#Transform DH and My Project

When I think about the transformative nature of my project, it is a bit difficult to see anything overtly transformative at the start. You have only to go to my philosopher bio page and scroll down to notice something a little disconcerting. All of the philosophers are white men. At first it may seem like there’s no way to bring about a transformative project when the ideas I’m using are based off of those of people steeped in the patriarchy, but I think that my project can be transformative in subtler ways.

Many of the ideas that these white male philosophers have are ones that most people would not encounter unless they were to take a course on them in a school. Of course you can find their ideas online, but often the writing is confusing and difficult to understand even for a scholar. One of the aims of my project is to avoid the scholarly type of writing that I so often encounter in my own research. I try to write the ideas in a way that makes sense. The ideas are still complex and may have to be ruminated on for a while, but at least it shouldn’t take reading it five times through to understand what’s going on.

I also chose to focus a great deal on certain publications that are not academically or scholarly inclined. They are protest publications, written by students who found that they did not fit in with the typical college academic. I will be talking about publications such as Black Awareness, EASTIT, Acid Express, and Junto. The first was a publication meant to discuss the experience of people of color both at Gettysburg and in the larger community. EASTIT was a publication that was very critical of the institution and aimed at un-clouding the idealistic minds of the first years. Acid Express was written to help the Gettysburg community understand the positive effects of mind-opening drugs. And Junto was a magazine that was put out by the Christian Association which often spoke of issues of social justice. These were not the mainstream publications put out and supported by the administration. Some of these publications were of concern for the higher up individuals in the college because the messages ran counter to all that the college was trying to teach. But the writers thought that their messages were important enough that they had to put them out into the world. Celebrating the bravery of these writers, (many of them anonymous) and discussing their words brings voice to communities outside the mainstream.

In the last section of my project, I use an online publication called SURGE. This is a contemporary website in which students share their stories and experiences on topics such as race, gender, sexuality, social justice etc. Many of the writers are anonymous, but they are all trying to further discussions of social justice and expose what is wrong in our society.

White male philosophers may have written about these ideas and spread them in their classrooms, but it was these marginalized groups that took these ideas and used them in a call to action to transform the world. My project is not about celebrating the philosophers. It is about taking those ideas out of the stuffy classroom and analyzing how they affected the real, living, breathing, changing world. It’s important as Digital Humanists to always think about where the ideas that we work with come from, how the white and patriarchal world has affected them, and what we can do to fight against it.