Building What?

This week I started with Stephen Ramsay’s post “On Building” which opens with several comments he made at a Digital Humanities  panel at MLA in Los Angeles this January. I had the good fortune to attend the conference which I must admit seemed rather tame. Ramsay’s post speaks to a whole world of foment that I missed, making me even more grateful that I am in this Digital Humanities class. No longer will I  merrily skate by  the discussion because I have  not been initiated…  In the DH world, Mr. Ramsay needs no introductions. But in our class of , mostly, neophytes it is helpful to know that he is an Associate Professor of English and a fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities http://cdrh.unl.edu/ where the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) announced a $500,000 challenge grant to build a permanent endowment for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In light of our discussions about preservation, scholarly conventions, gates, authority and expressivity, a CDRH endowment is truly exciting, but I digress.

The idea of needing initiation is a good starting point for discussing Ramsay. His central thesis is that Digital Humanists are builders by definition. This spins into a complicated discussion of what that means (Ramsay’s expansive definition is posted in his three-minute  MLA position paper, “Who’s in and Who’s Out”). Do you have to write code to be a member of the Digital Humanities community? Where does theory fit? A foray into that discussion began for me in the plethora of energetic comments attached to “On Building” followed by a visit to William Pannapacker’s Chronicle article on Triumph and Cathy Davidson’s article “Advice to DigHum Job Candidates, Don’t Lead with HTML.”

Here is what I am left with today:

• This discussion has spanned the last twenty years in multiple forms
• Digital Humanities as a field is evolving and struggling to find authority in the academic realm– this is not always pretty
• I have not yet found a lot of discussion about teaching and students in relation to the “home” of Digital Humanities in Higher Education
• I hope the position battle does not reduce the incredibly rich possibilities for collaboration across disciplines

Conflict is not sport in my world. The interwoven discussion patched together above left me disappointed about our collective decisions as the privileged who are blessed to make our livings in colleges and universities. We still celebrate “Black History Month” rather than American History. Our students build miles of uniform strip malls that are becoming standard across borders (and I don’t just mean the physical structures themselves). We don’t acknowledge the librarians, counselors, bus drivers, and residential life staff that support our students and keep them whole  enough to write papers. Community should be ultimately inspiring .  And, while conflict is healthy and natural, defensiveness is wearying over time. And then, I reread Davidson’s conclusion and got over myself:

Digital Humanities should be leading the way, not with mark up but with bold, transformative goals that help make the humanities central in a confusing time that no one fully understands or has mastered.   An ideal job candidate burns with the passion of making a field anew.   Vision, expansiveness, imagination, ideas, and brilliance are the requirements. Knowing or not knowing HTML is way down the list of attributes that make colleagues know that you are the one they need for a better and brighter future . . . or even to get from the top to the bottom floor of the skyscraper at the MLA interview without thinking, “Please, please, don’t let me get stuck between floors with this pedantic, boring, tiresome person.”   What you want is for those elevator doors to open and your interviewer to still be asking you follow-up questions, and the logical next statement is:  “By the way, are you free now for coffee?  I’d love to talk more about what you just told us about how you are co-teaching an undergrad class in Kreyol literature with college students in Haiti, building a virtual environment as your meet-up space, that your own students in your Haitian literature seminar are in social networks with Haitian students, and they are collaborating on an anthology of contemporary Haitian post-earthquake writings by displaced students living in the homeless camps?   People are saying that students at your university are deciding to major in French in greater numbers than any time in the last decade.   That’s amazing . . . ”

Enough said.