Roopika Risam is an assistant professor of English and Secondary English Education at Salem State University. She researches intersections between postcolonial, African American, and US ethnic studies and the role of digital humanities in mediating between them. Her work has recently appeared in
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This article examines the relationship between intersectionality and the digital humanities. Intersectionality offers a critical approach to debates between theory and method in the field, transcending simplistic hack vs. yack binaries. This article situates debates over difference in the digital humanities within the context of the culture wars within the U.S. academy during the 1980s and 1990s, locating the stakes for diversity in the digital humanities. It surveys digital humanities projects, outlining the need for alternate histories of the digital humanities told through intersectional lenses. Finally, the article proposes ways of looking forward towards the deeper intersectional analysis needed to expand intellectual diversity in the field and move difference beyond the margins of the digital humanities.
Digital humanities scholarship and intersectionality
While digital humanities has grown, so too has the number of voices making the case
for attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, and other
categories of identity in the field. Increasing numbers of panels at the annual
meetings of Digital Humanities; Modern Language Association; American Studies
Association; American Historical Association; National Women’s Studies Association;
and Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC)
examine the role of difference in digital humanities scholarship. In today’s
eternal September of the digital
humanities
Where is cultural criticism in the digital
humanities?
Can we describe digital archives as
feminist?
Why are the digital humanities so
white?
Can information be unfettered?
A recent special issue of the journal
women, people of color, LGBTQ, or other under-represented groups
Have decades of digital studies enhanced, altered, or muted the project to recover and represent more diverse histories of writers, thinkers, and artists positioned differently by gender, race, ethnicity, sexualities, social class, and/or global location?
Resistance to the utility of cultural criticism abounds. Notably, Matthew
Kirschenbaum argues many critics target a construct of fundamental opposition in thinking
between humanities theorists and deliberately anti-theoretical DH
journeyman learning
experiences
The relationship between theory and praxis is integral to the digital humanities.
Connections between the two appear in the archives built, corpora analyzed, oral
histories recorded, and geographies mapped. As Alan Liu has suggested, the practices
of digital humanities make engagement with cultural critique online possible disciplinarily legible projects
that rely on
canonicity for justification, yielding a field that trades on its kinship to much older modes of
humanistic study
crucial work by women, people of color,
and the GLBTQ community
To avoid this pitfall, we need critical approaches that transcend false binaries
between the experiences of women of color are
frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism
burdens, largely the consequence of
gender and class oppression...compounded by the racially discriminatory
employment and housing practices women of color often face, as well as by the
disproportionately high unemployment among people of color
multilayered and routinized forms of domination...often converge
to shape
the experiences and limit the opportunities of women of color – black women in
particular – whose concerns are not adequately represented by either anti-racist or
feminist discourse alone
This article proposes that intersectionality is a viable approach to cultural
criticism in the digital humanities, enabling us to write alternate histories of the
field that transcend simplistic
In 2009, William Pannapacker called digital humanities the next big thing,
a move that recalls the
rise of critical theory, the ideological posturing, pop
culture, and hermetic word games
were supplanting humanities education
...the very idea of language as the
basis of humane education – even of human identity – seems to give way to a
post- or pre-verbal discourse of pictures and objects. Digital humanities
becomes another name for the obsequies of humanism
History repeats itself in other ways too. The backlash against theory for its elision of difference resonates with arguments for cultural critique within digital humanities. Along with theory came criticism of its rise from black, ethnic, and women’s studies. Many scholars in these fields were conscious of their hard-won gains during the 1960s and 1970s – establishing academic departments and journals and having their work recognized as scholarship – and worried their position within the academy would be jeopardized by the arrival of theory in the 1980s. They did not see theoretical models based on the work of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as schools of thought that promoted their goals. Rather, they viewed the rise of theory in opposition to their work, which was located not in continental philosophy but in lived experiences of difference in the U.S.
In her essay
The New Philosophers, eager to understand a world that is today fast escaping their political control, have redefined literature so that the distinctions implied by the term…have been blurred. They have changed literary critical language to suit their own purposes as philosophers, and they have reinvented the meaning of theory
literary critical languageis digital humanities’
black, women, [and] third worldscholars invested in intersectional approaches to literature are coerced into adopting the language of theory and
speaking a language and defining their discussion in terms alien to and opposed to our needs and orientations
Digital humanities scholars who work with difference fear for its viability, much
like Christian and her colleagues worried about their relationship to theory in the
1980s. Will black, ethnic, and women’s studies be legible within digital humanities?
