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ISSN 1938-4122
Announcements
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2024 18.4
Digital Sankofa: Understanding the Past and Futures of Black Digital Humanities
Editors: Rebecca Y. Bayeck and Joseph Bayeck
Front Matter
Digital Sankofa: Understanding the Past and Futures of Black Digital Humanities
Rebecca Y. Bayeck, Instructional Technology & Learning Sciences, Emma Eccles Jones College of Education; Human Services, Utah State University; Joseph M. Bayeck, World Language, Montgomery Public Schools
Abstract
[en]
In an increasingly digital and digitized world, weaved in algorithms, the meaning and importance of the emerging field
of Black digital humanities (Black DH) is central to our understanding of the experiences of Black people. This special
issue builds on previous publications to center Black people and Blackness in the current world through the lenses of
Black DH, setting the stage for the various meanings and roles Black DH can play in its intersection with others fields
and practices that affect Black humanity and experience.
Articles
Debates in #BlackDH: Key Moments and Queer Directions in Black Studies Scholarship
Faithe J. Day
Abstract
[en]
Historically, the study of the digital has been an amorphous undertaking, spanning multiple fields and disciplines and positioning the
digital as a democratic space open to multiple communities and perspectives. Despite this ideology, scholarship, including research on
#transformDH to #BlackDH, has demonstrated the need for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion within the digital humanities.
Specifically, these hashtags have been used to curate diverse scholarship while demonstrating the need to create a scholarship that
focuses on an intersectional understanding of the digital humanities. By drawing on the histories of research and researchers both
within and outside of Black studies, this article will illuminate the means and methods of producing scholarship at this critical
intersection while speaking to the need for greater inclusion of Black feminist, queer, and justice-oriented perspectives.
Pushing back against the impetus to add identity to the title of a field or framework in name but not practice, this article refines
the histories and contributions of multiple disciplines and standpoints that should be included and credited when defining the
“Black” in Black digital humanities. Whether sparking hashtag activism and crowdsourcing digital labor to developing new
terminology and fields, Black digital humanities draws on and develops work that is already critically engaged with the intersection
of identity and digital studies in theory and praxis. By focusing on the development of the Black digital humanities and its defining
characteristics, this article will also articulate how the nexus of digital research, activism, and pedagogy offers key interventions
and new directions for both Black studies and the digital humanities.
Bridging the Gap of Exhibition Design, Instructional Design, and the Learning Sciences
for the Future of Black Digital Humanities
Rebecca Y. Bayeck, Instructional Technology & Learning Sciences, Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, Utah State University
Abstract
[en]
This article examines the connection between Black digital humanities and fields such as the learning sciences,
instructional design, and exhibition design. Focusing on key elements of these fields, this paper shows their
relevance to Black digital humanities, arguing that the future of this emerging field lies in its intersections with
other disciplines.
Infrastructural Sovereignty in the Black Atlantic
Dhanashree Thorat, Mississippi State University
Abstract
[en]
This article locates how the violent afterlives of slavery and colonialism manifest in internet infrastructure,
specifically focusing on Google's undersea fiber-optic cable named “Equiano”. This naming calls on Olaudah
Equiano, an eighteenth-century Black man who was sold into slavery and later purchased his own freedom.
Equiano eventually advocated for the abolitionist movement and published an autobiographical account called
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
(1789). Reading Google's infrastructural initiative against the grain of Equiano's autobiographical
narrative, I pursue the histories, lived experiences, and affective registers of enslavement, colonialism, and Black
liberation called into being by the invocation of Equiano's name. This article highlights the implications
of undersea cable projects for infrastructural sovereignty when Western and capitalist corporations drive the
development of internet infrastructure in postcolonial nation-states like Nigeria. Furthermore, I forward
Equiano's testimony and his unrestrained desire for freedom as a call to reimagine internet
infrastructural politics and data justice. Equiano's autobiography testifies to the capacity of the Black
radical imagination to pursue liberatory pathways that had been declared foreclosed under regimes of racial terror.
Methodologically, I build on extant scholarship in literary criticism on Equiano's narrative as well as
Black and postcolonial digital humanities to illuminate historically situated (infra)structural modalities and the
racial politics undergirding them.
Case Studies
Decolonial by Design: Building Sekuru's Stories
Jennifer W. Kyker, University of Rochester
Abstract
[en]
This case study illustrates how carefully designed digital publications can make significant contributions to decolonial
scholarship, with a focus on the humanities. Drawing upon my recent experience creating Sekuru's
Stories, a co-authored digital humanities project featuring music from Southern Africa, I suggest
several ways to engage this decolonizing potential. Among other issues, I discuss which digital platforms may prove most
readily accessible to users with limited internet access, outline options for making content available in indigenous
languages, and highlight special interactive features such as comparative map viewers and 3D imaging. I also discuss
considerations in building digital projects that will prove accessible, robust, and sustainable over time, as well as
specific strategies for cultivating a wide audience. One highlight of digital publication is its ability to support
multiple navigation options, including both linear and non-linear ways of moving through content. Similarly, digital
projects can integrate both narrative and non-narrative formats, blending aspects of monograph and website. When these
considerations are taken into account, well-designed digital projects are uniquely capable of reaching a wide audience of
scholars, students, and laypeople. As evidence, I analyze data from Google Analytics showing that the primary readership
for our project is located in Southern Africa. I argue that digital humanities projects can prove accessible
and engaging for non-specialists without sacrificing scholarly rigor, and I call upon scholars to embrace the decolonial
potential of digital work. I conclude by outlining concrete steps to place the digital humanities more firmly at the heart
of the humanities writ large.
