Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (metaLABprojects)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.11 (582 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674728947 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-07-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
(Daniel Herwitz, University of Michigan)A beautifully nuanced and wide-ranging elaboration of the creative energy and possibilities that reverberate from the messy entanglements of the humanities, computational technologies, digital aesthetics, cultural histories, and feminist theory. She seeks to link the abstract universe of software design with ongoing ideologies of race and gender, and suggests even the algorithm is not immune from its cultural context. McPherson does what few can: she moves into the messiness,
. Tara McPherson is Associate Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California
Nonetheless, this critiquethe difficulty of centering theory and politics in the longer arc of the computational humanitiesrings true for many familiar with the field.Tara McPherson considers debates around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities and addresses Gary Hall’s claim that the goals of critical theory and of quantitative or computational analysis may be irreconcilable (or at the very least require “far more time and care”). For over a dozen years, the Vectors lab has experimented with digital scholarship through its online publication, Vectors, and through Scalar, a multimedia authoring platform. She then asks what it might mean to designfrom conceptiondigital tools and applications that emerge from contextual concerns of cultural theory and, in particular, from a feminist concern for difference. The history of this software lab intersects a much longer tale about computation in the humanities, as well as tensions about the role of theory in related projects.In the provocative essay “Where Is the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Alan Liu argues that “while digital humanists develop tools, data, and metadata critically rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics, or culture.” Many scholars have taken issues of gender or race as a central concern in digital projects, including Martha Nell Smith, Susan Brown, Melissa T