This post will examine how the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, Colored Conventions, and Reviews in Digital Humanities reflect issues discussed in our readings.

Early Caribbean Digital Archive lays out clearly their goals: to make literary works from the Caribbean and other related groups digitally accessible and to provide means to decolonize these works. In Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, there is an emphasis on decentering Western knowledge standards and procedures to value and evaluate DH works from Global South practitioners. There is an acknowledgement that many existing archives are built with colonial practices, but envision digital archives that remap what is perceived as “non-knowledge”. The ECDA values the practice of “remix” which highlights the stories of marginalized people through digital means and gives their narratives equal standing with those of European Colonial authors. Equally important is the intentionality in providing and curating resources for pedagogical means. Growing the DH field and solidifying its legitimacy requires creating entry points for engagement in ways that are tailored to different academic settings.

Through their commitment to open access and offering/developing pedagogical tool, DCDA and Colored Conventions can work to address one of the issues laid out in Digital Black Atlantic. Two of the structural issues detailed in acquiring enough participation from Digital Humanities scholars of color was the lack of access in these communities to STEM scholarship and lack of peer reviews who have a deep understanding of the intersections of the African Diaspora and digital studies. Through their offerings, projects like these might help to cultivate the very peers that can be difficult to garner.

Lack of access to peers to contribute to larger bodies of research from the Global South was also mentioned in Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, as the authors felt they were not successful in acquiring the number of contributions they had hoped from a range of languages, perspectives, and research approaches. In both the projects mentioned in this post and the paper itself, decolonization of knowledge and knowledge standards will be paramount in growing the diversity of DH.

In Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh explain that there is a lack of exploration in DH with human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, and media studies. While perusing the projects in Reviews in Digital Humanities, this was salient when searching through field of study or by topic or method. Spending more time with other repositories for DH projects would help me understand this issue more. Starting questions: How does the editorial process impact particular types of submissions? What interventions are already in place to broaden these intersections? How are calls for submitting to DH publications promoted?

Defining what Digital Humanities(DH) is might be unnecessary because not every DH project has to share the same theoretical foundation. Instead, they have “family resemblances” within the structure of praxis in the sense that they provide the community with open space for discovering, rethinking, learning, and interacting. The theme of each DH project varies according to its specific interests, location, language, culture, and the infrastructure it has now; thus, I believe that “Openness” should be a key pillar to digital scholarship in both dimensions – epistemology and practice.     

Colored Conventions Project (CCP) is a good example as it has certain features:   

1. Epistemic Justice & Sovereignty: CCP clarifies the principles and goals of its work; that is, rediscovering and understanding devalued and underrepresented Black history and voices. Especially by affirming “Black women’s centrality to nineteenth-century Black organizing,” the project reshapes epistemic sovereignty: (a) what we need to know; (b) who must be included; and (c) how it should be done.   
2. Open online access & Interplay: All the materials, information, and digital records they use for the project are open to the audience on the website. Plus, CCP encourages users to actively interact with and participate in the project by accepting newly found records that are not featured in the project yet. (The website specifies the records needed.) In addition, each section on the website is closely related and users are able to find the contents they need very easily as they navigate the site.   
3. Pedagogical approaches: The project offers teaching guides through which the user can freely use and teach the materials in K-12/AP/College classes. Each chapter has a separate curriculum for K-12 and AP/College Classes with the use of diverse approaches to audiences – 1) Resources, Methods, Questions, and Standards for K-12, and 2) Questions, Class Activity, and Example for AP/College Classes. With this attempt to offer educational support, CCP is linking its ongoing work to the present and future.     

What I noticed from CCP is its localness. The project narrows down its research interests and subject. When embracing the localness of a certain community and the research (In the case of CCP, the project focuses on Black organizing movement history that occurred from 1830 to the Civil War), there could be the danger of sacrificing its interconnectivity with others. However, through the open structure of the inquiry and research, CCP gives users an opportunity to critically engage with the project and other participants.  

It is obvious that without breaking the dominant structure of academia, which has been hierarchical, exclusive, and Western-centered, it is almost impossible to attain and secure epistemic plurality in DH. In this regard, the argument about “becoming undisciplined” echoes deeply in the field of DH. Nonetheless, we must recognize the limits of our knowledge that is only achievable on a particular given condition. Epistemic delinking, in this sense, would be a hasty step, just like pitching “The Big Tent”. Instead, I believe, as CCP shows us, we need many small tents with more localness and openness in themselves. This should be the first step for DHers to take toward the expanded community of digital scholarship.

