Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, where she is part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster. Among her publications, she is the author of
This is the source
In this reflection, I discuss my path into digital humanities scholarship through Black studies. I share how I became involved in digital humanities in the 2000s as a graduate student who found that it offered answers to methodological problems I was encountering in my research. Then, I examine how early career colleagues and I banded together to create a space for Black studies and other ethnic studies fields within digital humanities in the early 2010s. Finally, I propose that addressing race — and its relationship to gender, sexuality, nation, disability, and colonialism, among others — is a matter of scholarly integrity that must be put at the center of digital humanities inquiry today.
Instead, the question we should be examining is how addressing the operations of race — and its relationship to gender, sexuality, nation, disability, and colonialism, among others — is nothing less than a matter of scholarly integrity and must be put at the center of digital humanities inquiry.
I came to digital humanities through Black Studies, looking for answers to a question — and found more questions. But the answer was always clear: we are the ones we’ve been waiting for to create the space for digital humanities to more fully realize the promise of the democratization of knowledge and to improve representation of minoritized communities in the digital cultural record.
In the late 2000s, beginning my dissertation on what W.E.B. Du Bois called the global color line,
I struggled with the limits of written
text as I tried to articulate flows of knowledge between social movements influenced
by Black radicalism. Paper seemed ill-equipped to contain what was coming to life as
a vibrant, multidirectional exchange around the world. Every attempt to pin it down
seemed a pale (pun intended) representation of beautiful complexity that lived in
institutional and community archives.
One day, everything changed. Doing research in the Huey Newton Papers at Stanford University, I came across subscriber rolls of
I didn’t know this was called digital humanities,
and I’m not sure many who
were working in the burgeoning field knew that either.field,
sub-field,
or
methodological toolkit.
Given the significant amount of ink spent on
this debate, I’m not sure anyone else is either. Today, digital cultural mapping
is such an accepted digital humanities practice, that it may seem odd that its
status was ever in question.digital humanities
had been introduced through publication
of
digital humanities,linking it to conversations between volume editors and the marketing department at Blackwell.
Becoming part of a conversation in its nascent moments, where the terms of the engagement
were being hashed out in the early 2010s — and, unusually for academic discourse,
hashed out through Twitter hashtags — was empowering and discouraging in equal
measure, particularly when one comes to it as I did: as an answer to methodological
problems I encountered in Black Studies. I had not come to digital humanities through
the same routes of other digital humanists of my generation, many of whom were
graduate students at universities with senior digital humanities scholars, but by
accident.Postcolonial
Studies @ Emory
in the 1990s was one of the first postcolonial digital humanities
projects, though she didn’t call it that either.
Mercifully, I was not alone. While Twitter was a point of entry into the fray of
digital humanities, it was also where I began to find my people — other graduate
students of color, as well as senior allies and those in adjacent fields like new
media studies, who’d found their way to digital humanities and shared my concerns
about the ways that digital humanities elided questions of race and
colonialism.
But there were battles every step of the way.
I have never been swayed by arguments about whose time
it is because power — in
this case, the power of academic discourse — operates precisely by dividing and
conquering competing claims. It forces a fictive sense of prioritization, the sense
that only one pressing need or concern can be at the forefront of conversation.
Instead, the question we should be examining is how addressing the operations of race
— and its relationship to gender, sexuality, nation, disability, and colonialism,
among others — is nothing less than a matter of scholarly integrity and must be put
at the center of digital humanities inquiry.
We aren’t there yet — but could be. And now