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.

One of the things that stood out for me in this week’s readings was Lisa Spiro’s inclusion of experimentation as a key value of digital humanities, specifically her championing experimentation knowing that failure may be an outcome. Spiro says, “Not all experiments succeed as originally imagined, but the digital humanities community recognizes the value of failure in the pursuit of innovation.” There’s something very liberating in acknowledging that a failure doesn’t render the work leading up to it as necessarily unsuccessful or meritless.

The Torn Apart/Separados project fully owns and explores in depth the mistakes they made in the creation of their site. For example, in Vol. 2, they concede that earlier graphs displaying the total value of ICE contracts were based on miscalculations and misunderstandings of how government contracts work. They also discuss ways their original ideas for representing their data ultimately did not work. They explain how they couldn’t use a word cloud to display the different contract awardees on a scale that was legible and also maintained accuracy. They also had to rethink their display of data pertaining to the self-reported gender and racial demographics of the contract awardees to ensure the clarity of their purpose for including such information: they wanted to expose the diversity of people involved in the project, but in no way do they want to say there needs to be more diversity of people working for ICE, so they moved away from their original pie charts, which mimic the way this data is proudly displayed by the government to demonstrate opportunity.

By including all of this information about their process and methods, both successful and “failed,” I think they are also demonstrating another value highlighted by Spiro: openness. Indeed, there are two volumes of this project now, both of which are available to view, rather than the latter volume replacing the first volume. They admit the first iteration was created with a more narrow purpose (mapping where the detention centers are located, showing that the “border” is everywhere), but that the initial investigations led them to more questions, many of which they grapple with in Vol. 2. And even within Vol. 2 they discuss more questions they were unable to fully answer and visualize (for instance how the centers and ICE are reported in the media) and ways they hope the project can continue. To me, this speaks to the project creators as having open minds and a willingness to engage with the data and source materials responsibly rather than trying to force an outcome or narrative onto them. And through their openness in addressing their shortcomings—or more accurately the unfinished-ness of their project—they have reframed it not as an ultimate failure of the project, but as a call to action to bring more people into the project and continue the work (hello collaboration!).

On a semi-unrelated tangent, I also found the discussion of the peer-to-peer semipublic review process of the Debates in Digital Humanities to be incredibly fascinating. Coming from a background in medical publishing, with a much different peer review process, I admit I never even thought about what peer review could look like in other fields. I think this speaks very much to the collaborative nature of digital humanities and recognizes the value of academic endeavors and pursuits not just in their final product, but also the process through which it was created.

The international advocacy initiative the 4Humanities charged that makers within the digital realms have “ …a ‘special potential and responsibility to assist humanities advocacy’ because of [their] expertise in ‘making creative use of digital technology to advance humanities research and teaching’” (Gold).  For this post, our focus is the Color Conventions Project (CCP), which defines itself as “a scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long histories of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life” (Introducing the Colored Conventions Project).  This site was chosen because its makers made innovative use of a spectrum of technologies, offered users direct engagement, and explored a part of U.S. history about which I knew very little.

The site focus is a seventy-year span, from 1830 through the 1890s, when Black people organized across the U.S. and Canada in pursuit of suffrage and the legal recognition of their human rights.  The mechanism they used was State and National political conventions.  The main site breaks this history into a variety of exhibits that go beyond a specific event.  For example, the section on Black women’s economic power details the important role Black women played in supporting these conventions, from housing travelers in their boarding houses, feeding the convention goers, and supporting the event with monetary contributions. 