The peer-reviewed journal Reviews in Digital Humanities centers the belief held by Stephan Ramsay that digital humanists create things. The project deploys principles of open access and transparency to facilitate the production and maintenance of digital scholarship. The site defines this output as “digital archives, multimedia or multimodal scholarship, digital exhibits, visualizations, digital games, digital tools, and digital projects.” By centering projects over traditional articles, it also challenges what academic output could look like inline with the tendency among many in the field to be disruptive, as well as generative.

The site provides DH practitioners with a free platform to submit, review, and publish digital projects, stating that their goal is “to foster critical discourse about digital scholarship in a format useful to other scholars.” By providing digital humanists with infrastructure to easily review work and have their work reviewed, it makes the process of building projects approachable and attainable. This accessibility may also make it easier for communities traditional marginalized from academia to join in.

Reviews in Digital Humanities also archives digital projects in a variety of ways that make it easy for users to browse and engage with. The Issues tab catalogues different volumes. The projects are also searchable by Alphabet, Time Period, Field or Study, and Topic under the Project Registry. This creates a robust experience, allowing for casual exploration of different topics and ontologies, as well as more direct searches.

Themes of open access, collaboration, and justice appeared throughout our readings this week. Reviews in Digital Humanities leverages these ideas to help scholars build projects and knowledge across a variety of subjects, making the case that the projects can define DH.

When exploring these projects, it is clear that they are mindfully cultivated and maintained with the issues discussed in our readings at the forefront. As is always important, the lens that these projects are published through is mindfully accounting for issues that are institutionally central not only to Digital Humanities or academia, but the world as a whole. While they do not all explicitly address each issue discussed, as the range is so broad, they account for what is relevant. They also exemplify how expansive the field can be, with each of them being unique and more narrowly focused, but accounting for a broader representation of the subject matter.

I found the Colored Conventions Project site to be incredibly conscious, addressing a wide range of these issues. Not only has their team done significantly meaningful work since the project was launched in 2012, they seem to have done so in a way that pays homage to the root of their research in a modern way. The statement of their principles on the site shows this clearly. The first principle is to collaboratively enact principles and values modeled by the corresponding movement. This alone highlights the defining collaborative nature of Digital Humanities, and its reliance on values as a basis for academic expansion. The next two principles display immense respect for humans, namely Black women and Black people as a whole. The centrality of reverence for these communities defines the tone with which the project is completed. Amongst the trivialization of feminist methodologies, as highlighted by Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh, and the need to properly credit Black communities in ways that have previously been intentionally overlook in academia, as shared by Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam, these values are uplifting to see held closely. The remaining two principles named support labor rights and the role of Black people as data creators, while acknowledging the harm that has been imparted on the community historically by means of weaponized data.

In the context of the larger project, these principles acting as pillars paint an image of how important the issues are to digital humanists. At its core, this redefines Digital Humanities as a field in which previously othered/oppressed academics have a space to expand upon their work in a way that continues in spite of the current and historical boundaries.

Amongst the exhibits and conventions, which seem to have a deeply collaborative nature, this project also labels Digital Humanities as innately pedagogical. The teaching portion of the project encourages continual expansion and impression by those who have interest in the work and wish to teach or learn the content. I found all of the projects to show similar foundations, but the Colored Conventions Project is a clear exhibition of respect and collaboration amongst digital humanists which I think makes a larger statement about the field and it’s ineffable nature.

If you were to center an understanding about what DH is around one of these projects/sites, how would DH be defined (or redefined)?

In reviewing Northeastern University’s Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), I was struck by how many of the themes used to present the project remained consistent with themes from our readings–and, how many of those themes were immediately made clear in the archive’s introduction and brought to life throughout the website.

