Kirschenbaum and Fitzpatrick: Deja Vu?

Here is my attempt to make as many connections as I can between Kirschenbaum and Fitzpatrick and everybody else. Ready, set, GO!

Fitzpatrick, on the whole, reminded me most of Claire Lauer's Kairos piece, and all the issues upon which that piece touched. Here is the general listing of topics I recognized: FUNDING (as always); developing a new sense of community through the new naming of digital humanities while also figuring out if the name actually fits and what to call it (and how this correlates to getting money through grants!); conflict among "proper" usage of digital humanities; taking the theory and developing it into classroom practice; more semantics and weaving this new fangled thing into university discourse; making tension between disciplines productive rather than detrimental. 

Kirschenbaum, although he uses a very strongly stated skeptical quote from Selfe to start, I still sense that he ends on an optimistic note about the fact that coining the term "digital humanities" fixed most, if not all, issues (much like Cooper/Selfe believed in the power of discussion forums to save the meek, non-verbal students from obscurity. While the creation and naming of "digital humanities" does create new venues for exploration, most of the discussions we've had in class via previous readings indicated that, of course, there are more battles to be won.

Kirschenbaum's example of the "coolness" and modern vibe of digital humanities via Brian Croxall's MLA conference paper going viral during the actual conference brought up some interesting connections and critiques for me. To start, as a doctoral student trying to network and carve out a spot as a future university professor, I can attest to the fact that conferences are crucial to professional development of doctoral students, but are often expensive to attend/difficult to receive support for (*cough* funding in humanities battle *cough*). Therefore, the fact that Croxall still managed to make a name for himself and get press through Twitter and "in absentia" is awesome. However, how realistic is it to think that grad students, up and coming professors, and other "noobs" will be able to uproot traditional conferences and make them happen through Twitter eventually? The Twitter versus MLA idea is interesting when thinking back to Ohmann's description of the difference between technology used by institutions and technology used by citizens. In this case, MLA the institution, which is the gold standard of "humanities-ness," might decide to hold an expensive on-site conference where we discuss what digital humanities is doing in theory. However, the masses may think instead: let's use twitter and other online sites to make a digitalized virtual conference. Clearly, two different takes on an umbrella term "digital humanities." Could the latter actually happening? Is it happening anywhere yet? Just curious!

Also, Kirschenbaum's exploration toward the end of the article of how Twitter and other technologies might be increasing the urgency for scholars to distribute their work more "freely to an audience apart from or parallel with more traditional structures of academic publishing" (60), brings up all kinds of questions. First, as Lester Faigley points out, there are a lot of imperfections with the university as a learning institution and labor force, so implementing technology is only going to complicate intellectual property ownership etc. (point arrow back towards Lanham also). Second, just because we've now created a "digital humanities" category, this does not mean that digital and web stuff counts officially toward tenure, or maybe it does, or how does that work? As long as tradition holds, "digital humanities" research, projects, explorations will just be supplementary, yes? Third, was this written when Twitter first emerged and everyone thought this would be the new world of online learning? Just curious, because Kirschenbaum has a lot of faith in the power of Twitter.