Are the odds in your favor?
Money.
You gotta love money. It allows you to pay for things without begging for them. You can buy a computer, pay rent, then food. You know health plan. It also allows you the freedom to be in spaces where you can say what you want, looking how you want and saying no when you want.
So you should not do it for money, but you should have money to be doing it.
And I think this article to an outsider like me from all the texts given on the topic of Digital Humanities gives a somehow “managerial” insight into the state of things.
This article has to be read in the fullest and best to also check all the comments around it. Its hard to extract things out of this article as that would take them away from the context of the whole piece.
Because, removing all the rhetorics away, what is actually happening in the area of Digital Humanities? Through all the texts I have read it is this one that stroke a chord with me when trying to figure out, why is everyone still asking themselves : “What is Digital Humanities?”
Maybe everyone is asking themselves that, because there is not enough money in it for everyone to be what they are, so everyone is still shifting between what could be possible to be if the opportunity arrises.
I think in that sense the connection between the Silicon Valley model and the model in Digital Humanities is quite good, because a startup constantly researches itself until it finds a customer base and then goes for exponential growth.
Is then an actual thriving Digital Humanists just a startup who made it?
In that sense there is one point from Kirschenbaum that strikes a chord with me:
I came to the realization that I’d much rather use my days to work on the things I love than the things I hate. And that, let me confess, has nothing to do with being a digital humanist. It has everything to do with being me.
So basically Digital Humanities is a community of people doing the things they love.
What a luxury position to be in.
How do I get in?
#With_love.
