I chose Mapping the Republic of Letters and focused on Locke’s Letters Project for a deeper analysis. 

The author of Locke’s Letters Project – Claude Willan of Princeton University, provides an attractive subheading for his work -‘ John Locke likes this’: An ego-network analysis of Locke’s letters. Willan says his goal was to answer a simple question about John Locke: how did Locke think of his letters? I wanted to know what an ego network was/is, and did John Locke speak about himself in the third person in his letters when he said, “John Locke likes this?” Sadly I couldn’t find these answers on the website and didn’t have the time to investigate for myself. 

Willan’s visualizations are impressive, and you get a sense of how much work it must have taken to put them together. His visualizations all have the same design -a colorful cluster of what resembles an island surrounded by a circular coral barrier. When you zoom in and click on one of the circles on the island, it brings up interesting information about a person whom Locke wrote. For instance, Philippus van Limborch was a Dutch philosopher, theologian, editor, letter writer, and latitudinarian. According to Wikipedia, Latitudinarians were people of that time who believed “The sense that one had special instructions from God made individuals less amenable to moderation and compromise, or to reason itself.” They sound fascinating, and the visualization would be so much more interesting if there were accompanying links explaining such things and how someone like van Limborch and latitudinarian were relevant to John Locke and his letters. 

I think that because there isn’t more context, it diminishes the significance of Willan’s work. I know the project is ‘mapping the republic of letters,’ but it would be great to have a little more background on why these letters were so important and what they contributed to the enlightenment. That information is out there, but if it was alongside Willan’s visualizations, more people could appreciate his efforts.

As I’m still absorbing and making sense of the ideas of this week and last week’s readings, plus our class discussion, I realize (again and again) how writing is a constant challenge and a tool for thinking. Ramsay and Rockwell (2012) compared coding and writing and asked if those could be considered intellectual pursuits or theorizing enterprises. Writing, according to them, is a technology or methodology that “lies between model and result in humanistic discourse”. However, the mere “act of putting words on a page” cannot be considered a “scholarly act”. But I wonder if those two actions -coding and writing- could in fact be comparable (or, rather, to what extend) and therefore, if “building” in DH could ever become a technique as transparent as writing seems nowadays.

Writing, this old method polished throughout millennia by different societies, helps that “thinking occurs in the first place” (Ramsay & Rockwell); it is both the medium and the tool. It took humanity some time to sort of collectively arrive there, and it meant a parallel process of delegitimization of other kinds of knowledge that resembled the act of writing but do not use an alphabet or a grammatical system for its production (for example sewing symbols and transmitting knowledge and stories through textile fabrication, as some indigenous groups do, i.e: the Kogis). But I would say that after all that effort to make alphabetize the masses there is in fact a certain degree of transparency when we use writing as the method to theorize. One can elucidate implicit and explicit meaning in a text and position the writing in a broader context that might reveal intentions, place of enunciation, interest, etc. One can read the subtext of a text. But I don’t know if that could be achieve in coding or in digital tools and for the general public. The authors themselves point to this problem, which is perhaps imbedded in the way technology was conceived in the first place: “it is the purpose of that tool (and this is particular the case with Digital Tools) to abstract the user away from the mechanisms that would facilitate that process” that is, the process of learning how to use the tool. There’s a constant separation between producer and user, back and front end, because that’s where the “mysticism” of technology lies upon.

And so, opacity in DH seems to be at odds with the critical humanistic tradition. But, it appears again in Kelly Baker Josephs piece for a completely different reason. She writes: “I am learning to incorporate space and time for opacity” in classes. This need is a conclusion she reflects upon from the course Digital Caribbean, she ponders on its content and outcomes but most importantly on the role of her students in the class. Here opacity appears as something necessary, a condition to make a classroom safe and have a safe learning experience. Opacity could be part of an ethic practice when teaching with digital tools but especially when dealing with scholarly production that directly challenges and destabilizes our identities, like the students from minority groups in her class interacting with the Caribbean digital. And so, she concludes that there needs to be a mediation between visibility for scholarly production in our digital era of maximum exposure (“livestreamed conferences, recorded lectures”) and invisibility (privacy?) for safe learning practices. I find her conclusion very valuable and her inquiries extremely interesting. Her reflections make me wonder if in our current digital world and for most of the population both the medium and the tool have exceeded us -the coding and the interface- they seem so beyond our control and our understanding yet so ubiquitous. Even when we have access to internet and digital mediums that does not mean we actually have them as tools, as Josephs puts it, “access does not mean use, and use does not mean full engagement”

So what would full engagement look like for everyone? What would be necessary to have the “opacity” in digital tools be turned to our favor? Would that make “building” more like writing? And why some authors propose the need to move away from discourse when using the tool (Davis Baird)? Why is it that less discourse seems more like a good thing or a “fancy” solution for the linguistic bias in academic theory as for the tech realms; why does this feel like a sort of suppression of the capacity to do deep intense analysis, why does this feel like part of the process of making everything a “ready to use” product that is unquestionable and mystic since it appears to us completely out of context just like the tech products themselves, coming out of the blue.. the “cloud”…when in fact they are not. There’s infrastructure, invisible work and extractivist practices operating all the time in technology creation. I wish DH could make that less opaque.

