Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019: Introduction

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019

Introduction

A DH That Matters

Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein

What matters in 2019?

On the surface of things, not much. In the United States, we have seen “fake
news” take the place of informed reporting, “free speech” replace equal
protection, and personal profiteering vault a chaos agent into the role of
commander in chief. There he remains, secured by a welter of corporate
interests, conservative media moguls, GOP enablers, and a vocal minority of
the U.S. citizenry who find the rhetoric of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and
generalized vitriol more appealing than the aspiration of a more perfect union.
Events that only a few years ago seemed impossible—the intentional
destruction of the nation’s social safety net, open rallies of armed white
supremacists, and even the prospect of nuclear war—have become part and
parcel of our daily lives.
What is the role of the digital humanities in the charged environment of 2019,
and how can digital humanists ally themselves with the activists, organizers,
and others who are working to empower those most threatened by it? Having
spent nearly a decade immersed in the Debates in the Digital Humanities
series, and even longer in the field, we are convinced that digital humanists can
contribute significantly to a larger technically and historically informed
resistance. By enabling communication across communities and networks, by
creating platforms that amplify the voices of those most in need of being heard,
by pursuing projects that perform the work of recovery and resistance, and by
undertaking research that intervenes in the areas of data surveillance and
privacy, the “artist-theorists, programming humanists, activist-scholars,
theoretical archivists, [and] critical race coders” whom Tara McPherson, writing
in the first volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities, called into being, have
now been united with their task (154).
Indeed, this work has already begun. Media design professor David Carroll,
for instance, was the one to the file the lawsuits that helped bring to light the
problematic data mining of Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica in the
run-up to the 2016 election. The coalition of activists, organizers, and
statisticians who, in 2017, established the group Data for Black Lives are
mobilizing the field of data science around issues of racial justice. From within
the digital humanities, we have seen the rise to prominence of the Colored
Conventions Project, which exemplifies how principles of collective organizing
can inform both project structure and research focus. We have also seen how
DHers can mobilize in response to immediate need, as in the distributed efforts
of DH centers around the United States that held participatory mapping events
in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria with a goal of improving the routing of
aid to Puerto Rico; and we have seen the collective work of Mobilized
Humanities, an outgrowth of the hurricane mapping project, which created the
website Torn Apart / Separados in response to the U.S. policy of separating
immigrant children from their parents. These examples are by no means
exhaustive, but they demonstrate how digital humanists, as well as scholars and
practitioners in an expanding set of allied fields, can contribute in concrete and
meaningful ways to improving the situation of those most affected by the toxic
turn brought about by the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.
The chapters in this volume were drafted before the 2016 election, and we
ourselves write in the middle of 2018. To the degree that, in advance of the
present moment, our authors demonstrated a commitment to advocacy and
engagement, their words represent the embers of a fire that has since burst into
flame. Had this work been compiled any later, we believe that it would have
focused even more clearly than it already does on the profound transformations
wrought on the national and international landscape. After all, 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; through its calling attention to issues of academic labor and credit
for the same; through its questioning of ossified institutional structures and
outmoded scholarly systems; and through its attention to how digital methods
can help prepare students for both academic and nonacademic careers. But the
events that have transpired since the 2016 election demand a more explicit
assertion of these beliefs, and evidence that we are translating these beliefs into
action. Now is a time when digital humanists can usefully clarify our
commitments to public scholarship, addressing our work not simply to “the
public” but also, as Sheila
Brennan has observed, to specific communities and the needs that they, and
not we, identify as most pressing (386). Now is a time when we can employ our
visibility in the academy to advocate for those whose contributions to digital
scholarship remain undervalued. Now is a time when we can model how
research undertaken by students and scholars who are both technically adept
and critically informed can matter, not only to our chosen fields but also to the
world at large.
As this work progresses, we must take care to acknowledge the myriad forms
