BLACK DIGITAL

HUMANITIES

DEEPTHI
VU22POLS0100005

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 THE ORIGIN, CONTEXT AND THE CASE FOR
BLACK DIGITAL HUMANITIES

The cutting edge of utilising computer-based technology in the humanities is digital humanities.
The discipline, which was formerly known as "humanities computing," has expanded significantly.
Its initial goal was on creating digital tools, databases, and archives for writings, artwork, and other
types of things. Computers began with these basic functions, and as computation advanced, they
provided more complex methods of handling and searching digitised culture.

It is unlikely to agree on a precise definition of the digital humanities because the community
includes members from a variety of disciplines, methodological viewpoints, professional
vocations, and theoretical tendencies. Different scholars defined Digital Humanities in a different
way, Matt Kirschenbaum(2010) in his paper “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in
English Departments?” draws an interesting comparison between DH and Twitter and their
respective impact on scholarly communication, allowing the development of a distinct network
topology. For Twitter, that topology is manifested in “aggregates of affinities, formally and
functionally manifest in who follows whom, who friends whom, who tweets whom, and who links
to what.”

In The History of Black Studies Published by: Pluto Press. The origins of Black Studies, also
known as African American Studies or Africana Studies, can be traced back to the Civil Rights
Movement and the social upheaval of the 1960s. (Abdul Alkalimat, 2021) During this period, there
was a growing demand for education that reflected the history, culture, and experiences of African
Americans, which were often marginalised or ignored in traditional academic curricula. The impetus
for the establishment of Black Studies programs came from students, activists, and scholars who
advocated for a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of American history and society.
They sought to challenge the Eurocentric perspective that dominated academic institutions and
promote a curriculum that acknowledged the contributions and struggles of Black individuals and
communities.

Black Studies and the discipline of digital humanities come together to form the setting for black
digital humanities. The history, culture, and experiences of Black people and communities are
studied, documented, preserved, and engaged with using digital tools, technologies, and

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approaches.
From extraction to production, from consumption to disposal of digital technologies, the
landscape of information and communication technology, including the tools utilized in DH
initiatives, is wholly responsible for racialized brutality and environmental damage.

Changes in the approach of digital humanities with regards to data was the need of the hour as the
digital humanities can profoundly alienate Black people from participating in its work because of its
silences and refusals to engage in addressing the intersecting dimensions of policy, economics, and
intersectional racial and gender oppression that are part of the society we live in; this engagement
cannot be relegated just to Black digital humanists. We are living in a moment where Black
people’s lives can be documented and digitalised, but cannot be empowered or respected in
society.

Information and communication technologies are intertwined in exploitative labor practices and risky
environmental activities. Digital humanities should design against or openly fight these practices,
and this must include our daily choices that encourage erasure and quiet among practitioners. As
Mcllwain wrote, “We have designed familial recognition technologies that target criminal suspects on
the basis of skin colour. We’ve trained automated risk profiling systems that disproportionately
identify Latinx peoples as illegal immigrants. We’ve devised credit scoring algorithms that
disproportionately identify black people as risks and prevent them from buying homes, getting loans,
or finding jobs”. We should no longer deny that digital tools and projects are implicated in the rise in
global inequality, because digital systems are reliant on global racial labor exploitation. We cannot deny
that the silences of the field in addressing systemic state violence against Black lives are palpable.
Whenever there are arguments and debates upon anything, the basic way to substantiate arguments
is to present the statistics and data presumably them as reality. But are data present digitally
accurate? Who is digitising the data? Can data be changed according to the perspective of the
individual designing the data? In this context, Rachel Wallach

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said, There is a general belief that data is objective, neutral, and therefore accurate. "Numbers don't
lie," goes the oft-repeated maxim. But what about the people interpreting the data: can individuals
really be objective or neutral? Who gets to decide which data is important? And what about the
stories and truths that data can't tell?
https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/15/jessica-marie-johnson-black-beyond-data/

Although artificial intelligence and machine learning feed applications to enrich them, the truth is that
the original programming is made by a human (or several). Who defines, initially, the parameters for
the algorithms, are the people who created the program or application. The lack of well-defined
criteria can result in generalizations, and this can lead to discriminatory or racist actions. The
history of the use of algorithms in politics to influence social mood, which was tense in the United
States in the late 1960s, comprehend the social climate, and win elections. However, these initiatives
cleared the way for widespread surveillance of the Black population, which at the time saw the most
unrest. Digital humanists should dwell deep into the realities than digital mining. Bringing black
studies into mainstream can cancel out the imbibed stereotypical social issues in digital humanities.
Few scholars have thrown light on the importance of why it is to be done.

