Articles
[en] “Whole Self to the World”: Creating Affective Worlds and Black Digital Intimacy in the Fandom of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and InsecureBrienne A. Adams, Georgetown University
Abstract
[en]
This article examines how Black fans utilize social media platforms to engage fandoms
of contemporary Black popular cultural productions. Specifically, how Black digital
intimacies are created through examining the interiority expressed in the cultural
productions and their fandoms. Utilizing YouTube and Twitter fan comments from The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl [YouTube,
2011-2012] and Insecure [HBO, 2016-2021], this article
proposes affirmative transformative fandom to examine the affective relationships
fans have with their fan objects and fellow fans to explore their own intimate
live
[en] Afro-Indigenous Women Healers in the Caribbean and
Its Diasporas: A Decolonial Digital Humanities ProjectFranny Gaede, University of Oregon; Ana-Maurine Lara, University of Oregon; Alaí Reyes-Santos, University of Oregon; Kate Thornhill, University of Oregon
Abstract
[en]
Caribbean Women Healers: Decolonizing Knowledge Within
Afro-Indigenous Traditions, is a multi-year collaborative research
co-produced by faculty and digital librarians and technical professionals from the
University of Oregon Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Services (DSS). This digital
humanities project contributes to existing Black Digital Humanities by centering
deep-listening and digital decolonization methodologies that prioritize human
dignity, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), and data stewardship. More
specifically, Caribbean Women Healers highlights how
Afro-Indigenous (Black and Black-Indigenous) women elders mobilize their
intergenerational knowledge and roles as healers, teachers, and community leaders
within Caribbean healing traditions to effect change well beyond the traditional
centers of those communities.
[en] Digital Black Voices: Podcasting and the
Black Public SphereBryan M. Jenkins, Howard University; Taryn K. Myers, West Chester University
Abstract
[en]
Podcasts exist as new form of digital media that is quickly growing in
popularity but remains understudied. This study explores Black podcasts’
contributions to the Black public sphere. The study found that Black
podcasts are a space in which Black people participate in discourse that
seeks to build community and resist against hegemonic structures. This
study contributes to Black public sphere research and the digital
humanities field by positioning Black podcasts as a counter-public for
Black people.
[en] Voluptuous
Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought Romi Ron Morrison, University of Southern California (USC)
Abstract
[en]
As algorithmic models increasingly assist, judge, and manage human life, a growing
amount of scrutiny, criticism, and backlash has ensued, calling into question the
violence of such powerful applications and demanding a renewed focus on bias, ethics,
and governance. At the same time elite academic institutions and massive tech firms
have been adaptively adept at the capture and depoliticizing of its critics [Whittaker 2021]. Calls for a fundamental reckoning with the logics and
violences of computation have been largely disciplined into niche new industries of
expertise which Phan, Goldenfein, Mann, and Kuch refer to as “economies of
virtue.” In response, this essay explores Black Computational Thought as a
critical intervention into the residues of Post-Enlightenment thought mapped onto and
subtending contemporary computational logics. By placing computation within such
genealogical bounds, we are free to ask the question, what other proximal places
might we look to to recover computational practices that challenge colonial logics of
coercion? What other genres lay in wait? Black Computational Thought holds open these
proximal possibilities and directs our attention to the quotidian, social, opaque,
woven, and fugitive practices of computation born from Black diasporic movement.
[en] #BlackScholarJoy: The Labor, Resistance and Joy
Practices of Black Women Graduate Students Ravynn K. Stringfield, University of Richmond
Abstract
[en]
Black graduate students from all disciplines, particularly Black women, who may otherwise be isolated in our respective institutions, have taken to the digital as a space to resist the marginalizing ways of the Academy as it exists. We fight, but we also care for each other, promote transparency about the graduate school process, lift as we climb, build professional networks and friendships alike. We utilize the digital in innovative ways to transform our separate experiences into collectives. Blogs, podcasts, Instagram accounts, twitter threads, digital writing groups, and more all serve as methods of resisting and engaging in carework. This essay will explore the various ways Black graduate students have decided that the “revolution will not be televised” -- but it will be online.
