[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 03 : Bettivia and Flanders

[B. Bogart]

Thank you Julia. I'm not sure if you saw my question that followed up on
Rhiannon's question? (Sent on Mar 17, 2015 11:42 am)

After reading your responses I'm even more confused as to what DH
actually is. You did mention some difficulty in defining it, but the
extract from your email below baffles me. Based on this quote, it would
seem DH is simply the application of IT skills (meta data, websites,
etc.) in a humanities context. This is quite a bit more shallow than my
previous conception of DH as science-about-humanities. I fail to see
what, as a discipline, we gain if its simply the exploitation of an
existing skill set that becomes increasingly dominant and even
displacing traditional media. Is DH about making humanities knowledge
more accessible, or about applying quantitative and analytic methods
from data science to cultural artifacts? (or both? or neither?)

What strikes me most is the notion of all the graduates of new media art
and design programs could fit under the umbrella of DH (as far as I can
glean from the quote below). I keep thinking of the notion of the
"creative coder" who knows a lot of design and some coding, and is
intended to prototype whole projects and act as a bridge between the
design and coding specializations. There has been some backlash against
this area because graduates have been seen as lacking the depth of
coding skills to balance their design ability, and end up working
largely as designers because coders are required to fill in the skill gaps.

The reason for my interest in (and challenge of) DH is an apparent move
to the quantification of everything and thus the domination of
scientific methodologies over all others. Maybe this is an obvious
extension of the movement for social science to be accepted by hard
sciences in terms of rigorous methods?

To get back to the topic of Engineering the University (which is
interesting it itself being an apparent optimization or design problem
to solve, rather than a dialogue to unfold), I wonder what students end
up being DH professionals and what programs do they attend? Is DH IT +
humanities training? Is it IT skills taught in the context of
humanities? Is it better under the umbrella of computer science as a
data science? Is DH a signal of the impending collapse of the science
and art distinction, resulting in a unified quantitative methodological
framework for science-about-culture and science-about-nature?

Ben Bogart

On 15-03-17 07:27 PM, Julia Flanders wrote:
> A museum might feel a need, without any prompting, for a "web master"
> or a "metadata specialist"--but once we have a pool of professionals
> who understand how the well-formalized intellectual capital of
> metadata can serve as the basis for a dynamic online presence that
> engages the public in exploring the museum's collections, that's the
> basis for an entirely different kind of professional niche.