of labor that underlie it. By entering into conversation with our institutional
administrations about how those who contribute this crucial work can reap the
benefits of more stable employment, we can do our part to shore up the
university itself, which has begun to show fissures brought about by decades of
legislative defunding and corporate influence. As individuals and as a field, we
must interrogate our work to ensure that we are not ourselves complicit in the
neoliberal practice of naming problems in order to evade their resolution, or that
the attention and resources bestowed on digital scholarship and DH centers do
not eclipse the work of others who have provided us with the foundation, both
intellectual and institutional, for our work. Ultimately, we must each ask
ourselves if our service and scholarship, and the field in which we place this
work, are sufficiently committed to addressing the problems we face in the
present moment. And if the answer to that question remains unclear, we must
look to ourselves to recalibrate our own—and our discipline’s—scholarly stance.
We have traveled far from the issues that framed the first volume of Debates
in the Digital Humanities, published in 2012 during the first term of the Obama
administration. Then, the key questions facing digital humanities had to do with
the impact of digital methods and scholarship on the academy. When, for
instance, Tom Scheinfeldt, then managing director of the Roy Rosenzweig
Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, posed the
question of whether the field was required to “produce new arguments” and
“answer” new research questions, he was able to argue convincingly that digital
humanities needed more time to mature, to experiment, and to play (56–58). His
short piece, originally posted on his blog, was an attempt to stake out space for
low-stakes inquiry and non-goaloriented exploration in the face of demands
from DH skeptics that the field justify its emergence by presenting clear
evidence of research impact. But as the field has matured, the question of how
digital humanities relates to a larger world that is itself in crisis has added a new
urgency to questions about the value of digital scholarship and methods.
Our work within the digital humanities is enabled by larger social, political, and
technological systems. In the present moment, we need work that exposes the
impact of our embeddedness in those larger systems and that brings our
technical expertise to bear on the societal problems that those systems sustain.
Such work is exemplified by scholars such as Safiya Noble, who reveals the
racist assumptions planted in the algorithms that power Google searches
(Algorithms of Oppression); Marie Hicks, who illustrates the history of gender
discrimination that has contributed to the inequities of representation in
technological fields (Programmed Inequality); Lisa Nakamura, who exposes the
physical and intellectual exploitation at the heart of hardware manufacture
(“Indigenous Circuits”); Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who highlights the unscrupulous
corporate networks that masquerade as research platforms (“Academia, Not
Edu”); and many others who work at the intersection of technology and social
justice. Their scholarship enables us to confirm, without a doubt, how social and
cultural biases pervade our technologies, infrastructures, platforms, and
devices. Digital humanities in the year 2019 might thus be said to be driven by
an imperative, both ethical and intellectual, to acknowledge how history, culture,
society, and politics overdetermine each and every one of our engagements
with our work and the tools that enable it. We must therefore commit to making
a digital humanities that matters beyond itself, one that probes the stakes and
impacts of technology across a range of institutions and communities.
In our introduction to Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, we offered
Rosalind Krauss’s formulation of the “expanded field” as a model that might help
move us away from thinking about the digital humanities as a “big tent,” with its
attendant questions of who or what is included within it, toward a conception of
DH as a set of vectors of inquiry that are defined by their tensions, alignments,
and oppositions (x). A few years later, as the world careens from crisis to crisis,
the expanded field model may still work, but it must more clearly account for
work outside of digital humanities and outside of the academy. Models, as
Richard Jean So reminds us, are meant to be applied in a self-reflexive fashion:
one runs the model over a dataset and refines that model iteratively over time.
Our expanded field model is no different; we must pause to take account of
work currently in formation that indicates powerful new directions for the field.
The rough shape of those directions is indicated by, for instance, the 2016
launch of the African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities
(AADHum) project at the University of Maryland, which seeks to center African
American history and culture in digital humanities inquiry; the 2017 Digital
Library Federation conference, which featured keynotes by community arts
activists alongside academic librarians and archivists, placing those fields in
dialogue; the location of the 2018 Digital Humanities conference in Mexico City,
which affirmed the global outlook and multilingual aspirations of the field; and