[en] Reaping the Harvest: Descendant Archival Practice to
Foster Sustainable Digital Archives for Rural Black WomenJazma Sutton, Miami University, Ohio; Kalani Craig, Indiana University Bloomington
Abstract
[en]
Little is left of the built environment that marked the Greenville-Longtown Black
Settlement, a once-thriving, free Black agricultural community on the border of
Randolph County, Indiana, and Darke County, Ohio. The people of Greenville have not
been forgotten, however, because of the memory-work undertaken by each generation of
Black women whose power and agency connects their past with their future descendants.
This article draws on “descendant archival practices” as a method to understand the
importance of Greenville’s Black women in the preservation of rural Black community
heritage and in the writing of Black women’s histories in the antebellum Midwest.
Descendant archival practices connect Black digital humanities practices to the
Longtown-Greenville descendant community's digitization of artifacts and oral
histories and supports a community-owned version of their active Facebook group. The
result, a History Harvest called “Remembering Freedom: Longtown and
Greenville History Harvest”, will facilitate ongoing community
participation and future history harvests for overlooked, forgotten, and
long-silenced communities.
Metareflections
[en] My DH Present, Past, & FutureMoya Bailey, Northwestern University
Abstract
[en]
My Day of DH (Digital Humanities) 2020 included an hour long talk with a social
media platform about diversity and inclusion on said platform. Following their
initial inquiry, I raised concern around the language of “inclusion,”
countering that inclusion implies bringing people into an already existing center.
I asked if their BIPOC users really wanted to be included or if they wanted to be
allowed to exist on the platform without being disproportionately surveilled. My
ability to garner the attention of a social media platform and then critique its
work is not something I envisioned for myself when I started out in DH.
[en] Looking Backward and Forward: Pleasure, Joy, and the Future of Black DHKim Gallon, Brown University
Abstract
[en]
This reflection provides a brief examination of Black DH genealogy. Focusing on a set of significant moments and events in the origin of Black DH provides an opportunity to showcase how it has been central to the development of the broader digital humanities field. Moreover, this select survey of Black DH reveals a pattern of work that utilizes a “technology of recovery” to restore the humanity of Black people through digital projects that center social justice but neglect joy and pleasure.
[en] Caribbean Futures in
Black DHKaiama L. Glover, Barnard College
Abstract
[en]
The author reflects upon the intersection of Caribbean studies and “Black
DH”, exploring issues of hierarchies and Eurocentricity, as well as
recent conferences and projects which exist in the aforementioned intersection.
[en] The Fulll MontyElizabeth Losh, William & Mary
Abstract
[en]
Black DH is central rather than peripheral to the field of the digital humanities and
challenges the origin stories of humanities computing and its blind spots about data
and white supremacy. Unfortunately the same issues about diversity and inclusivity in
conferences, professional organizations, and scholarly communication remain unchanged
over the decades, and the burden falls on Black and Brown DHers
disproportionately.
[en] Nutha Planets: On Telos and Digital
BlacknessLouis M. Maraj, University of British Columbia
Abstract
[en]
This short reflective essay meditates on how/why digital Blackness need not strive to
recover or repair humanity for Black peoples. It questions the teleological drive for
building Black digital archives and technologies motivated by representational
politics. The foray performatively suggests otherwise by leaning into Sylvia Wynter’s
(2007) notion that such folding into the figure of the human — overrepresented by
Western Man — snuffs polyvalent and polysemic pluralities for Blackness.
[en] “For the master’s [DH] tools will never dismantle the master’s house”: An Alternative Primer for a Critical Black DH PraxisAngel David Nieves, Northeastern University
Abstract
[en]
Building on an earlier e-Black studies manifesto from the late aughts, this paper outlines a Black DH, that as a social movement and as a political project challenges without hesitation or apology a still white-dominated field of digital humanities – and is resolute concerning its commitment to racial justice. As Moya Bailey, Kim Gallon, and Jessica Marie Johnson have argued elsewhere, Black DH should be simultaneously experimental, analytical, computational, speculative, and have unique design capabilities as a series of practices and speculative exercises. This paper proposes guidelines or principles to assist this and makes clear that the process of scholarly inquiry with Black knowledge-making, and discovery takes precedent over final product. This praxis is possible if we promote collaborative co-creation models of teaching, research, and service for the humanities in an interdisciplinary framework that centers and helps prioritize Black women and queer voices and perspectives in Black DH work.