If I were basing my understanding of the Digital Humanities (DH) on my exploration and experience of ECDA’s project and site, I would extract the following:

1. Open access: the site is designed to be accessed freely through the internet and intentionally designed with the user experience in mind. This is evidenced in the clean layout and clear navigational cues and explanations, as well as the incorporation of visuals and overall site and material organization.
2. A commitment to expansive and evolving curation: The ECDA describes their project as “re-archiving (remixing and reassembling) materials from existing archives as well as archiving new materials,” clearly indicating their ongoing work to evolve their materials, tools, and systems alongside the evolution of the project. There are several prompts and buttons throughout the site that encourage users to suggest materials and/or contact the organizers to get involved as a teacher or collaborator. Additionally, while the archive is currently document-heavy, their expansive approach to curating is also evidenced in their stated desire to incorporate and draw connections between a variety of material types.
3. Archiving and/or organizing information in a way that centers marginalized experiences: ECDA’s archival process is both intentionally sourcing new, previously unarchived materials, as well as citing contributors of narratives that have previously been (or are currently) incorrectly archived under others’ works. For example, they have been extracting slaves’ narratives from slave-owners’ publications in order to appropriately credit the material’s source and establish rightful ownership of that knowledge and perspective.
4. Offers pedagogical tools to make use of materials: Beyond enabling open access, ECDA also offers a growing section of pedagogical support for those looking to share the archive’s materials with others, especially in a classroom or educational setting. In the world of academia, where research is often riddled with jargon and predominantly presented in a long-form written format, the accompaniment of pedagogical guidance can help researchers engage a broader audience in understanding and actually using their work. Through this effort, ECDA remains in alignment with its stated objective while offering a solution for a classic challenge within academia. 

As mentioned, each of these themes were also present in our readings this week and can be found consistently across many of the sites we explored. While not an entirely comprehensive description, using ECDA’s archive to construct a definition of DH might sound something like: DH is characterized by principles of open access; expansive and evolving curation; archiving and/or organizing information in a way that centers marginalized experiences; and offering pedagogical tools to make use of the material.

Several of this week’s readings emphasize how the digital humanities must continually assert why they matter. On the one hand, this serves a practical purpose: doing so helps ensure DH’s survival against a backdrop of academic austerity cuts and the dominance of for-profit tech giants in the digital landscape. On the other, the imperative helps align DH projects with the field’s ideological aims — to participate, as Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein write, in a “larger technically and historically informed resistance” (“A DH That Matters”).

“Torn Apart / Separados” is a prime example of how the digital humanities can spur action and intervene in sociopolitical issues in real time. This project visualizes a series of relationships and networks that make up the US’ 2018 Zero Tolerance Policy, which cut off asylum seekers by prohibiting and prosecuting illegal border crossings. In the project contributors’ words, this is a “rapidly deployed critical data & visualization intervention” (the project’s welcome page), suggesting it is neither a retroactive analysis, nor a neutral or removed take.

With this project, the researchers aimed to demonstrate that it is possible “to respond quickly, yet carefully, in times of crisis” (the “Textures” tab) — an explicit nod to how DH can prove its value. “Torn Apart / Separados” plays out what Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh, citing scholar Jessica Marie Johnson, describe in their introduction to Bodies of Information: “As Johnson notes, this [the digital humanities] is not simply ‘academic’; the work and communities of Black, Native, Latinx, queer, trans, and intersectional digital scholars have ‘literally saved lives’” (“Introduction”). 

The project seamlessly moves back and forth between the academic and the public, between belief and action. For instance, its “Allies” tab — which aggregates and maps vetted organizations that are on-the-ground and able to assist — makes it abundantly clear that it brings value not only to academics, but also to the families and communities affected by the crisis.

In reviewing a subset of the Reviews in the Digital Humanities repository (Volume 4, Number 6: June 2023; Review: In Search of the Drowned), I would define DH as a tool that can enhance the historiography of Holocaust studies and of Genocide and Mass Violence scholarship, while providing “a voice to the voiceless.” As noted in this Yale, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the historian Saul Friedlander in the 1990s -2000s went against the generally held position of dismissing survivor testimonies in favor of Nazi documents because they were known to have factual inaccuracies. Nonetheless, as Friedlander and DH scholars have uncovered, we now have platforms, such as the one mentioned here, that offer insights into understanding the evolution of Nazi policies toward Jews, perpetrator motivations and German citizens reactions to state promoted antisemitism propaganda. In this archive, DH allows readers and platform users to navigate the site in an attempt to understand the experience of mass violence through the victims’ eyes. In this “era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka), testimonies provide us with a view into the past, which have the potential to uncover new information and contribute to our understanding of the experience of mass violence.

