The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.
Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.
This passage grabbed my attention because it is not something I have ever thought of before and it was not immediately obvious how it connected to digital humanities. I have never been sure quite what I want to do but I was always fairly confident that it would involve making something whether that be engineering a new object or producing research or anything else I could think of. When I was young this seemed like the way to leave my mark on the world. It makes sense that I would think of the male dominated maker field as the best. While I agree that caregiving is generally under appreciated, I’m not sure I completely agree that making is overvalued especially when I think about it in the context of digital humanities. The humanities are often based in the “analysis” category but by applying the digital bit they can be transferred into the making category. Breathing new life into a topic and making it more widely available doesn’t seem particularly bad or male centered. It seems to me we can value caretaking more without diminishing the value of making.
This term I am most excited to explore projects that take big data sets and make them accessible and understandable such as GIS mapping. I took a course in human geography which used a lot of different charts and animation to explain topics such as human population growth and technological growth. I found it amazing how large meaningless numbers could come to life when presented in the right way which is why I am excited to explore some tools I could use to do this myself.
