Hi NUDHL Gang!

When we had our last text-based discussion, I found the submissions by members about themes and ideas they wanted to discuss very helpful (in case you didn’t notice when I combined them and made that list for our discussion).

As you get ready to come over to Kaplan, if anyone has anything they found more relevant or interesting and want to be sure gets attention today, please post–even if it’s list and author style like I did–before the meeting. I think this will help structure our discussion.

My initial contribution is to keep on the table the discussion some of us had after Ben Pauley:

-what constitutes scholarship

-how does DH connect or conflict with the notion of individual scholarship (hactivism could be considered along with this)

And then, from the Gold readings, which are rich with great questions:

-where can we find non-whiteness in DH? Why, as Tara asked, is embedded whiteness present? What are it’s effects? What are ways to deal with systemic white privilege in DH?

-Not only race, as George Williams suggests, but disability, gender, sex, ethnicity, nation–these have strange positionings both in code and at the user interface. How do we acknowledge this? How do we change this?

-Here’s some things I would like to unpack:

What happens when we choose a specific practice–all of which are part (or, as some argue, not part) of DH;

media specific interpretation (I call it textual analysis or close reading) ala McPherson’s UNIX example;

labor/capitalism/neo-liberal presumptions; practices such as performance (hacking in Losh) vs interpretation (i.e. textual analysis);

everyday practices of computing vs constructing the basis and logics of tools functioning (McPherson and Williams, at least);

recognition that DH must do analysis that is media specific, not use old tools of film, etc;

thinking not just about digital divide or images/info collected about non-dominant groups (race, disabilities) but inclusion in logics;

choosing not to code (Posner) because of who one is (embodiment);

rethinking embodiment, self, divisions as suggested via disability).

I’m really excited about our discussion because the encoded race, sex and gender in digital technologies is at the heart of most of what I teach. I’ll share a hardware image to give you an example. It is of male and female ports. Ports are named male and female in order to fit (guess which one is male). The same is true with hard drives. The one that turns on your computer is “master” and other hard drives available to the computer are “slaves.” Apple recently revised this terminology, but it was there until about 2005.

How do hardware stereotypes reflect the DH issues we’ll be talking about today? We are responsible for DH, if not hardware, so this is a question of profound importance to me.

Looking forward to a lively discussion!