“Colored Conventions”  

It is my idea, that Digital Humanities (DH), taken as a whole, is a field central to providing an underpinning of empathy and service in the sometimes self-serving fields of academia and technology. It is a practice and continual process of outreach.  If DH can be briefly described as: an area of scholarship that provides support for and insights into societies by employing, manipulating, building, and advocating for digital technologies… then its continued propagation into the general ‘universal’ lexicon of our web-literate modern generation is assured.  

The website “Colored Conventions”, which by its own introduction exists to: “[bring] buried African American history to digital life”, acknowledges its purpose being rooted in “social justice activism”.  Colored Conventions clearly illustrates an outgrowth of DH as defined above —  an active scholarship that explores – and often creates – communication pathways using the digital space.

Can we talk about this in class today?

As others have mentioned, one of the values that is paramount to the field is its ability not only to experiment but to do so freely, meaning that failure is not only safe, but considered valuable, as it creates “new ignorances” that may not have otherwise been found. It is possible that the act of defining the digital humanities is an experimental process that will continue to recreate itself and uncover imprecisions and new ignorances in ways that other fields that are less experimentation, tool, and values-driven are not.

A thread that ran through the assigned texts was an effort to define Digital Humanities with examples like the “big tent” metaphor, or as an expanding field likened to sculpture. It is possible that DH resists definition because it is in a constant state of revision/remix/refactoring (choose your tool) but that also makes these attempts to do so very lively. The attempts to define DH are like experiments themselves, and if they lack precision or do not meet the requirements of their test, they have discovered “new ignorances,” which allow the scope of the field to grow and refine itself. This itself appears a defining feature of DH and is one of the most exciting parts to me, the exploratory and revolutionary reflection on itself and ability to reinvest in a better, more

I have to ask because it is a thing I have been trained to do, why are we doing this? Beyond the convenience of explaining the field to those outside it, would precision of definition be a goal? Or efficiency? This could help practitioners in the “definition experiment” understand what a better outcome could be, or even a better failure.

If precision is less important, but creating understanding within the field is more so, Digital Humanities may best be defined by a set of values, as Spiro begins to do. Values are difficult to wrangle as well, but after examining more of the texts this week I believe they have a point: The DH field and its practitioners are most likely to have these characteristics in common. The values suggested (Openness, Collaboration, Collegiality & Connectedness, Diversity, Experimentation) are broad but difficult to argue with especially given the work we have been presented with this week and their extended definitions. I believe many of us have come to study DH because we hold these values in our work as well and are excited to find a field that may support them.  

Reading just how much gate-keeping is present in the digital humanities and how much of a tug and pull is seen within scholars goes to show that all the change happening in our environment is necessary. Whether it be political, environmentally, or academically, it’s apparent that it should be a topic taken seriously in conferences; a place where every walk of life should be welcomed. When reading “The Digital Humanities Moment” I personally found it funny how the peer-to-peer reviews lead to small arguments in the margins but with all the discourse happening it only strengthened their voices, so much that it “led some authors … to cite one another’s essays and peer reviews.” I feel that this goes to show that arguments at the end of the day are still necessary and it helps people grow and tune their ideas and helps them better understand what they are either fighting for or protecting. Personally I believe that the “digital” in digital humanities truly means approaching the internet as a new medium. People are connected to the web in more ways than one at the moment, whether it’s through Facebook, Instagram, or twitter, since it gives more and more people a platform to voice their opinions. 

What truly resonated with me is Lisa Spiros’ piece “This is why we fight” where she not only acknowledges the gate-keeping but brings up wonderful arguments for how digital humanities is in essence about activism and how it can grow into a valuable community where not only scholars are welcomed but anyone that wishes to voice their concerns and how necessary it is to have it placed in academia, where the ideas can grow and be challenged. Going back to “The Digital Humanities Movement” I found surprising how Ramsey went from saying you need to know how to code to saying building makes you a digital humanist where it’s more of “moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.” Not only should you gather ideas but also make something of those topics to further challenge yourself.

The Torn Apart / Separados website helps drive the fact that DH is about activism since the map shows just where exactly government money is being allocated and to who and which company makes a profit. Coming from a first generation Mexican family living in the United States I believe that more and more people need to become aware of the true nature of ICE and how the detainees are being treated and how children are forcefully being separated from their families. If it’s one thing that truly gets to me it’s kids being placed in vulnerable settings. What better way to challenge this then to show what living conditions they are being placed in with the help of social media, where information is spread within seconds. But with this comes a great downside, people may place their biases and come off as one sided. Although it should be our responsibility to give them the facts and bring the truth forward. It’s exciting to see where the digital humanities have a place in the future and how and who partakes in it. At the moment it has a plethora of resources to get around but it needs that drive from us, scholars, and those at academic platforms to keep it moving forwards.