I also wonder, especially looking at the examples (provided by Todd Presner) of some DH projects that had a very critical and engaging outcome, what is the role of the “consumer”. When he explains the projects by Sharon Daniel and Erik Loyer, I can’t help but feel uncomfortable (which I guess is part of the intention of the project anyways). The lives of two very vulnerable populations, women in prison and a group of heroin addicts, becomes audible to others. Listeners that are most likely in a safe “social, material, and cultural circumstance of listening” and although this probably creates very empathetic feelings and challenges the hegemonic way of viewing this marginalized populations, I don’t think it alters the very vulnerable conditions of their existence. So, maybe to say this is a cliché, but part of me feels like the projects are intended for a society of spectators, those of us who have the comfortable conditions to listen, view or read. On the other side there are the people providing the data that gives life, sense, and structure to the project. And in another those that do the building.

Nonetheless, the possibilities that open up when DH projects engage in the “speculative making” seem fascinating, and perhaps in doing so the tool becomes more accesible to new audiences. I guess this is what Presner suggest at the end: “imagining a new move from within the order of things” and “changing the rules of the game”. Perhaps opacity and transparency could be part of those moves? and what is at risk for doing so?

Although an entirely different experience than someone in the Caribbean, I still know how the aftereffects of colonization can be complicated and painful. I grew up in southern Ireland, which fought and won its independence from Great Britain. The top bit of the Island is still part of the United Kingdom, and until recently the bitter division colonialism caused left a trail of blood and misery. Even today, any peace that exists is always on a knife edge. But I did think of a glaring difference between Ireland’s struggle with colonialism and somewhere like the Caribbean. Ireland has always had a voice. In the field of humanities, Ireland, historically, had some of literature’s finest promoting its freedom. 

Take people like W.B Yeats and Oscar Wilde. Yeats passionately promoted Irish culture and literature, and Wilde believed in his country’s “evolution of a nation” free from the UK. It helped that they wrote in English, but there is a difference between people like Yeats and Wilde from my ancestors and me. They were born into Anglo-Irish families. It didn’t make them any less Irish, but their background is closer to the colonizers and mine to the colonized. The anglo Irish were the minority in numbers and the majority in wealth. They had nicer everything, and their children achieved more out of life. So, as proud as Irish people are of Yeats and Wilde, it can also be tainted with a sense of inferiority. We want to ‘own’ gifted people who said lovely things about the land of our birth, but deep down, you know that their existence was very different. And these mental contractions contribute to the inferiority complex of a country post-colonialism. 

I thought of this concerning our DH readings these first weeks. There is a general desire to speak on behalf of marginalized groups within DH. But I believe we can never honestly know someone else’s experience, even with the best intentions. I think that one of DH’s primary goal’s should be to find ways for people to tell their own stories, particularly if they have an inferiority complex.

DH as Flowing Water

As I was reading the different readings assigned to us this week, my brain was trying to make sense of the different meanings, ideas, and perspectives of Digital Humanities. I was thinking about it must be exciting that  this field is new and how everyone is trying to come up with a definition.  It seems like collectively, scholars are trying to put it in a box with instructions on how to handle it (not exciting). 

From the first reading, The Digital Humanities Moment (2012 – until A DH that Matter (2019) – there seems to be a massive change in definition and approach. However, we all know that as of today, September 2022 – that definition is only more complex as we just underwent a substantial transformative change in our society due to the pandemic, especially in related to technology and humankind.

As I looked through the different websites, my mind shut off its analytical functions, and then I started to get emotional looking through visual projects of DH. The Early Caribbean Digital Archive & Colored Conventions Project DH projects serve to preserve history (good and bad) and educate students. The Torn Apart / Separados informs the public of our inhumane and corrupt politics that hurt our vulnerable friends, family, classmates, students, and friends. However, it can also be a tool for advocacy and promoting changes for people who want to support immigrant rights. 

Based on the readings and sites, it seems there would never be a defined definition or approach to Digital Humanities since humanity and technology are ever-changing. Instead, I think Digital Humanities can support the relationship between technology and human being. DH should not be in a box but flow like moving water.

