Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities
Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities
A growing number of people in digital humanities are concerned about the issue of credit for digital work. These include scholarly editors, literary critics, librarians, academic computing staff, historians, archaeologists, and classicists, most of whom have advanced degrees in some area of humanistic study and who have turned to building, hacking, and coding as part of their normal research activity. At the heart of the issue is whether the work counts as scholarship and whether those doing such things are still engaged in humanistic inquiry. This chapter works toward a materialist epistemology sufficient to the task of defending building as a distinct form of scholarly endeavor, both in the humanities and beyond. It does not offer specific solutions to the challenge of having work in the digital humanities count in concrete institutional terms. The aim is to understand the practices of digital humanities more fully, with an eye toward strengthening the practical arguments which institutions commonly demand.
Keywords: digital humanities, digital work, credit, materialist epistemology
Minnesota Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.