Digital Humanities, is as Matthew K. Gold described, a continuation of New Media Studies, it is crucially about building things, with the potential to assist humanities advocacy and advance humanities teaching. Recently, in an increasingly charged technological environment, it is inextricably linked to contemporary political or cultural moments. In a digital space, there is the potential to create an equalising field for humanities, which endeavours to create greater transparency in access to institutions, methods of research, and the academy more widely. There is, despite this drive for ethical intellectual engagement with the humanities, a need for further diversity in research and a movement away from anglocentric positions of study.
Projects that employ some of the principles of digital humanities (e.g. available and accessible to the public, explorative engagement with primary texts) can widen the scope of interpretation available to traditional humanities. By adapting literary or written documents into visual resources, these projects can bring previously dense or obscure information to a wider audience.
I completely agree that DH feels more potentially accessible to more diverse positions than previous forms of scholarship. However, I wonder to what degree this actually manifests. Access to the technology necessary to operate high-powered algorithims can be limited by wifi access or technological expense in the global south. DH expands what scholarship in the humanities can be, but it also seems to create a new set of boxes. To some extent, it feels easier to publish an article than it does to access a fairly innovative and energy-intensive form of technology. I’d be interested to read if these new boxes actually are more accessible to universities in the global south than previous forms of accepted scholarship.
Thanks, Niamh and Eli – good points here about how DH’s efforts to open up access to knowledge can’t solve other problems such as the inequities brought about by marked disparities in access to expensive tech and resources. To misquote William Gibson, accessibility, like the future, is unevenly distributed. The ‘minimal computing’ movement is a branch of DH work where questions like these come to the fore, and we’ll think a bit about this in the upcoming weeks in class.
I agree with your statement that there is a ‘need for further diversity in research…’, and I believe DH keenly lends itself to this progression in academia. This reminded me of a project I found whilst researching last week called ‘Musical Geography’, which maps various musical stories (such as Josephine Baker’s tours in the 1920s, or ‘Music in the Gulag’ which maps the popularity of Russian folk songs). Yet this project leans very heavily towards Western historical events, I would like to see more projects published under this collection that explore non-western musical stories. I’ve linked it below if you’re interested.
https://musicalgeography.org/