Given the pernicious uses to which maps have been put throughout the millennia, perhaps in the long run they are more of a liability than a benefit. It is one thing for map makers to abuse the inherent distortions resulting from reducing a three dimensional space onto a two dimensional surface, which Mark Monmonier argues in How to Lie with Maps necessitates a basic competency in map literacy. It is another thing for people to use maps in the project of violent empire building and the wielding of power though hegemonic ideologies that naturalize otherwise strange notions of empire, nation-state, national sovereignty, and territorial nationalism. Was not the map a key tool, along with seafaring technologies, in the establishment of the Madeira sugar plantations by the Portuguese during the early 1400s, setting the stage for 400 years of arguably the gravest loss of life and human suffering ever experienced in the history of the species? Yarimar Bonilla, Max Hantel, and Mayukh Sen address the painful consequences of map making when placed in the hands of either brutalizing conquistadores of the Caribbean, fixated on territorial obsessions of self-serving sovereignty, or 21st century tech companies which, while offering globally available satellite-to-street-level detail to the privileged, supply blurry ground-level images of regions inhabited by a large part of the world’s population.

Yet despite the risks and the dangers, also shared with many if not all technologies, maps continue to be a part of the pursuit of collective emancipation, personal autonomy, and the flourishing of human beings. As a way of understanding and organizing geographical space, arguably the most fundamental of all dimensions of this particular universe (at least), maps have enabled the increase of knowledge of the world and as a result the expansion of the human mind. Perhaps in the same way Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell argue that computers represent conceptual models, maps similarly help us model relationships arising from spatial experience, resulting in topologies of geographic knowledge that serve as gateways to unbounded understanding (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012). The world mapped as a globe with its imaginary representation of humanity must count as a key image of the humanistic tradition. Perhaps the emancipatory power of maps is greater than the power of information itself, reflecting a mental computer in which spatial algorithms execute logic that translates scale, projection, and symbolization and resolves generalizations of point, line, and area symbols.

While maps help to enforce ideologies and the world-making experiences of dehumanizing difference, they offer–despite significant omissions, over simplifications, and distortions identified by Bonilla and Hantel in “Visualizing Sovereignty”–important moments and opportunities for counter hegemonic resistance (Bonalla and Hantel 2016). A look at a map of México before the 1846 US Intervention (La Intervención Estadounidense en México, known in the US as the Mexican-American War) evokes irony-laden chistes (jokes) that the gringo not only invaded lands inhabited by Spanish speaking people, but that even today those lands are still culturally bound to Mexico and Spain regardless of any imperial promulgations to the contrary. Similarly the ease of making maps with map making software has helped community historians remap, recover, and decolonize indigeneity. Maps now abound throughout the Internet of Native American homelands labeled by their indigenous names, such as maps of homelands of the Lenape who lived in Lenapehoking, an area later labeled New Jersey, southeastern New York State, eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, and southeastern Connecticut. Perhaps because the ontological and performative act of naming, labeling, vocabulary building, and semantic marking (space and territory) in some sense represents the most powerful act of authority before the use of physical force, digital maps could very well be the most powerful of all digital technologies. Maps arguably enable the complete colonization of the mind once the colonizer succeeds in expropriating mental labor to make semantic inventories. The emergence of mind maps and mind mapping software and their incorporation into agile software and organizational “brainstorming” processes suggests that mapping in various ways continues to enable the opening of markets and channels of resource and wealth extraction begun by map making and empire building Renaissance Europeans.

How can we make digital maps and engage in digital map making in ways that do not recapitulate processes of exclusion? As with other practices in digital technologies, an adherence to the values enumerated by Lisa Spiro (openness, collaboration, collegiality and connectedness, diversity, experimentation) offers a starting point (Spiro 2012). The self-assessment, self-reflexivity, and auto-critical analysis of Bonalla and Hantel, in which they delineate the shortcomings and the iterative, fail-fast processes of their map making of the Caribbean, offers a path toward the prevention of harm (Bonalla and Hantel 2016). Perhaps most importantly of all would be the process discussed and experienced in our last class: a commitment to a digital praxis of care that takes into account transgressive imaginaries, assemblages, fragmentary pasts and futures, diaspora-recovery, rescue, the violence of the academy, and the communication of already known understandings to the rest of civil society. Less importantly in terms of theory, digital theory perhaps finds a caring path not so much through Vincent Leitch’s Renaissance of Theory (Leitch 2005) as through an extension of Marquis Bey’s Black and ungendered fugitivity, in which safe refuges are built by academic fugitives in the diasporas of interdisciplinary borderlands where the neoliberal university does not dare venture (Bey 2019).

