[-empyre-] Engineering the University & intellectual history

[Hamilton, Kevin]

Johannes, 

A key thread of the month's discussions is that none of our guests leave
claims to "newness" unexamined. I should hope that should be clear to you
by now. Julia's expansion of Chad's comments on this add to the thread
that sometimes "newness" in scholarship only means "newly visible." If
you're going to argue with whether or not something is newly visible,
perhaps you are not paying enough attention to the subjectivity of vision.
There are plenty of things that may not be newly visible to me that are
newly visible to others - the boundaries of such visibility themselves
constitute know-ablilty, discourse, access. This is precisely why work
like Julia's (or that of Lisa Gitelman in her work on paper archives, or
that of Lisa Nakamura on tech labor) is so helpful to a discussion of
Digital Humanities.

I don't think any of our guests are here to re-hash the anxieties over the
"truly new" so common to modernism. If you wish to, have at it. You'll
have plenty of company, just not less of it on this list (at least this
month.)

Regards,

Kevin


On 3/21/15 1:48 PM, "Johannes Birringer" <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>dear all
>
>>>[julia schreibt]
>...there's strong historical precedent for most of the interesting
>strands of DH's intellectual history thus far. But they are new in the
>sense that they are newly visible to the people whose intellectual
>traditions contributed to the mongrel.
>
>One example is the idea that the systems by which we create and
>disseminate scholarly information are themselves deeply implicated in the
>meaning of that information. In traditional scholarly book publishing, a
>scholar prepares a manuscript for publication and sends it to a publisher
>who undertakes the process of turning it into a circulating object (the
>book). The activities that belong to the publisher (page design,
>typesetting, printing, binding, distribution) are understood to be not
>only completely distinct from those of the scholar (research, idea
>formation, writing, revision) but also in a sense to have no bearing on
>the ideas carried in the book; they may be *appropriate* (the cover
>design and typography are suitable or unsuitable for an academic book)
>but they aren't constitutive of the book's meaning. The fact that the
>scholar is not consulted on these points (and would be unhappy having
>responsibility for them) shows how little they are considered to have to
>do wit
> h the book's content; there's a strong discontinuity between the two
>domains. 
>
>..The "new understanding" here (arising from the mongrelization of roles
>or from the estuarine zone I metaphorically prefer) is that in the
>digital medium, for digital humanities, our representational and
>production systems are perfused with intellectual significance.
>>>
>
>I'm waiting for the protests against this intellectual-historical
>account...
>I am not sure I can follow the narrative at all;
>at least I would argue, from my recollection of artbooks, art historical,
>critical/theory books, historical, anthropological scholarship, science
>books, catalogues, poetry editions, and many other forms of writerly and
>graphic art production, ukiyo-e, illustrated books, scores, etc etc over
>centuries  (I suppose you apply a very narrow understanding what gets
>done as scholarship?), there has been no discontinuity at all, and thus
>these claims for a new understanding amongst the digital humanities are
>justifiably in inverted commas. I can't speak for others, but I surely
>have been involved in the design, and the dissemination of my stuff, and
>of course most artists do that as a matter of fact. I would also think,
>though, that scholars have been as acutely aware of their apparatus as
>current metadata or hyperdata operators or information management systems.
>
>regards
>Johannes Birringer
>
>_______________________________________________
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