It is in human nature to want to put a direct definition to every entity we encounter. For various reasons one might say that this is in fact the correct way to go about life, especially when diving into the world of academics. Without a clear cut agenda of what a field of study is trying to convey, how can one begin to understand it? Or rather how might one begin to define it? This seems to be the main issue in the DH department that I’ve come to find out in my readings- an ongoing debate on what it is to be a digital humanist and what can they contribute to this contemporary way of learning and teaching.

In Matthew K. Gold’s essay “The Digital Humanities Moment” in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) he brings up the controversial debate sparked by University of Nebraska scholar Stephen Ramsey. His talk titled “Who’s in and Who’s Out” brazenly included the statement of “If you are not making anything, you are not …a digital humanist” this is in addition to him proclaiming that one must be able to code in order to be considered a digital humanist. Gold brings up that this declaration had brought out intense debate during the session and online discussions as well. This situation in itself has proven the conundrum of DH. Some individuals are hard set on viewing it through a strictly technological standpoint but for others DH is more. This is discussed further into Gold’s essay when discussing what compromises Digital Humanities. Is it a place for theory? Politics? Can social media be an asset to it or does it trivialize it? All these questions up for discussion but with that comes inevitable arguments.

In trying to find a solution an interesting but relatively weak metaphor that was proposed at the 2011 ADHO annual conference featured the idea of DH being viewed as a “big tent”. However much like everything else in this field, this too was also up for debate and criticism. In Matthew K.Gold and Lauren F.Klein’s “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field” in Debated and the Digital Humanities (2016) they showcase examples of these critiques. Melissa Terras in ‘Peering inside the Big Tent’  “expressed concern that the big tent of DH, like those employed by the evangelical groups of the nineteenth-century United States, whose outdoor revival meetings inspired the phrase, might be less welcoming—due to scholarly status, institutional support, and financial resources—than those already on the inside would hope or believe”. Gold and Klein address the disapproval of the metaphor and bring up the fact that Digital Humanities is being practiced more and more as an ever growing field and thus must be perceived in a broader context. However the problem of scale then arises, how much can one subject area withstand? This goes back to the initial issue I brought it up concerning definition. If DH addresses more than one thing at a time, how can it be defined?

Lisa Spiro in “This is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” dives into this topic but her solution to it goes beyond a standard definition. Rather she suggests creating a core set of values. These values were split up into 5 sections- Openness, Collaboration, Collegiality and Connectedness, Diversity and Experimentation. Through these values Spiro advocates for the Digital Humanities to work together to promote a community that is open to cooperation and unity so that multiple tools and ideas can all be processed and shared through one outlet. She admits that in doing so ideas may clash and get complicated but in her own words she believes that “by developing a core values statement, the digital humanities community can craft a more coherent identity, use these values as guiding principles, and pass them on as part of DH education”.

With Spiro’s notion of a collaborative project in mind I checked out the multiple projects/websites provided to us and I found that her ideas were tangible if one is willing to do put forth the effort to do so. One titled the ” The Early Caribbean Digital Archive” features an open collection of poetry, diaries and novels as well as a collection of maps and images. Already we see a partnership between literary elements and those concerning visual aspects. In addition to this the site also aims to “remix” the archives found with digital tools to get a more accurate reading of the materials found since most of it was primarily authored and published by Europeans. Similarly we see this with “The Colored Conventions Project”, the purpose of which is to bring forth the buried history of the 19th century Black organizing to a an interdisciplinary research hub for anyone to access. The CCP explains they go about this through the use of partnerships that help with a variety of things such as locating, transcribing and archiving. The site also organizes and produces digital exhibits which feature a look at areas of interest that are not discussed as much, such as the contributions of black women towards the economy during the 1830’s delegate conventions or the early activism of Black Californians that challenged laws and policies used against them. On paper an inclusive hub of different outlets of information may seem disjointed and scattered, but my personal experience on these sites say otherwise. Instead of expounding on the issues that were presented to me in the readings, I was proved that it could be done if values of teamwork are applied.

In all I believe the issue of defining in the DH community is one that doesn’t necessarily need to be solved. To pigeon hole and gate keep this field is only doing a disservice to those who participate in it. In my personal opinion, the more informational sources you can tap into the better, and if that means collaborating with those who specialize in a different field than you, so be it. I don’t think DH needs a limit or a certain set of skills to qualify someone. That thinking seems archaic and with the ever changing world we live in we must think outside the box (or tent) if we really want DH to be used to it’s full potential.

