Background

In 2012, along with DH software developers Alejandro Peña and Francisco Onielfa, I started to work on a digital oral history archive that gathers, preserves and provides access to the testimonies of Spanish women who became adults and mothers during the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). Their daughters, who came of age during the Spanish transition to democracy  and its subsequent democratic governments, interview them about their recollections of the pre-democracy years and the socio-cultural differences they perceive between the two generations. The interviews are recorded on video. The archive, Mothers and Daughters of the Spanish Transition to Democracy, has collected 51 interviews to this date, and we continue expanding it.

Corpus

For this praxis assignment, I have used the first 20 interviews of our oral history archive.

Brief description of the sources:

• The participating mothers were born between 1921 and 1942.
• Their daughters were born between 1944 and 1977.
• The interviews were conducted between January and June of 2012.
• The interviews followed a semi-structured, open-ended format.
• The interview time-average is 92 minutes.
• The 20 interviews have been combined in one document for a total of 246,659 words.

Tools

All the interviews in the archive are processed with Dédalo. After being transcribed, they actually undergo a text analysis . We “index” them by linking different interview segments to the thesaurus descriptors that we have created for this specific project.

For this praxis activity, however, I have not used our thesaurus descriptors, and I have worked with the unindexed texts.

After a superficial exploration of Voyant, the tool that I decided to use, I was under the impression that it did not have multi language functionalities, so I consulted with Filipa Calado, our Digital Fellow, who used Python to clean my text.

Here’s the code that Filipa wrote to eliminate words that were irrelevant for my analysis:

I actually made Filipa go through a good deal of unnecessary work because, upon a more thorough investigation of Voyant, I found that the tool is, indeed!, multilingual, and that it provides interesting options to users, such as the possibility to edit the stopword list, which I took advantage of.

After I applied the new stopword list to my text, the count went down to 165,215 words.

Process

Making decisions about which words should stay or leave was not easy. For example, after applying my first modified list to the text, the analysis showed that the most frequent word was “no.” I wondered: Was the presence and frequency of this adverb saying something about the project participants’ experience of repression under the dictatorship? I began playing with the stopword list to try different scenarios, and decided that the analysis was richer when “no” was absent.

Similar questions arose with words such as “bueno,” which in Spanish can be used as a filler that marks a moment of reflection or hesitation (“Well…”) or as the adjective “good,” in opposition to “bad.” Eliminating all the “bueno” words might hide important information. I began to see how digital text analysis needs a good amount of linguistic tweaking in order to guide interpretation in a reliable way.  

After playing with the stopword list for some time, I decided to keep this Cirrus visualization for the time being:

“Yo” (“I” in English; 1348 occurrences) and “madre” (“mother”; 1148 occurrences) are the highest frequency words. One could formulate some preliminary interpretations based on this data. For instance, subject pronouns are generally implied in Spanish. Speakers do not need to insert the subject pronoun in every sentence because verb conjugations already indicate who or what the subject of the sentence is. The excessive presence of subject pronouns is redundant, unless it is used for clarification or reinforcement. Thus, the fact that “yo” is the most frequent word in the interviews might denote self-assertiveness: the mothers are asserting themselves as the protagonists of the interviews. If confirmed, this would be a positive outcome, as many of them expressed fears and insecurities before participating in the project. They often said that their lives were “normal and uninteresting,” and that they didn’t think they had anything to share with the larger public.

The Links tool of Voyant shows the occurrence of “yo” in connection with “creo” (“I think/believe”; 198 simultaneous occurrences) and “sé” (“I know”; 127 simultaneous occurrences), which would support the idea of the interview as a space for self-definition and self-determination.

However, because I had eliminated the word “no” from the analysis, I do not know whether the verbs “creo” and “sé” might be have been used, at least in some instances, in the context of negative statements, as in “I don’t know.” An analysis of both scenarios should be made before arriving to conclusions.

There is another caveat to the “assertiveness” interpretation: the corpus contains the daughters’ questions too, and, in all probability, they have used “yo”. This distortion could be easily avoided by eliminating the daughters’ questions from the corpus before uploading it to Voyant.