In a time of paradigm shifts, moral and political treachery, historical amnesia, and psychic and
spiritual turmoil, humanistic issues are central — if only funding agencies, media interests, and we
humanists ourselves will recognise the momentousness of this era for our discipline and take
seriously the need for our intellectual centrality. — Cathy Davidson, 2008

Any connection between humanity and the digital entails research into how computational
processes could support the idea that humanity emerged through racialising institutions, even as
they encourage attempts to piece together or otherwise construct alternative human modes.

I would name this process “Restoring Humanities Digitally”, characterised by initiatives to use
digital platforms and resources to reveal the entire humanity of marginalised people.
We must deal with public policy and resource distribution models that enable the existence of the
digital to have such a profound hold in our job in addition to the everyday use of digital
technologies. Current DH work must challenge the impulse in digital humanities that privileges
digitally and computerisation, along with the related concepts of use, access, and preservation,
while often failing to account for more immediate and pressing global concerns. These concerns,
which include the crisis of racialised global capitalism and the environmental catastrophes from the
attendant issues caused by digital infrastructures, are issues that critical DH scholars could play an
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active role in addressing and remedying. The field must foreground a recognition of the
superstructures that overdetermine the computerisation and informationalization of DH projects, so
that those projects can intervene in instances of racial, economic, and political oppression.

Strategies like
1. Social media can be called a lifestyle in today’s world, it can change your perspectives on things
altogether. To bring Black studies into the limelight, the reality should be brought in-front of a
large population and vigilance. Social media even reflects how a majority is thinking or a
minority is seeking for. As Kim Gallon(Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities) 2016
says that with hashtags like #SayHerName, #BlackLivesMatter, and #ICantBreathe, movements
that denounce the pervasive police violence against black women and men have started on
"Black Twitter" and Facebook, continuing black people's centuries-old quest to reveal their
shared humanity to the world. These hashtags demonstrate how black people's humanity is
bound to a racial system that values white people's lives more highly than those of black people.

There are many instances like, In July 2013, three Black organisers, Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors
and Opal Tomett, were discussing on Facebook the acquittal of a man who killed Trayvon
Martin, a 17-year old black teenager in Florida. “Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter,” Ms.
Garza wrote on Facebook. Ms. Cullors replied: “#BlackLivesMatter”. Ms. Tometi joined in and
the hashtag spread its digital wing. BLM radically differs from the earlier avatars of black
mobilisation that cloaked as civil rights or faith-inspired. All three founders are women, Ms.
Garza and Ms. Cullors identify as queer. They say their motto is also to touch black people who
are marginalised by African American politics itself. The BLM website says its “mission is to
eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on black
communities by the state and vigilantes”. (The Hindu newspaper 2020)
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/ black-lives-matter-a-hashtag-that-turned-into-a-
rights-movement/article31768333.ece

2. The project of recovering lost historical and literary texts should be foundational to the black
digital humanities.
In Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience,
Martin Kilson (2000) heralds literary studies as a pioneer area for the maturation of Black
studies. He writes, This was so particularly where the field of literary studies overlapped
psychological and societal areas of inquiry, producing what has amounted to a new academic
discipline, that of black cultural studies. Moreover, the traditional field of literary studies was

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 itself broadened by the penetration of this field by the works (and thus styles, aesthetics, etc.) of
black American writers, African writers, Afro-Latin writers, and Afro-Caribbean writers. And, of
course, field of women's studies (gender studies), which evolved almost simultaneously with the
field of black studies, has contributed in many enriching ways to the spin-off field of black
cultural studies and also the established field of black studies. (p. 174)

3. Another issue related to discrimination in the IT industry has to do with the language used to
define certain components of a network or systems architecture. Concepts like master/slave are
being reformulated to change for a less objectionable terminology. The same will happen with
the concepts of blacklists/whitelists. Now, developers will have terms like leader/follower, and
allowed list/blocked list.

