0.11 Roundtable discussion  (Page 4/5)

In my paper I gave an example of a student who had produced a photo-documentary of his block in Los Angeles’s historic Filipinotown. By itself, it might not be that interesting, but it is within the framework of a scholarly apparatus and alongside many other such participatory projects. HyperCities provides different lenses to examine the ways in which the history of a place might be articulated. It’s not a collaboration by design, but a way to open up possibilities for participation that sometimes result in unexpected gains and sometimes, of course, unexpected failures.

Herlinghaus : Whether people do or don’t engage with digital humanities from a variety of disciplines might not be a question of insight, but one of repression. I am less interested in why more people from older generations or from certain fields are not engaged in digital humanities, than I am in their neurophysiological and neurosympathetic reasons for not doing so. Their resistance is emotional and affective. Let me go back to Caroline’s expression of energy and synergy. Intellectual survival is dependent on more or less regular communication with colleagues from other fields. The synergy and energy that emerge out of this communication are especially important because they produce something different. On a rational level, it’s probably not so difficult to envision the constitution of such work or the planning of interdisciplinary centers for the humanities. But how could we facilitate the synergetic/energetic level, which is tremendously important for creativity and drawing transversal connections? How could we address the tendencies towards depression that are, to an extent, reproduced within academic structures?

Smail : A geneticist colleague of mine said that although he is ultimately interested in history and wants to find out about migration patterns in the past, he has to spend 90 percent of his time doing things that are related to therapies. He feels that he has to fund his historical interests—what you might call his humanist interests—by virtue of giving the medical community what it wants from his lab. I was curious to know whether this is a fairly widespread phenomenon. An interest in music can be an interest in Alzheimer therapy, but it can also be an entirely different humanities-oriented inquiry.

Patel : There has been a change for the better in the past decade. It used to be that if you wanted to study music and the brain, you didn’t use the word “music.” Instead, you said, “I’m a neuroscientist, and I’m interested in complex sound processing.” If you wrote the word “music” in your grant, you were out of the competition. Now you can write grants about studying music and the brain, and I think that trend will increase because we’re seeing the effects of music on therapy, biology, and the feedback systems. I’ve been fortunate to have started my career at a time when it’s okay to talk about what you’re doing openly, without having to code it.

Smail : So, because the sciences are open to the idea that music can be part of therapy, then music can be an object of inquiry? According to this logic, then reading or other “addictions” could be subjects of scientific inquiry as well.