In the 2012 Debates in the digital humanities, DH is described as field that is self-reflexive and self-critical. One of the few issues addressed as a problem that DH was facing as a field is its lack of political commitment. However, we can clearly see through the evolution of DH in the 2016 and 2019 volumes that it is becoming more and more political. In fact, the sites and projects we explored during this week’s reading speak to this transformation. Separados, The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and The Colored Conventions project are all politically committed to do decolonization work in one way or another.

In this blog post, I wanted to reflect on DH’s political commitment as an imperative. Is it possible for Digital Humanities to be neutral in a time where white supremacies are gaining increased power all over the world? Clearly not. This necessity for DH to do decolonization work is not only due to the current climate but also to Digital Humanities’ own colonial history. In the Digital Black Atlantic, Risam and Josephs talk about the Digital Humanities as the juxtaposition of two spaces: Digital + Humanities. They remind us that each of these spaces have contributed their own share of neoliberal practices in academia and outside of it. On the one hand, the humanities constitute a big part of the project of the empire as well as “the founding of colonial universities within colonies”. On the other hand, technology has historically been used to silence minorities and “disempower black communities”. The juxtaposition of two spaces with such loaded history can be successful and revolutionary only if it acts as “a disruptive political force to reshape fundamental aspects of academic practices” (the Digital Humanities moment)

I have always thought of politics as a valuable part of DH, but after these readings, I see it as a more foundational pillar to DH. It is  impossible to imagine doing decolonizing work by using traditional and often colonial academic approaches to humanities. That is why, as the Digital Black Atlantic puts it, it is imperative to decenter whiteness and put diasporic communities at the center of the inquiry to truly achieve a DH that contributes to the decolonization of the Global South.

In “Introduction: The Digital Humanities Moment”, Professor Gold talks about the ways in which digital humanists can create an alignment with activists and organizers. In that context, he mentions the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) as an example from within the digital humanities that “exemplifies how principles of collective organizing can inform both project structure and research focus” (Gold, 2019). The CCP is an impressive digital archive highlighting early black mobilization and organizing, in particular the understudied aspect of the 19th-century reform movement that is black conventions. On its website the CCP underlines its mission as a “scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth century Black organizing to digital life.” Not only is the archive intended to provide information about the movement that remained invisible in popular history that highlights black agency and black leadership, it also creates a dialogue between the past and present of black organizational activism. Many of the issues that are of topic in the primary sources speak to ongoing issues like state violence and police brutality that current movements such as Black Lives Matter are focused upon. I think this really speaks the argument made in the “Digital Black Atlantic Introduction” about “the practice of re-membering a memory, and, in doing so, actively reconstructing the realities of the past [while also] linking it vitally to the present and the future” (Baker Josephs, Risam, 15).

One major interdisciplinary accomplishment of the project is its digital and interactive exhibits section. These exhibits of scholarly research are created by professors and their undergraduate or graduate students, using primary documents of the CCP’s collection to draw attention to a specific aspect of the Colored Convention movement. For instance, the graduate student Samantha de Vera built one exhibit to highlight Black women’s contributions to these conventions, which was made possible through the CCP’s effort of digitizing and transcribing not only the minutes that explicitly mention the male delegates, but newspaper articles, proceedings and other materials that document the conventions. Here, the Colored Convention Project specifically aims to include researchers, students and the public to become a part of the scholarly conversation and to produce narratives from its archival records that have been invisible in the academic and public discourse. I think this really relates to what Lisa Spiro emphasizes in her proposed values of openness  and collaboration, and also highlights the importance of “the public role of historical scholarship” (Spiro, 2012).

This week’s readings and featured projects have expanded my definition of Digital Humanities and opened up the possibilities of research, output and social justice issues within DH. It is interesting to note the trajectory of the readings (2012–2019) and where the focus of the next iteration of Debates in Digital Humanities will be, particularly with the current political climate and global pandemic.

One issue that often came to mind when viewing the websites is the accessibility and sustainability of DH work, mentioned by Gold and Klein in 2016. Torn Apart / Separados has been divided into two volumes. Volume 1 focuses on ICE detention centers and Volume 2 looks at ICE’s financial structure. The beauty of digital projects such as this is their ability to update, expand and transform over time. New data sets can be analyzed, collaborators added and different forms of technological tools deployed. However, with the rapidly changing nature of technology, will this project be accessible in five or ten years? Will the Javascript programming function in future iterations or is this not a consideration? Should DH practitioners focus our attention on audiences of the present and near-future and not far-future? For example, I have found “broken” or non-accessible areas of the Colored Conventions Project. While this minor inconsistency does not alter my view of the success and worthiness of this project, it is conceivable that other digital projects may be experiencing the same dilemmas, even at a larger scale.