Will other forms of difference – gender, sexuality, ability – have a place in the
field as well? Scholars who take up these issues focus on the ways digital humanities
intersects with how we engage difference in our work. These approaches are grounded
in core questions of difference above, articulated by Alan Liu, Jacqueline Wernimont,
Tara McPherson, and Amy Earhart, among others. Newer groups within digital humanities
have been inspired by their concerns. For example, #transformDH is an academic guerilla movement
seeking to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for
transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects
that push at its boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and
inclusion
intersectional critical cultural
studies” such as “critical race and ethnic studies; feminist, gender, queer
studies; postcolonial, transnational, diaspora; disability studies; DIY (Add
your own!)
gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and ability are
all central to how we encounter and participate in digital humanities
and
that we must work collectively towards
transformative, social justice oriented engagements
global explorations of race, class,
gender, sexuality, and disability within cultures of technology
The recent popularity of digital humanities obscures a longer history of which these
initiatives are part. Just as Christian pushes back against the newness of theory and
argues, people of color have always
theorized
Another area of scholarship that inspires digital humanities scholars invested in
intersectionality is new media studies, which has been asking difficult questions
about difference and the Internet since the 2000s. Lisa Nakamura’s work interrogates
the ways that online experiences shape perceptions of race, ethnicity, and identity,
drawing on critical race theory as she identifies a relationship between operations
of stereotypes online and offline raced, gendered, and classed, and situated in
particular social, and economic, and cultural contexts
and emphasizes the
importance of acknowledging subalternity in cyberspace produce and maintain the unequal
distribution of power in the mediascape
provide[s] an important analytical and
conceptual tool for enabling us to understand gender, race, and class, as
dimensions of social identities in transition, especially as reflected in the
media
often described conflation/caricature
of the new media scholar as an apolitical white heterosexual male
academic
Recent calls for intersectional analysis in digital humanities are further indebted
to Sandra Harding’s ground-breaking work in feminist and postcolonial science and
technology studies, which considers the relationship between feminist ways of knowing
in scientific paradigms, the role of multiculturalism in science studies, and the
imperialist foundations of European and American science New digital technologies have their own
history, one that is recent to be sure, but that nevertheless resonates to
historical questions of race, class, gender, nationalism, and sexuality that
are at the heart of a feminist intellectual enterprise
These concerns are vital to the analytical work of digital humanities, the
computational technologies developed or used to produce scholarship, and the ways
projects are designed. Like any scholarly field, digital humanities veers towards the
monolithic, constructing centers and peripheries. Every definition is necessarily
exclusionary but the task of defining is an inevitable part of academic practice.
Yet, acts of exclusion often come at the expense of those who inhabit the margins and
whose identities are shaped by intersecting axes of difference. This phenomenon
manifests in multiple ways, from the presumptive white maleness of digital humanities
What I offer here is the beginning of a genealogy that identifies the influences of intersectionality on digital humanities, in its approach to theory and practice. I chart the ways intersectionality has been part of conversations in the digital humanities and survey projects in which we might find hints of intersectionality. These are the traces on which we might build to properly situate intersectionality as critical approach to the field. Broad in range, hallmarks of intersectionality in digital humanities include common sense advice for cultivating a diverse community, theoretical models for understanding the ways difference shapes digital practices, applied theoretical models that position intersectionality as an already existing but oft-overlooked part of computation, and practical tweaks like acknowledging inclusions and exclusions in data or developing search functions that enable intersectional engagement. Projects that are explicitly intersectional in their design and development are more rare but nonetheless essential.
Among early voices advocating for a theoretically intersectional approach to digital
humanities is Martha Nell Smith, who proposes that the rigor of the field depends on
it. She suggests, Our pliant and accommodating standards
need also to be more interdisciplinary and take into account the
embracing messy
humanity in all its diversities
is, according to Smith, no longer a luxury for our community, it
is a necessity
How have these items of knowledge and the
organizations and working groups who made them come into being? Who has stakes
in their presentation? What is visible in these new media archives and what
might not be? Can what is invisible but relevant be known to users of new
digital archives?
