DHPoco Summer School Forums

What about a reference to what came after May 68 in the context of cultural Sudies: the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s? Berube's done some useful writing analyzing their impact. Or, some acknowledgement about the tensions that pervade ethnic studies/area studies/postcolonial studies?

@MimiTNguyen I'm happy you jumped in - love Threadbared! Over at Emory, there has been a huge push for public scholarship. I ended up giving a talk on how to use Twitter effectively on a panel on social media and public scholarship, and the entire audience was grad students. Meanwhile, the faculty who tended to engage in public scholarship (and social media) at Emory are ones who already had a reputation. We have some downright resistance too - I was giving a talk to new grad students and mentioned Twitter, only to get the smackdown of all smackdowns. I still maintain that Twitter has been an incredibly important networking tool (#dhpoco is an outcome of it!) but I have seen rewards from Twitter (collaborations, opportunities, friends) that are worth it. Conversely, it's hard for me to see how blogging into the void as a junior scholar has the same value - except if by blogging I'm able to figure ideas out for myself.

It's this feeling that makes me grouchy about DH that doesn't "count" for our tenure cases because on one hand I agree with Alex that those of us playing with DH on the margins need to embrace a Just Do It ethos - or it won't get done. But it's so often the people in the margins who have the burden of educating the majority (without compensation or recognition for the contributions).

I agree about optimism and the emergence of new projects that have the potential for changing how DH is perceived. It is important work but it's labor that is largely uncompensated - and I don't just mean in the financial sense. One of the frustrations I have in this line of work is how predictably DH replicates larger trends within academia and outside of it about the acceptability and legibility of work that pushes back against its own canon. I love #dhpoco Summer School in part because it has reminded me of the different projects others are working on and that there are others who share the commitments that led @adelinekoh and I to start #dhpoco - and it has brought many of us together to have these converstions. Ideally, the more we pool our thoughts, share our ideas, and so forth, we are able to get something back for the work we do - at least in an affective sense.