the increasingly substantive efforts to expand DH work at HBCUs, tribal
colleges, and community colleges. What is signaled by these wide-ranging
efforts is a DH practice that is one part of a larger expanded field of socially
oriented work—work that is informed by the digital, but extends beyond it.
As the variety of DH scholarship proliferates—to borrow a phrase from the
forthcoming special issue of PMLA on the topic—it is increasingly being
published in a range of established disciplinary venues. The publication of
special issues of prominent journals—not only PMLA but also American
Literature, American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, differences, South Asian
Review, and Visible Language, among others—is an important marker of growth
for the digital humanities. But a special issue of a journal is what signals the
arrival of a field; the next phase occurs when articles that draw from that field
appear regularly in those same journals in what Ted Underwood describes in
Chapter 10 in this volume as a “semi-normal thing.” Today, DH articles appear
in disciplinary journals such as ELH, NLH, Configurations, and PMLA integrated
with articles that take a range of different approaches. This transformation
speaks as much to the goals of DH scholars, who are seeking to make their
digital work relevant to their colleagues, as it does to the evolving status of
digital humanities within extant scholarly fields.
Also at work in the digital humanities in 2019 is a deepening and narrowing of
scholarly niches within the field: this is another result of the field’s maturation.
We are witnessing sophisticated developments within subfields of digital
humanities that result in scholarship that is not always fully legible to those not
versed in the particular methods or conversations taking place in that domain;
see, for instance, the recent growth of the Journal of Cultural Analytics or the
increasingly nuanced discussions of method in digital history. Accompanying
this scholarship are calls for some subfields of digital humanities to split from it
altogether, motivated by critiques from the outside that are perceived as
uninitiated or uninformed. And yet, for the digital humanities to achieve its
strongest impact, its subfields must remain in dialogue with each other, open to
criticism in general terms if not specifics. Our principal task may no longer be to
define or defend digital humanities to skeptical outsiders, but instead to
translate the subtleties of our research to others within the expanded field—a
project that can help DH matter beyond itself.
Perhaps this shift is a good thing for a series like Debates in the Digital
Humanities (DDH), which is defined by its critical engagement with the unfolding
tensions that surround DH research, teaching, and service. As editors, we have
consciously steered DDH volumes— both the biannual volumes we have edited
and the special-topics volumes edited by others—away from a case-study
approach and toward argument-driven essays. Our editorial process is
intellectually involved and time intensive; we go back and forth with our authors,
and back and forth again, to ensure that the essays presented in DDH volumes
foreground the stakes involved in their arguments. In some cases, this is a
conversation that takes place over multiple drafts, conducted over multiple
years. We believe that this rigorous process of editing and revision is essential
to ensuring that the series lives up to its name and clearly examines the
complications and contradictions involved in DH work.
With this in mind, going forward, we are committing to publishing shorter
biannual volumes so that the essays can be published before the debates they
address have been resolved. Likewise, after two long special volumes—Making
Things and Drawing Boundaries, edited by Jentery Sayers, and Bodies of
Information: Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities, edited by Jacqueline
Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh—future special volumes will be shorter as well.
We are excited to share with you a range of such volumes in the coming years
on topics that include the digital Black Atlantic, global digital humanities, and
institutions and infrastructures. All of these books will be published in print, in
ebook form, and online on the open-access Debates website, which will soon
make the transition to become an instance of Manifold, the interactive
publishing platform recently released by the University of Minnesota Press and
the GC Digital Scholarship Lab at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
As we look out into the world in 2019, we see much that is damaged. But in
line with Part V of this volume, “Forum: Ethics, Theories, and Practices of Care,”
we choose to exercise what Stephen Jackson has termed “broken-world
thinking” and to extend to our fragile and often dispiriting world small acts of
recuperation that may be the building blocks of larger collective actions (222).
We hope that from counting to caretaking, from speculating to building, the
digital humanities in 2019 and beyond will continue to offer space to work
toward a more hopeful future, one where the shine of innovation gradually gives
way to the familiarity of use, the tasks of maintenance, and the stubborn
knowledge that there remains much work left to be done.

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