[en] New Questions, Next WorkBethany Nowviskie, James Madison University
Abstract
[en]
This brief, invited “metareflection” identifies the most exciting questions in
digital humanities and cultural heritage as those opened up by a potential
redistribution of power and redesign of our social and technological infrastructure
inspired by Black Studies, arts, and digital practice. What might it mean to shift
from extractive and controlled modes of digital research and curation to ones that
are generative, healing, and truly open-ended? What will happen if we succeed in
empowering and centering individuals, collections, and community concerns that have
long been marginalized? What might the DH community build next, if we make necessary
changes in capital, focus, and control — and embrace the shaping role of the choices
that each of us make within living systems every day?
[en] Our Time Is Now (It’s Always Been Our Time)Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College
Abstract
[en]
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.
[en] Linking Data and
Disciplines: Interdisciplinary brokering in digital humanities research Sabrina Sauer, University of Groningen; Berber Hagedoorn, University of Groningen
Abstract
[en]
Interdisciplinary collaboration within digital humanities research requires brokering
and boundary-crossing work. This article maps interdisciplinary exchanges between
computer scientists, media scholars and information scientists to explicate how
interdisciplinary brokering affects knowledge and tool production in the digital
humanities. The analysis of qualitative data collected during a 17 month-long digital
humanities research pilot - set to collaboratively test a digital Linked Open Data
(LOD) search tool - provides insights into the exploratory search behaviour of a
total of 122 (digital) humanities scholars, and how these insights informed brokering
work within an interdisciplinary research team. The article argues that
interdisciplinary collaboration first and foremost requires disciplinary recognition
in order to succeed, and demonstrates how practical, empirical research insights - in
this case about user research - mobilize interdisciplinary decision-making processes.
Conclusions indicate in what ways computational tools and collaboration affect
knowledge production, and suggest that understanding the stakes of digital humanities
research with digital audio-visual sources requires an integrated perspective
characterized by both theoretical interdisciplinary discussions and their empirical,
practical application. The article furthermore concludes that digital humanities
brokering and boundary work should not only revolve around tool development, but also
requires self-reflexivity in aligning epistemological chasms between disciplines by
means of collaborative translation practices.
[en] Critical Design as Theory, Experiment, and Data: A Sociologically-Informed Approach to Visualizing Networks of LossPeter L.Forberg, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Abstract
[en]
In this paper, I develop an online website that assists users in answering the
question, “What do you need to remove in order to erase [thing] from [your life or
society]?” through network visualization methods. This project subverts the typical data
visualization strategy of working with extant data by encouraging users to produce data,
demonstrating how data visualization techniques can constitute a way of thinking and
creating rather than just analyzing and representing. However, this tool and its
affordances are primarily a case study for a sociological approach to critical design in
the Digital Humanities: By critically examining the tool itself (as well as the process
that created it), I am able to pose the broader questions of (1) how does the creation
of digital tools and projects reflect a theoretical interpretation of the social world
and its processes, and (2) how can these interpretations constitute the data of
sociological studies? In resolving these questions, I suggest that critical design can
be viewed as theory, experiment, and data: designs constitute a social theory, data can
be experimentally produced within this social theory, and encouraging reflective design
can turn the social theories of design themselves into data.
