In my opinion, there has and never will be a true “definition” of DH as it in itself is an art and with art, there are many passages and pathways. However, I do think it can help captivate audiences and bring not only an opportunity but knowledge to those universally. For example, The Digital Black Atlantic brings a more “inclusive term “digital Black Atlantic” into the light from the very root, Digital Humanities. But, what is the “digital Black Atlantic”? Well, Josephs and Risam (2021) beautifully defines it by saying,

“In the space between “digital” and “humanities” where Blackness and technology meet, the digital Black Atlantic pushes back against the ways that technologies have historically been and continue to be used to disempower Black communities (and also against the dominance of such narratives) to instead emphasize how Black communities have taken advantage of the affordances of technology to assert their humanity, histories, knowledges, and expertise.”

Josephs and Risam (The Digital Black Atlantic 2021)

This leads me to one project that captivated me, Colored Conventions Project. Representing past and present socio-economic and racial issues, in which I feel that DH can have a strong representation in both. This representation being, showing and giving knowledge to others about issues whether it be nationally or universally. Uncovering “buried history” is not only important for the families that had to live through it but for the future.

Relating this to my current (and many) definition(s) of DH, art can be constructive, knowledgeable, collaborative, and even political etc. Art signifies history more than we know, and bubbles important issues for all to see. The “digital Black Atlantic” unites all from accross the world to understand not only American Black history but brings representation to the bigger moral dillemma of race. The CCP unites DH and their organization to bring “scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life.” by using “innovative, inclusive models and partnerships to locate, transcribe, and archive the documentary record related to this nearly forgotten history and to curate digital exhibits that highlight its stories, events and themes.” (CCP 2020).

In The Digital Humanities Moment, DH has an existential framing within the lens of the very purpose of the university system: “In a moment of crisis, the digital humanities contributes to the sustenance of academic life as we know it, even as (and perhaps because) it upends academic life as we know it.” And continues, “can DH provide meaningful opportunities to scholars seeking alternatives to tenure-track faculty employment? Can it save the humanities? The university?” These existential questions are still be considered.

One suggestion is that you have to know how to code to be a digital humanist but was softened later to simply building and making things. Of course, one can be a technologist and not a coder and I would suggest that a DH scholar needs to be at least the former, but not necessarily the latter which can be prohibitive and exclusionary.  

I’m interested in digital pedagogy, which the Graduate Center’s course description captures as “digital methodologies that enhance the classroom experience for both students and instructors,” and this class, Intro to the Digital Humanities showcases this. It’s a hybrid class – meeting sometimes in person and other times, online; using the Academic Commons and a public WordPress blog – a more streamlined and recognizable and intuitive platform than Blackboard, with dynamic online syllabi instead of PDF or Word downloads. 

In Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field, the expansion or “big tent” of DH is exhaustive and what I’m discovering from this and other readings – and starting to accept and even embrace – is that DH doesn’t have to fit into a neat box. Innovations happen at warp speed in the digital space and DH, as a living, breathing discipline – or perhaps more accurately, interdisciplinary field –  has to be malleable enough to accommodate and embrace those changes. And if it upends traditional academic and pedagogical norms that are desperately in need of innovation, bring it on. For instance, instead of the three areas of study currently offered by the DH program at the Graduate Center, I’d like to see 10 or more fields of study that speaks to range of interests DH students have and would like to pursue. The “big tent” indeed.

Northeastern University’s early Caribbean Classroom embodies some of what is covered in the articles, particularly the possibilities of collaborative curriculum. The Early Caribbean Digital Archive is online and publicly available. It includes materials for students, teachers, and researchers. It solicits materials from the community along with suggestions for syllabi, class activities, and assignments. In other words, it’s crowdsourcing curriculum and pedagogical innovations from a “variety of  levels, places, and backgrounds.”

The trajectory of the Digital Humanities delineated from Gold and Klein’s work in 2012 through Josephs and Risam’s 2021 work in The Digital Black Atlantic provides a traceable account of the evolution of the field into that which now fosters invaluable projects such as The Colored Conventions Project and The Early Caribbean Digital Archive. Questions posed in The Digital Humanities Moment regarding the necessity of theory and politics in the field, as well as concerns raised addressing the inadequate attention paid to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, appear to have been (and continue to be) gradually answered and addressed, with works such as Wernimont and Losh’s Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities pushing the discipline into territories initially recognized as neglected. Projects such as The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Torn Apart / Separados further speak to this progress, with the former working to illuminate the erased narratives of those subjugated and enslaved through European imperial domination in the Caribbean, and the latter functioning as an effective tool of digital scholarly activism in the fight for justice at the Mexico-U.S. border in opposition to policies of family-separation and the vast web of money circulating the United States’ Congress working to preserve ICE’s draconian influence over immigration policy. Having read what the Digital Humanities aspired to be a decade ago at the embryonic stage of Tom Scheinwelt’s suggested period of maturation, experimentation, and play, it’s both exciting and inspiring to see the resultant synthesis of practice and theory once advocated for in Klein & Gold’s Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field take shape in these unique and effective approaches to Digital Humanities scholarship.

