I find there is a serious flaw in academics strait-laced pursuit of “objective truth” as a holy grail, not only in the humanities but even in the ‘hard’ sciences.\u00a0 No one start out with a cold research question, and anyone who claims to do so is wrong. In the course of reading a students partial MA draft,\u00a0 I wrote this, which isn’t perfect but it is, I think, something I’m happy to hang out in public on the issue.<\/p>\n
“objectivity – I think no researcher is objective; everyone starts form the point of finding something interesting. There then a journey, from “I’m interested in digital humanities’ through admitting honestly\u00a0 “I’m interested because I get a childish delight out of playing with the tech toys” to “How can we make better use of the technology to empower learners”<\/p>\n
Now this is entirely relevant because post-enlightenment academic discourse demands that we speak only of the third state there, and makes any admission of playful engagement a contemptible weakness. If its fun, it can’t be scholarly, because scholars must be SERIOUS, and OBJECTIVE. My journey with technology began, at least in real life, when I was about 14 and got to work on a computer in school, and linked to my love of scifi and Star Trek because in front of that green screen with the clicky buttons – I WAS SPOCK! Oddly enough, that fits perfectly with my interest in using digital tools to empower learners – I don’t think it requires much thought to see how that links up. So, the borrow a colleagues\u00a0 much used phrase, ‘What’s my point here?” Well, in very loose Jungian\/Campbell terms, I have a perfectly balanced little “heros quest”, internally coherent and psychologically satisfying in which my subjective playing with tech is cosy with my academic interests, and I can be publicly comfortable with that. I do it because its fun, and it is fun which happens to be socially useful for at least some of my fellow humans.<\/p>\n
So, yes, not only is it perfectly right to discuss your journey with the digital from curiosity, through frustration to (towards) a sort of mastery, but I think it is actually essential to your overall argument that you make that point.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I find there is a serious flaw in academics strait-laced pursuit of “objective truth” as a holy grail, not only in the humanities but even in the ‘hard’ sciences.\u00a0 No one start out with a cold research question, and anyone who claims to do so is wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikecosgrave.com\/blog2006\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}