“Describing oneself as a maker — regardless of what one actually or mostly does — is a way to accrue the gendered capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.”
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).
This passage immediately stood out to me because it’s something that a lot of people in the generations before ours have implicitly engrained. The idea that being a maker is not only descriptive but also a political and economic tag that is usually associated with gender. The author is saying that calling yourself a maker means that you not only receive the neutral recognition for making the product but also the implication of status and gender on top of that. The product outcome being viewed as more important than the invisible work that goes into it is something that is carried over from the humanities into the DH world.
This connects to my educational experience where I’ve been exposed to the process of creating a digital product and learned the importance of the steps it takes to create a product. The data cleaning, coding, creating a template for a web page, etc. From our first class, seeing the frustration and effort that it would take to become efficient in Fusion 360, gives me a new appreciation for those working behind the scenes to produce 3D modeling and animation.
During this term I am especially interested in learning the processes behind 3D modeling, mapping, and data visualization, not simply as technical skills but as humanistic practices. The way they require a series of interpretive decisions like what to include or exclude, how to represent space or data effectively, and how viewers will interpret and find meaning in the product. In this sense, modeling and visualization are not neutral translations of reality, but arguments shaped by values, assumptions, and context.
Rye, I agree with your thought that earlier generations often followed the association of gender with certain things. I love how you show appreciation to those behind the scenes of Fusion360. It relates back to what you said in your first paragraph about products being viewed based on their outcome vs the work behind it. Very good job connecting those two ideas!