I have a couple of interests that I would like to see discussed during THATCamp Texas.  I’m interested in looking at ethical research practices in digital humanities scholarship.  What does it mean that current practices are influenced by “mapping” and “data mining” practices that, while beneficial to the current modes of research practices, are instituting the same colonial structures of knowledge production that come with western modes of literary studies?  How do we negotiate the necessity of our research without creating disciplinary divides?  How can we challenge the current modes of thought that position digitisation as a process of manifest destiny (the we need to do it first, frontier rhetoric)?  Though these questions seem a bit “out there” I believe these will be conversations that will need to take place as we start to think about the culture of digital humanities research, something Alan Liu has discussed recently at the TILTS 2011 symposium.

I’m also interested in thinking about bringing digital humanities research, ethically of course, into the composition classroom.  How can we get students to work and understand texts in the same ways that we do?  What are the benefits, the downsides, and how do we do it ethically without making them laborers?  What are some of the tools that can help them develop the necessary literacies that are required of these composition classrooms?