The cultural primacy of making, particularly in tech culture — that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, repair, analysis, and especially caregiving — is informed by the gendered history of who is credited with making things and, in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.
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).
I found this quote very interesting since it made me challenge my views about “making” and its importance. Since middle school, whenever I was asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” One of my go-to responses was, “I don’t know, but I know I want to make things.” Being able to create has been a very important part of my process of choosing a potential career. While Chachra does concede that “making” is valuable near the end of her article, she ultimately argues that she does not view herself as a maker because she values her work that she does with and in service to other people. I know how valuable people-oriented activities, like caregiving and education, are particularly because my grandmother, mother, and sister have all worked as teachers. However, this article has made me rethink my potential internal biases, and I now wonder if my specific emphasis on and fascination with “making” has caused me to subconsciously diminish ways of working that are “not-making.”
I was especially intrigued by Chachra’s point in the quote above that the idea of “making” is a gendered concept and is influenced by a male perspective of history that does not recognize domestic creations as true “making.” I had not considered how a male-dominated view of history could affect the importance I give to “making,” but it did remind me of discourse that I’ve seen regarding the fiber arts. Some people view works made with embroidery, knitting, crochet, etc. not as art, but merely as “craft.” I believe that people make this distinction between art and craft because of the domestic and feminine associations people have with knitting and crocheting, and that they make this distinction to diminish and devalue fiber/textile art. This is much like how Chachra points out that “non-making” activities, especially those that are associated with femininity, like care-giving, are devalued compared to “making.”
I am most eager to learn more about the different ways data can be visually represented. The Data Visualization Quilt made by Claudia Berger in “#DHMakes: Baking Craft into DH Discourse” particularly piqued my interest because I did not consider that the Digital Humanities could include physical materials. I hope we can learn more about unconventional ways that Digital Humanists represent data and that more of my previous thoughts and ideas about Digital Arts and Humanities may be challenged.
