The three introductions to Debates in the Digital Humanities (Gold 2012; Gold and Klein 2016, Gold and Klein 2019) that we read this week progressively focus on DH’s political responsibility and political engagement. In this progression, I also perceive a shift from abstract discussions of power to concrete ones. The 2012 introduction dwells on how DH may positively disrupt traditional scholarship. The 2016 tackles the issue of definitions, and the inclusion/exclusion acts that may derive from them. Starting from the first paragraph, the 2019 introduction engages the issue of politics very directly, and evokes recent political, historical and social events that have shaken the US. The title is fitting –“A DH That Matters”– and the text contains clear calls to action: “… how can digital humanists ally themselves with the activists, organizers, and others who are working to empower those most threatened by [the charged environment of 2019]”?

Wernimont and Losh’s introduction to Bodies of Information (2018), and Josephs and Risam’s text on the “Digital Black Atlantic,” which prefaces a book by the same name (2021), offer some responses to the political concerns and questions of the 2019 Debates’ introduction, and so do the digital projects listed for review this week.

Feminist theory has taught us that objectivity and neutrality are fabrications, and that avoiding a political positioning is, in itself, a political stance with political consequences. That said, there are digital projects that are consciously political, that is, political by design. Torn Apart/Separados, Colored Conventions Project, The Eearly Caribbean Digital Archive and Reviews in Digital Humanities are consciously political. They embody (Wernimont and Losh) the quest for political meaning that the 2019 introduction of Debates puts forth.

Here are some of the concepts that appear in the readings and that are embodied by the projects. My quotations are meant to illustrate each point, but the embodiment is more encompassing and more far reaching than what I can show through them:

Materiality: “Socks are needed for detainee welfare” (“Textures,” Torn Apart).

Situatedness: “…all repositories are created and maintained by individuals located in time, place, and history, who make choices about what counts as knowledge…” (“Decolonizing the Archive,” ECDA)

Values: “We pledge to account for Black women’s labor and leadership in our own historical work and in our own project practices” (“Principles,” Colored Conventions Project).

Labor: “More than 2,500 people—scholars and teachers around the country, undergraduates, and members of the public—have contributed their time and energy to our ongoing, online effort of transcribing convention minutes and creating digital exhibits” (“Introducing the Colored Convention Project,” CCP)

Affect: “These precarious human lives … dwell in the purgatory of the U.S. executive’s state of exception where … hundreds of immigrant children remain separated from their families.” (“Textures,” Torn Apart).

Intersectionality and decenteredness: “…to support ongoing digital scholarship and community-building in critical ethnic, African diaspora, indigenous, Latinx, and postcolonial studies, among others” (“About,” Reviews in Digital Humanities).

Other relevant principles that the projects adhere to are transparency of process (laying out the “how”), humbleness (acknowledgement of past mistakes and improvements), rejection of closure (projects are open and evolving), and emphasis on the collective and collaborative (“we” instead of “I”).

Wernimont and Losh discuss an article in which DH is understood as a neoliberal tool at the service of the neoliberal trajectory of our universities. Against this argument they observe that, in fact, DH has opened and may continue opening liberating spaces within academia (“maroon” spaces). I believe that both dynamics may be true and possible. I believe that whether DH is to create a new and radical Humanities will depend on how willing DHers are to consciously assume their political responsibilities at all levels of their practice.