frozen social relations
Producers should make every effort to
make clear what has been occluded by remediation, by principles and practices
of selection, and to unfreeze old binaries of authority and involve users in
knowledge production
Another consideration is the tensions evoked by engagement with difference in the
digital humanities. The field is beleaguered by its own creation myths and investment
in constructing itself through the
competing narratives of privileged, middle-class, white high-school politics in
tension with privileged, middle-class, white people who work
men –
middle-class white men
are more likely to have been encouraged to engage
with computational technology at a young age If you [digital humanists] want women
and people of color in your community, if it is important to you to have a
diverse discipline, you need to do something besides exhort us to code
Let’s make inequities of power something else we decide to
abandon
and proposing guidelines for intersectional engagement in the
digital humanities community: 1. Let’s think about ways to build
communities of underrepresented people...2. Let’s acknowledge that we all do
racist and sexist stuff sometimes...3. Let’s talk about when our niceness could
be shutting down important conversations...4. Let’s believe people when they
tell us they feel uncomfortable
Approaching difference by blending Smith’s recommendations for intersectional
analysis and Posner’s community guidelines reveals the ways the field is already
informed by intersectionality. As Bianco has suggested, computational scholarship
already is a radically heterogeneous and a
multimodally layered – read, not visible – set of practices, constraints and
codifications that operate below the level of user interaction
Our ethics, methods and theory are
Tools cannot be
separated from the knowledge systems in which they have been imagined and
made
but proposes we might frame intersectional practices as tools
themselves
By approaching intersectionality in the digital humanities at the juncture of
disciplinary knowledge and technical specification, we blend theory and method and
avoid what Moya Bailey calls the add and stir model of diversity, a
practice of sprinkling in more women, people of color, disabled folks and
assuming that is enough to change current paradigms
This identity based mixing does little
to address the structural parameters that are set up when a homogeneous group
has been at the center and don’t automatically engender understanding across
forms of difference
queer operating systemsuggests that a queer perspective, broadly construed, would change how we view technology. Queer OS
would take historical, sociocultural, conceptual phenomena that currently shape our realities in deep and profound ways, such as race, gender, class citizenship, and ability … to be mutually constitutive with sexuality and with media and information technologies, thereby making it impossible to think of any of them in isolation
queeras an operating system, Keeling proposes to decenter social norms in favor of their alternatives. Moreover, she frames Queer OS in intersectional terms, emphasizing the relationship between sexuality and other categories like race, ability, and nationality. Offering another alternative, Fobazi M. Ettarh interrogates the relationship between Boolean search terms and intersectional identity. Describing her experiences in library school, she notes,
I am proof that these [race, gender, and sexuality] are not separate issues. I am not Black one day and Queer the next. Instead, I am Black AND Queer. In Principles of Searching we learn how important and, or, and nor are in Boolean searching. Too long the environment has been Black OR Queer
Can digital humanities mean transformative critique?
lay claim to our place within digital humanities
where neither the digital nor the humanities will be terms taken for granted
In additional to theoretical precursors, we have projects that, in their own ways, provide models for how to approach digital humanities through an intersectional lens. An acknowledgment of the inclusions and exclusions within a data set or the source material is an important start. Allison Booth’s
Prosopography must be selective, but it can claim a share of attention for marginal identities. Most women have gone missing in history and have no printed memorial. The Anglo-American catalogues in CBW tended to exclude all but the rare working woman, woman of color, or woman who did not belong to the Christian middle class of English descent. Religious nonconformists and various minorities nevertheless began to use this tool of recognition. The collections camouflage or accept some examples of diverse sexuality and same-sex relationships and many examples of single or old women. It is high-ranking women who pursue heterosexual affairs who get censured in these books — but not always or not with conviction. Some books celebrate opposites of thegood woman type. The limitations of the lists – and any canons or lists – notwithstanding, a search through this bibliography and the books it registers helps to correct some distorted generalizations about the lack of records of women in the past.
The project’s
an indispensable tool for historical analysis,the project creators
see gender as one among other constituents of identity
A project might also structure its search mechanism to optimize intersectional analysis. Brad Pasanek’s
User integration is another way digital humanities projects can make intersectional interventions possible.
women,
Chinese,
African,and
diaspora,suggest an effort to foreground a range of objects from 125 federated websites. The Collex interface offers possibilities for creating exhibits, which allows users to interact with the material through curation; even users without specialized training could arrange the material to explore a range of topics through available objects. Moreover, Collex offers the possibility of expanding the archive of affiliated websites via RDF, allowing creators of substantial projects to seek peer review and inclusion in NINES. NINES demonstrates openness towards greater representation and offers tools to make that possible.
designed to engage readers in the exploration and discovery of topics related to early modern women’s writing
Rather than isolating race as a focus, the best research sees race in relation to concerns of gender, class, religion, and sexuality. To say that race is connected to these other social divisions is not to say that race is analogous to these other categories, nor is it to say that all marginalized people are oppressed or made marginal in the same ways
Beyond projects that address intersectionality indirectly, we can look to the examples of those that foreground it in project design. An example of an intersectional digital archive, Amy Earhart’s project
invites the scholar to utilize a broad set of digital documents to reconsider how the town and its writers are situated within broader scholarly conversations
These [Concord] authors interacted with groups less frequently recorded in textual documents of the time period: free African-Americans, Irish immigrants, the poor, and criminal class
By digitizing a broad range of materials that represent the diverse people associated with literary production the archive allows scholars to rethink the way we conceptualize individual work associated with Concord, to redefine our assumptions about literary and historical representation, and to reconsider the very foundation of our disciplinary studies
scholars invested in early work on race in digital humanities insisted on building editions and digital texts as activist intervention in the closed canon
A further dimension to consider is how intersectional analysis can be engaged through
text mining. In their work on the Black Drama database, Shlomo Argamon, Charles
Cooney, Russell Horton, Mark Olsen, Sterling Stein, and Robert Voyer made space for
intersectional structures within the database as they considered the degree to which machine learning
can isolate stylistic or content characteristics of authors and/or characters
having particular attributes – gender, race, and nationality
Race, age, gender, nationality,
ethnicity, occupation, sexual orientation, performers, if a real person and
type
allows joining of object attribute
searches, forming a matrix of author/title/character searching
one can search for words in speeches by
female, black American characters depicted by male, non-American authors in
comedies first published during the first half of the 20
th centuryhint at larger discursive and
representation issues
Can the database
be intersectional?
