The theme for
NYCDHWeek
2018 was
DH in the Moment: Reaction, Response,
Relevance, which the organizers note was designed to “consider the ways in which DH work can be extremely timely,
political, and radical.”
[1]
Projects that spring immediately to mind as prime examples of such work might be
the #PRMapathon initiative that began at Columbia University following the
devastation of Hurricane Maria in late 2017, or the more recent, multi-layered
#TornApart/#Separados data mapping in response to “the USA’s
2018 ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’ for asylum seekers at the US Ports of
Entry and the humanitarian crisis that has followed”
[
Torn Apart 2018]. As Lindsay McKenzie pronounces, such “rapidly produced and highly topical digital humanities
projects are challenging perceptions of the field”
[
McKenzie 2018] and are therefore drawing our attention to what
the digital humanities can do “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
Inside Higher Ed Will Fenton writes: “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”
[
Fenton 2018]. These questions mark a turn in the digital
humanities, a turn that signifies an acceptance of space in the academy and
ownership of a recognized (potential) public platform that now demands we do
something with 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
The
Virginia Quarterly and two short documentaries for public
television. Additionally, Dawes was inspired to create a collection of poetry
from the experience and to perform the poems to music. Still unsatisfied with
these results, Dawes further collaborated with the Pulitzer Center to create
Live Hope Love, an
interactive web project that combined much of the above materials, with
additional video interviews, music and photography.
Before I delve into more details about the project, I want to say that I was
hesitant to begin here because:
- Live Hope Love was, to all appearances, a
well-funded project, which is rare in cases of what may be defined as
activist digital work, and
- It falls uneasily in that gray area between traditionally defined
digital humanities work and new media.
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”
[
Risam 2015]. I want to write Dawes into this DH genealogy and
therefore begin with the messy multimedia-ness of
Live Hope
Love. It is partially the project’s straddling of this unclear
division between media formats that makes it ideal as a paradigm of the ways
that digital platforms are able to react, respond, and be relevant “in the moment.”
[2]
The digital is what enables the seamless hybridity of the Live Hope Love project, as well as the ethical navigation of the
very real power differentials at play in a US-based report on HIV/AIDS in
Jamaica. The “vital voices” of 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 Live Hope Love allows
for the results of Dawes’ research in the HIV/AIDS community in Jamaica to be
relatively easily available to the members of that community, for them to
consume or use as desired or needed. It also allows for the stories of and from
members of this community to be relatively accessible to those of us
outside said community, both within and without Jamaican
borders. Stories filtered, yes, in part by Dawes and his collaborators — the
photographer and the musicians — but also the community members’ stories in
their own voices.
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). Live Love Hope demonstrates
how a digital platform can be designed to ethically respond to the needs of
vulnerable and marginalized Caribbean communities while representing them from
elsewhere.
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, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English
Departments?,” Matthew Kirschenbaum writes,
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. [Kirschenbaum 2012]
This, of course, is not the definitive answer to Kirshchenbaum’s titular
question(s) but it aims to be as capacious as possible for that moment. There
is, however, a notable absence of activism in this definition, indicative of the
perspective of the field then. Kirschenbaum writes at a particular time in the
institutionalization of the digital humanities, one during which it was becoming
the “next big thing” and required much discussion of
definition and borders, which activism necessarily blurs.
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
“moment of definition,” we are once again asking
questions of who we are and what it is we do. Specifically, how does DH work
“in the moment” and why have our embraced definitions
been noticeably devoid of an integrated activist component. But to ask such
questions is to exclude, to return to Risam’s phrasing, the many “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
[3] — many of which think (or thought)
activism alongside research and pedagogy — focus on members from marginalized
communities who have used digital tools to further their voices and existence.
The two (activism and “diversity”) are inextricable. The
“relevance” of DH, therefore, is not a new question for
those who have relied on it as part of their activism, and who have incorporated
their activism in their DH work. Black studies, gender studies, Caribbean
studies are founded on the question of how academic research connects to the
communities under study (at least when it is done well). In recognizing the
contributions of these methodologies to DH (and vice versa), digital humanities
is being forced to also recognize ways a definition based on scholarship and
pedagogy reveals only part of the whole picture.
In using the term “activism” in conjunction with the digital
humanities, I am thinking more broadly perhaps than the standard definition of
political activism. Rather, I am thinking along the lines of how Amy Earhart
implicitly defines it in, “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”
[
Earhart 2012]. In this way, DH activism can form a necessary
bridge between the lingering theory and practice divide of digital humanities.
Asking not so much what it is you are doing, but rather, how does what you are
doing serve to generate positive social change?
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”
[
Sutton 2017].
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 “supposed”
to be used, creating what Moya Bailey calls “digital
alchemy.” As Bailey writes:
Alchemy is the “science” of turning
regular metals into gold. When I discuss digital alchemy I am thinking
of the ways that women of color, Black women in particular, transform
everyday digital media into valuable social justice media magic that
recodes failed dominant scripts. [Bailey 2015]
“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”
[
Grow 2014]. If anyone is using digital tools to react and respond
and
make change in the moment, it is certainly Ruddy Roye. In one
of his trademark mini-essays on a
2017
Instagram post from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, he
reflects on traditional works of art and what he calls “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 collaborators rather than
his subjects, Bailey also involved members of the black trans community in
designing her investigation of their use of digital platforms. She directly
asked: how can this project answer not only my research questions, but also
questions that black trans women themselves might have about their networks?
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
Debates in the Digital Humanities,
Matthew Gold writes:
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. [Gold 2012]
The larger questions of the “nature and
purpose” of 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 “assessment” and “outcomes,”
has meant that the humanities must more transparently (and measurably) serve a
tangible and visible purpose.
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”
[
Gold 2012]. In order to be disruptive, we must also shore up
traditional forms of academic research and publication.
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
imagined
non-academic public. But that impact, that relevance, can — and in some cases,
should — be a multi-step process. For example, a project like the
Slave Societies Digital
Archive is purposely directed toward researchers. Formerly known as
the Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies, the project is a
preservation initiative housed at Vanderbilt University. It digitizes, and in
some cases preserves in analog format, records from churches and municipal and
provincial archives in what were the Iberian colonies in the Caribbean and Latin
America. It is a massive archiving project that has at its heart the mission to
provide “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”
[
Sutton 2017]. According to Angela Sutton, project fellow at
Vanderbilt, “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’
Live Hope Love and
Thomas Spears’ long-running Francophone site,
Ile-en-Ile, projects that have always
had contemporary communal self-determination and the betterment of the lived
experiences of marginalized peoples at the center of their mission. Careful that
we don’t relegate projects like the Slave Societies Digital Archive or
publications like
sx archipelagos to outside this
“moment” or irrelevant to activist genealogies because
their explicit audience is academic.
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 “hack or
yack” all one wants, but if either is divorced from a real-time
community, then what use is it?
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
“doing for” underprivileged populations in ways that make
us feel relevant; and then patting ourselves on the back (while also accepting
the rewards and accolades of the academy) for our benevolence. The caution is
that, like Roye and Bailey, we collaborate with our communities, rather than see
them as subjects of our work.