Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism

As the field of digital humanities has grown in size and scope, the question of how to navigate a scholarly community that is diverse in geography, language, and participant demographics has become pressing. An increasing number of initiatives have sought to address these concerns, both in scholarship—as in work on postcolonial digital humanities or #transformDH—and through new organizational structures like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization’s (ADHO) Multi-Lingualism and Multi-Culturalism Committee and Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH), a special interest group of ADHO. From the work of GO::DH in particular, an important perspective has emerged: digital humanities, as a field, can only be inclusive and its diversity can only thrive in an environment in which local specificity—the unique concerns that influence and define digital humanities at regional and national levels—is positioned at its center and its global dimensions are outlined through an assemblage of the local. This idea was at the core of my Digital Humanities 2014 talk, in which I suggested that accent is a fitting metaphor for negotiating the relationships among local contexts. Similarly, at Digital Diversity 2015, Padmini Ray Murray insisted, “Your DH is not my DH—and that is a good thing.”Claire Warwick reiterated this idea in her DHSI 2015 keynote speech, suggesting that local institutions and cultures are critical to digital humanities practice. Additionally, in her talk at the Canadian Society of Digital Humanities and Association for Computers and the Humanities joint conference in 2015, Élika Ortega posited, “All DH is local DH.” The insistent resurfacing of this theme at digital humanities conferences signals a critical need for sustained theorization of the relationship between local and global in scholarship and practice

Revising History and Re-authouring the Left in the Postcolonial Digital Archive.

In November 2013, the National Archives of Britain revealed a secret stash of declassified colonial documents that had been hidden illegally by the Foreign Office for decades past their allotted 30-year suppression period. The archive includes: [M]onthly intelligence reports on the ‘elimination’ of the colonial authority’s enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of a man said to have been ‘roasted alive’; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Among the horrors revealed in the million-plus files appear tales of bonfires held at the end of empire. The Orwellian-titled “Operation Legacy” spawned diplomatic missions to British colonies on the eve of independence charged with destroying evidence that, in the words of colonial secretary Iain Macleod, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government … embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others, e.g. police informers.”2 The missions were planned in excruciating detail: “the waste [burnt documents] should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up … [records disposed at sea] packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast.”3 News of the records first came to light during a trial in which Kenyan men and women alleged mistreatment during the Mau Mau revolt against British colonial rule. British historians, in particular, were enraged by the secret archive; as Cambridge professor Anthony Badger, who was appointed to oversee the declassification, has written, “It is difficult to overestimate the legacy of suspicion among historians, lawyers and journalists...”4 that has resulted from news of the hidden archive’s existence. Indeed, disclosure of these records reminds us that the imperial archive remains with us, in both literal and figurative terms

Building An Ethical Digital Humanities Community: Librarian, Faculty, and Student Collaboration

This article examines work building a digital humanities community at Salem State’s Berry Library. The initiatives are comprised of a three-pronged approach: laying groundwork to build a DH center, building the DH project Digital Salem as a place-based locus for digital scholarship and launching an undergraduate internship program to explore ethical ways of creating innovative research experiences for undergraduate students. Together, these initiatives constitute an important move toward putting libraries at the center of creating DH opportunities for underserved student populations and a model for building DH at regional comprehensive universities

Digital Art History for Beginners: The Spreadsheet

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: In this assignment, Nancy Ross describes her approach to teaching at the intersections of gender and class in twentieth-century art history through data visualization. Drawing on data from the Armory Show of 1913 exhibition catalog, Ross engages her students in finding data, developing data sets, identifying sets of questions intended to promote intersectional inquiry, and digging into the data to begin finding answers for these questions. She also discusses making graphs to visualize the data, then building on them to create more complicated ones. Ross’s approach speaks to the challenges she has experienced while teaching topics like gender and sexuality at a conservative university in Utah and to her success with teaching digital art history through intersectional analysis. Instructors can draw on assignments such as these to give students the opportunity to challenge their own biases, prejudices, and deeply held beliefs about the intersections of identity categories within cultural production, whether in art history or in other disciplines

