Through our class discussion and readings, it is enlightening to learn how the digital humanities field has evolved over the years. Furthermore, it seems that the field has faced similar setbacks and reckonings with regards to defining the field, who is part of the community and how changes in society can impact the field.

The sites and projects we’ve explored embody the concepts discussed in the readings. Whether it’s access to prior online publications, or online archives of history bringing hidden stories to life through texts, maps and images, each site captures the definitions of digital humanities discussed throughout the readings and in our last class. In addition, the sites represent the complexity of digital humanities and how the field is not a “one-size fits all.” 

For instance, in The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and The Colored Conventions Project, the scholars have compiled powerful digital tools that not only bring attention to social issues, but serve a purpose to educate audiences on our painful history, and encourage us to think about the ways we teach history to future generations. This ideology is also referenced in A DH That Matters in the context of addressing problems we currently face, “…  we must interrogate our work to ensure that we are not ourselves complicit in the neoliberal practice of naming problems in order to evade their resolution.” 

Meanwhile, in Reviews in Digital Humanities, Drs. Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam have designed an open access archive of peer-reviewed journals, providing those who wish to enter digital humanities a deep dive of the current phenomena in the field. Such sites are crucial as they begin to provide accessibility (excluding those who don’t have access to technology or computers), but simultaneously serve as a means of transparency of which fields of study are featured on the site, bringing back the questions of who is currently part of the digital humanities community? And who is being excluded as a result?  

When we review Gold’s intro “The Digital Humanities Moment” in 2012, Klein and Gold’s intro “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field” in 2016, and the last one in 2019 Gold and Klein’s intro “A DH That Matters” as a set, we see a clear overview in-progress of what DH means, what DH does, and what the current notion of DH is not able to cover and explain. By calling DH the “big tent” and supporting DH as an expanded field, scholars in the field set the ground and point the direction for us to examine broad-scale/interdisciplinary studies/multiple power structures (race, gender, class, geography, etc.) in defining DH. We clearly could not think DH in the singular form in any unified way. I found the organizing method of “boundary objects” in the Bodies of Information very useful and as I put in my annotations the “polythetic” (having many, but not all properties, in common) way of giving definitions but in the meantime get all on board is a very good practice too. Wernimont and Losh’s Introduction and Josephs and Risam’s work “The Digital Black Atlantic” challenge the concept of “big tent” and calls on us to reconsider the question: is this “big tent” big enough to include marginalized or even invisible groups?

The Torn Apart/Separados is a social justice DH project of data narratives presenting the landscape of immigrant detention and is a collaboration among faculties, librarians, and students. The project looks at marginalized groups’ stories happening in the “backyards,” under the “big tent” and represents a way of looking at immigrant data and designing visualizations. I also searched the name of the project and found many talks/reports/interviews done by their team members, which I think we could further ask a good question in defining DH practices: how to facilitate collaboration and build networks/how to promote and increase a project’s impact to encourage people to understand a crisis.

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive presents pre-twentieth-century Caribbean materials to unfold the stories of the early Caribbean. I browsed the “Archive” and “Classroom” sections on their site and think this project is a wonderful example of combing DH and its “stepchild” Digital Pedagogy. Their design paid special attention to diverse perspectives and possible readers’ reactions to materials that might be authored-centered in the past. (“The materials in the archive are primarily authored and published by Europeans, but the ECDA aims to use digital tools to “remix” the archive and foreground the centrality and creativity of enslaved and free African, Afro-creole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world.” “Take a Tour.” Early Caribbean Digital Archive. Accessed September 7, 2022. https://ecda.northeastern.edu/) By looking at this project, I am especially interested but also puzzled at the intersection of DH and Literary Studies. In most DH definitions, we see “humanities “but I usually see more practices in History and Sociology. If we are going to cover sub-disciplines of Humanities, what does it mean to be a DH scholar in literature and how do we study narratives, novels, poetry, and diaries? Is it necessary to distinguish methods between literary history and close reading?

The two sites above are housed in the universities’ domains. The Colored Conventions Project is different and is a collaboration between universities. But I also found a site sustainability issue there. When I clicked the button “Read Project Principles,” a 404 page pops up. This might not be specifically a DH definition problem, but how we store things in the digital age is super critical in creating DH projects.  

Reviews in Digital Humanities is definitely a pilot of peer-reviewed scholarly contributions in the field of DH. Peer reviews and the relevant publishing process are certainly an issue in evaluating what counts in a scholar’s contribution to a certain field. I really enjoyed reading these reviews but am still not sure about what we should do to develop DH research journals other than the review type.

It was interesting to read the different introductions to the Debates in Digital Humanities series this week as they showcased the evolving definition(s) of the field itself. In “The Digital Humanities Moment” and “Digital Humanities: Expanded Field,” it is noted that the DH lexicon was originally (and often still is) grouped by the term “The Big Tent” of DH, which was how the initial 2011 Debates book framed its included essays. Aligning with the nature of a good debate, we learn in the “Expanded Field” piece that due to some effective debating about the use of that term, the “Big Tent” (despite its name) was limited in scope and did not capture the full essence of DH.