[en] Studying Large-Scale
Behavioral Differences in Auschwitz-Birkenau with Simulation of Gendered
NarrativesGábor Mihály Tóth, USC Shoah Foundation / USC Viterbi School of Engineering; Tim Hempel, Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science / Department of Physics; Krishna Somandepalli, Google Research; Shri Narayanan, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Abstract
[en]
In Auschwitz-Birkenau men and women were detained separately; anecdotal evidence
suggests that they behaved differently. However, producing evidence based insights
into victims' behavior is challenging. Perpetrators frequently destroyed camp
documentations; victims' perspective remains dispersed in thousands of oral history
interviews with survivors. Listening to, watching, or reading these thousands of
interviews is not viable, and there is no established computational approach to
gather systematic evidence from a large number of interviews. In this study, by
applying methods and concepts of molecular physics, we developed a conceptual
framework and computational approach to study thousands of human stories and we
investigated 6628 interviews by survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. We
applied the concept of state space and the Markov State Model to model the ensemble
of 6628 testimonies. The Markov State Model along with the Transition Path Theory
allowed us to compare the way women and men remember their time in the camp. We found
that acts of solidarity and social bonds are the most important topics in their
testimonies. However, we found that women are much more likely to address these
topics. We provide systematic evidence that not only were women more likely to recall
solidarity and social relations in their belated testimonies but they were also more
likely to perform acts of solidarity and form social bonds in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors constitute an important digital
cultural heritage that documents one of the darkest moments in human history;
generally, oral history collections are ubiquitous sources of modern history and
significant assets of libraries and archives. We anticipate that our conceptual and
computational framework will contribute not only to the understanding of gender
behavior but also to the exploration of oral history as a cultural heritage, as well
as to the computational study of narratives. This paper presents novel synergies
between history, computer science, and physics, and it aims to stimulate further
collaborations between these fields.
[en] Algorithmic Close Reading: Using Semantic Triplets
to Index and Analyze Agency in Holocaust TestimoniesLizhou Fan, University of Michigan; Todd Presner, UCLA
Abstract
[en]
The following article presents a digital humanities exploration of indexing and
analyzing expressions of agency in Holocaust testimonies. Using a set of text
analysis methods to identify, classify, and visualize “semantic triplets,” we
show how attention to agency complements and extends conventional approaches to
indexing. Our examples come from two corpora of Holocaust oral histories: the first
were conducted in Displaced Persons camps in 1946 by an interviewer named David
Boder; the second were conducted by the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive
in the 1990s. We focus on two salient testimonies from each corpus in order to
describe the methodology and what the analysis of agency can contribute to the
writing of “microhistories” of the Holocaust. Building on semantic web analyses,
the methods provide a groundwork for the development of a graph database to search
testimonies by agency and thereby provide historical insights about what people
report they did and what was done to them.
[en] Researching Spanish
Dance in Time and Space: A GIS for La Argentina's Ballets EspagnolsBlanca Gómez Cifuentes, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Carlos Fernández Freire, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC); Isabel del Bosque González, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC); Idoia Murga Castro, Instituto de Historia, CSIC
Abstract
[en]
This study presents the results of the research project on the Ballets Espagnols de
Antonia Mercé La Argentina, a dance company active between 1927 and 1929 that adapted
the model of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to a repertoire based on the construction of
a national identity through the modern and avant-garde aesthetics of interwar Europe.
The systematisation of the preserved sources and their visualisation in interactive
maps permits research to be carried out on one of the most brilliant episodes in the
history of Spanish dance and to collaborate in the recovery of a forgotten dance
heritage.
[en] Sight and Sound:
Counter-mapping the U.S.-Mexico Border CrisisLacey Schauwecker, University of Southern California
Abstract
[en]
Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive are two archival studies of the
U.S.-Mexico border crisis that challenge hegemonic practices of documentation,
including those historically privileged by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,
human rights activism, and the field of digital humanities alike. Though De León and
Luiselli have participated in human rights work while identifying migrant corpses and
collecting detainees’ testimonies, both use counter-mapping to interrogate the
dominant humanitarian move of restoring visibility and voice, or sight and sound, to
human victims. After investigating the ways in which De León and Luiselli privilege
visual and sonic counter-mapping, respectively, I model a more multi-sensory
counter-mapping practice. Though this practice remains far from perfect, I argue that
such digital counter-mapping crosses sight and sound in ways that defy historical
divisions among humans and nonhumans. Accordingly, it decenters humans as the sole
victims of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis.
