As a teenager, I read Ayn Rand on how any work that needed to be done day after day was meaningless, and that the only worthwhile endeavor was creating new things. To the distress of my mother, my response was to stop making my bed every day.
Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentry Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
When I read that quote, I knew that I was going to find the point of Debbie Chachra’s chapter fascinating. Her short anecdote was punchy, clever, and above all, evocative. The quote starts with a big philosophical claim — people should live their lives in pursuit of big, productive ideals! Monotony is the death of meaning! But it’s misinterpreted in classic teenage fashion: routines and maintenance are therefore worthless. It reminded me how many of my friends in middle school would have enthusiastically embraced this philosophy. Perhaps more meaningfully, it also reminded me how necessary routines and maintenance are, even (or especially) in the midst of making. Chachra says something like this explicitly in her final sentence (“we should celebrate and foster education, maintenance, analysis, critique, and, above all, caregiving”), but I found it to be the most striking here, in the beginning.
When I started thinking about that unseen work and how it’s undervalued, I noticed reflections in my own life and experiences too. On a personal level, I often find it difficult to step back and assess if I’m doing something the way I want to be doing it. That’s one aspect of maintenance: checking in with your systems. I’ve also seen how time and time again, big ideas start off strong but gradually lose support and cohesion. (On a non-personal level, Google Stadia and other similar products come to mind.) That’s an example of a lack of maintenance, and it’s disastrous.
So, after reading through this side of a debate I didn’t previously know even existed, I’m excited to learn more about how “making” (or the lack of it) might become a throughline in our studies of Digital Humanities. Some important projects in DH, like the creation of digital archives, might be easy to interpret as not truly “making,” since they’re “just” gathering existing work and making it accessible — not posing new ideas or introducing new technologies. However, that work is intensely valuable. Imagine a world without online databases! I’m also looking forward to learning about digital archiving more generally (which I understand is super broad!), since I personally think that archiving and library management is satisfying and fulfilling.