The same caveat applies to my entire text analysis, which focuses on the mothers but has, nevertheless, included the daughters’ questions in the corpus to be analyzed. However, considering that the mothers’ narrative is a lot more extensive than their daughters’ interventions, my improvised interpretations might not be completely invalid.

The high presence of the word “mother” is intriguing. You might say that it is not a surprise: after all, the project is “all about mothers” (wink to Almodóvar). But, are they speaking about their own maternal role or are they referring to their mothers? I am inclined to think that they are speaking about their own mothers, which would show the presence of a matrilineal focus in the interviews.

The Links tool (see above) did not provide me with information about the presence of the mothers’ mothers in the interview, but did reveal that the term “mother” is collocated in the environment of “father,” which might indicate that the interviewee is, indeed, speaking about her parents when the term “mother” appears. The Links visualization also shows the terms “daughter” (“hija”) and “granddaughter” (“nieta”) in connection to “mother,” which could support the hypothesis of the matrilineal angle. Again, one could say that the project itself is matrilineal by design, but the interviewers and interviewees were not asked to focus on the grandmother-daughter-granddaughter line. If anything, the semi-structured interview-guide includes questions about family and children in general.

Back to Voyant word-lists options, I’d like to highlight the “White List” function (I wish they would have called it something less racialized), which allows users to observe the behavior of terms of interest to them. In order to use the “White List” options, it is important to set the “Stopword” list to “None:”

I chose to look at the historical and political terms of the periods that the interviews cover: republic, war (“guerra”), dictatorship, democracy. I also inserted some terms frequently associated with them: repression, Church (“Iglesia”), sin (“pecado”), freedom (“libertad”), free (“libre”).

“War” is the highest frequency term, which shows its robust presence in the collective memory of the project participants –a stronger presence than that of the 40-year dictatorship. A possible interpretation is that the questionable and imperfect nature of Spain’s democratic transition has failed to facilitate an unambiguous condemnation of the dictatorship, which might lead the participants to address the term indirectly, use euphemisms or avoid it altogether. By contrast, the “horrors-of-the-civil-war-narrative” does not carry any ambivalence in Spanish collective memory, which might account for the strong presence of the term “guerra.” Of interest, too, is that the “república,” the democratic period immediately preceding the war, has a minimal presence, which might corroborate the ineffectiveness of the Spanish democratic transition to rehabilitate the memory of its pre-war democratic precedent: the much-demonized, very progressive, and shortly-lived Spanish Second Republic (1931-1936).

There are many other interesting observations based on this quick analysis. For example, the participants might have codified the term “repression” as “sin” and “Church,” judging from the disparate presence of those three terms in the Cirrus visualization. The terms “libertad” and “libre” are more frequent than “dictadura,” and about as frequent as “democracia,” perhaps signaling a more defined and stable presence in the collective memory of the participants. 

Possibilities

Voyant is a versatile tool that offers multiple possibilities for a project like mine. I could, for instance, separate the interviews to compare age and term frequency; I could analyze daughters and mothers separately; I could compare my interviews to other memory projects covering the same period; etc.

It is important to note, though, that variable control and a careful design of the analysis are necessary steps if we are to rely on Voyant’s data. For instance, we must be sure of the accuracy and homogeneity of the interview transcriptions (i.e. you cannot compare terms referring to time if dates have not been transcribed homogeneously). The stopword list is also of paramount importance because it has a direct impact on the type of information the analysis will yield. Additionally, in a project like the one I am working with, the data collection process must be taken into account as well: project design, interview format and questions, participants’ profiles, how interviews have been processed, etc.

Mina Rees Library Workshop Series

Presenter: Jill Cisarella- [email protected]

Review co-written with Nelson Jarrin

This workshop was conducted by Jill Cisarella on October 26, 2021. Jill is a very organized and dynamic speaker who shared with us her excellent PowerPoint presentation:

http://bit.ly/oa-explained-2021

The objective of the workshop, she said, was to show us how to publicly share our work and how to find the work that others share.

