I recently listened to a podcast which highlighted the prevalence of Link Rot in websites. A member of the Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab mentioned in the podcast examining more than two million links in New York Times articles found that

“25% of all links that were used on the New York Times were completely inaccessible”.

I wonder if there is some connection, perhaps racial, between the care and maintenance of websites and the prevalence of Link Rot? The problem with this question is that it is my assumption that individuals typically maintain websites and not Institutions. The question of an unbalanced maintenance of websites which deal with non-white content and then choking it up to Institutional bias is difficult to pinpoint. My initial guess is that if Link Rot happens to a website it is because the author/creator of the site has deemed it defunct and moved on to other things. But not always.

I think it still would be interesting though if the Harvard U team filtered down to which websites had higher rates of Link Rot based on the subject matter/author. Perhaps they would find out that articles on Race/Gender issues were relegated to a certain server which didn’t receive the same amount of care as other articles. Perhaps it would be the Opinion pieces? I wonder if there isn’t some bias that could be identified in the storehouse of large Institutional websites.

Still, the analogy of care for websites and the “A Pedagogical Search for Home and Care” article is a bit thin. When is a website dead? When does it require care? I identify Link Rot in this analogy because it the most obvious form of decay that websites endure. It is also the most revolting to our senses. We shudder at outdated websites in the same way facing death agitates us. But yet, wouldn’t it be better to define these websites as dying, and isn’t there a place for dead sites: https://archive.org/?

How would we go about thinking of a thanatology of websites?

This week, I was struck by Ryan Cordell’s piece “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” given its approach to questioning basically the structure of our own DH Intro course. I have been finding some DH readings difficult, especially those that play “inside baseball” and position entry-level scholars to save a field they have yet to enter (a trap that Cordell falls into himself). I have been asking myself, outside from the academic context, why is DH important?

Risam offers a few ideas, particularly when around with DH x Postcolonial education:

• Understand the politics of knowledge production and how print, and now digital, cultures marginalize communities outside the Global North
• Become critical tech consumers, which can help transform into skepticism into action
• Engage with the “core concepts that undergird modernity and alternative perspectives on community formation by considering instantiations in the digital cultural record”

In terms of a pedagogical approach, Cordell gives a few reasons as to why readers like me tend to not be engaged; a lack of attention to case studies in class, teaching DH to DH (rather than to a specific discipline that could benefit from digital tools/theories), and general undergraduate technological skepticism. All of these resonated, and made me question: Where was the digital in my undergraduate liberal arts degree? Should I now just be studying Art or History and use digital tools rather than studying DH itself? Cordell lends a few suggestions that I particularly agreed with (and wish had been shared with me, especially at the undergraduate level):

1. “You do not need an entire DH curriculum, or even a designated DH course, to introduce substantial digital pedagogy into your classes: Teach distant reading alongside close reading and do not worry about proving how revolutionary the former is.”
2. “Teach new technological tools as a development in the range of human technology: By contextualizing our moment of digital remediation historically, as but the latest phase in a long history of textual reinvention, help students understand why assignments ask them to experiment across modalities [and] consider the medium as well as the message of their own research and arguments.“

However, beyond pedagogical suggestions Cordell leaves us at a dead end. He writes that once the DH mania is over, there must be “more productive rapprochement with the larger humanities fields.” Where is that? Is the DH mania over? If so, what are these rapprochements, and how can I, as a new student, start from these rapprochements rather than helping to define a field that may one day eclipse itself? I tend to think that this answer lies in practice, and so I look forward to continuing these thoughts and questions as I work on my text analysis project, and into my final work for the course.