If one were to ground their understanding of the Digital Humanities in a single project, Torn Apart/Separados would likely do the most to both define DH as it exists currently and to advance the possibility of recalibration and redefinition in the future. TA/S operates as a paragon of engagement with “the world beyond the academy,” providing a material analysis of the structures of power perpetuating an ongoing humanitarian crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border (Gold & Klein, 2019). Such projects seeking to elucidate fiscal networks of influence provide activists and digital humanists with the resources to develop further projects of resistance and disclosure, with TA/S explicitly stating this intention and allowing their data sets and models to be readily available to the public for future engagement. Through the open-source nature of the project’s findings, Torn Apart/Separados directly answers Gold and Klein’s question, “…how can digital humanists ally themselves with the activists, organizers, and others who are working to empower those most threatened…?” (Gold & Klein, 2019). Torn Apart/Separados works to define the Digital Humanities due to its awareness of itself as a “building block of large collective actions,” extending an effective strike on the clandestine nature of ICE’s fiscal entanglements to those who might continue such a project in the future as both the Digital Humanities and activism continue in becoming restructured, redefined, and recalibrated (Gold & Klein, 2019).

Resources

Gold, Matthew K., and Lauren F. Klein. 2019. “A DH That Matters” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press.

What I found the most interesting of the sites/projects was browsing the texts from the Early Caribbean Digital Archive. Its objective is “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.” There are some fascinating accounts of the time. How could you not be enticed by a story titled “Camps in the Caribbees: The Adventures of a Naturalist in the Lesser Antilles”? Even Victor Hugo’s tale of interracial friendship and rivalry “Bug -Jargal” is in there. I read some sections from “Camps in the Caribbees,” which are fascinating. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read “Bug-Jargal” because the PDF was in French, but given the author, I’m sure it’s great stuff. So I couldn’t help but feel that DH’s only role with such work is to help explain the context of when and by who it was written. I believe DH should be about simplifying the subject of Humanities, and what I found from this project and our readings is that this is not often the case.

One of the questions “The Digital Humanities Moment” asks is: Can [DH] save the humanities? The university? It can play a central role in progressing the humanities and third-level education. But, I think some of the arguments in the readings potentially make DH look like academic elitism. There’s a danger in intellectualizing and ‘owning’ the debate around very complex issues. For instance, in “Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities,” it says:

“Yet as women and feminists who have been active in the digital humanities since it was called “humanities computing,” we are often astonished to see forms of intellectual engagement that confront structural misogyny and racism relegated to the status of fringe concerns.” The implication that someone active in the beginnings of DH carries more credence on significant issues like misogyny and racism suggests that there’s a hierarchy within DH and those at the top get to say what’s what. 

As it says in A DH that maters: “Now is a time when digital humanists can usefully clarify our commitments to public scholarship, addressing our work not simply to “the public” but also, as Sheila Brennan has observed, to specific communities and the needs that they, and not we, identify as most pressing.” I think this advice applies to us too. We should carefully assess what’s already identified as pressing issues, but make sure to follow our own paths envisioning where DH is going . 

A perennial challenge among historians who attempt to reconstruct the lives of underrepresented groups in the premodern, early modern and modern periods is making the silence of the sources “speak” to the authentic experiences and identities of those groups. Surviving bodies of archival sources that ostensibly describe marginalized or oppressed persons, whether narrative or documentary in content, tend overwhelmingly to be recorded by the conqueror or the social hegemon, and therefore are biased by the power dynamics of authorship; that of propertied white men, in the context of transatlantic commerce and slavery in the early modern period. This presents two challenges:

1. Trying to tease out of the texts—beyond the biases or power-motivations of the authors—evidence for the authentic lived experience of the marginalized persons described; and
2. Extracting and presenting this evidence in ways that center marginalized persons as agents and proper subjects, rather than as passive objects of colonial knowledge.

To achieve these ends, the Early Caribbean Digital Archive takes the digital medium of its endeavor as its starting-point for the decolonization of early modern knowledge. As noted on the page Decolonizing the Archive: Remix and Reassembly, the digital archive affords possibilities for re-centering oppressed persons and drawing new connections across inherited bodies of organized knowledge in ways that traditional, analog formats could not. Beyond digitally extracting, remixing, recombining and uniting digital facsimiles of disparate printed sources–-as many digital history projects already do-–the ECDA demonstrates its specifically post-colonial aspirations by subverting the the notion of “authorship” through its embedded slave narrative collection, in addition to the creation of independent, searchable library catalog records resulting from these extracts:

…instead of (only) reproducing the authorial status of “Bryan Edwards” as it has appeared on the spine of his well-known book, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) for more than 200 years, the ECDA has also extracted the story of an enslaved woman named Clara from that text and placed her name in the identifying category of author of “Clara’s Narrative.” We are collecting a growing number of similarly embedded slave narratives, extracted from texts written by European colonial authors, which we have remixed to form a new digital anthology of narratives that speak to one another (beyond the context of the words of Bryan Edwards or similar texts) in new ways and across new contexts.

A brief look at the digital library record for Narrative of Oliver extracted from Edwards’ History is demonstrative. Oliver, a 22-23 year old slave taken out of present-day Ghana, is centered not only as the author of the text extracted from Edwards’ work, but is also treated as the proper subject of the extraction’s own library record. The addition of subject keywords (“slave narratives,” “Assiantee Country,” “Ghana”) to this unique record enable Oliver’s narrative to be discoverable by keyword search on the Northeastern Uiniversity Library Digital Repository Service in a way that it might not otherwise be in other digitized editions of Edwards’ History.

deep thoughts

Welcome to the course site for DHUM 70000, “Introduction to the Digital Humanities.” We’re looking forward to working with you this semester. We’ll use this site for our postings and will also make use of an associated course group on the CUNY Academic Commons.

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