Here are some aspects of OA that she elaborated upon:

1. Background:

Not too long ago, most journals were printed and available in a physical form. Now, in the digital age, many journals and scholarly articles are primarily or exclusively online. As for books, publishers used to charge a hefty fee to print and distribute physical books with hundreds of pages. Now, publishers prepare and distribute books and journals online, but this has not brought access prices down. Selfishly, publishers do not share any of their savings and profits from digital publishing with the consumers, writers or reviewers. To the contrary, certain publishers have created a new form of lucrative business in which they place journals, books and articles behind paywalls.

Our presenter shared with us some stark numbers: the profits of publishing companies such as Elsevier and Spring have surpassed those of Apple, Google and BMW!

2. What is Open Access?

Jill landed at the definition of OA by way of contrasting the traditional system of scholarly publication (“outmoded, expensive, and exploitative”) and the OA publication system (“community-owned, scholar-led, values-driven”).

There is a debate between whether Open Access is defined by cost-free, public-access publishing that is legal and available online or by public access plus open license, that is, the right for anyone “to reproduce, make derivative works, distribute, display, perform, etc.”

For this workshop, our presenter used the first of those two definitions.

3. Open Access standards:

Green OA: This label refers to journals that allow authors to post their articles in OA repositories. These journals might actually operate with copyrights, but they give rights to authors too.

In this category, you may find institutional repositories (such as CUNY Academic Works), disciplinary repositories (such as Humanities Commons CORE) and authors’ personal or institutional websites.

Hybrid OA: This label refers to journals that are not OA, but will make an article OA if the author (or their institution) pays an article processing charge. (Imagine! You actually have to pay to be free!).

4. What about Academia.edu and ResearchGate?

They are not OA venues. In fact, these platforms are monetizing the work of scholars that publish on their sites. To make matters worse, they are incurring copyright infringement. Frictions with publishers have resulted in these platforms having to take down up to 40% of their content.

5. Finding OA:

• Google Scholar. This is one way to search across many different Open Access repositories. On the right side of the articles in a given search, there will be information about whether they are “free” (available in PDF or within a website). In Google scholar, you can also configure your settings to add links to libraries (up to five). In this way, when you are searching, you will get information about whether those libraries have those items. With Google Scholar, it is easy to distinguish between free and paywall materials.

• Unpaywall.org and Openaccessbutton.org. These tools are similar to Google Scholar in that they harvest Open Access content. They will also tell you whether the article you’re searching for is behind a paywall. Occasionally, you will be able to find the latest version of an article in a manuscript form (before going to the press). Although you might eventually need the published version, these final versions will provide the content you need while you wait for, say, an interlibrary loan request.

6. How can Jill and other librarians help?

Most journals will grant copyrights to authors a few years after their article has been published –an important piece of information most authors don’t have. Librarians at Mina Rees have lists of journals and their policies in this regard. If they don’t have information about the journal in which you have published, they will help you contact it and ask for permission to go OA with your work.

7. How can researchers help?

Researchers can contribute a great deal to the OA movement by uploading their articles into these repositories and let other scholars and students find their work in a “free” and Open Access way. By allowing information to be accessible, we can create a world in which this is encouraged –a culture shift in which the norm is to have access to information for free and not behind paywalls. It is not ethical to have these articles behind a monetary system in which no  one but the gatekeepers is being compensated.

Important: Jill Cisarella invited us to stay tuned for upcoming workshops about understanding journal publishing contracts and exercising our rights as authors!

The topic and the texts of this week are, to me, evocative of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), Agnes Varda’s splendid documentary about modern-day “gleaners:” people who live off “leftovers,” be they discarded food or broken objects. In reading, I felt like a gleaner too: the new texts kept pointing at texts we have read, and I began rescuing bits and pieces from past weeks, making connections, and recycling knowledge.

