What other types of questions can we be asking here? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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What other types of questions can we be asking here?

(6 posts) (6 voices)

Asked 2 years ago by Josh
Latest answer from briancroxall

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Josh
Member
I would like to interrupt our regularly scheduled questioning here at DH Answers and get a little meta. DH Answers is a fantastic resource, but it tends to be very tool and tech centric, and I wonder it isn't time to find ways of facilitating other types of non-totally-unrelated discussion here.

Recently, some really great discussions have been happening on Twitter and sites like DH Poco that have arisen in response to more social, political, and cultural questions, events, prompts, and provocations in relation to DH. I feel that some of these questions—of gender, labor, disciplinarity, and others—might be even more illuminating when embedded within other, more dominant, discourses, like those around available tools, technologies, and methodologies.

I also think that, due to issues of scope and scale on Twitter and the epic-scrolling and searching that needs to happen to stay up-to-date on the latest of 150+ blog post comments, we might need to seek out a better mechanism for supporting these important discussions. I don't mean to say these discussions shouldn't be happening anywhere and everywhere—of course they should!—but I also think that the way DH Answers was originally set up makes folks less likely to bring these types of discussion here. (Or maybe it's something else entirely? Discuss!)

For instance, a quick look at the categories one has to choose from when posting a question (this one is filed under "About DHAnswers" which may or may not makes sense) reveals how much we are privileging technical questions about tools and technologies, and while there's certainly nothing wrong with that (the tools and tech, not so much the privileging) it unfortunately, I'd argue, suggestively narrows the conversation considerably.

"1 Year Ago" Matthew Kirschenbaum asked the DH Answers community, "Should DHers accept military/defense funding?" which he tagged with, among other things, "ethics" (not a single "Popular Tag" explicitly deals with any of these "other" issues). It was also filed under the category "Project Management & DH Profession," which seems to be the catch-all for questions that don't fit strict the limitations of the tech-centric discourse. I think the question Matthew raises, due to everything from recent events (see: PRISM) to the history of humanists working in military research, makes this a very pertinent and important question worth exploring, especially in this particular digital space. And while before and after that post there have been several of a more political or ethical nature, there have not been many, and that seems, at the very least, worthy of concern and some discussion.

So, LONG STORY SHORT, I'd like to see what others think about this by asking the following questions (along with all of those implicitly and explicitly raised above): (1) Can and should DH Answers be a place for social, cultural, political, etc. discussion (as it seems it at times has been)? (2) What types of categories can we add that would make folks more comfortable feeling such questions are welcome? (3) How can we continue to further integrate discussions happening in other venues—Twitter, DH Poco, personal blogs, MLA Commons, etc.—with DH Answers?
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Posted 2 years ago Permalink
Bethany Nowviskie
Admin

Hi, Josh -- these are great questions! I'm very interested to hear what others think, but I can also share some observations about DH Answers as one of its founders and moderators.

I'd love to see more conversations like the ones you cite happening here. One of the reasons ACH, the Scholars' Lab, and ProfHacker developed the site a couple of years ago was to encourage deeper and more easily-followed and -discoverable responses to questions than we were seeing on Twitter. To be honest, the initial idea (after watching people try and fail to troubleshoot each other's code and software installations on Twitter and in blog comments) was a more tech-oriented forum (something similar to the then-nascent Stack Exchange, and not quite as geeky and offputting as pastebin-like gists on GitHub might seem, to people new to DH) -- but we very quickly discovered how much people wanted to use the site to ask broader questions and have deeper conversations, which was something we embraced.

As you observe, the initial categories never got revised to encourage that explicitly. That's something that could be easily remedied, if people want to propose new ones and suggest posts that should be migrated over into them. Or we could do it in a more grassroots way, by encouraging people to re-tag older posts (now that there are enough of them!) to form new categories and ways of navigating from the ground up. We could then modify the front page to highlight those.