A great example of this is that of Ester Fox’s testimony, which provided insight that hasn’t been well-documented. In this and other testimonies, to use Miranda Fricker’s term: “epistemic injustice (a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word)” is avoided and because the platform enhances the victim’s testimony by linking scholarly historiographical references and disclosures (throughout the passage); namely, where addition work can be explored or where more work is needed, and thus the reader can choose to further explore or stop their review.

I believe that this survival story is also of significance in that here we have a unique testimony – an example of a Jewish female doctor, who served as a concentration camp doctor in 2 camps (Guben and Bergen-Belsen) – a testimony that may never have been documented had this DH median not come to fruition. Her story is also extraordinary in that upon liberation, Ester served as a doctor in a displaced persons (DPs) hospital, where “one aspect of this post war healthcare landscape…[has] not yet [been] explored.” In my view, this survival story is also of significance in that Ester provides testimony “that fits the tasks of intersectional feminism…of communal care” in an era (1940s) when “structural misogyny and racism” were met with mass violence and genocide. Her account cannot be taken as a “trivialization of feminist methodologies” as the authors Jacqueline Wernimont & Elizabeth Losh warn us of in Bodies of Information – where modern tech culture can reinforce pre-existing biases.

In thinking about this blog post, I am most interested in the second question posed by the prompt: if one project in the digital humanities could define the subject as a whole, then how would we perceive DH? What are the limitations of defining DH through one instance of its application? On the other hand, how does narrowing the scope of DH into a single project help us identify defining features of the methods, questions, and uses of DH? I chose to focus these questions on the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), an “open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images”. Using this week’s readings as a reference point, I seek to build an understanding of the ECDA as exemplary of DH methods, aspirations, projects, and pitfalls. 

The ECDA project primarily stands out to me as a product of DH scholarship in that it seeks to make the once strictly physical (pre-twentieth century texts, maps, and images) now digital. In a literal sense, the ECDA serves as a digital platform (a website) for the study of history, African diaspora studies, literature, postcolonial studies, and other intersecting disciplines. However, the ECDA expands its role as a tool of DH by offering transparent explanations of its origins, functional components, and goals for public use. The ECDA site also asserts its use beyond a static archive and frequently solicits submissions from those using the platform. This built-in call for collaboration allows for the ECDA to facilitate scholarly communication and promote the “production and validation” of knowledges constructed by those who have been systemically marginalized in academia, an element of DH explored in “Global Debates in the Digital Humanities”. The ECDA site exemplifies how materials collected for digital archiving and analysis can then be studied: student projects, narrative maps, exhibits, and short writings about the archived materials all demonstrate the kinds of scholarly inquiry made possible by access to the ECDA site contents. My favorite part of the ECDA is the “Classroom” feature, which makes syllabi, lesson plans, and student projects available to the public. With digital pedagogy as a significant concern in the field of DH – “the digital humanities has always seen itself as a field that engages the world beyond the academy—through its orientation toward the public in its scholarship, pedagogy, and service” (Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019) –  this component of the ECDA is true to the spirit and goals of the field, even if site users are unable to see how widely used the classroom resources truly are. My concerns about DH lie in the ephemerality of digital spaces in a turbulent world: suggested syllabi are posted on the site, but what if anti-CRT legislation makes an innocuous enough lesson plan, like “Early African American Literature”, illegal for teachers in some states to use? What’s more, some tabs on the ECDA site – like the “Blog” feature – route visitors to a “nothing found” message. Unless someone is constantly maintaining the site, then risk of becoming out-of-date could compromise the archive’s usability and credibility for digital scholars. With these peaks and pitfalls in mind, I think that the ECDA site constructs an understanding of DH that centers on: 1) digital accessibility in the form of a free, public, online platform; 2) open collaboration, or a field that requires contributions from scholars and site-users alike; 3) transparency in methodology, where the project’s creation is explained and its intended uses are exemplified; and 4) ease of updating, with the goal of making the project accessible and relevant long after its inception. 

Profs. Krystyna Michael and Jojo Karlin at the CUNY Graduate Center.