The readings from Matthew K. Gold’s and Lauren F. Klein’s “Introduction: A DH That Matters” to Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 and Kelly Baker Josephs’ and Roopika Risam’s “Introduction” to The Digital Black Atlantic led me to two sites, one on the recommended list—the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (https://ecda.northeastern.edu/) — and one that followed from the list and the reading combined—Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica (http://www.musicalpassage.org).   These two sites, in turn, reinforced and recast the questions and projects of the two Introductions in multiple ways.  Here I focus on three areas of particular interest to me as an academic scholar: the potentially changing relation of digital humanities to the academy as epitomized by Gold’s and Klein’s statement that “the expanded field model may still work, but it must more clearly account for work outside of digital humanities and outside of the academy”(1); Josephs’ and Risam’s interest in the role of canon-building and “the practice of citation”(4) for the digital Black Atlantic and digital humanities more generally; and the potential for the digital Black Atlantic to challenge the assumptions “within digital humanities . . . that the epistemology of white, dominant, English-speaking cultures of the Global North is a ‘universal,’ . . . by virtue of the transnational and multilingual dimensions of this work” (5).

            Both the ECDA and Musical Passage depend on academic institutional support as well as external funding and resources for their knowledge production.  ECDA is primarily a product of scholars and students at Northeastern and their archive is based in part on texts from and partnerships with academic libraries.  At the same time, the archive is reliant to a great extent on early Google digitization of library books with the limits to imaging, accuracy, and completeness that are symptomatic of that resource.  Using the archive can be unproductive if one hopes to search through traditional methods and categories: bibliographic printing details or female authorship for example.  The archive’s strength, however, lies precisely in the way that it reconceives of the archive as a tool as well as a body of K/knowledge: seeing “new possibilities for re-archiving (remixing and reassembling) materials from existing archives as well as archiving new materials”( https://ecda.northeastern.edu/home/about/decolonizing-the-archive/).  As Brandy K. Williams states in a recent conference paper, “when Knowledge with a capital K is about possession or ownership it becomes a colonial project” (“Technologies of resistance: towards feminist futures” GCWS 8/27/20).  Thus, by “remapping the lines between knowledge and non-knowledge” through its project to “disrupt, review, question, and revise the colonial knowledge regime that informs the archives from which [they] draw most of [their] materials” (https://ecda.northeastern.edu/home/about/decolonizing-the-archive/), the ECDA doubly decolonizes the archive, foregrounding other accounts of authorship and identity (through the recovery and juxtaposition of embedded narratives) while actively restructuring the kinds of questions the archive itself provokes and encourages.  The placing of the archive’s scholarly home predominantly in one institution and, indeed, one department, however, limits the range of languages and cultural production that the archive can provide.  Ultimately, the archive functions in English, both linguistically and in terms of the sources of textual publication.  By being predominantly book based, its resources for visual culture depend on print and are imbricated with traditional Knowledge forms even as its recontextualization invites us to deploy those materials in new interventions. 

Interestingly, the ECDA demonstrates how “in scholarship, particularly on marginalized communities, the practice of citation is key to building and reinforcing a recognized (and recognizable) canon that confers status on an area of study” (Josephs and Risam, 4).  Josephs and Risam emphasize the importance of looking to “the hard-won canons of black and postcolonial studies’ as crucial to the process of the “breaking and claiming of . . . interstitial space between recognized academic disciplines” as well as acknowledging that “the structure of current academic systems means that [the] ability to publish this volume is dependent on its legibility to these traditions” including the “white predominant perception of digital humanities” (12).  Their Introduction both offers a multinational/multilingual corpus of theory based on earlier critics like Gilroy, Glissant, Morrison, Brathwaite, and Du Bois, and provides links to other sites of knowledge production like AADHum and Musical Passage: Jamaica 1688.  Similarly, the “Projects We Love” section of ECDA, points visitors to such “additive” archives as Musical Passage, which itself embodies some of the disruptions of national and disciplinary boundaries within which ECDA remains constrained, through material circumstances if not in its methodology and aspirations. 