Most of the more meta-conversations have wound up in the category on projects and professions, but you can also find a bunch by searching for "theory," and similar terms, and paging through the results. See, for instance, threads on practice vs. theory, how to credit collaborators, the relevance of DH to tech culture, its relationship to media studies, the common good, diversity, and its own history. That was just from a quick search on one term -- and if you click through, you will certainly observe that the conversations never got as in-depth as they could and should! But the potential is there. My sense is that we got more of that type of question in the early days of the site than lately.

It would be interesting to see if the community found value in bringing the more in-depth debates that have been happening elsewhere, mostly in blog comments, to this space -- and what changes that might bring. Speaking only for myself, I do, sincerely, hope that Q&A threads here will always begin with a genuine Q. That is, from the beginning, I imagined DH Answers as a place that could facilitate friendly offers of help (sharing of experiences and perspectives, as well as simple "answers"), and keep the grand-standing ("this is more of a comment than a question") to a minimum. But that's just my taste -- and I don't think it's at all incompatible with in-depth, meaningful discussion.

For a number of reasons, the ACH caretakers of DH Answers (now, mainly Stéfan Sinclair, Jeremy Boggs, and me) have been exploring alternate platforms recently, more in the Stack Exchange line -- but this custom-hacked-together implementation of an open source discussion forum platform does have the advantage of encouraging longer responses (case in point! for better or worse!).

What's the will of the community? This is everyone's space. We'd love to know where you all see it going.

Posted 2 years ago Permalink
Ethan Gruber
Member

To be honest, I will probably stop reading this forum if it becomes overrun with "cultural" questions.

Posted 2 years ago Permalink
Vika Zafrin
Member

Interesting question to think about. The kinds of discussions you're talking about, Josh (and Bethany), are pretty dear to my heart. I like food for thought.

It's also nice to have a platform that attracts pragmatic content. This doesn't mean technical questions and answers only: the military/defense funding thread is a good example. I'd love to see more (broadly speaking) cultural DH discussion here, and I'd love for that discussion to be ruthlessly pragmatic. Common good as applied in cyberinfrastructure recommendations. Diversity, how to do it (not why we need it, which I think is pretty much settled). DH's relevance to coders in terms of actively understanding other humans.

Humanities disciplines are all pragmatic at heart, but writing about them is often too esoteric. DHAnswers seems like a good venue to shift that (im)balance a little.

Posted 2 years ago Permalink
Patrick Murray-John

I see a virtue in keeping an emphasis here on exchanges that really can be Question and Answer, as opposed to the broader discussions that are happening in blogs, DHPoco, twitter, and elsewhere. The virtue of this site, as I see it, is the ability for newcomers to DH, or to a particular topic or tool in DH, to get a quick survey of the knowledge lurking in the DH community. It addresses an important issue in DH that has come up at many THATCamps, the tendency of assumptions about technical knowledge to exclude newcomers.

Having used and moderated a variety of fora, I find that it is helpful to the community -- whatever community is involved -- to have distinct places to go for different kinds of questions. It makes it easier to respond to a question on Twitter, for example, to be able to say DH Q&A is a good place to ask a question like "Can you point me to projects that have made good use of R?", and DHPoco is a good place to ask more social- or theory- centered questions.

Posted 2 years ago Permalink
briancroxall
Member

This is a fascinating question, Josh. I agree that we could expand the categories for posts on the site, although I don't know that it's feasible to go back through and re-tag a large quantity of posts that have already happened on the site. DH loves crowd-sourcing, but that seems a bit unwieldy.

I'll agree with Bethany, however, on my belief that the site should remain steered by questions and the community's attempts to answer those questions. In this way, it seems a fitting service of the ACH for fostering and growing the community of people who work on the humanities using / with computers somehow. But there's no reason why an Alan Liu can't come along and ask a question to the effect of "whither cultural studies and digital humanities?" Or someone who has just read one of Steve Ramsay's pieces could ask, "Do I need to learn to code to be a digital humanist." What wouldn't seem appropriate—to me—would be for Alan or Steve to ask that question in a rhetorical way and then to proceed to answer it. A blog or a journal, in other words, this ain't.

Posted 2 years ago Permalink

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