tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post7560952424094353014..comments2023-11-24T03:28:23.119-05:00Comments on Scriptio Continua: Outside the tentAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05582281819129069158noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-1097868819699769392013-09-13T16:07:02.644-04:002013-09-13T16:07:02.644-04:00As for dwindling, two recent pieces partly about T...As for dwindling, two recent pieces partly about TechCrunch Disrupt seem pertinent, if magnified in ways I personally haven't seen within humcomp or DH: Khadijah M. Britton, "<a href="https://medium.com/ladybits-on-medium/3a01c7c65b71" rel="nofollow">What Women Don't Want</a>"; Rachel Sklar, "<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130910193916-35886056-the-riptide-of-titstare" rel="nofollow">The Riptide of Titstare</a>."Sharon K. Goetzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05919021425045032416noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-7271352448195783102013-09-12T15:35:59.708-04:002013-09-12T15:35:59.708-04:00Hugh: Sorry, historian:) I guess my hope is that ...Hugh: Sorry, historian:) I guess my hope is that recent changes are more easy to undo . . . Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03491279928478180533noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-25518868281621009252013-09-12T14:07:33.248-04:002013-09-12T14:07:33.248-04:00As much of an embarrassment to programming as it i...As much of an embarrassment to programming as it is, one positive thing I've noticed about "DH" in the past is that it can create an environment which fosters people coming in via the more balanced humanities culture and getting introduced to programming because of the technical/coding aspects of DH. Somewhat of a social parallel to the idea that while some assume DH represents a colonization of the humanities by CS, it may in fact be the reverse.Ryan Baumannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10399481585276781810noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-3922287788538928922013-09-12T12:23:23.950-04:002013-09-12T12:23:23.950-04:00Jean: agreed. "accident of history" is a...Jean: agreed. "accident of history" is a bad phrasing. What I mean by it is "for no good reasons at all". :-) I'm continually enraged when I see post facto rationalizations of the imbalance (like the recent Dave Winer nonsense, e.g.). You're absolutely right that the shift is pretty recent history.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05582281819129069158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-26862552377729808392013-09-12T12:03:17.173-04:002013-09-12T12:03:17.173-04:00Hugh: I have no plans to stop coding (would probab...Hugh: I have no plans to stop coding (would probably go nuts if I tried), but thanks for the encouragement! I do question your assertion that programming is a male dominated field for historical reasons. There was a time (say the 1980s) when CS was the most gender balanced field in STEM. It seems like no one is quite sure why, but something shifted in the 1990s and the field developed a new set of highly negative attitudes towards women. My dad has been a professional programmer since the 1970s. He is really confused/saddened by this shift and tries to hire as many female programmers as he can to keep a gender balanced workforce at his company, but he has to do a lot of leg work to find them.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03491279928478180533noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-81245393580585389682013-09-12T07:20:16.004-04:002013-09-12T07:20:16.004-04:00ptr: Thanks!
Jean: I really think the male-domina...ptr: Thanks!<br /><br />Jean: I really think the male-dominated-ness of tech is just an accident of history and the more women join in, the better socialized its denizens will become. The only barriers to entry are social, which is not to say they aren't there, and aren't a problem, but they're also not rooted in any real differences in intelligence, temperament, etc. Don't give up! We need you.<br /><br />Patrick: I dunno. I notice with some amusement this morning that one of my interlocutors on Twitter submitted this post to DHThis and it only garnered a couple of votes (that does not mean go vote for it!). I think this might be a sign I'm right :-). I'm not terribly bothered if DH has moved on, and I think it has—this is what Steve Ramsay was pointing out in his <a href="http://stephenramsay.us/2013/05/03/dh-one-and-two/" rel="nofollow">DH I and II post</a> a few months back. And I wouldn't argue that my skills (such as they are) aren't applicable to the current version of DH. But I don't think that what they're being applied to now is DH any longer, despite my label :-).Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05582281819129069158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-1971357687223044692013-09-11T23:29:33.163-04:002013-09-11T23:29:33.163-04:00Hugh, you've explored some topics I've als...Hugh, you've explored some topics I've also been thinking about, but it's interesting to me that you see some things the opposite of the way that I have.<br /><br />When I hung around DH crowds more often (in the early 2000s), I found that even then people spent a lot of energy on defining DH and on theoretical questions rather than getting projects done. I've long contrasted the Digital Humanities conferences with, say, DLF Forums in that the former requires that papers be couched in a research agenda, whereas the latter is quite open to project reports. So I'm not sure that the DH community was ever concerned with the same thing as people like you.<br /><br />While I fully agree that we have a serious structural problem in how we fund DH work (in that it often carried out through grants and therefore the staff are always in a precarious situation), I actually have more faith in libraries' ability to find the money to fund the important work like support for DH projects. From the point of view of enabling scholarship, hiring a bibliographer or a DH programmer are really quite similar: both have to understand how scholars work and what they study in order to create effective tools for scholars to use. Now that I work in a library, I wouldn't really contemplate moving to a DH center (or a publisher) whose funding is less secure. Yes, library budgets are cut, but they are also quite strategic in how they allocate money, and they are evolving to reallocate money more efficiently to allow them to move into supporting things like DH.Kevin Hawkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07725552620057595725noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-34644925102494541802013-09-11T19:12:18.764-04:002013-09-11T19:12:18.764-04:00There has been a lot of noise lately, but it does ...There has been a lot of noise lately, but it does NOT constitute a redefinition of DH. Your mad skillz are still DH skills. For years people have talked about what is DH. Nothing has happened recently that gets us closer to a definitive answer to that. Patrick Murray Johnnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-65313050049846561632013-09-11T17:16:33.620-04:002013-09-11T17:16:33.620-04:00Thank you for writing this! I have a similar reac...Thank you for writing this! I have a similar reaction to a lot of what is happening right now, but I don't really know how to respond (except to hope everyone can sit down and learn from each other). I identify most strongly with the maker/coder side of DH and yet so much of what I hear claims that women are excluded from DH because of the technical/coding aspects. Which, on a bad day, can leave me wondering if I belong anywhere...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03491279928478180533noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-57328282336527834502013-09-11T14:36:02.369-04:002013-09-11T14:36:02.369-04:00Sam: You have certainly never given me that impres...Sam: You have certainly never given me that impression. :-) I don't think it changes much if DH has become something else, just that we need to be mindful of whether we should still claim to be part of it. And perhaps not look to it for much help.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05582281819129069158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-25908151631351925202013-09-11T14:14:39.422-04:002013-09-11T14:14:39.422-04:00If DH has "moved on and left a bunch of us be...If DH has "moved on and left a bunch of us behind," it's not going to go very far, especially if it isn't any different in its biases and prejudices than the establishment it appears to have replaced. In any case, I don't want to be part of a scholarly community that looks down on the people whose work makes the community possible in the first place. I hope that I have never given you the impression that I think of you as "just" a programmer. I consider what you do to be the fullest expression of the humanities tradition, since it encompasses logic, grammar, rhetoric, math, history, philosophy, languages, and literature. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01627337180317397141noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8725958.post-70175766322168447962013-09-11T14:02:33.692-04:002013-09-11T14:02:33.692-04:00Hugh - As someone who is a full time industry prog...Hugh - As someone who is a full time industry programmer looking in on DH from the outside, really excellent comments. ptrourkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11627177632355292812noreply@blogger.com