Emily, it’s too bad you weren’t with us on Friday to add to the conversation. (This began as a response to your post, but it became too long.) A lot of the points you mentioned in your post truly resonated with me as well – especially the notion of ‘building things’ as scholarship, which to me suggests several possibilities for study as we explore departures from an era of mainly discursive inquiry (high theory being especially possible in an era of ‘invisible’ print) to a very material time marked by varieties of communicative technologies that mingle, compete, succeed, and fail at different times. I’m borrowing much of this from Ramsay and Rockwell, who of course suggest the possibility of ‘building things’ as a new direction for scholarship.

Perhaps building things, then, rather than arguments, is a productive direction for the future of the academy, although our things will certainly be invested with arguments in some way. In this sense I think I’m approaching DH from a different perspective than Jillana, though I am not at all resistant to developing a new theoretical framework along the way. I do think however that I’m probably motivated toward the material possibilities of DH by three things: 1) my anxieties about the futures of academic labor; 2) my (measured) optimism for the possibilities of digital humanism, especially re: cultivating a public audience; 3) following my interest in the history of printing and bookmaking, my desire to consider the ‘electronic revolution’ as historically contingent, but also the latest link in a communications continuum (contra Parry, 435). These motivations touch on issues such as power (in the academy, not in society) and legitimacy of academic work, which I hope we discuss at more depth at the next meeting. I think it merits some attention, and I think I speak for the graduate students here. The problem of evaluation of digital work is complex, as Ramsay and Rockwell rightly recognize (76), but it has every consequence for humanistic study if “To ask whether coding is a scholarly act is like asking whether writing is a scholarly act” (82). Juliana, you expressed similar concerns in your post and at the table. I agree with you that they introduce a variety of dilemmas, however important ones. I was also glad to speak with Amanda after the last session about some of these issues (and much of what I write here came up as we spoke).

In the first decades of printing, the press was glorified as a divine miracle (and condemned as demonic), but four centuries later it was (generally) taken for granted, invisible. If we only began to reconsider the printed book as a technology because of our recent saturation in consumer electronics, perhaps the future will bring with it a regularization (in copyright, habituation, etc) that will render the internet more ‘invisible’ than it seems today. I have no way to predict the future, of course, but if this could be the case, I think it makes sense to wonder about what scholarship we can build for the future, especially as a young scholar anxious to benefit from the digital tools around me and to give back to the greater community. In other words, I think we as humanists seriously need to consider building things in the attempt to sustain intellectual inquiry, and that we should regard this direction not so much a concession to a neoliberal turn, but to act constructively and publicly in what is merely a new, if unstable and constantly developing, communicative environment. It will be hard, though – clicking “publish” after writing these posts always brings me anxiety!