Community-Driven Linked Data Approaches in Builders and
Defenders: Nashville's Historical Black Civil War Database
Angela Sutton, Vanderbilt University; Jessica Power, Vanderbilt University; Fisk University
Abstract
[en]
The Builders and Defenders database
(www.buildersanddefenders.org) is a collaborative project
which collects the biographical information of Nashville's Black population during the Civil War era.
With over 18,500 entries, it offers fresh insights into the far-reaching viewpoints, experiences, interpretations, and
meanings surrounding the history of the free and enslaved Black builders of Nashville's wartime defenses
and the defenders of the city and a nation free from chattel slavery. It is grounded in work with this population's
descendants and others working in local Black history and is, therefore, shaped by many different perspectives.
This article embodies the team's reflections on the collective decisions and conversations between descendants,
public and academic historians, computer scientists, and software developers working together to provide open-access
historical information that was locked away behind paywalls or difficult to access on microfilm. These collaborations
allow for an efficient, flexible exploration of the history that continues to impact the lives of Black
Nashville and the nation. These continuing conversations with local groups highlight how the team's
intentions and methodologies are shaped by and continue to shape the community-driven approach to linked data.
Issues in Digital Humanities
Library Professionals: Instrumental in Black Digital Humanities
Jina DuVernay, Clark Atlanta University; Gwinnett County Public Library
Abstract
[en]
Librarians and archivists, particularly those whose work focuses on resources pertaining to the Black diaspora, play a vital role in the
field of Black digital humanities. Yet, all too often they are left out of conversations surrounding the Black digital humanities. This is a
missed opportunity. Reflecting on my own work as a library professional, I argue that bridging the gap between the Black digital humanities
and the social sciences, particularly library science, can prove to be incredibly fruitful in all phases of a digital humanity project.
Articles
The Best Laid Plans: Case Studies of the Loss of Four Early (1996-2003)
Digital Humanities Websites
Dr. Drew E. VandeCreek, Northern Illinois University Libraries
Abstract
[en]
This study examines factors contributing to the loss of four grant funded, free use digital humanities websites funded by the
National Endowment for the Humanities' Education Development and Demonstartion Program, 1996-2003: Decision Point! at Auburn University,
Hawthorne in Salem at North Shore Community College (Danvers, MA), the New Deal Network at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute (Hyde Park, NY),
and River Web at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The evidence shows that website loss did not occur suuddenly. In all four cases,
organizations that accepted program funds to create online materials ultimately failed to develop or continue procedures to manage them effectively.
As the organizations or organizational divisions that developed these websites struggled to sustain them or indicated an unwillingness to do so any longer,
their creator(s) asked a college, university, or research library to take responsibility for them, without success. Online materials became subject
to increased risk of loss in both contexts in part due to rapid technological change,often expressed in accelerating software product update cycles,
combined with a general lack of funding and personnel available for addressing it after the end of grant period. Several other elements also played
parts in website loss however, often shaping the ways in which technological developments and financial circumstances did their damage. In three instances
website creators discovered that common vicissitudes of organizational life, including revised objectives, changing tactics used to achieve them,
and new administrative personnel compromised website sustainability. In two cases adminstrators' responsibility for risk management led them to remove
legacy websites made obsolete by new technology. In one case research pursung technological innovation in the retrieval and management of large data sets
contributed to the loss of a funded resource. Finally, simple, inexplicable failure also contributed to that website's demise. These four cases can provide
a digital humanities community increasingly concerned about the sustainability of grant funded online materials with additional evidence of how technological
change and financial shortfalls threaten these resources. In doing so, it can also show how more complex organizational dynamics often contribute
to website loss.
The Ludii Games Database: A Resource for
Computational and Cultural Research on Traditional Board
Games
Walter Crist, Leiden University; Matthew Stephenson, Flinders University; Éric Piette, UCLouvain; Cameron Browne, Independent Scholar
Abstract
[en]
As commercial tabletop and video games become increasingly popular throughout the
world, traditional board games are becoming a form of endangered intangible cultural
heritage, and in many places what were once widely played games have largely been
abandoned. The Digital Ludeme Project applies artificial intelligence and
computational techniques to the incompletely documented rules of traditional board
games from 3500 BCE until the present to help preserve accurate knowledge of these
games. The project engages with the historiography of knowledge about traditional
games, determining which parts of the rules are provided by various textual,
archaeological, artistic, and ethnographic sources. To document this knowledge and
situate it geographically and chronologically, the Ludii Games Database provides the
first comprehensive and rigorous Open Access database of scholarship on the global
history of board games. Furthermore, the database is used as a source for data for
the Ludii general game system, which makes the games playable and provides the
analytical tools that will be used in future reconstruction work. Finally, the
database may also serve as a reference tool for scholars pursuing research on
games-related topics.
Author Biographies
URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/preview/index.html
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