After some technical issue I have access to the site and therefore posts my blog a bit delayed.

I enjoyed this week’s readings because they gave me an insight into the changes of the field of digital humanities over time. They showed different aspects of digital humanities, and at the same time more or less all of them acknowledge that digital humanities can’t not easily be defined and should not be defined. It is a field that is changing and evolving over time which can also be seen as a strength. I find this aspect relevant when looking at the two projects “Colored Conventions Project ” and “The early Caribbean Digital Archive”, since both projects work with archival material but gives the opportunity for the user to explore and understand the material in different ways. In ways the projects reflect ideas from the readings about not narrowing down and putting the projects in a specific box. 

Both projects look at archival material and historical periods with new approaches than the traditional way. The project Colored Conventions uses historical images and documents to expand our understanding of early Black organizing, and The Early Caribbean Digital Archive wished to expand how we discuss and think about history, colonialism, and the experiences of enslaved. When looking at the projects with the gaze of digital humanities their use of history and wish to create a change stands out. Something that the reading “A DH that Matter” touches upon with the potential for DH to be a technically and historically informed resistance. Both these projects reflect these ideas as they both present a push back to traditional storytelling of their fields, and ask the user to reflect on a new way to approach the specific historical context. Both are created with the idea of representing parts of history that are often forgotten or not given space. In many ways both projects can be defined as digital humanities projects today even though the discussion of digital humanities as a field is still changing and probably will continue to be debated.

A/N: This post was originally much better, but between my myriad tech issues this past week some of my data was erased. Apologies for any lateness on that same note.

In our first lecture, we asked ourselves to define Digital Humanities. Ultimately, the best agreed-upon decisions seemed to be those that had the most potentially opposed concepts, like ‘academia’ and ‘public’. As DH becomes larger as a field, it becomes subject to further privatization- not due to any fault of the field but simply as a product of the time in which we live. There is becoming a difference between Digital Humanities and digital humanities. The specifically corporate privatization of not only data but of knowledge, period, is a vicious cycle in academia in 2022. The barrier to entry for any academic field is so high, adding to that the pressures of securing funding, and you have Google awarding grants and SciHub being sued by the most major scientific journals out there. These monopolies are not only a problem for the market or even the private sector- it is affecting all of us. Google can have its digital humanities, but we must not let corporate ownership of our scholarship take hold in Digital Humanities. It is an ironic twist of fate that these monopolies allow us to simultaneously bring our scholarship more to the public, while also furthering this privatization epidemic. And with the idea that these two exist at the same time, there is a realization that Digital Humanities exists in an almost overtly liberal space. Knowledge for public good is an innately liberal idea, I’d argue. And that also unfortunately means Digital Humanists must do battle with many of our most prevalent political issues right now and must position ourselves as activists.

So how does the physical work shown via the websites provided showcase the scholarship associated with it? Museums are the perfect representation of Digital Humanities as a field. Public knowledge curated with an angle to show as much complex truth as possible (generalizing here), all the while it’s enmired in this battle with private collectors and institutions who don’t want to repatriate old artifacts. However, what’s digital about that? In walks the digital collection. While these collections exists, frankly they’re seldom used by the public. We must consider how we can fix that, make digital collections engaging outside of aca- or pan-demic necessity. Something about these collections that makes them very DH is the classroom sections of both sites (I unfortunately wasn’t able to access one)- the ability to further disseminate this information. I also want to say that there’s something innately Digital Humanities about African American, Latin American, and Caribbean historical scholarship due to the way information was taken from being privately held from people like slave holders and that information is now public by donation from families and diaries etc. That’s something beautiful!

With that, I think one of the final things I took away is that there’s the literal Digital Humanities, and there’s the mentality of Digital Humanities. The more things that have the mentality of DH, the better! However, with the rapid privatization of the internet, we have to actively fight for the digital component of DH to become public again as it was in the good ol’ days (snicker).

Ultimately I believe that what Digital Humanists are trying to fight is the age-old classic: power. Ownership of knowledge is the ownership of power, and in the most proletariat possible sense Digital Humanists are attempting to take back the knowledge that is ours– whether taken from us by corporations, wars, or slave holders. We are on the precipice of discussions that are ultimately about classism, power, and what it means to make us human.

After reading the introductory DH texts, I admittedly have become obsessed with thinking about the impossibility of (terminally) defining DH. It seems plausible that thinking about the “big tent” and “expansion of the field” and the “alchemical move” of juxtaposition all point to DH as an actively moving, changing, and static-resistant line of inquiry. 

