Blog Week 1

“The appropriate metaphor for education, as Ursula Franklin has pointed out, is a garden, not the production line.”

— 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).

This quote caught my attention because it touches on a point that is often ignored in our current technology culture and digital humanities: human subjectivity. In the present era, capitalism and technologism are combined. “Making” is constantly equated to a production line that produces discrete artifacts. However, the subject of education, research, and learning is always the human being, not the product. The metaphor of the production line suppresses the subjectivity of students by viewing them as objects being processed. In contrast, the metaphor of a garden reminds us that education should provide students with nourishment, care, and a supportive environment, rather than uniform processing.

Taking this idea to Burdick et al., “Humanities to Digital Humanities,” brings about a pretty interesting collision. Burdick et al. propose the concept of “Generative Humanities.” They suggest that digital humanities is a generative enterprise that emphasizes “making things,” including images, software, and systems. At first glance, the two texts seem to contradict each other. The former warns that defining ourselves as “makers” reduces complex human experiences into market-driven artifacts and factory production lines. Meanwhile, the latter insists that DH must be a generative practice where we learn by “making things”. However, Burdick et al. note, “They are, instead, like all great pedagogies that preceded them, education for an environment”. This statement directly resonates with the metaphor cited in the beginning. Thus, DH’s “making” is not about building a standardized factory. Instead, it is about building a digital garden.

In my experience with math and stats learning, while coding or doing data analysis, I often feel a sense of alienation as a “tool person on the assembly line” – to apply a certain model or complete the prescribed code output, my own humanistic perspective has been squeezed instead.

Under the large umbrella of Digital Humanities, I am particularly interested in Critical Interface Design & Modeling. Instead of using computation just to process raw numbers, I want to explore how to design interfaces that incorporate humanistic ambiguity and how to curate digital archives that allow people to explore history from multiple perspectives.