- 1 – The Digital Humanities Summer Institute has grown concurrently with the dynamic field of digital humanities. Best defined as the intersection of computational methods and humanities scholarship, with a methodological commitment to thinking and theorizing through making (McCarty; Gold), digital humanities has gained significant momentum during the past quarter century, in keeping with the growing social and cultural importance of computing.
- The field has reached a certain maturity – at the time of writing the leading journal in the field is fifty years old – and so many digital humanists, both in this volume and in other venues, have offered different origin stories for the digital humanities . . .
- The discipline is many-faceted and so these multiple origin stories, with their varied inflection, help to elucidate the historical methodologies that explain why we do digital humanities as we do, and how we might consciously shape the discipline to do digital humanities in new ways informed by methodological and theoretical advances in the field. Among other indicators, the growth of the digital humanities is apparent in its increasing integration into curricula, and in its practice by an expanding community of researchers. It is now clear that technology can help further the goals of the Liberal Arts, and Doing Digital Humanities offers one community’s perspective on how engaging computation can realize those goals.
- 3-4 – The Foundations chapters introduce the theoretical precepts of digital humanities, with a specific focus on the particularities of the discipline that have been forged at the intersection of histories of race, language, gender, access, method, and scholarly practice. Together, the chapters outline how digital humanists might best interrogate these histories in the interest of an equitable discipline.
- 12
- Method archaeology
CHAPTER 2 Global digital outlooks in humanities Multilingual and minimal practices computing – Alex Gil and Élika Ortega
- As a group that bases the majority of its work on collective praxis, it is challenging to try to arrive at conclusions. As can be seen from these pages, the work of GO::DH is exploratory and an ongoing process. In agreement with the SIG’s objectives, multilingualism and community translation, and minimal computing, are two of our approaches contributing to the formation of a truly global DH community. These two scholarly practices seek to bring into DH an awareness of the different practices and local conditions. They also seek to highlight how purposeful and selfreflexive uses of tools can help lower barriers of communication. Furthermore, we hope to inspire others to rely on their communities to design and implement strategies and exercises that nurture their field.
Chapter 3 Problems feminism with white Intersectionality and digital humanities – Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh
- 35 – Feminist digital humanities, in so far as we can say that such a thing exists, has a problem, which can be summarized in one word: whiteness. 1 The scholars listed in tables of contents, conference programs, and websites of professional organizations are notably lacking diversity when it comes to racial representation. Even the most “recognized” feminist scholars of race in the digital humanities still tend to be white.
- 38 – Similarly, we find ourselves doing consciousness-raising work about hashtag feminism, Black Twitter, and efforts to facilitate trans-inclusive discussions that acknowledge and credit the informational labor of others. When we teach the MEALS acronym to focus attention on the ways that technology is always m aterial, e mbodied, a ffective, involves l abor, and is s ituated, we very often find that we also need to unpack that ‘s’ in order to understand how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and age are all at work in the particularities of lived experience.
- Has this “MEALS” analytic been deployed in the historiography of technology?
- 39 – This suggests to us a need to understand how innovation inequality, or the differential impacts of uneven distribution of innovation, shapes lives and lived experiences. . . . As certain technologies appear to become ubiquitous, assumptions that everyone is a so-called digital native and has ready access to the latest technologies effectively oppress and marginalize those who have neither the knowledge nor the devices. As Susan Cozzens and Dhanaraj Thanur observe, “technology flows . . . create social and economic boundaries such that certain technologies stop diffusing between and within countries, thereby creating innovation inequality.” We are living in a moment with both digital divides and ever-widening participation gaps, and intersectionality is one of our best tools for seeing these challenges.
CHAPTER 4 Towards best in collaborative knowledge practices online production – Susan Brown
- 47-48 – The status of citation as a bedrock of scholarly practice indicates the extent to which knowledge production has always been collaborative. However, in this context, collaborative practices are inflected by multiple factors associated with the transition from print to digital media, including differences in the way authority operates, the easy reproducibility of content, the apparently endless possibilities for inter-relation, major shifts in modes of reading and analysis, the flood of digital content that shifts us into an attention economy, challenges of longterm curation and sustainability, and the wealth of possible forms of digital scholarly publication in an age of incunabula. New streams of networked language challenge us, in ways we now only partially comprehend, with their massive shareability and mashable dynamic forms, to devise new forms of research collectivity that will help to overcome the isolation both of research resources and of researchers working in a digital environment.
- 53 – Metadata standards, by embedding categories that organize knowledge and shape our understanding of the world, are a highly political form of infrastructure, and their implications need to be considered carefully (Bowker and Star). Some standards make it impossible to represent the complexity of certain fundamental concepts (Brown and Simpson, “Curious”), and, as Christine Borgman has argued, “Interoperability allows some data and stakeholders in and keeps others out” ( Big Data , 47).
- 60 – If we can bring such collaborative knowledge circuits into being, then ecosystems made up of individual and team researchers, citizen scholars, publishers, libraries, and memory institutions, supported by robust scholarly communities and collaborative infrastructures, have the potential to scale up online knowledge production exponentially, with results we can only glimpse in current experiments in search, retrieval, data mining, and visualization.
CHAPTER 5 Understanding pre-digital book the “Every contact leaves a trace” – Hélène Cazes and J. Matthew Huculak