Join Digital Scholarship Librarian Kristy Golubiewski-Davis for this series of online conversations, where we’ll be discussing the issues and topics presented in the “Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities” special issue.  The volume is published as an open access online book by Debates in the Digital Humanities.  The discussions throughout the 21/22 academic year are informed by the publication, but no reading is required to join this discussion.

We encourage you to join regardless of if you’ve read the articles or not.  You are invited to read any selection of the chapters below that interest you or to join the discussion and bring your own experiences.

Discussion prompts:

• Humanities - Writing Vs. Making
  • Several authors in this section talk about the primacy of text in humanities - both as an item of study as well as a mode of scholarly production.  Would you agree or disagree with this assessment?  
  • How does digital scholarship engage with this narrative?
  • In what ways does the process of making affect “interpretation, analysis, and abstraction” in DH?
  • How have you engaged with “thinking-through-practice” or critical making in your work?  Do you find there is a distinction between “reading and critiquing” and “building and making” in your work?
  • What happens when you expand the boundaries of humanities outputs to include interpretive or digital objects that are not traditional text?  Examples from the inspiration include: Staley’s 3d printed wall of term frequencies, Staley’s color blocks that depict grammar structures without words, The Living Net techno-textile project that transforms network activity into sound which in turn vibrates a net, and the MashBOT project. 
• Boundaries & Gatekeeping
  • What similarities and differences exist between traditional humanities writing and the creation of digital humanities (or digital scholarship) projects?  
  • Is there a clear boundary between them either in definition or in how the scholarship activities affect professional advancement? 
  • How do these boundaries translate to gatekeeping that you have seen or experienced around what “counts” as legitimate professional activity in digital scholarship?  
  • Have you found those boundaries helpful or hindrances?
• What types of invisible labor are inherent in digital scholarship?  Are there any examples you have encountered that help make that labor more visible?

Related Reading (not required):

The above questions were chosen based on the information presented in the following chapters.  We invite you to read any chapters that interest you prior to the discussion meeting and participate in an asynchronous discussion on the readings through our DH Debates reading group.  The built-in tool annotation tools will allow you to engage with comments from other readers in this group asynchronously between discussion meetings.  

Part I: Making and the Humanities

• The Boundary Work of Making in Digital Humanities | Julie Thompson Klein
• On the “Maker Turn” in the Humanities | David Staley
• Vibrant Lives Presents The Living Net | Jessica Rajko, Jacqueline Wernimont, Eileen Standley, Stjepan Rajko, and Michael Krzyzaniak
• A Literacy of Building: Making in the Digital Humanities | Bill Endres
• Project Snapshot: MashBOT | Helen J. Burgess
• Making Humanities in the Digital: Embodiment and Framing in Bichitra and Indiancine.ma | P. P. Sneha

Part I context:

“The first section, “Making and the Humanities,” addresses foundational issues about how boundaries are drawn between thinking and doing (Klein) as well as how creative work manifests in humanities contexts, and vice versa (Staley). Entwined with these issues are key matters of literacy (Endres), or how much making, writing, building, coding, digitizing, and fabricating intersect despite common cuts between them. Equally important to this section are the embodied acts of translation and framing we perform in our research and how those acts are imbricated with maintenance across technical and non-technical work (Sneha). The projects featured in this first section also represent compelling collaborations between artists, humanists, and designers (Rajko et al.), where acts of making are collective (not individuated) and give us a tangible sense of how cultural criticism is enacted through experiments with circuits and interfaces (Burgess).”

- Excerpted from the Introduction: “I Don’t Know All the Circuitry” by Jentery Sayers
 

This discussion will be virtual, and you will receive a Zoom link by email when you register.

Participants who register early will receive an email update with the discussion questions at the beginning of the month.

All discussions in this series:

10/29: Introduction
12/3: Making and the Humanities
1/28: Made by Whom? For Whom?
2/25: Making as Inquiry
3/31: Making Spaces and Interfaces
4/29: Making Spaces and Interfaces (continued)
5/27: Making, Justice, Ethics