            Rather than an archive, Musical Passage presents itself as a careful interpretation of a “single rare artifact.”  Like the participants in the digital [B]lack Atlantic and ECDA, it is “motivated to make audible what otherwise falls silent in the historical record” (www.musicalpassage.org/#about); in this case literally the sounds and performances of the early modern/middle period African diaspora.  It also models new methods and modes of interacting with a core text of colonial Knowledge, even as it invites its visitors to participate in the “experience of closely engaging with the rich, although mediated and multilayered information on the page” (“About the Site Design”) that characterizes traditional textual scholarship, albeit providing hypertext and multisensory material to its layers and imagining a non-specialized audience (“Sloane published the results of his research in a very large, leather-bound volume, about four times the size of an average modern book [http://www.musicalpassage.org/#read]).  The site offers an unusually balanced intercultural understanding of the document, thanks in part to the wide range of university, departmental, and disciplinary homes of its primary creators –Laurent Dubois, David Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold—but also thanks to its recognition of and engagement with repositories of scholarly knowledge not often seen as relevant to the academy (i.e. Jamaican Musicians Respond March 17 2017).  Moreover, Musical Passage builds on the polyglot and Black Atlantic parameters of its singular text to suggest a shared knowledge that is made possible by “hovering, listening, and reading” not only to/in this particular document but as a call to a “slow” digital praxis.

One of the features that make The Early Caribbean Digital Archive a special place to center DH are the implicit questions it asks of us as it concerns access, power, and our relationship to both, that DH enables. I think these provocations are urgent, especially as it concerns Spiro’s argument about DH’s identity and the current pressures placed upon this dilemma as Western dependence on the field increases during a time of pandemic, continued state violence, natural disaster, and an election season. 

To frame, The Early Caribbean Digital Archive is described as a decolonial project and archive, and its mission is to make “pre-twentieth-century Caribbean archival materials” available for research, public access, and contributions to the field. Objectively, it serves as a powerful, politically-transparent, and institutionally-verified site of critical, curated and reliable historical information signature to DH. 

However, interpretatively, its presence and collection processes (for the good it accomplishes) open conversations on authority, privacy, and the right to excavate and digitize information in DH. 

We understand the political imperative that undergirds The Early Caribbean Digital Archive. But as visitors interact with historical material, and the prompts on how a majority of it is still scattered and inaccessible to the constituencies from which they belong, it should provoke questions on the extent of access, and the almost exclusive-like authorization of digital material for and by Digital Humanists.

To clarify, I think this is what The Early Caribbean Digital Archive *provokes* as we appreciate the historical context surrounding this specific Archive, and as we interpret DH as a field with a particular commitment to the public. 

‘What does it mean for DH scholars and institutions – and not a constituency or its’ people – to have authority over material and the availability of it?’ is a longwinded question that I carry about my topics and the utility of DH.

Specifically, I believe a true meditation on access, authority/power, and privacy can extend the existing discourse on ethics, and the development of guidelines that allow us to mitigate authorial (and potentially exploitative) practices that shape the way information is managed, deployed, and by virtue, the field’s identity.

After doing the readings (not to mention attending 3 other courses during the week), my understanding of Digital Humanities as its own distinct entity and field of study has certainly broadened. I still hold fast my initial impressions on it: that it innately marries aspects of traditional humanities with aspects of technology and the modern era, that it has an intrinsic sort of intertextuality to it, and that it’s a pervasive, yet subtle concept that exists in plain sight without people necessarily knowing that it is there (that is, many people engage with the digital humanities without even knowing it). However, after doing the readings I think I’ve come to a bit more a detailed understanding that I hope will only continue to grow.

Lisa Spiro’s “This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of Digital Humanities” is the first piece I looked at with the idea of digital humanities consciously on my mind. It took me a little by surprise: Spiro doesn’t write very much about anything I could entirely view as a single, unifying force behind the subject. Rather, her writing seems to indicate a desire to outline was the digital humanities are more abstractly. That is, through her discussion, she provides information that when pieced together, forms an outline of what the digital humanities are, rather than beginning with simply citing a definition and then going from there. For instance, she writes that “the digital humanities encompasses fields such as librarianship in addition to humanities disciplines,” and that “[its] community promotes an ethos that embraces collaboration as essential to its work and mission.” While statement such as these explicitly characterize the digital humanities, they don’t outright define it, instead leaving one to independently interpret and piece together an individualized, yet guided and consistent idea of what the digital humanities could be.

A piece I read later on that also inspired me to a significant degree is “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field,” by Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold. I read this after Spiro’s piece, which caused me to think about the relation between Spiro’s method of writing with Klein and Gold’s idea of a “big tent.” Klein and Gold outright state that “it can at times be difficult to determine with any specificity what, precisely, digital humanities work entails” within the first paragraph. Perhaps what spoke to me most from this piece was the idea that instead of “requiring that the tool-building work of an ImagePlot or a Bookworm, to name two recent contributions to that domain, speak directly to their objects of analysis,” digital humanities might “explore how the creation and deployment of such tools perform distinct but equally valuable functions.” I see a parallel between this and the idea of “show, don’t tell” – rather than just a requirement to have an explicit connection between a tool and a creation or other object, digital humanities allows for deeper and more varied examinations.