Works Cited

Bey, Marquis. 2019. Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Bonilla, Yarimar and Max Hantel. 2016. “Visualizing Sovereignty: Cartographic Queries for the Digital Age” in sx archipelagos, International Small Axe Project. Accessed September 12, 2020. http://smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/issue01/bonilla-visualizing.html.

Leitch, Vincent B. 2005. “Theory Ends” in Profession, 122-28. Accessed September 12, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595805.

Monmonier, Mark S. 1991. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ramsay, Stephen and Geoffrey Rockwell. 2012. “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities” in Debates in the Digital Humanities edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Accessed September 12, 2020. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/c733786e-5787-454e-8f12-e1b7a85cac72#ch05.

Sen, Mayukh. 2017. “Dividing Lines. Mapping platforms like Google Earth have the legacies of colonialism programmed into them” in Real Life. Accessed September 12, 2020. https://reallifemag.com/dividing-lines/.

Spiro, Lisa. 2012. “This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” in Debates in the Digital Humanities edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Accessed September 12, 2020. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/40de72d8-f153-43fa-836b-a41d241e949c/section/9e014167-c688-43ab-8b12-0f6746095335#ch03.

From this week’s reading, two points significantly stood out to me. One relating to the idea of a map as a temporal tool rather than spatial one. The second one is how tools like Google Earth continue and uplift colonial legacies. In “Visualizing Sovereignty”, Yarimar Bonilla and Max Hantel highlight that modern maps are drawn within constrains of western cartography which leads to a visualization of sovereignty within the limits of nation-state autonomy. This leaves non-sovereign territories to be drawn as “inexplicable” and ambiguous to the map readers, if they don’t question the history behind the map and what made it become what it is. One of the solutions that Yarimar Bonilla shifts to is the representation of the Caribbean as a temporal map that is ordered by the year on which Caribbean societies shifted from colonial status. Such a map helps in putting the geospatial representation within a temporal space, which helps “unsettle views of contemporary borders” — example of “The invasion of America Project”.

This text reminded of an incident that went viral a few weeks ago. I remember seeing a lot of posts on Twitter and Instagram about how Google removed Palestine completely from Google Maps. I went to check on Google maps for myself, I navigated to the location of Palestine on the map and found “Israel” written as the country name. There were a lot of articles written on this and there were a lot of calls for Google to recognize Palestine on the map “again”. However, after a few days, the truth came out: Google never removed Palestine on the map, simply because it never had it on the map. One particular response from a Google expert on a forum on the google support website caught my attention.

The Google expert said that “Google takes a neutral view when it comes to countries, borders, etc; and uses the overall consensus of all nations and how cartographers around the world depict such matters.  As the world situation changes, so will Maps.” If Google hold such a neutral view on political conflicts, why would it so blatantly choose to represent Israel instead of Palestine on the map? In fact, Palestine is recognized by the UN and its members as an independent state. However, it is not recognized by the US. This highlights the US-centric  foundation that a tool so widely used around the world is built upon. The map here becomes a tool that showcases racial capitalism and white supremacy, rather than one that helps explore different parts of the world. In doing so, Google erases ten thousand years of Palestinian history and culture and turns a blind eye on more than 70 years of violent Israeli colonization of Palestine.

Mayukh Sen brought up a very similar example of how Google Earth has “the legacies of colonialism programmed into it” like many other platforms.  In this article, Mayukh Sen highlights how Google Earth only mapped out major cities in India, when the hundreds or thousands of smaller cities and villages are just a blurry insignificant image on the screen labeled by its anglicized name, making it harder for natives to find their own homes, because they are not essential to white, western audiences. According to Mayukh Sen, this makes “Google a de facto neocolonial force, whether or not it intends to be”.

This week’s readings emphasize the important role DH has in reframing humanities itself, a discipline which has been built to uphold systems of oppression through race, gender and class. DH projects allow us to reexamine our world-view through different lenses such as Black Studies, Feminism, and Caribbean Studies. However, we have to be mindful that the technological tools and data we use may have also been built upon those same systems. For example, if creating an archive, one has to examine how and from whom material was collected and if that material is a fair representation of the subject (institutions should not be immune from scrutiny in this assessment). And, in building that archive, do the digital tools used provide equity and accessibility? 

