“But you can also think about coding as eliciting a specific set of desired behaviors from computing devices. It is the Searle’s-Chinese-room take on the deeper, richer, messier, less reproducible, immeasurably more difficult version of what we do with people — change their cognition, abilities, and behaviors. We call the latter “education,” and it is mostly done by underpaid, undervalued women.”
Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentry Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Debbie Chachra’s approach to the concept of ‘making’ was powerful and struck a chord with me. Not only did her gendered lens provide nuanced and unexpected insights, but the way it frames digital humanities is also powerful. Digital humanities can be about creating, such as the 3D models we’re producing for our lab assignment this week, but it’s also equally about communicating. The work of packaging knowledge and art into a digital framework is an important facet of digital humanities, and it does not have less value simply because it isn’t the creation of a new product, concept, or thing.
As Chachra says in the quote above, coding is often seen as a form of concrete creation, with value and prestige in society. However, it has a lot of similarities to fields such as education; in many ways, coding is just communicating with a computer. Of course, this doesn’t discredit the field, but it also shouldn’t discredit education and other communicative practices.
This notion hits home when considering it in a college context. Oftentimes, college students can be heavily influenced by a focus on career goals and postgraduate opportunities, which, of course, is a generally positive and important thing to consider. However, this can end up looking more like a preference towards STEM fields, or generally, fields that people consider to be big money-makers after college. While this isn’t necessarily bad, it can undervalue fields which are just as important. Carleton is a bit better at not enforcing this rhetoric, but the ideas are still present. In this way, Chachra’s point is very applicable not only to the digital humanities, but to pretty much everyone.
Chachra’s discussion of ‘making’ made me more interested in some of the more communicative aspects of digital humanities, rather than just the more creation-heavy ones. I’m looking forward to archival-related work and communicating digitally (such as posting this blog on WordPress!) as much as I’m looking forward to learning about 3D modeling and digital mapping.