“Until scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as publishing in print — and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too — few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal and undervalued.”
Truth.
(From Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence).
Do humanists get their ideas from anything at all?
Ted Underwood:
The basic mistake that Fish is making is this: he pretends that humanists have no discovery process at all. For Fish, the interpretive act is always fully contained in an encounter with a single piece of evidence. How your “interpretive proposition” got framed in the first place is a matter of no consequence: some readers are just fortunate to have propositions that turn out to be correct. Fish is not alone in this idealized model of interpretation; it’s widespread among humanists.
Blogs vs. Term Papers
New York Times:
Of all the challenges faced by college and high school students, few inspire as much angst, profanity, procrastination and caffeine consumption as the academic paper. The format — meant to force students to make a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.
And so there may be rejoicing among legions of students who have struggled to write a lucid argument about Sherman’s March, the disputed authorship of “Romeo and Juliet,” or anything antediluvian. They have a champion: Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.
UNL professors work to create digital Walt Whitman archive
Daily Nebraskan:
Walt Whitman, one of America’s most influential and significant poets, isn’t an easy author to parse through. His writing is complex, dense and requires careful study of fragmented manuscripts to fully appreciate or even understand. Since the mid-1990s, the Walt Whitman Archive has been engaged in an ambitious project to digitize Whitman’s notebooks, manuscripts, essays, letters, journals and key contextual resources into an integrated and user-friendly website. In 2007, the Archive moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and under the co-direction of Ed Folsom and Kenneth Price, has made exciting developments into both the public understanding of Whitman, as well as the potential for digitization in the future of academia.
The Digital Humanities surrounds you
I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away. Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.
