history of this kind of intellectual work. And maybe, just maybe, that move would also solve much of the much-fretted about “crisis of the humanities” by permitting a reconnection or reacquaintance between wider publics and humanist intellectuals.
"But the silver lining here is that what will most improve or sharpen practices of new media creation and interpretation is not technical skill with hardware and software nor is it being the most brave-new-worldish professor on the block. What would most dramatically improve or transform existing digital practices of cultural interpretation and information literacy would be the extrapolation and extension of many of the existing and long-standing strengths of humanistic inquiry. Note I do not say, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” New media environments are new, and the jobs and practices which extend from them are also novel. "
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