[en] Ethical and Effective
Visualization of Knowledge NetworksChelsea Canon, Department of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno; Douglas Boyle, Department of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno; K. J. Hepworth, UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Abstract
[en]
Knowledge mapping combines network analysis and data visualization to summarize research
domains and illustrate their structure. In this paper, we present a framework for ethical
and effective visualization of knowledge networks, which we developed while building a
knowledge map of climate communication research. Using the climate communication knowledge
map as an example, we highlight the practical and ethical challenges encountered in
creating such visualizations and show how they can be navigated in ways that produce more
trustworthy and more useful products. Our recommendations balance tensions between
qualitative and quantitative and objective and subjective aspects of knowledge mapping.
They demonstrate the importance of critical practices in the development of knowledge
maps, illustrate the intertwined nature of analysis and results in such projects, and
emphasize the constructedness of the resulting visualization. We argue that the only way
to produce an effective knowledge map is to produce an ethical one, which requires
attention to the ways trust and accountability can be produced at every step of analysis
and production. This extends the literature on ethical visualization in digital humanities
projects by offering a clear example of the utility of a critical approach for a
traditional, science-oriented knowledge mapping project.
[en] Heterochronologies: a platform for
correlation and research in temporal graphicsJohanna Drucker, Department of Information Studies, UCLA; Peter Polack, Department of Information Studies, UCLA; Pietro Santachiara, Department of Information Studies, UCLA
Abstract
[en]
The difficulty of integrating the data, metadata, and classification schemes
produced across a wide geographic, historical, and cultural variety of
institutional sites and practices was a major impetus for the creation of
Linked Data (LD). The promise was to make diverse sets of data
interoperable through subscription to an array of standardizations while
leaving the original data intact. These operational requirements enable
interoperability at the expense of specificity, and require considerable
resources for implementation. While LD supports connection and access
across disparate data sets, it is not focused on the intellectual issues
that have to do with enabling the correlation and comparison of diverse
ontologies, or preserving and exploring their epistemic and cultural
specificity — issues essential to humanistic study. In addition, LD is
exclusively concerned with linguistic data, and can hence not be applied to
information that is expressed in graphical form. Contrastingly, the
Heterochronologies project regards temporality as a concept expressed
epistemically through various culturally-specific, authoritative
ontologies, which are instantiated by graphical representations such as
chronologies and timelines. The project concentrates on extracting
computationally tractable structured data from historical images so that
the underlying ontologies may be compared without subsuming them into a
hegemonic data model. In this sense, the Heterochronologies project is an
exercise in comparative ontology.
In this paper we describe the factors that motivated the project; its various
epistemological underpinnings, as well as the methodological approach that
guided its development; the phases of our work; and the contributions that
emerged from the project. Though currently still in development, its
culmination is a digital platform — the Time Capsule — that supports
comparative pedagogy, and in so doing demonstrates both validity and
relevance of a few fundamental notions: a) structured data can be
systematically extracted from graphical structures with a logical approach;
b) comparisons of temporal schemes can be supported by a digital platform
that considers them as instantiations of ontologies that need not be
reconciled to a single standard; c) the historical and cultural specificity
of these ontologies can be exposed and analyzed using digital means.
[en] Networked Cross-Dressing: A Digital
Refashioning of Shakespearean Gender SubversionErik Simpson, Grinnell College; Hannah L.P. Brown, Department of Psychology, University of Florida; Lana Sabb, Grinnell College; Olly Shortell, Prescott College; James Lee, University of Cincinnati
Abstract
[en]
This paper uses network theory and network analysis to propose a new approach
to analyzing cross-dressing in Shakespearean drama, specifically the key
questions driving much of the scholarship on that topic in recent decades:
What kind of disruption to the social order did cross-dressing represent in
Early Modern England, and what did it mean to shift that disruption from
the street to the stage? We know that the laws and customs of the age
emphasized clothing that matched the outward appearances of people to their
places in the social order. Network analysis allows us to analyze how
characters become gendered through a non-linear, non-hierarchical lattice
of social relationships. As the characters interact and social
relationships change, the individual’s gendered subjectivity also
transforms. We find that cross-dressing protagonists propel themselves from
isolated social worlds into a complex web of relationships through
cross-dressing, and that entry into sociability follows predictable
patterns. By following those patterns, the characters combine roles--the
broker and the heroine--that are normally separate in Shakespearean comic
plots, creating a hybrid type that becomes visible through network
analysis.