The “Reflections” section of Torn Apart / Separados is extremely helpful in putting the visualizations in context. As much as visualizations are important, scholarly writing is also a necessary component of DH projects. Personally, I’d like to see projects expand beyond the world of academia and scholarship and include other voices as well. I gained a greater understanding of DH after reading the peer-reviewed projects in Reviews in Digital Humanities, but perhaps some DH projects can broaden their audiences to allow for more equitable access to information. Regardless, it is impressive how far the field has evolved. Its role in the research and knowledge of past, present and future issues is immense.

DH emerged from the readings as an inclusive, open, collaborative, diverse, multi-disciplinary, and democratic academic space. This is evident in the projects/sites, which are collaborative, multi-disciplinary, and feature a diverse set of backgrounds and expertise. What stood out the most in the readings was the increasingly political nature of Digital Humanities work, and the ability of the DH community to respond so quickly to larger societal problems, which are now far greater than they were in 2016 or 2019. It was not difficult to observe the sense of social and civic responsibility (discussed in the Debates series) in the projects, all of which apply technical and scholastic DH tools to build platforms, store and facilitate communications that elevate voices less heard.

In TornApart/Separados the entire process of developing the visual tools is detailed on the site, including challenges that the visualization of data and government data in particular presented and adjustments that followed. Much like the Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Colored Conventions Project, TornApart is a collaboration of a diverse team that includes librarians, academics from several disciplines, journalists, and project managers among others. On a side note, it was interesting to see InGen has moved on from dinosaur theme parks but still swimming in morally dubious waters. 

The early Caribbean Digital Archive reflects not only the civil sensibility mentioned above, but also how DH work can challenge established academic practices. By making archives and collections more accessible and moving away from a Eurocentric perspective, this project seeks to “decolonize the archive” through the voices of black, Creole, indigenous and colonized people. Similarly, the Colored Conventions Project highlights the very important role that black women played in nineteenth-century Black organizing, which would otherwise remain unseen. This project is a tremendous and timely resource, not least because it makes this information accessible at a time when many political forces seek to delete or rewrite the black experience. 

The digital projects reflect our readings in the sense that they demonstrate the collaborative nature, commitment to inclusion and diversity and openness of what Digital Humanities scholars across the globe are still currently trying define and stay committed to as their values. I use the word trying when describing a DH’s scholar’s commitment to values because the field is evolving so greatly over the past ten years or so. We read in all three chapters there was as shift away from ‘Big Tent’ humanities and a push for the field to become more expanded and to include more ‘builders’ per se into this field of work. In my opinion, values need to be demonstrated for years in order to be fully acknowledged and understood, but what is positive is that projects are absolutely heading in a direction to aid more humanitarian efforts troubling our world. 

Similar to technology and it’s rapid advancement and short path to obsolescence, it seems that digital humanists have a spoken requirement for their current projects to be reflective of real-time issues and also to work toward uncovering further determining the work of a digital humanists impact on culture while dually being tasked with archiving our past and present societies digitally. It seems like a lot of work, but with the earned and well regarded title of a digital humanist, you are more or less considered a gatekeeper, teacher and servant of knowledge in your field. Tackling current issues with great attention to minority groups is one example of the DH community’s commitment to document the largely absent past digital documentation of BIPOC and current and past events of oppression that is most reflected in the projects. Further, the open source nature of the DH community in it’s exchange of knowledge is not only defined in its values but is also directly reflected in the simple fact that these extensive sites require no academic credentialed login to view these projects so literally anyone with a link can view this. Further, the reviews in Digital Humanities is open for anyone to view and we can chronologically see the journal’s focus turning toward the digital documentation from people of diverse races and ethnicities in the latest release in January 2020. 

In summation, it’s with great debate and collaboration but also quite incredible that the DH community is at large banding together for the long haul and gearing toward providing much light to lost data, current data and future humanitarian data, but also including more different kinds of DH workers into this type of research and development, in the effort to secure it’s place in academia and beyond with high integrity.

I’m interested in how this week’s readings, over time, seem to draw out this tension between what could be understood as “Digital Humanities” and “digital humanities.” I understand the former, with first letters intentionally capitalized, as an attempt by scholars (as seen especially in the readings from 2012-2016) to understand a field’s relationship to the academy. Specifically, the Digital Humanities, as an academic field and institution itself, is continuously trying to balance the potentially subversive use of technology with traditional modes of knowledge production. On the other hand, “digital humanities” seems to act as the very refusal of these traditions: the refusal to acknowledge the white, Western university as epistemic authority, and the refusal to derive an understanding of its Value from it. It’s in finding a liminal position within these positions (based on the readings) that I find a lot of DH scholars. In particular, Spiro’s attempt at defining the field’s values—such as diversity and openness—can perhaps be understood as one possible way to alleviating this tension, in that defining values provides the specificity needed for the field to be taken seriously, yet are defined in such a way that opens it up for conversation, interdisciplinarity, and new “relations.”