Conversation within the 2014 Critical Code Studies Working Group indicates the importance of intersectionality to our understanding of code as well. The CCSWG 2014 featured a week on
What is feminist code? What is feminist coding?in relation to code snippets by Mez Breeze and micha cárdenas. Among the conversations generated were the relationship between executable code and cárdenas’s work code poems, an issue raised by Mark Marino. cárdenas explained,
I am more committed to the visionary and speculative possibilities of these code snippets than their literal executable possibilities
allowing the absent-presence of feminist executable code to operate as an irritant
an occasion to continue to question the structures that have not permitted such a thing to exist
feminist without qualification can easily be equated to white, cis-gender, first world feminism,asking
What is gained and lost by the formulation of this code as feminist, as opposed to say, decolonial, in the sense of rejecting western systems of epistemologyand raising the question of the role of intersectionality in code
Shake syntax, smash the myths, and if you lose, unearth some new linguistic paths(qtd. in
Finally, practicing digital humanities through social media, Jessica M. Johnson’s
a social media triptychcomposed of three sites:
anti-oppression, feminist and social justice oriented
The field is also interdisciplinary, supporting and supported by research emerging from the fields of African, Africana/African-American, and Latin American studies; women, gender, and sexuality studies; and feminist, post-colonial, and race theory
black feminist/radical woman of color digital humanist and media maker
writing,
research,and
teachingtracks, the site provides a range of resources on African Atlantic Diaspora history. Complementing these sites is
processing Atlantic slavery through application, code, and screen
The theoretical approaches and projects I have described here are intentionally diverse in subject, providing a survey of intersectional traces in the digital humanities. Some projects, like Earhart’s, Argamon et al.’s and Johnson’s work, consciously integrate intersectionality into their design. Others, like
The affordances of the digital humanities are often thought to reside in its ethos of
building and hacking, in the pursuit of knowledge that emerge from the act of making.
As this survey of theoretical and project-based traces of intersectionality within
digital humanities proposes, cultural critique is perhaps misunderstood by its
detractors in the field as an attempt to force a theoretical rubric onto digital
humanities or to rehearse a hack
vs. yack
binary. Rather, theoretical
moves are implicit within digital humanities projects and excavating them is
necessary to ensuring intellectual diversity. We have the opportunity to build a more
inclusive field, new methodologies, and new forms of analysis.
Why an intersectional approach? As Kathy Davis suggests, intersectionality is not a
normative straitjacket
or
predetermined method of feminist analysis anticipates, rather than arrives
at, the normative or theoretical goals often imputed to it
doing
intersectionality. Rather,
intersectional digital humanities asks us to begin with the specificities of a data
set, identify the layers of difference that intersect within it, and use that
knowledge as a basis for project design.
The fluidity of intersectionality is a natural fit for the flexibility that digital
humanities connotes. In its recent popularity, Patrik Svensson suggests, digital
humanities has seen a higher degree of heterogeneity and
inclusion of other epistemic traditions
a tool, an object of study, an
exploratory laboratory, an expressive medium, and an activist venue
big-tent digital humanities
would encompass this proliferation of modes
meeting place, innovation hub, and trading zone
to emphasize commitment to interdisciplinary work
and deep collaboration
fractioned (not homogeneous)
collaborative (not coerced) trading zone and a meeting space that supports
deeply collaborative work, individual expression, unexpected connections, and
synergetic power
needs to support and allow multiple
modes of engagement between the humanities and the digital...[to] maximize
points of interaction, tackle large research and methodology challenges, and
facilitate deep integration between thinking and making
imagining the world from multiple
perspectives and wrestling with conflicting evidence about the world
faces these ambiguities head-on and even
preserves them
Working at the intersections of digital humanities and intersectionality, we can
intervene in the false dichotomy between digital humanities and cultural critique.
For, as Bianco reminds, We are not required to choose between
the philosophical, critical, cultural, and computational; we
I gratefully acknowledge the advice of Jacqueline Wernimont and three anonymous