“What is Postcolonial Digital Humanities(#DHpoco)?”

Abstract

Recently, digital humanities has received attention for its intervention in literary and cultural studies. This was certainly the case last May when we three met and resolved to collaborate on this piece while attending the Women’s Studies Summer Technology Institute at the Univ. of of Maryland, College Park. While the definition of “digital humanities” is contested, we would assert that digital humanities brings computational and other digital technologies to bear on humanities scholarship and engaging humanistic tools to understand digital media. This is vital because it is indisputable that digital media shapes identity and culture faster and more influentially than any other cultural force in the 21st century. As such, it comprises sets of practices as varied as computational software use to analyze myriad texts, engaging visualization tools in research, using mapping software to understand literature or history (including participatory GIS), digitizing texts to create new archives, and using our knowledge of culture and history to critically analyze and understand digital objects and cultures