Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (metaLABprojects)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.41 (535 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674728947 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-09 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Richly illustrated with digital scholarly projects on race, gender, and social justice that her lab helped to build, as well as a retelling of the history of code and computing using a feminist lens, this book is deeply generous and generative. This book radicalizes the digital humanities, persuasively arguing for the centrality of difference in parts of the field that ignore it. There is no one better at navigating the span between critical modes of theoretical inquiry and the creative cultural production of digital tools. Tara McPherson’s digital work is a model of intelligent design in a crazed world; her projects are bold and innovative. A must-read in every way. McPherson does what few can: she moves into the messiness, not to settle the matter, but rather
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”). This path leads back to the Vectors lab and its ongoing efforts at the intersection of theory and praxis.. 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. 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. 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.&
Tara McPherson is Associate Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.