4. Digital humanities present Black Studies scholars – as well as other scholars studying the
experiences of people of color – with a double bind. Some Black Studies departments have been
resistant to embrace the possibilities of emerging technologies, new media, and digital platforms
in their work. University departments everywhere tend towards a kind of institutional inertia that,
ironically, encourages fierce competition for the cutting edge in research while maintaining and
defending “traditional” structures like tenure, disciplinary boundaries, and the traditional
academic publication system. Neal (web series) a Professor Black Popular Culture in the
Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University puts out “on the one
hand, if we look at Black Studies proper, the fact is it’s a field that continues to be driven by
older scholars [who are] still very much tied to a 1960s style Black Studies model.”

The integration of Black studies into the realm of digital humanities is a powerful endeavor that
holds immense potential. By marrying the tools and methodologies of digital humanities with the
rich narratives and perspectives of Black history, culture, and experiences, we pave the way for a
more inclusive and accurate representation of our shared human story. This fusion not only
addresses historical biases and gaps but also amplifies the voices of marginalized communities,
fostering a deeper understanding of the complexities of our world. Through collaborative efforts,
innovative projects, and a commitment to ethical and equitable practices, the synergy between
digital humanities and Black studies has the capacity to reshape the landscape of academia,
technology, and society itself, forging a path toward a more just and harmonious future.

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 Conclusion

We must work to center Black digital humanists and scholars; this work is ongoing and necessary,
especially in the face of anti-Black violence in academia and digital spaces. We also recognize that
there are inequities within Black DH projects, and limited funding also means limited opportunity.
Even with a stream of new lines of hire, the academic job market remains unstable. Coupled with
issues of retention and the abuses and exploitations faced by Black scholars, even those that can
finally be put into productive positions find themselves pushed to the margins of academia. By
implementing strategies like, Curriculum Integration, Research and Projects, Data Collection and
Representation, Algorithmic Justice, funding and grants, public engagement, etc. We can ensure that
Black studies are rightfully recognized and integrated into the digital humanities landscape,
contributing to a more inclusive and accurate representation of history and culture. Precarity is rife,
but each day we marvel at how these scholars resist and center themselves and their colleagues. We
imagine this special issue as a hub of that resistance. In a fight against white-supremacy,
sexism, and ableism, we stand with other scholars of Black DH and we work towards a more
equitable world.

Bibliography

Matt Kirschenbaum’s. 2010. What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English
Departments?, 150, pg.5.

Mcllwain wrote, “We have designed familial recognition technologies that target criminal suspects on
the basis of skin colour. We’ve trained automated risk profiling systems that disproportionately
identify Latinx peoples as illegal immigrants. We’ve devised credit scoring algorithms that
disproportionately identify black people as risks and prevent them from buying homes, getting loans,
or finding jobs”.
There is a general belief that data is objective, neutral, and therefore accurate. "Numbers don't lie,"
goes the oft-repeated maxim. But what about the people interpreting the data: can individuals really be
objective or neutral? Who gets to decide which data is important? And what about the stories and
truths that data can't tell?- Rachel Wallach

https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/15/jessica-marie-johnson-black-beyond-data/

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In a time of paradigm shifts, moral and political treachery, historical amnesia, and psychic and
spiritual turmoil, humanistic issues are central — if only funding agencies, media interests, and we
humanists ourselves will recognise the momentousness of this era for our discipline and take seriously
the need for our intellectual centrality. — Cathy Davidson, 2008

Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities Kim Gallon).

(The hindu newspaper) https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/black-lives-matter-a- hashtag-

that-turned-into-a-rights-movement/article31768333.ece

In Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience,
Martin Kilson (2000) heralds literary studies as a pioneer area for the maturation of Black studies. He
writes,
This was so particularly where the field of literary studies overlapped psychological and societal areas
of inquiry, producing what has amounted to a new academic discipline, that of black cultural studies.
Moreover, the traditional field of literary studies was itself broadened by the penetration of this field
by the works (and thus styles, aesthetics, etc.) of black American writers, African writers, Afro-Latin
writers, and Afro-Caribbean writers. And, of course, field of women's studies (gender studies), which
evolved almost simultaneously with the field of black studies, has contributed in many enriching ways
to the spin-off field of black cultural studies and also the established field of black studies. (p. 174)

Neal, a Professor Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies
at Duke University puts out “on the one hand, if we look at Black Studies proper, the fact is it’s a field
that continues to be driven by older scholars [who are] still very much tied to a 1960s style Black
Studies model

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