Look Down Go Down / quote 5 of 5
The industrialisation of the digital humanities
What I fear most of all for us is not the cuts to funding, which holding to our purpose we can survive, but the loss of purpose through complicity in the industrialisation of the digital humanities. What I fear is that we find ourselves in Charlie Chaplin’s place in Modern Times (1936), on some production-line, making widgets for a purpose over which we have no say and which we are likely to have forgotten. Such a fate we cannot survive. Instead of a research practice it means a typing pool sort of dying that produces step-‘n-fetchit facilitators who are safe from all risk by conforming to the bureaucrat’s template of knowledge-work.