This brings to mind The 1619 Project by the NY Times which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative” through an interactive website, essays and podcasts. Despite the wealth of knowledge the project provides, there are barriers to access the information (NY Times paywall). More importantly, President Trump has recently warned that schools and institutions using the 1619 Project in their classrooms could be defunded by the federal government. I fear this threatens the value of DH. DH projects can bring to light areas in the humanities which deserve inspection. However, what are the consequences if they are not used for scholarship, or even discouraged/banned by power structures? I’d be interested in hearing what others think.

• I want to briefly (lol) examine geography as a link between Gallon and Josephs’ approaches to ‘Black’, diasporically, and how it governs the deployment of ‘Black’ and the application of it in Black DH (BDH).
  
• Across the many BDH projects included in Gallon’s essay (Graham’s Project on The History of Black Writing, Digital Schomburg) the offerings in BDH are rich, and yet deeply rooted in the West and recovery and epistemologies made there  — which may be slightly antithetical to ‘Black’ as encompassing or universal, and what BDH seeks to accomplish as an application, without a closer examination of the term (to which Gallon begins to unpack in the beginning of her chapter).
  
• We see this particular struggle intimated in Josephs’ offerings on her 2010s coursework; it is precisely compounded by the way geography moderates or governs ‘Black’ when contemplating the intersection of Digital and Caribbean, and how methods of DH can be used to emphasize (or contemplate) cultures that (should) assemble ‘Black’ and the DH field as a whole. I wished for greater detail on how the six out of eight Caribbean students (for the course) deployed DH with this in mind.
  
• Despite the nomenclature of ‘Black’ and how ‘Caribbean’ intimately disrupts barrier (as a culturally diffusive ethnicity, not traditionally considered ‘West’ despite region) the dearth of information on the intersection of DH and the Caribbean encourages us to consider how BDH can (and must) look after this category as we consider the deployment and assemblage of ‘Black’ in the field.
  
• When I contemplate BDH as an assemblage and in fact, “a progenitor and host,” per Gallon in Digital Humanities — specifically on the concept of humanity — Josephs’ struggle helps me to tangentially infer on how the geographical power structure of the West currently situates and governs BDH epistemologies determined to do the opposite in its purposeful “dismembering” of the DH field.
  
• In looking at both, I yearn for more assemblages that look like Josephs’ work, and that move the dialectic of Gallon into categories that re-contemplate nomenclature – beyond whiteness as a next step – with greater consideration to geography, especially as a primary way to contemplate what assembles or constitutes ‘Black’, in (and outside of) DH.

While teaching at MNN (Manhattan Neighborhood Network), my friend Destiny and I created and facilitated a course titled: Social Media for Social Good where we encouraged high school and college students to look at social media’s effects on real life social justice movements. During this time we looked platforms like Facebook and Instagram. We studied hashtags like #blacklivesmatter , #iftheygunnedmedown and #sayhername. We analyzed if these hashtags and social media campaigns and questioned if they were just a trend or a legitimate social justice movement that could have real life repercussions. At the time we concluded it was a mixture of both.
If I were to recreate this course today, I would take a look at #blackouttuesday . I’m always weary in partaking on trending hashtags and other social media trends since they tend to happen and spread so quickly, it doesn’t give me enough time to thoroughly research it before posting. This one in particular was suppose to be a way to “blackout” large corporations that “support BLM” but not in the best and most effective way. It was suppose to be a hashtag to bring awareness to issues and resources surrounding the BLM and at the time, the recent police brutality incidents that caused the death of Brianna Taylor and George Floyd. The hashtag was started by the music industry but it was quickly co-opted and appropriated by thousands of accounts that were simply trying to be part of the “trend.” These didn’t bring any attention to police brutality, didn’t offer resources to help organizations and individuals in the BLM nor did they even mention the names of Taylor and Floyd. So what was the point? Did this social media campaign make a difference? When scholars (DH scholars) look back, will this be seen as an effective campaign or as another selfish, attention seeking, trend for millennials to “feel connected” and “part of something”?

I thought about these questions while reading Kelly Gallon’s Making a Case for Black DH. Her piece emphasizes the importance of studying Black DH and other so called “Black Humanities” through the perspective of Black people. Were these hashtags created by Black people to bring awareness and start a discussion among their own? Can others partake? And in so, in what ways? How will these discussions and social media campaigns be perceived by the people of this communities in the future? How and by whom are they being persevere? Are they worth it?