This led to the concept of expanding the field, which naturally opened up more debates about the nature of DH inclusion. Through further debating about the DH framework, the experts in the field move away from merely adding new scope to include in the tent and start identifying biases and problems with what already lives under in the tent. Due to the technological barriers to participate in DH, we encounter debates about social economic access to the subject matter. Due to the nature of what is traditionally studied in the humanities, we run into the bias of too many DH projects surrounding white male figures. Due to the stereotypes and cultural pressures of who should participate in digital fields, there’s clear gender and racial gaps in the cohorts of DH practitioners.

What I found of most interest when reading through the articles, which wrap with the Digital Black Atlantic primer, is how each piece presents dialectical issues with the DH subject matter, and how the following piece addresses those issues and presents new solutions. Those solutions open up more debates, which create more solutions. It’s almost an infinite loop of a subject matter evolving towards a static definition that it will never settle on. This dynamic nature of the field is simultaneously daunting and freeing, as it seems there are countless angles to build research on.

It seems that digital humanities is experiencing sort of a zenith in its ability to coagulate different disciplines and change the academic environment in the university setting. We should look at the elasticity of the term as an advantage not as a disadvantage as many would claim. “Understanding digital humanities as an expanded field can help ensure that the specificity of these methods and their own rich histories can be brought to bear on DH, and vice versa.” The comment speaks of the evolution of the field to an expanded as more technological progress allows to greater expand its elasticity and possibilities of research that it brings. The volume and connectivity is ever more important and digital tools shape humanities part of the digital humanities so called big tent as defined by Knauss. Elasticity of the field allows it to research underserved communities that were neglected either by design or because there was no academic progress so speak for its researchers as it allows it to connect with different disciplines under one banner. Different communities can have a voice through the tools of digital humanities but we must not forget the needs of those said communities and ethics of research surrounding that. Digital humanities should be looked as a tool, a valuable tool in a researchers kit for more nuanced understanding within the humanities discipline.

The transition from the tag “the next big thing”(Chronicle, 2009) to “the thing”(Pannapacker, 2011) requires some justification. Also, actions speak louder than words. Let’s examine some of the projects to justify the importance of DH.

The Torn Apart / Separados, a collaborative project launched in June 2018 centered around the United States immigration policy of separating families at the Mexico-U.S. border. This project is under the “big tent” of social justice and interventions against government policy to avert humanitarian crises. The most important aspect of this project is giving voice to the unheard, revealing the untold stories, and focusing on those who require to be uplifted. In a broader way, DH scholars have drawn an overall landscape of immigrant detention. The project demonstrates the collaborative power to execute a mammoth project at a greater speed with a distributed network and the ability of storytelling with data to alert people regarding a crisis.

The Colored Conventions Project is a free publicly accessible digital archive and information resource. The collection contains a series of important national meetings of Black leaders with the goal to enhance the living standard of Black communities across the United States and Canada. The project not only emphasizes the meetings but also sheds light on the crucial work performed by the Black women to make them successful that required representation. The project brings historic collaborative effort to life with digital tools and transforms pedagogy for students, activists, and scholars.

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive, is a publicly accessible collection of Caribbean texts (diaries, novels, poetries, travel records, and history), maps, and images of the early twentieth century of the Caribbean. The collection brings the two most critical aspects to light that are at the core of modern capitalism which also existed in the early Caribbean i.e. Plantation slavery and settler colonialism. Also, the phenomenal storytelling of  European imperial domination and enslavement of African and indigenous American people is at the center of the project. The project demonstrates the ability to archive history using digital tools which is an objective of DH.

The aforementioned projects demonstrate the significance of DH in different aspects. In its own way, DH has transformed these projects to serve a greater cause rather than only using digital tools. The question that was raised in the article “The Digital Humanities Moment” is, “Can DH save humanity?” I want to inspect it from the opposite direction of “Does humanity requires saving?” In essence, none of the projects are possible with pure humanities methodology. In my opinion, where traditional humanity stops, DH begins. DH not only fulfills these projects but also set a new standard for Digital projects that truly justify the title “the thing”(Pannapacker, 2011).

In our first class my group defined digital humanities as The analysis of the interaction of information with technology through a humanist lens. It focuses on how information is gathered, communicated, accessed and interacted with by humans with the consideration of various social issues therein (e.g. inclusion, technological literacy, polarization and misinformation, the impact of social media).

The Colored Convention Project states ‘The process of bringing the long and dynamic history of the Colored Conventions to digital life is one of archival recovery and innovative partnership.’ I believe this process is at the core of DH, it involves collaboration, community, innovation, research, digital archiving, visualization, digital exhibits, tools, and games. My group’s definition states DH focuses on how information is gathered, communicated, accessed and interacted with by humans with the consideration of various social issues which is in line with the work and enlightening and educational information shared on the Colored Convention Project site.

If I was to center an understanding about what DH is around the Colored Convention Project, I would build on my teams definition to include collaboration and community and utilizing DH to investigate and understand and teach history, especially around social justice movements in a visual and interactive way.

The Colored Conventions Project Why Didn’t I Know? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYgFgkxZh2o