Kelly Baker Josephs is Professor of English at York College, CUNY and Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of
This is the source
This essay was written specifically for NYCDHWeek 2018, the theme of which was
Responding to the tendency to focus on “DH in the moment,” an essay from DYCDH week 2018.
The theme for NYCDHWeek 2018 was
consider the ways in which DH work can be extremely timely, political, and radical.
the USA’s 2018Zero Tolerance Policyfor asylum seekers at the US Ports of Entry and the humanitarian crisis that has followed
rapidly produced and highly topical digital humanities projects are challenging perceptions of the field
in the moment.
There is much to be said for these projects, much that has already been said and
more than I am capable of saying here on the technical, the practical, and the
affective labors involved; but that won’t be my attempt in this essay. I focus,
instead, on the fact of the current questioning of how the digital humanities
can be timely, political, and radical.
The timing
of this question interests me because it was not a prevalent question even a
decade ago. Judging from the focus of a majority of DH publications, which
increased significantly approximately a decade ago, the prevalent question for
many years was: What is the digital humanities?
We certainly haven’t answered that question to everyone’s — or maybe even anyone’s — satisfaction, but I find it more interesting that we are, in this moment, asking not just what the digital humanities does, but what the digital humanities does for others. For instance, in a recent article in
It’s time that digital humanists own their role as public humanists…. Framing digital work as public work raises important questions, not just about what we do, but where and for whom we do it
In turning to this question of how we do what we may do for others in the digital humanities, I speak from a rootedness in Caribbean studies and I begin with a Caribbean-centered digital project from 10 years ago, a time when digital humanists (newly named as such) were realizing the institutionalization of the Digital Humanities. In 2007, commissioned by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Ghanaian-Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes began research for a project on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Dawes’ research resulted in traditional methods of reportage: a standard, albeit extended, essay for
Before I delve into more details about the project, I want to say that I was
hesitant to begin here because:
But, in keeping with Roopika Risam’s contention that given the many
earlier, oftunrecognized instances of digital
humanities work that [engage] with difference,
I agree that there
are alternate histories we must write about the digital
humanities
in the moment.
The digital is what enables the seamless hybridity of the
vital voicesof those
living with HIV/AIDS— whether they have the virus themselves or are caregivers to those who do — are centered in the navigation of the site. In terms of technology, the poetry, documentary footage, video interviews, and performances are able to coexist coherently — the real alongside the poetic, critical alongside creative — within the design of the platform. The project itself is static, a closed aesthetic product, but it links back to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, where the continuous life of the project is captured via articles and videos related to Dawes’ Jamaica research and links also to a similar project Dawes later conducts in Haiti.
The web-based production of
The ethics of this presentation of Jamaicans living with HIV/AIDS is what makes the digital nature of this project so important. Though the entirety of the site does frame the video interviews, they can be played in any order and without the hierarchizing format of the documentary (for those who do want this fixed format, the two documentaries produced from Dawes’ trips to Jamaica are also included on the site).
This is one face of DH Activism. It is not a workshoppable, immediately-produced, immediately-reproducible, lightning-fast-results form of activism, but it is nevertheless one attempt at redressing a social inequality and generating positive social change. And this is what I take this question of response and relevance to be about: redress of social inequalities and the making of positive social change. But this is not new to the digital humanities. At least, the question may be new, in this DH moment, but the practice is not. In particular, those of us in Caribbean studies, in black studies, in women’s studies, who intersect with the digital humanities, have always already been invested in making our digital work relevant and responsive to the communities we work within.
To speak about those intersections, I’d like to go back to that DH moment of institutionalization when many scholars were offering definitions of what DH is, was, could and should be. At the end of his much cited essay,
Whatever else it might be, then, the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to, a scholarship and pedagogy that are collaborative and depend on networks of people and that live an active, 24-7 life online.
In the manner of the digital culture it is intimately engaged with, Digital
Humanities itself undergoes change rapidly, so that now, only 8 years after that
earlier, oftunrecognized instances of digital humanities work
that [engage] with difference.
The we
on the margins of those definitions of the Digital Humanities have been steadily
hacking and yacking with our communities and with our communities’ interests at
the heart of our digital activities.