It is becoming quite evident in our readings that the evolution of computers and technology truly coincide with the evolution of the humanities and ultimately humans, but it sure does seem to be taking a while for it to become a fair playing field for all people in so many ways, but mostly in the sense that the humanities are subject to the social constructs of race, ethnicity, sex and gender roles just like anything else is in our modern society. Once again, systemic racism, sexism and ableism are so pervasive in our lives that even in technology, assumptions are still being made about how to use and to what extent people can actually use this technology and access useful data, none the less incredibly important stories and experiences from people of color have to be so mindfully recorded and often unearthed years later, almost like a fossil. Given the imbalance of work done on black culture vs white culture, we have to look at the scholars and the question remains – who is more worthy of their data being collected and acted upon? There is also a great focus on the medium in which the message is being delivered and also obtaining credit when things are being posted digitally within and outside of the DH community, and while that’s well and good that the concern is there, what will the solution become in the long run? This seems to be an ongoing and troublesome conversation in academia, as credit for a scholar should be so much more concrete than just the equivalent credit of a general twitter post by a regular civilian, which in reality we don’t own the content in some cases after it’s posted depending on the platform. There is more work to be done, and in the case of racism in America it will be endless work to bring to light these nearly lost stories, but ultimately we can see that the current BLM movement and pro-feminism has already made it’s way into the DH community and we can only continue to support that. We can see right here at the CUNY Graduate Center that professors have already attempted to bring these stories into the classroom which therefore digitizes them and stores the data. In creating more scholarly resources on people of color and using our feminist and antiracist eyes in examining past databases and organizations, the DH community is at large committed to making data more accessible in communities that are in need but has also taken a beating for being racist in itself, and therefore we witness a massive upheaval and influx of more well-rounded and all encompassing humanities data.

From the perspective of a small tech startup mindset, the ever looming burn rate of funding and the ever pressing need to demonstrate market share potential and traction mean that any time spent on ways and methods of knowing and understanding is by and large a recipe for disaster.  Perhaps it is for this reason that the university earns its keep by devoting time and attention to matters that have consequences beyond the viability of a market dependent enterprise under neoliberal capitalism.   

As soon as questions of power arise in the examination of the hows and the whys of knowing within a given academic field, the university itself rightfully becomes a site of critique, debate, and contestation.  Questions about academic labor and funding–including which kinds of labor and which kinds of funding, and how ways of knowing perpetuate racialized, gendered, and other forms of exclusion–rightfully become subjects of research, shape the directions of research, and serve as successful or failed theories and models for social institutions in the broader society.

Some questions regarding valid forms of knowledge in the DH might include:

• How and why might some individuals assert that DH threatens the kind of PhD system that has held sway over the last 200 or so years?
• How might academicians, faculties, and PhD committees be ready to open up spaces that rely on other ways of demonstrating worthy contributions to knowledge and understanding?
• Does not interdisciplinarity imply the “potential” relevance of any question, theory, or claim, depending at the end of the day on definitional boundaries established by the lineages of program heads or department faculty who determine the scope of the discipline in terms of the relevance of questions for ongoing and future research?
• If language itself is arguably a (social) technology, might technology questions at virtually any level or from any domain “potentially” pertain to the production of knowledge and understanding within any given interdisciplinary field?
• How can digital technologies and digital data be used by and within academic communities in ways that defend higher education from the neoliberal assault and the subversion of humanistic values that often accompanies capital in its seemingly unending drive toward self-expansion?  (This last question was prompted by a piece I stumbled across recently while searching for “socially engaged” scholarship that amounts to a full scale and categorical critique directed against the digital humanities.  Entitled “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities” and published in 2016, the authors, two of whom identify themselves as having “long histories as digital researchers”, reject and attack DH for being part the “neoliberal takeover of the university”.   In what must be by now a bygone artifact of earlier DH debates, there is a considerable amount of nuanced academic politics.  Whether or not their argument is valid, it has been instructive to consider a markedly critical, if not negative, perspective.  It points to the importance of being very clear and transparent about the goals, commitments, values, and epistemologies of the field.  While digital humanities as a field is clearly not part of a “neoliberal takeover”, I do think digital scholars are more likely to succeed than not by being aware of the ways in which funding can end up subverting the potential of DH within the broader humanities and higher learning.)