Event Title
Building a Community of Practice Bridging Making and Thinking (Panel B)
Location
Room 409, South Hall
Start Date
30-9-2016 10:15 AM
End Date
30-9-2016 11:45 AM
Description
The field of Digital Humanities spans many communities of practice, from design of digital texts, archives, and libraries to cultural studies of new technologies and media. The discourse of Making is fostering a new community of practice emerging from intersections of the epistemology, rhetoric, and aesthetics of building. Building tools is being reconceptualized from a reductive mechanical production to an intellectual endeavor with its own practices, theory, and standards. Framed by the historical boundary between thinking and doing, the emergence of this expanding community was signaled by the shift from the label ”humanities computing” to “digital humanities.” Growing theorization of “thinking-through-practice” is expanding beyond initial attempts to redefine the boundary of humanities and technology to expanding concepts of critical making, a hermeneutics of code, platform and game studies, and a new materiality of “things” that simultaneously moves design to the center of research questions, elevates process over product, and prioritize versioning and extensibility over definitive editions and research silos. This development also calls into question how boundaries of disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, occupational professions, and institutional structures have been drawn, prompting us to rethink, in James Brown, Jr.’s words, the “state lines” they fix, protect, and sustain. Emergence of a new community of practice challenges singular definition of Digital Humanities by creating, transforming, and understanding what the umbrella term implies for a broad field that is simultaneously expansive and fragmenting.
Building a Community of Practice Bridging Making and Thinking (Panel B)
Room 409, South Hall
The field of Digital Humanities spans many communities of practice, from design of digital texts, archives, and libraries to cultural studies of new technologies and media. The discourse of Making is fostering a new community of practice emerging from intersections of the epistemology, rhetoric, and aesthetics of building. Building tools is being reconceptualized from a reductive mechanical production to an intellectual endeavor with its own practices, theory, and standards. Framed by the historical boundary between thinking and doing, the emergence of this expanding community was signaled by the shift from the label ”humanities computing” to “digital humanities.” Growing theorization of “thinking-through-practice” is expanding beyond initial attempts to redefine the boundary of humanities and technology to expanding concepts of critical making, a hermeneutics of code, platform and game studies, and a new materiality of “things” that simultaneously moves design to the center of research questions, elevates process over product, and prioritize versioning and extensibility over definitive editions and research silos. This development also calls into question how boundaries of disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, occupational professions, and institutional structures have been drawn, prompting us to rethink, in James Brown, Jr.’s words, the “state lines” they fix, protect, and sustain. Emergence of a new community of practice challenges singular definition of Digital Humanities by creating, transforming, and understanding what the umbrella term implies for a broad field that is simultaneously expansive and fragmenting.