Dear Friends and Colleagues,
This week I’ve chosen three articles on the topic of DH Community.
Paul Crowther’s Ontology and Aesthetics in Digital Art is not about DH per se, yet I believe it touches on issues near and dear to the Digital Humanities as Crowther’s work typically deals with importance of canonicity in art criticism. Many of his arguments can slide right into discussions we’ve been maintaining regarding the status of criticism as a creative process and as a curative process. Crowther maintains that a canon is an open-ended feature of artistic criticism that seeks to maintain the context of work and evaluate them on the basis of ethical worth rather than form or reputation. As a result, the new focus on canonicity is one that is tightly interwoven with community.
Causer and Wallace’s piece in DHQ, Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham describes challenges with interactivity and crowdsourcing from the “Transcribe Bentham” project. Such an article is interesting because it is a more “subjective” account from two well-known Digital Humanists and their attempts to engage with their audience. It also deals with crowd-sourcing, a very contested concept in the 21st century and presumably deals with authorship as well as labor in community.
Finally, I’ve chosen to include a work from my field by Charles Taylor, simply titled Identity and Democracy. Taylor is a political theorist at McGill University who is classified as a “Communitarian.” His work argues that the modern identity is shaped by a variety of intellectual and creative sources that the modern mind must communicate with others. This short work deals with the importance of communicativity of identity in modern democracy. I feel this can be easily applied to the digital humanities as much of what we discuss as issues in DH are issues in democracies as a whole.
