The Genius of the Tinker

Thanks for this, Michael. Revolutions in scholarship always involve content AND form, and this was true in the context of the social history “revolution” in the historical profession 35 years ago. We didn’t get sucked into a social scientific approach so much as we allowed social history to become institutionalized in the profession and forgot the more radical origins that drove the movement in the first place: an emphasis on broadening access to scholarship to include a broad, public audience; a more radical, inclusive approach to the appropriate subjects of history, including previously ignored or excluded groups; and a transformation of standard forms and principles of academic practice. I’d say that these three radical approaches are also very much up for grabs and relevant within digital humanities as well. If DH ends up being simply the latest fad within various humanities disciplines then we will miss out on an opportunity for a more fundamental, radical reorientation of our intellectual work. Tinkering, for sure…but much, much more.
Steve

Hi there,

Thanks so much for kicking this off!

Michael, at the end of this post I’ll be joining you in the optimist corner, but these are very real issues, and the connection to Steve’s experience in the history of history is very valuable. Some of us here have probably read Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature too, which makes some chilling points – he argues that the discipline of English has successfully neutralized a whole series of disruptions (feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonial studies) by incorporating them into the “field-coverage” model, i.e. just tacking on another field. And interdisciplinary efforts (like ours : ) don’t fare any better on his view: “Since interdisciplinary programs tend to be assimilated into the university as add-ons, instead of building bridges between the disciplines such programs tend to reproduce the fragmentation they were invented to counteract” (xiv).

And, really wearing my miserable old bastard hat now, that might not even be the worst outcome. How about this from Jim Groom, founder of EDUPUNK, as he stares down the barrel of the movement’s work being held up as a model for the “DIY U” by critics of public education: “the framing of EDUPUNKS as the romanticized destroyer—or necessary idiots—who pave the way for the edupreneurs… an EDUPUNK that devastates public education in service to the unregulated promise of free markets and capital is possibly the worst vision one can imagine” (http://bavatuesdays.com/edupunk-or-on-becoming-a-useful-idiot/). Anyone want to see DH in the classroom as “service training for the new de-humanized economy”? No wonder that some, on the one hand, are protective of DH, and others find that the label makes them queasy.

This second nightmare future of DH could even, in some horrible perfect storm, be combined with the first.

OK, so now we’re all depressed. But it doesn’t have to be that way, right? Actually, I really believe it doesn’t, and what’s inspiring about this group as an insurgency, unsupervised, is that it can be sui generis. We can mix our own flavor of DH here at CUNY – if we think it should have more of a focus on pedagogy, ed tech, the fine arts, do more outreach to our colleagues in the traditional humanities, to the public, we can do all those things. But we’ll need to make thoughtful choices too, with the help of the people who’ve been through this before.