Part of the reason I submitted this rather later into the week was that I wanted to get more background knowledge on digital humanities from the other courses I’m taking in the digital humanities program. I won’t talk about each here, but I want to breifly bring into conversation a subject that Lisa Rhody discussed in her Methods of Text Analysis course: the idea that simplifying something or arbitrarily categorizing and grouping something for the sake of expedience may influence that which follows in its wake. In class, this idea was related more to sex and gender, and of course, I’m ironically grossly simplifying the idea, but I feel like it could be incredibly helpful to examining digital humanities in general.

To clarify, digital humanities doesn’t need a succinct, textbook definition. It’s an amalgamation of different ideas, backgrounds, and media. One could absolutely view it as a subject, either academic or conversational, but similar to, for example, feminism, formalism, and psychoanalysis, it can also serve as a lens to examine work under. Digital humanities as a lens probably has a significant of overlap with other lenses, but in a sense, all lenses have significant overlap with one another, and not simply because they are all lenses. An anthropocentric reading of a work could perhaps have a lot in common with a Marxist reading of the same work, or even other works, after all.

One thing this week’s reading make abundantly clear is the multifaceted , and sometimes fluid definition of DH that is so often employed by scholars. My own limited understanding of the digital humanities has led me to evaluate these definitions in a contemporary sense in order to understand the essential value the digital humanities has in academia. Paraphrasing from Matthew K. Gold’s “The Digital Humanities Moment” the DH is currently one of the only fields of research which possesses the ability to address the ever changing nature of academics in order to accommodate our advanced technological realities. Although a preliminary definition, this tentative understanding of the worth and function of the digital humanities led to my better understanding that like most fields of study the digital humanities are subject to change, perhaps more so than several others. Although the field of DH lends itself to easy interpretation, defining those who practice in the digital humanities proves to be a more meticulous task. In Lisa Spiro’ s “This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of Digital Humanities” a specific acknowledgement is included offering some perspective on this issue. Stating the lack of core values amongst a community consisting of those with “different disciplines, methodological approaches, professional roles and theoretical implications”, Spiro demonstrates how this varied group inversely affects forming a tight definition of DH.

Spiro’s assessment of the field of DH and those who practice in it raises the question about what exactly would serve as core values. In a field which lacks a uniform body of scholars all from the same disciplines defining core values necessitates an abstract description. Spiro states “In defining core values, the community needs to consider what it is excluding as well as the cultural and ideological contexts surrounding the values it promotes. Given the diversity of the community and the ways in which culture informs values…”. Decidedly vague and justifiably so, Spiro’s mode of assessment allows for two things: the first being the expansion of DH to be an interdisciplinary field of study, and the second provides a criteria by which practitioners of the digital humanities can define their work. So what does this mean? To link this definition to the wider view of DH, therefore encompassing the varied individuals who inhabit the field, an understanding is provided by Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold in “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field”. Klein and Gold’s understanding of the digital humanities goes hand in hand with Spiro’s assessment in explicitly acknowledging a “…decentering of digital humanities, one that acknowledges how its methods and practices both influence and are influenced by other fields.” Where Spiro finds the digital humanities to be a diverse community in need of interdisciplinary focus, and intersectional contexts, Klein and Gold confirm this notion by stating this abstract, but accurate description, “…enrich its discourse and extends it reach.”

Forming a fully functional definition of the digital humanities is no easy task. One might even say that it would be impossible to define a field whose influence is the very basis for the future of academia. Departing momentarily from vague “big tent” descriptions and a polymorphic idea of the digital humanities as it changes according to technology, we have one significantly explicit tell in field work. The work produced by those in the field provides for us a working definition that serves the alternate purpose of defining the fields influenced by and included in DH. The project titled “The Early Caribbean Digital Archive” demonstrates the how the intersections of sociology, history and DH are used to create a platform to best deliver and interpret data. This method of data representation offers itself to extrapolation while simultaneously confirming the interdisciplinary nature of DH.

The information I have gleaned from these readings can effectively be summed up by acknowledging DH as a field that is still in its early stages. It exists as a recent addition to Masters programs at the Graduate Center and has only recently found its footing in academia. If these early definitions of DH are any indication of its ubiquitous nature in our technological realities, however, then the future of DH is well secured. It has also proven itself to be a viable career path as tentative descriptions have painted DH as essentially invaluable to all facets of academia.