Reading Response (A Bonus Assignment)

 While reading through this forum, I was struck by how much the idea of care works in tandem with DH, that in doing the work of DH, we are showing the “we do care for the object worlds around us” (Jackson). I think this is particularly true of a semester where we are documenting our current pandemic – we’re not just doing the caring of the past, as many of the websites this semester did, but we’re also doing the caring of the present. While projects like OMV, GIDSP, The Internet Archive, and Colored Conventions focused on remaking, we are making, I think, a story of COVID19 in Lincoln, NE. Nowviskie’s ‘Capacity of Care’ urges that we “build platforms that promote an understanding of the temporal vulnerability of the individual person or object; that more beautifully express the relationships of parts, one to another and to many a greater whole” (Nowviskie). We are doing this by providing a multitude of perspectives across a wide variety of mediums about the effects of the COVID19 pandemic, a relationship of parts present not just in Lincoln, NE but in the greater whole of the course. The work of our final unit/publication is especially helpful in this because it documents contemporary and historical contexts of the land that better add to the greater whole, but also do as Klein and Gold note, “draw attention to the range of forms of care that currently sustain the digital humanities as well as to the range of people, in a range of roles, who are currently performing this work” (Klein and Gold). Which is to say that I think the work we’re doing in this class is important, that we’re proving we care by documenting a sum of a greater whole, an experience that humans are currently going through, but also by acknowledge care for others – the Native Americans who sustained this land before it even became a campus and city experiencing COVID19 as well as the Black Lives Matters protests that overlapped with the pandemic. While I think some of the websites we viewed through the semester showed ethics and care in much more tangible ways, that line up more with Risam’s work, which feels more in line with the ethics of care, what we’re doing with our projects is ongoing and present and a practice of care.