The “Maker Turn” within the Digital Humanities
In the same anthology, David Staley, in “On the ‘Maker Turn’ in the Humanities,” considers making not only as “an interpretive act” to “unlock meaning,”3 but further, as a valuable approach to actively account for and foregrounding the role of materiality in humanities scholarship. Staley writes:
Like other approaches discussed here, Staley identifies the similarity between research that centers making and/or design as particularly well-suited for exploring the material world, and its potential for researchers, scholars, and students. Perhaps, then, making should not be circumscribed within the digital humanities specifically, but instead, would figure better in terms of a material humanities, thereby reiterating the value of material exploration, one that would include the digital, but not be limited to it.“Humanists do not have a name (other than ‘art’ or ‘performance’) for an interpretation or reading that is not written. […] The idea that humanists might use tools to make things may sound counterintuitive; however, humanists already make things: textual things. These things are not usually identified as such, and their material production goes largely unnoticed. […] The ‘maker turn’ expands the range of objects humanists might construct. […] Once freed from the printed page, the design of an interpretive object foregrounds the act of making as an important feature of the interpretive act. Design is thus a crucial part of interpretation and making in the humanities.”4
While the critiques of maker culture and making (described in detail below) are well-founded and indispensable within the “maker turn” among (digital) humanities projects, a self-reflexive, critical approach to making allows for a humanities that continues to take up that which is beyond the textual and discursive, and one that looks to the material world to explore the human condition. In other words, making within scholarly spaces and pursuits should not be reduced to refer solely to the “maker movement” done academically, but also understood in relation to its generative worth in relation to material-ideological exploration. Perhaps, at some point, we can move beyond making if we (who?) find it too ideologically, politically, and socially fraught, and consider alternative modes of naming and utilizing these practices.
Footnotes:
- Matt Ratto, “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life,” Information Society 27, no. 4 (2011): 252, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2011.583819.
- Julie Thompson Klein, “The Boundary Work of Making in Digital Humanities,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 21.
- David Staley, “On the ‘Maker Turn’ in the Humanities,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), 32.
- Ibid., 36–37.