However, if “A DH That Matters” makes anything clear, it’s that our world in crisis has revealed that out very understanding of relations are subtended by histories of slavery and colonialism—relations that are undergirded by race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, I found myself trying to define DH around projects like “The Digital Black Atlantic” and The Early Caribbean Digital Archive. Specifically, what these projects communicate is that the subversive potential of DH lies not in the technology themselves, but in how DH invites us to rethink what we consider our sources and sites of knowledge production: What would it mean for us to read the margins as not secondary, but primary sites of exploration and knowledge? A theoretical/methodological lens of the “Black Atlantic”, Josephs and Risam argue, “negotiates movement across time and space, forging varied spatial and temporal relationships,” through re-mixing the archive and reconfiguring memory in the present. In calling attention to and re-mixing “travel narratives, novels, poetry, natural histories, and diaries” as a way to disrupt the Western archive, The Early Caribbean Digital Archive does just that; acting as, what Donaldson would call, an “ephemeral archive” that speaks to “the transient nature of modern memory,” and emplacing the past, present and future together. From these projects, I see the potential for DH to cultivate a politic that celebrates and takes seriously overlooked, non-traditional texts—which, in this moment, may look like tweets, Instagram infographics, hashtags, etc.

In this way, what these projects—and a Black critical lens in general—provides “digital humanists” is, perhaps, the very refusal of the “humanist” concept itself. Indeed, Black feminists like Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe have long written about how the figure of “The Human” has been historically constructed as the white, cis-heterosexual male—a colonial technology that defines Blackness as non-human, imposes relationality as hierarchy, and justifies centuries of brutality and violence along lines of race, gender, and sexuality. If we take this as our starting point, then the remixing of the archive with a Digital Black Atlantic lens can be understood as not only the act of recovering the past, but an onto-epistemological practice that refigures ways of Being and Becoming: specifically, ways that refuse the sovereignty of The (rational, individualistic, and technocratic) Human. And so I wonder: If we are to take these works seriously, then would a digital humanities for the 2020’s and beyond be better understood as a digital non-humanities? And what would that look like?

Each of the digital scholarship projects under review (Torn Apart/Separados, The Early Caribbean Digital Archive, Colored Conventions Project, and Reviews in Digital Humanities) exemplifies particular aspects as well as the general spirit of the field of Digital Humanities as described and presented in articles by authors Matthew Gold, Lauren Klein, Lisa Spiro, Kelly Baker Josephs, and Roopika Risam in Debates in the Digital Humanities (DDH). From an information technology perspective, the projects demonstrate a close alignment between implementation and a general analysis of requirements for the development of digital projects and social infrastructure whose goals are arguably the extension and enhancement of research, teaching, and social engagement within the humanities and higher learning.

In Torn Apart/Separados, the Mobilized Humanities team demonstrates its commitment to social and political engagement identified in the 2019 essay “A DH That Matters” through data mining and a series of hard-hitting data visualizations that expose the financial links between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and elected officials and corporations.  With the Colored Conventions Project the team led by co-founders Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey also carries out its commitment to social justice by combining access to free and open source databases and digital exhibitions–that document African American conventions organized in the years before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War–with crowd sourced digital scholarship activities and community support for contemporary civil rights activism. Through the online journal Reviews in Digital Humanities, the journal’s editors offer a fast-track model for peer review of digital scholarship that contributes to needed academic reform in peer review processes discussed in the DDH’s 2012 essay “The Digital Humanities Moment”. Leveraging  technology opportunities for curated digital content preservation and memorialization, The Early Caribbean Digital Archive self-consciously centers the public memory of history-from-bottom-up through primary sources of early Caribbean cultures that speak to the truth in the African proverb “until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

While the digital projects implement only a small subset of the new techniques and applications identified in the DDH’s “Expanded Field” of 2016, each of them contributes to a digital culture-sphere reflected in the growing number of conferences (such as the recently held Virtual DH2020 conference of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)) and associations making up and constituting an expanding world-wide-web of digital humanists. Of all the issues mentioned in the DDH’s “state of the field” essays, perhaps the least explicitly addressed are the “controversies over tenure and casualized academic labor” identified in the DDH’s 2012 initial essay “The Digital Humanities Moment”. As a potential avenue for filling this gap, the interdisciplinary (and transdisciplinary) field of Critical University Studies would seem to offer possibilities for cross-fertilization between conceptualizations of academic labor and power in higher education and applications of the Digital Humanities.