Consequently, the focus of defining DH can shift to exploring and illuminating the relationships between all and various elements of DH (some might be: constituents of the DH community, topics, modes of scholarship, academia/beyond academia, activism & politics). DH becomes about exploring our webbed nature, without ever arriving at a single stable map.  We can train a variety of mobile lenses on a variety of interests and ask questions about mutual influences, dependencies, and the wider consequences of connections. 

I think one salient verb — a defining verb within the ECDA (Early Caribbean Digital Archive)— that addresses the active engagement of the aspects outlined above is REMIXING. As an example of remixing in the context of digital archiving, ECDA shares the “extraction” of slave-narratives embedded in the accounts of colonizers and collecting and arranging them separately to forge a new narrative path, a “re-archive”. 

From the ECDA website, a passage the underlines the centrality of remixing:

“But the digital archive, we believe, offers new possibilities for re-archiving (remixing and reassembling) materials from existing archives as well as archiving new materials. This is not just the promise of recovery—not simply a question of finding materials that have been hidden in the past. Rather, this is a formal possibility—one linked to the new affordances of the digital archive which invite (if not require!) us to disrupt, review, question, and revise the colonial knowledge regime that informs the archives from which we draw most of our materials.”

Remixing leaves room for multiple and layered versions of creating history and developing counter-narratives.  It’s a supremely creative and, I’d say, fundamentally scholarly endeavor (as it consciously builds on existing materials). Remixing proposes and makes use of juxtapositions and honors iterations. So, remixing is one definition of DH in action.

While looking at ECDA and thinking about its use of remixing in digital archiving, I was reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of the Single Story”. The act of remixing to achieve retelling mitigates the single story. I was also thinking of Adam Banks’ Digital  Griots:  African  American  Rhetoric  in  a   Multimedia   Age, which  compares the story-teller to a DJ (see: sampling, remixing) and explores the narrative power of the mixtape in this context. 

[Revision and annotation are also basic maneuvers of remixing (which we engaged in while working on this week’s assignment). Because digital tools allow for easy revision and annotation, there’s also a chance to play with them, go beyond their basic application, and to unearth their creative and political potential. Which is what ECDA is demonstrating. ]

Taken together, this week’s readings lay out a few key dimensions to Digital Humanities work and thought. For example, “A DH that Matters,” expands on several ways in which Digital Humanities work might matter to people who aren’t already immersed in the field. Two are:

• Social or ethical impact with outward-facing projects that speak to an issue, goal, condition, inequity, etc.
• The impact on other fields — DH’s ability to engage with and embed itself within other areas of the humanities

Similarly, the other readings present modes of engagement that aren’t quite dichotomies but have the potential to be — let’s call them “and/or”s. As in:

“Or” may apply to individual projects, or more likely, the beliefs of individual scholars — but the projects we looked at this week offer a vision of and, from the Early Caribbean Digital Archive’s use of traditional digital humanities practices to tell history in a way that recenters the Black diasporic experience, to map- and visualization-based projects like Torn Apart/Separados that use mapping and other digital tools to assemble publicly accessible data into an unexpected format that drives users to engage with information they might otherwise ignore.

One last thought — in comparing the readings with the projects, I noticed another, unintentional and/or:

Compare nearly any sentence in Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh’s scholarly “Introduction” with the clear and inclusive framing of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive and the Colored Conventions Project, which are intended to be used by teachers, students, and the public, rather than just scholars. To fully realize the idea of Digital Humanities as a “big tent” and disruptive force, it’s worth interrogating if the ways in which DH scholars speak amongst ourselves keep that tent closed off to the very people we’d like to invite in.

As I explored the different sites, I found a common thread of digital archiving. It’s crucial for these forms of story-telling to exist, and to be materialized in something that people can interact with, learn from, and share with others.

I was particularly drawn to Torn Apart / Separados. Beyond serving as a series of informative visualizations, I feel as if this project embodies how digital humanities extends beyond the “academic” in the creation of digital tools used for survival. The scholars of Torn Apart recognize that “visualizations and data are mere parts of” a larger conceptualization of the “carceral geographies of immigrant detention in the United States”. I am interested to see the ways that this project can continue to expand, and possibly document the historical rise of incarceration threatening immigrant communities throughout time. How have borders (and how the US enforces them) changed? What moments in time demarcate an increased surveillance of immigrants, and how does that reflect violence enacted at sites of incarceration at the border?

In centering an understanding about what digital humanities is around the Colored Conventions Project and The Early Caribbean Digital Archive, I would redefine digital humanities to encompass digital spaces of multiplicity. These sites serve as archives of digital humanities scholarship, as well as community resources in pedagogy for their respective focuses. In serving as a digital space for different projects to exist within, and for opportunities of entry to the field through community events, no singular definition of digital humanities is put forth in a way that allows for people to explore existing possibilities and envision new ones.