In essence, it is not a coincidence that this question of how digital humanities
work can be timely, political, and radical
arises
in tandem with an increased recognition of diversity in DH. Movements like
#TransformDH, #dhpoco, FemTechNet, HASTAC, GO::DH, etc
In using the term Can Information Be Unfettered?
Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon.
Earhart speaks of
leveraging materials and knowledge … to change the social
position of people of color
; in particular for the digital
humanities, to use the space of the Internet [to] allow
those who [have] been silenced to have a voice
To make concrete the range of how digital work within black studies largely, and
Caribbean studies particularly, is already built on these questions of relevance
to the community or communities at the center of the work, I offer below two
very different examples of digital work committed to social change. First, Ruddy
Roye, a Brooklyn-based photographer raised in Jamaica who as early as 2013,
styled himself as an Instagram activist
; and
second, the Slave Societies
Digital Archive, which since 2003 has digitally
preserve[d] endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to
Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Americas
Ruddy Roye, already a photographer by trade for over a decade, embraced the
affordances of the digital right after Hurricane Sandy hit New York. He headed
out with his iPhone and subsequently posted images of the effects of the storm
on Instagram. The gritty reality of Roye’s images and the humanizing elements of
his accompanying lengthy captions — unusual on the social media platform at the
time — grew his following. His insistence on lengthy captions to add dimensions
to his already-striking images on Instagram means he deliberately pushes against
the boundaries of how the social media platform is digital
alchemy.
As Bailey writes: Alchemy is the
Social justice media magic
is what Ruddy Roye has
been making with his Instagram account for the past five plus years. In an
interview about his objectives with his work, Roye is not shy about his
ambitions. He states, a photographer once told me, about 13
years ago, that photography does not change anything. I have been trying to
prove that photographer wrong ever since
places that hold art,
asking: who do we do
this work for, what spaces should the work occupy, who gets to see the work,
who gets to tell the work, and on what platform should the work be told to
achieve maximum engagement?
These are the questions of community and
access that identity-based studies have historically asked and that digital
humanities scholars are asking more explicitly today. Roye’s own work with the
digital implies some of the answers even as it merely clears space for him to
continue asking the questions.
Moya Bailey’s theorization of digital alchemy grew from her work with black trans
women and the ways they build community through and across digital platforms.
Along with the concept of digital alchemy, Bailey presents in this article the
ethics of such work; encouraging academics to think, from the outset, of
designing a project with explicit questions about how what we do as scholars
might affect the community or communities we study. In the spirit of Ruddy Roye,
who insists that his photographs show his
Bailey positions this as a feminist approach to digital humanities work, but I
would argue that it also grows out of the tenets of black studies, which has at
its heart the historically activist mandate to work towards self-determination
and self-definition for black peoples. With the institutionalization within the
academy of departments and programs for Africana and African-Diasporic Studies
and related fields, there is a growing community of scholars who themselves may
be seen as the community for whom we do this work. That is, though the digital
humanities may often overlap with public humanities
and may be asking questions directly relevant to, or responding to, a
non-academic audience, it is also possible for the intended audience to be
specifically academic.
I turn here back to the moment of defining DH; in his introduction to the 2012 edition of
Clearly, this is a significant moment of growth and opportunity for the field, but it has arrived amid larger questions concerning the nature and purpose of the university system. At stake in the rise of the digital humanities is not only the viability of new research methods (such as algorithmic approaches to large humanities data sets) or new pedagogical activities (such as the incorporation of geospatial data into classroom projects) but also key elements of the larger academic ecosystem that supports such work.