However, what makes the site come alive is the astounding collection of ephemera the site makers were able to collect, including the convention minutes from many of the events.  These assets have been digitized, categorized, transcribed, and then given their own OMEKA database. There are dozens of photographs, cartoons, and renderings from the era.  Moreover, many interactive maps help to focus the mind on how challenging it was for Black people to travel and assemble during this time.  Nevertheless, for me, the ability to click a link … open a file …and to then be able to read the actual Minutes of the Fourth Annual Convention that was held in the Asbury Church in New York City on 12 June 1834 was profound and reminded me of something Professor Gold wrote in Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field:

Rather than 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, we might explore how the creation and deployment of such tools perform distinct but equally valuable functions—functions that must be considered in relation to each other to achieve their maximal effect. (Gold)

It is that “relation to each other,” which the CCP does so well!  The exhibits are given their historical context, but it is the primary source material that gives the site its soul.  In Lisa Spiro’s thought-piece This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities, the author asks that digital humanists “focus on a community that comes together around values such as openness and collaboration” (Spiro).  Here the makers of the CCP also excel.  On the site’s Principles page, the makers explain that “CCP seeks to enact collective organizing principles and values that were modeled by the Colored Conventions Movement” (Colored Convention Project Principles).  The fact they chose to model this modern endeavor using the same principles and values of the people who were the objects of their scholarship has a satisfying symmetry and shows this reader their respect for those now long dead. 

Finally, the makers of the CCP project do not limit their scholarship to the Academy; instead, they actively recruit any user to submit materials they may have found.  This is a critical step for scholars who do not want to risk falling into the trap of only talking to each other.  This is also consistent with an observation Professors Gold and Klein made in A DH That Matters, where they wrote: “the digital humanities has always seen itself as a field that engages the world beyond the academy—through its orientation toward the public in its scholarship, pedagogy, and service” (Gold and Klein).

Bibliography

Colored Convention Project Principles. n.d. Website. 31 Aug 2020. <https://coloredconventions.org/about/principles/>.

Gold, Matthew K., and Lauren F. Klein. “Introduction. A DH That Matters.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. eBook.<https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/0cd11777-7d1b-4f2c-8fdf-4704e827c2c2#intro>.

Gold, Matthew K. “Introduction. Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field.” Gold, Matthew K., and Lauren F. Klein. Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. eBook.  <https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/14b686b2-bdda-417f-b603-96ae8fbbfd0f#intro>.

Gold, Matthew K. “Introduction: The Digital Humanities Moment.” Gold, Matthew K. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. 1. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. eBook.  <https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/fcd2121c-0507-441b-8a01-dc35b>.

Introducing the Colored Conventions Project. n.d. Website. 28 Aug 2020. <https://coloredconventions.org/about/>.

Spiro, Lisa. “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. eBook.  <https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/9e014167-c688-43ab-8b12-0f6746095335#ch03>.

I’m delighted to welcome you to Introduction to Digital Humanities 2020! Here is our course description:

What are the digital humanities, and how can they help us think in new ways? This course offers an introduction to the landscape of digital humanities (DH) work, paying attention to how its various approaches embody new ways of knowing and thinking. What kinds of questions, for instance, does the practice of mapping pose to our research and teaching? When we attempt to share our work through social media, how is it changed? How can we read “distantly,” and how does “distant reading” alter our sense of what reading is?

Over the course of this semester, we will explore these questions and others as we engaging ongoing debates in the digital humanities, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, the question of whether DH has (or needs) theoretical grounding, controversies over new models of peer review for digital scholarship, issues related to collaborative labor on digital projects, and the problematic questions surrounding research involving “big data.” The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches.

Among the themes and approaches we will explore are evidence, scale, representation, genre, quantification, visualization, and data. We will also discuss broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship.

Though no previous technical skills are required, students will be asked to experiment in introductory ways with DH tools and methods as a way of concretizing some of our readings and discussions. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussions and online postings (including on our course blog) and to undertake a final project that can be either a conventional seminar paper or a proposal for a digital project. Students completing the course will gain broad knowledge about and understanding of the emerging role of the digital humanities across several academic disciplines and will begin to learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects.

Note: this course is part of an innovative “Digital Praxis Seminar,” a two-semester long introduction to digital tools and methods that will be open to all students in the Graduate Center. The goal of the course is to introduce graduate students to various ways in which they can incorporate digital research into their work.