"Teaching Artifact - Assignment: Digital Ethnography"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This digital ethnography assignment designed by Lori Ostergaard positions intersectionality at the heart of the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of the Internet. Among the goals for Ostergaard’s course are “study and apply theories of digital culture and its effects on online communities, especially in relation to ethnicity, gender, class, physical ability, and sexual orientation” (422). After initial assignments examining students’ own online identities and researching emerging media forms, the digital ethnography assignment requires them to interact with and analyze online communities as participant-observers. In their guided analysis, students apply their understanding of intersectional theories of identity to their study of the online community. They also produce a multimodal final project on the community, composing either a hyperlinked Web site or article, a wiki article, a narrated slideshow, or a documentary video. This assignment encourages students to understand the relationship between online and offline identities by examining behavior and language used in online communities. In their applied analysis, students explain their newfound understanding of how the Internet is grounded in intersecting axes of oppression. While this assignment is useful for ethnography, I have used it in my own classes for autoethnography—asking students to examine their own interactions with others online through platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Snapchat. Instructors can use this exercise to encourage students to think critically about their own roles as users and creators of online content. This assignment can also be used to help students reflect on how the intersecting dimensions of their own identities shape their experiences online and their attitudes about life offline

Fashioning Circuits

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Kim Knight’s course materials for Fashioning Circuits bring together the history of fashion and wearable electronics to explore the effects of media on bodies at the intersections of race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality. After doing small-scale projects to introduce students to creating wearables as well as participating in class discussions about intersectionality and media culture, students produce social-justice-oriented wearable projects intended to provide a solution to a problem, make a statement, or create a social intervention. This hands-on experience in critical making is accompanied by discussion of the affordances and limitations of fashion and its relationship with wearable electronics. While other course materials that blend new media with intersectionality tend to emphasize analysis and multimodal writing to assess student outcomes, Fashioning Circuits asks students to perform the critiques they are making by creating digital objects of a different kind—LED safety jackets for dogs, a carbon-monoxide-sensing hat, or an antianxiety bracelet—to demonstrate their understanding of intersectionality and technology. Instructors can incorporate Knight’s course materials, whether prototyping or implementation exercises, to offer students hands-on experiences of social justice innovation

ENG/GBS/WGS 3298: Women Writing Worldwide Global Focus Mapping Project

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Through the assignment “Women Writing Worldwide,” Jenn Brandt’s students explore the affordances of digital cultural mapping for understanding the relationship between transnational feminist theory and global contemporary women’s fiction. Brandt contends that mapping engages students from diverse backgrounds and connects them to the issues that affect women’s lives around the globe. Students begin by using the Tour Builder storytelling tool in Google Earth to map their own lives and tell their own stories. After connecting them to the platform through their own experiences, Brandt asks students to map the course material. In the collaborative project, each student is assigned a country and asked to research its context for women’s experiences. This assignment is significant for intersectional digital pedagogy because it challenges students to think critically about the different types of oppression experienced by women around the world and to understand the global as an assemblage of the local. Instructors who wish to connect students’ understanding of their own intersecting identities to course content can draw on Brandt’s exemplary model for class mapping assignments

Runaway Quilt Project

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Created for an assignment in Chris Alen Sula’s introductory digital humanities course at the Pratt Institute, Deimosa Webber-Bey’s Runaway Quilt Project provides an example of how students can draw on their personal experiences at the intersections of their own identities to develop a digital project in the context of a course. Drawing on her work as an African and African American studies scholar and experienced quilter, Webber-Bey explores the claim that quilts served as signs along the Underground Railroad through many forms of digital data analysis: data visualizations in Tableau Public, digital annotations using Digress.it, word-frequency analysis through Google Books Ngram Viewer, a timeline in TimelineJS, geospatial mapping using Leaflet Maps Marker, and network analysis in Cytoscape. Each method used in the project draws on material introduced in Sula’s course. This collection of assignments serves as an exemplar for how students can undertake multiple small-scale analyses to create a multipronged approach to a single research topic. Together, these modular pieces suggest how instructors can assist students in developing substantial projects on the complex intersections of race and gender by revisiting a data set through different research methods