nature and purposeof academia have come to include questions of activism and public intellectualism in recent years (both not least facilitated by the digital itself). It is not that activism is new to the university — think here of service learning courses as precursors — but that the public nature of digital humanities work, or the forced public nature of it, alongside a heavier emphasis on
As unpopular as it may be to say it, however, we also have to serve ourselves. We
— academics, humanists, Caribbeanists — have to make information and tools
available to others in our discipline so that the discipline may itself survive
to serve our students and, perhaps by extension, the larger public. As we
increasingly recognize the integration of digital humanities into the
interdisciplinary margins of the academy, we cannot afford to accept what Gold
describes as the fault line…between those who use new
digital tools to aid relatively traditional scholarly projects and those who
believe that DH is most powerful as a disruptive political force that has
the potential to reshape fundamental aspects of academic practice
This is not a new argument and not my argument here. I draw attention to it in
order to speak again to the question of relevance. The focus in that question of
relevance tends to be too much on a non-academic public. Or rather, too much on
the direct impact of a DH project or initiative on that full and complete open global access to these
documents. In particular, [for] researchers in and of Latin America and the
Caribbean to have increased access to their own histories
The availability of these records has allowed
historians, both academic and public, to re-create the histories of Cuba and
Brazil in a more representative fashion, centering on the Africans whose
forced labor built these nations.
2017 Google
Analytics reports show that the ESSSS site received nearly 50,000 unique
visitors monthly
and the digitized records have
been and are currently being used to produce [several] doctoral
dissertations and master’s theses
as well as course content and
teaching tools. Such digital projects as the Slave Societies Digital Archive,
then, are responding directly to a research-based, or pedagogical, need rather
than an explicit public need, though the line between academic and public
audience cannot in most cases be firmly drawn.
However, the positioning of an academic audience as the direct beneficiary of a digital project, particularly a project designed to speak to the needs of research on communities underrepresented in academic spaces, is an activist mission in itself. The success of Caribbean scholars is a part of my own objective with sx salon and was a major part of the conversation when I worked with Alex Gil, Kaiama Glover, and Dennis Tenen on refining the ideology and design of sx archipelagos. In particular, we prioritized access to research material, mentoring, and publication opportunities for scholars from outside the US. In asking what it is that the Digital Humanities does for the nebulous public, we run the risk of overlooking this very important community of scholars who need support in generating positive social change in the classroom. Admittedly, my understanding of the question of relevance and activism in the Digital Humanities is supported by, and inseparable from, my commitment to Caribbean studies. My choices to use digital tools for research, digital methods of analysis, and digital dissemination and presentation of scholarship are already tied to a much earlier decision to center the Caribbean and Caribbean peoples in spaces my training gives me the privilege to occupy; whether that be the classroom, or digital platforms, or this journal.
Having been too often in the position of claiming and justifying space for Caribbean literature in English departments, and for Caribbean studies in interdisciplinary spaces, I understand the efforts at defining the digital humanities for academic gatekeepers skeptical of what DH is and does. And I understand the desire to define for ourselves the relevance of the work we do for the communities we engage with and belong to. But, we need to be careful of how we frame the current attention to DH activism. Careful that in our framing of this moment, we don’t write a history of the digital humanities that excludes projects like Kwame Dawes’
These are some additional dimensions of the reaction, response and relevance of
digital humanities that I wish to insist not only into the histories of DH, but
also into the now now now of workshop weeks and lightning-fast,
immediate-results-oriented activism. To present a deeper and broader picture of
what it means to depend on the digital to redress social inequality and generate
positive social change. This defining DH moment corresponds with increasing
recognition of work being done by digital humanists already committed to diverse
minority communities and, therefore, it goes beyond questions of building vs
interpreting, beyond who’s in and who’s out. One can
Engaging with real-time communities, however, necessitates caution, with all
forms of DH activism, that we don’t in our rush to be timely, political, and radical
become a cadre of privileged DHers
In closing, I’d like to turn to a different defining moment, this time in Caribbean studies. In a special issue on
What is the picture that informs our various imaginaries (scholarly, fictive, visual, poetic) of the Caribbean as a space of investigation? What is the content of the form of that image and what is the rhetorical labor that it performs? What is thepoint (political, conceptual, disciplinary, moral) of mobilizing this particular image, rather than some other, of the Caribbean in these particular discourses?
In some ways, I am asking us to revisit the question of what
is the digital humanities
from the perspective not so much of what
we do, but what we do
My thanks to Sonya Donaldson, Alex Gil, Tzarina Prater, and Roopika Risam for their help as I shaped my arguments. I cannot do this work without a community of engaged and informed interlocutors.