Digital Humanities: The Field
I was just browsing Best Buy's website, and I took note of the way the store markets technology to college students. This got me started down a loooooooong and winding road. Buckle up!
I keep returning to Ulmer's idea of electracy (I'm posting this here, so we can talk about it in our discussions of Ulmer next week). Since reading Ulmer, I've been asking myself "What does elecracy look like, in practice?" on a regular basis. Coupled with the readings from this week about obsolete tenure and promotion practices, the thing that really stands out to me about my quest to concretize electracy (and I'm probably skipping steps here) is that maybe even the broad disciplinary constraints, like English, Rhetoric, Composition, Writing and Humanities, just don't work when they're applied to the digital.
In other words, based on the aggregate of the things we've read this semester, I think that the digital scholars we've read, though currently housed in English, rhetoric, and humanities departments (among many others), have planted all the seeds for us, the next generation of scholars, to make arguments that carve out a unique space for digital studies--independent of the traditional disciplinary boundaries that confine current processes of knowledge production. I think that digital studies could necessitate its own interdisciplinary departments in universities one day, and I imagine that they could operate, institutionally, much like other interdisciplinary programs, like many women's and gender studies programs, for example.
I also think that the historical trajectory of modern rhetoric and composition departments may even serve as an allegory for how we might conceive of the departmental development of a literal discipline for the interdisciplinary endeavor of digital studies.
Of course, I hope that not everyone agrees with me. The academy exists and subsists through disagreement. So I'm looking forward to a fun discussion about the good, the bad, and the ugly of making digital studies its own interdisciplinary, institutional endeavor.
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