Unsworth and Svensson - Making Sense of Scholarly Primitives and DH Landscapes

It is not easy to break down all of what I have just read into a tiny itty bitty blog post, because that would mean that I not only completely understand scholarly primitives and the landscape of the DH, but can state these understandings as concise facts.  And because not even Svensson or Unsworth, scholars in the field of DH, can concisely explain the broad world of digital humanities and all it entails, I won't pretend that I can.  However, I will organize some of my thoughts here.

Here are some of the take-aways I got from Unsworth's "Scholarly Primitives" article:

a.) Scholarly primitives are "activities basic to scholarship across eras and across media" (Unsworth, p. 1).  He classified scholarly primitives as actions, changing my initial understanding that scholarly primitives are understandings which scholars across all fields hold to be true.  Some of the actions he characterized as scholarly primitives were discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating, and representing.
b.) Digital tools that function on the foundation of scholarly primitives (i.e. Babble using the scholarly primitive of comparison) can not be customized to work better for a specific project.  If they are, they are no longer functional primitives which can be used across a broad spectrum of fields and/or medias.
c.) Unsworth concluded his article with a side-by-side view of a discussion of the Human Genome Project on one side, and a discussion of the Humanities Genres Project on the other, with 'humanist' substituted for 'biologist' and 'library' for 'laboratory.'  He uses this as an example of representation and deformation, two other scholarly primitives he adds to his list.  It is interesting that minus the slight change in the words he substitutes, the text remains the same and works for both discussions, although they are of completely different subjects.  I think that this further verifies his point that a scholarly primitive must be something which is blind to a field or study and can be used in all forms of scholarship.

"The Landscape of Digital Humanities" I found, as I suspect many of us did, to be much weightier, with a whole lot of definitions and theories and opinions to wade through.  I came to understand that:

a.) DH has not yet been completely defined as a field or rather just "an array of convergent practices" (Svensson, p. 5).
b.) One of the reasons DH is so important is that it has redefined scholarly inquiry itself - it has created knew ways to communicate and evaluate and organize scholarly thought and humanities work (Svensson, p.6).
c.) Out of DH has arisen critical cyberculture studies.  It seems that with the creation of anything in academia comes a critical study of it, in turn creating a NEW field of thought.

Much that Svensson discussed rang true with what we have already talked about in our class discussions, including how creating a DH center proves legitimacy of the study, the various tools available for use in the DH, and some of the pros and cons and areas of contention among scholars that come with opening academia up to the general public.

This was a lot of information for my brain to digest, and I predict that it will be having cramps periodically throughout the semester.