As a contribution to Lisa Spiro’s call to establish a set of core values for the Digital Humanities, in which she argues for the core values of “openness”, “collaboration”, “collegiality and connectedness”, “diversity”, and “experimentation”, I would emphasize the “self-reflexiveness”  discussed in the 2012 “The Digital Humanities Moment” and “multilingualism” as secondary and supporting values to the core values of “openness” and “diversity”. Self-reflexiveness and multilingualism offer a path to the consideration of long standing efforts in University reform outside of the United States, including for example aspects of social engagement with civil society formulated in the Third Mission initiatives in European Higher Education and the Extension movement in Latin American Higher Education that traces back to the 1918 University Reforms initiated by the students and faculty of the University of Cordoba, Argentina, in alliance with Argentine labor unions. These formulations are historically grounded in the hard-won recognition of the autonomy and social responsibility of the university as an institution critically situated along side (and as an agent of) government, business, and civil society. To the extent Digital Humanities in the United States can participate in and learn from efforts outside of U.S. institutional geography, the field of global DH might arguably find fuller sails and a more assured trajectory.

One additional contextual reference prompted by the digital scholarship under review is the experience of universities with modern authoritarian regimes and associated technologies and cultures of repression and resistance. While the histories of modern authoritarian regimes are very different and any comparisons are arguably problematic, U.S. universities and digital humanists at the current juncture stand to benefit from recalling the ways in which universities in such regions as Latin America (and in other areas of the Global South) responded in dark times to the impact of authoritarian regimes on civil society.  In particular, the role many universities played during the period of Latin American military dictatorship (1920–1990) offers a historically grounded reference for universities facing regimes that are implementing increasingly similar programs of brutality, trauma, and erasure of the truth.  Universities in Latin America responded by offering themselves as sanctuaries and informal social networks of resistance that addressed in various ways the need for connectedness and community as a means of coping with an unprecedented scale of trauma and violence directed at civil society. While the nature of repression in Latin America during this time was different than the brutality and trauma of the current moment, digital spaces organized, curated, and maintained by digital humanists offer one of many kinds of similar havens and avenues of resistance for civil society during a time of the resurgence of authoritarian brutality, repression, and trauma.

The idea of collaboration being critical to the success of DH projects is thread across all of the readings, and we can plainly see successful examples of it when browsing the sites. Specifically, the creators of Torn Apart/Separados left a note that they plan to make the maps and workflows available through Nimble Tents Toolkit, which is powered by the open sourced GitHub. They’re inviting others to continue to build on the work they’ve already started, and/or to copy the workflows for presenting a different issue. I completely agree with the benefits of collaboration covered in this week’s readings: faster publication, amplification of diverse and marginalized voices, recruitment of experts with different skillsets to help build more powerful tool, peer review etc. But I wonder how challenging it becomes to credit the authors of highly collaborative work. Is it a concern that a group might split off and run with some or all of the base work to create their own project? Maybe this flexibility is what makes DH truly powerful, and authorship and credit aren’t as important since digital humanists are all working towards the same goal of curating and learning from the information presented.

The readings also told us that similar to how expansive the definition of DH is, its impact has shifted away from scholarship to responding to the larger world. This made me think of the popular Citizen app, where a team monitors police reports and shares an alert that’s then pinged out to registered users. Passersby with the app can stream live video of the activity, and a comment thread is created for each event where neighbors can ask questions and share additional information. Each incident is left up on a local map for about a week. Related to the earlier paragraph, who are the mysterious Citizen authors/reporters? Does it even matter who gets the credit between the public users and the reporters as long as the information is being shared?

One last thing that left an impression on me this week was from the “Digital Black Atlantic Introduction” — the idea that memory isn’t only about invoking the past, but linking to the present and future. Toni Morrison called it “re-memory”, that by remembering a memory in the present we’re reconstructing the past. The authors mention an example from the essay, “Access and Empowerment: Re-discovering Moments in the Lives of African American Migrant Women” of returning to lost texts by Black authors. By working with the material in the classroom, students not only learn about archiving and history through preserving the memories, but they’re also cultivating a lasting interest in the material and themes. By using digital tools, we can recover and reclaim what’s been forgotten while connecting to the present. This entire theme was really interesting to me, and I find it inspiring that current generations can build and adapt the past through technology to learn about today and the future.