Academic communities, whether comprised of DHers or not, manifest themselves largely in writing. In her essay “Personal Theory: A Method for Humanities Scholarship in a New Media Moment,” Abigail De Kosnik argues that our scholarly writing style should embrace the personal inflection of digital genres (blogs, op-eds, etc.). De Kosnik advocates for what she terms “personal theory”–a style of criticism in which personal experience and situatedness is relevant–as a way for academic writers to reach a wider audience. This article is not so much about DH communities as about how scholarly communities should respond to the prevalence of digital media, but her argument about how our writing could work to change traditional academic structures is very relevant to discussions we’ve had about the DH community all semester. The article is chapter 6 of the book Digital Media: Technological and Social Challenges of the Interactive World, which you should be about to find here if you’re logged in to myLSU.
I also propose that we read Martin Weller’s “Interdisciplinarity and Permeable Boundaries,” which is a chapter in his book, The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice. In this chapter, Weller takes a critical look at cultural and economic aspects of the academy that discourage interdisciplinary. He then examines the usefulness of technology in breeching divides between disciplines. He uses blogs and Twitter as examples of interdisciplinary technologies. He tries to describe Twitter to people who don’t use it, which comes off as a bit dopey, but the meat of his analysis could provoke an interesting discussion about collaborative community. I scanned this chapter out of a hardcopy, and I can’t figure out to post a pdf to this post (if anyone knows, let me know), but if we choose this reading I can email it out.
