This happened to me again last night. Same intersection, except from the opposite direction; I was turning left across traffic into the side street that leads to my neighborhood, gauging whether the gap between the vehicles was enough to get across, and completely did not see the pedestrian crossing that side street, and came within inches of hitting him. Literally: he started running in mid-cross and just made it.

I don’t want to over-justify this — had I hit him, I’d have been wholly responsible — but I’m haunted enough that I feel I need to point out a few mitigating factors. Most importantly, that intersection is seriously dark, with no corner streetlights, and no painted crosswalk. And the guy was wearing black, head-to-toe, so even if I’d been on high pedestrian alert (which admittedly I was not; this isn’t a heavily walked route, especially at night), I’m not sure I’d have been able to pick him out.

The irony is that the police department is on this very corner. So at least if I’d hit the guy, they wouldn’t have had to go far out of their way to arrest me.

Anyhow: I’ve made my confession, and I promise to be much more pedestrian-aware going through that intersection, at all hours. And pedestrian guy, if you’re out there, I’m really, really sorry for no doubt having made your life flash before your eyes.

But Claremont PD: could we maybe do something about lighting that intersection a bit better, so nobody gets inadvertently clobbered?

There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humanities and its relationship to digital media studies. (See, for instance, the debate started by Ian Bogost’s post, as well as that provoked by Dave Parry’s first and second takes on the issue.) Some of this debate arose, I think, from a sense of annoyance among folks who’ve been working in DH for years that suddenly, now, with the rise of social media and the visibility of those working in and on those forms, a bunch of attention is being paid to something called “digital humanities” — but the thing going by that name isn’t quite the same thing that it’s been for the past few decades, and the thing that DH has been is now being overlooked (or worse, dismissed) in favor of this new interest in digital media.

As someone who works in digital media, but feels a profound connection to the idea that I have of the digital humanities, I’ve found myself a little puzzled at moments, both by the debate and by the emotion behind it. I’ve intermittently had that sense of realizing, mid-argument, that you and the person with whom you’re arguing are using exactly the same words but are nonetheless speaking two different languages. And as Matt Kirschenbaum noted — correctly, I think — the fact that these battles over the definition of such terms are based in stereotypes indicates that they’re nearly always, and certainly in this case, institutional turf wars.

This is not at all to say that such battles don’t matter — in fact, for those embroiled in them, institutional turf wars often matter enormously. But what I’ve spent the last few days pondering is why — what the real stakes of such wars of definition are, and whether there’s a better way of thinking about the questions of institutional structure that underwrite them. The result is an awfully long and somewhat rambly blog post, safely tucked below the fold, in which I work through my thoughts on these questions.
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