Brainstorming:
This is so much fun in the right setting and with the right people - so many cool ideas come out! The amount of different directions a brainstorming session could go when the floor is open to more people in various locations sounds amazing.
sharing research and scholarship in various stages of development.
I am very excited about this aspect of digital humanities - I hope this makes scholarship even more accessible to more people. Seeing research in different stages, especially the early ones, might further help research and scholarly projects feel more attainable to more people in certain fields (it is really easy to have imposter's syndrome or feel overwhelmed when all you ever see is the end result of others' work). Additionally, it will be awesome to have more people able to give input at the beginning stage of a study or project.
B or better it stays there.
Who is deciding what an "A" paper or a "B" paper is? Why is one person in charge of this? Every instructor has a different rubric they want students to follow and every student has different strengths. I have also met a professor who would adjust grades students got on assignments so the class average would be in a specific range (they would typically adjust the grades down, not up - this professor's reasoning being that too many As would muddle selection for scholarships. ...). My point is, one person should not get to decide whose work is worthy of being publicized. A public history site should have a sort of public council. Or at very least, a larger group of people ultimately deciding on information to be shared.
inequality
I know I have been criticizing this interview a lot, and I apologize for that, but I really do hope that the speakers consider educational inequality, too, in regards to who gets to post on the Historical Project ("educated" students) and who has the right to complain about it (the "uneducated" public).
Information policed by a single person (they mention taking certain stories down and deciding to leave others without consulting anybody else) is immediately problematic and metaphorical of the current post-academic system in general, in my opinion.
retrospective
I am concerned because they are speaking as though inequality is a thing of the past - do they mean a specific timeframe of inequality?
You can throw in smell.
I do find this a really interesting detail to add. This will paint a really broad picture of a place and time.
When you put stuff on the web and you’re working with students as collaborators, you get a lot of complaints. I’ve gotten my fair share of complaints.
I find it interesting that this project is assumedly for the public, but the speaker is frustrated to hear from the public when papers written by students and marked by (I am assuming) a single professor contain inaccuracies.
I’m not going to take it down because it’s written by students and unless something is, I wouldn’t let hate speech stay up there, and I will take things down if they’re just clearly- Chambliss: Wrong. Nelson: Like I want to give them the story. It can’t be fake history, it has to be a reasonable, not completely erroneous version. Students make mistakes and I let some of those mistakes go, but if something’s just totally off I’ll take it down. But in this case it wasn’t off.
This really makes me question how to make sure history is accurate and education is fair without falling victim to gatekeeping or violating freedom of speech. How do you monitor the content of a site like the speaker's without submitting work to peer review (with the idea of "peer review" itself being limited to the academic sphere)? I certainly don't know how to fix it, beyond making sure more than a single person is reviewing student submissions before being posted to a historical site.
That being said, maybe the work was factually accurate but saying Jackson was "brave" is definitely that one student's biased opinion and absolutely problematic, and in my opinion shouldn't have been posted.
if you got to keep it alive, it’s just a thing.
I do not understand. Nothing in history is in stasis. Language changes all the time. Even pens are constantly being updated. What is happening here.
My main reason I’m at least considering shutting it down for future contributions is I don’t want you or anybody else to have this built into your class and then it breaks and we’re struggling to get it, or maybe unable to get it working for anybody.
I can see the potential problems with technology that is changing so quickly, but I don't believe the answer is to quit when it becomes overwhelming. Maybe I am being overly simplistic, but surely the younger people the speaker referenced earlier in the interview (the ones who are particularly adept at digital technologies) could work to come up with a solution, maybe a new "Engine" that adapts with changing technologies? I feel like every site in existence needs to adapt and improve - mobile games have to constantly update, for example, and they have a lot of moving parts. The speaker's main problem seems to be an inability to fully adapt; their project, although innovative when it first came to be, is stuck in time.
Just pick it, pick a tool. Doesn’t matter what the tool is. I was super liberal about this. Tools are the things that you use to tell a story. You use a pencil, that’s a tool, so just pick a tool and if you want your tool to be, I’m going to make podcasts, all right, then you need to learn editing software. Also, it’s really about you need to be able to sustain this. You, yourself. You need to be able to carry this water all by yourself. There’ll be no one there for you. You have to be able to sustain this.
While I think this is fundamentally good advice, it is also leaning on the idea that no new technologies will be available to the student once they graduate or, ever. There is nothing wrong with having a favourite tool, but I would rather be flexible and adaptable. The speaker uses the example of a 3D printer as a potential inefficient tool - I am not sure why he used this example because it seems the interview took place fairly recently, and in 2024 3D printers are home devices for a lot of people (shoutout to everyone I know who makes D&D miniatures) and have been for a few years already. I am very confused by this podcast, overall.
one of the things about grant funding that probably the public doesn’t know, once you get a grant, it’s easier to get a grant. When you don’t have a grant, it’s way harder to get a grant.
This is unfortunate to find out. This statement implies that your funding is not affected by how good or impressive your idea is. Your ability to secure funding is tied to who you know, and who knows you; your ability to learn, or spend time learning something, is tied to resources that not everyone can get. It is less about deserving and more about networking.
I am trying to recover, explore, explain, document the Black experience in this community, and I’m trying to do that in a way that allows the Black community to have some ownership of it, which was a way for me to justify the work.
I am excited to see how Digital Humanities positively impacts the decolonization of scholarship. Ownership of stories and histories shared by a group of peoples without insisting everyone involved needs a (very expensive) degree in order to have a story worth recording would be wonderful.
“Does this need to be digital?” Like, this is a really important question. Does this need to be digital? Because all the heartache associated with doing this, if you don’t need it to be digital, just walk away. Right? No one’s going to blame you, no one will ever know. Just, does it need to be digital? They’re really shocked by that, because they’re like, “We thought you loved digital humanities.” I love a lot of things. That doesn’t mean you need to do it. Right? I like comic books, you don’t need to like them. It’s a question, right? And so the value is really complicated there, so this is really one of those questions that we don’t talk about all the time, but we probably need to talk about a little bit. How would you say that? What’s the value for students, for faculty, for the public, when we talk about digital humanities?
Another curious stance, considering this professor teaches Digital Humanities. I do get their point -- I feel as though certain information needs a specific vehicle to make sense. For instance, I would rather hear a song than have the lyrics presented to me on a soundless PowerPoint. However, they make it seem like a huge burden or chore. I am not understand what they mean by "heartbreak." Additionally, who is deciding what "needs" to be digital or not? (Who is deciding, and why?)
I think some interesting work that’s digital humanities isn’t really humanistic.
I find this to be a curious stance -- digital humanities seems, to me, another way of recording and sharing information, which is, arguably, human. People have been trying to share information orally, on stone tablets, on skins, on paper, etc. since the beginning and to me, digitally is simply another way to do that. Not inferior, not superior. Just different. But still fundamentally "humanistic".
Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest, is generally credited with havingfounded humanities computing in 1949
The degree to which the study of (and record-keeping for) the humanities has changed in less than a century is absolutely mind-boggling. According to Wikipedia, the first personal computer was not developed until the 1970s; maybe I am understanding the term "computer" too literally, but the fact that someone was already thinking of "humanities computing" 20-30 years before computers were home devices is so cool.
Do you have to knowhow to code [to be a digital humanist]? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanitiesand I say ‘yes.’ . . . Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things.
I find this stance to be a form of gatekeeping, and reductive. Quality is of course important, but I find it very frustrating that as soon as something becomes associated with "academics" or "scholarship," people immediately begin limiting who can do it and why, as if severely restricting its practice will keep it "pure" or "better."