There is an interesting dialogue between “Capacity through care” (B. Nowviskie, 2019) and past articles that reflected upon the dangers of replicating exploitation dynamics through archive building. Texts such as “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities” (Gallon, 2016) and “More Scale, More Questions: Observations from Sociology” (McMillan, 2016) come to mind. They warned us of big data’s unintended consequence: burying humans. They presented us with alternative methodologies functioning as antidotes for the voracity of knowing it all, preserving it all, and publishing it all that characterizes our western practice of research –a practice that has been propelled by the ongoing development of powerful digital tools (“Toward Slow Archives,” Christen & Anderson, 2019).

In “Capacity through care,” however, Nowviskie tells us to fear not. She tries to assuage our humanist anxiety “about data-driven research and inquiry ‘at scale’,” and to dispel our “deep-seated—and ill-timed—discomfort with the very notion of increased capacity in the humanities.” She suggests that, if we embrace a feminist ethics of care while we tackle our digital humanities tasks, data-driven research will help us to see connections among parts, and relations with the whole, without losing a sense of empathy toward the object of our research. She invokes a feminist ethics of care.

Susan L. Star in “The ethnography of infrastructure” (1999) summons an ethics of care too, albeit not explicitly, as she invites us to think of our computers as sewers, and of digital infrastructure as the architecture of our homes. The way we build these “objects” will markedly affect our functioning, our lives. In her article, the ethics of care is also present in the act of making “invisible work” visible in our projects.

The relational is as present in this text as it is in the one above: infrastructure has relational properties. Moreover, the relational is encouraged in the practice of partnering ethnographers and computer scientists “for the purpose of usability.” We must build infrastructure, like archives, in dialogue with the community that will use them, and with utter respect toward its group practices and culture (again: “Toward slow archives”).

Star also extends a call to her readers to find the master narratives that guide the development of infrastructure, a topic we have seen in most past articles: the importance of detecting underlying stereotypes and presumptions at all levels of the DH work.

Miriam Posner’s “See no evil” is also related to relatedness, or lack thereof, in that it investigates fragmentation in knowledge about supply chains operations, and the human consequences of such. Modularity, or rigid compartmentalization, enables blind spots in the distribution of goods by technological means. Modularity acts as a defense mechanism –denial– that keeps us from seeing the traumatizing processes of supply-chain operations, and to go on enjoying our gadgets in unproblematic ways.

“Rethinking Repair” (S. Jackson, 2014) and “Interview with Ernesto Orozco” (A. Gil, 2016) align with the feminist ethics of care and relationality when they promulgate a connection to our objects beyond the consumptionist “use-and-discard” model. Gil, in his take on Orozco’s “technological disobedience” concept, invites digital humanists to break apart, so to speak, their instruments of work and reassemble or reuse them for a longer life or for an entirely different life. Gil also takes from Orozco the rejection of “finitude:” and object is never finished, whole; its life is never overdetermined by its initial intended use.

An interesting idea of Gil’s: easy access to digital tools becomes, paradoxically, an impediment to getting to know them, that is, to connect with them. In other words, wealth separates us from the know-how. We become expert ignorant-users of technology.

I write from a 2011 MacBook Pro that works just fine, but that I am forced to replace because I can’t upgrade its operating system any longer. Orozco’s laptop power cable broke down when he was responding to Gil’s interview questions. He considered buying a new one, but decided to search for ways to repair it.

Although I find the invitation to break my computer apart quite tempting, à la Cuba, I will never know what to do with its tripe, no matter how much I read about putting it back together or reusing its parts. As a society, we have much to learn about, and fight against, programmed obsolescence. An ethics of care may guide us in this process: rather than attaching ourselves to objects as a result of unbridled consumption, let’s care for them.

In 2015, I began to collaborate with victims of a crime that has come to be known as “the stolen babies cases of Spain.” Along with my workmates, expert developers Alejandro Peña (Àlex) and Juan Francisco Onielfa (Paco), we created a digital archive that documents the victims’ search for their children. We called it Maternidades robadas (Stolen Motherhoods). We worked with 20 victims of the crime: parents and siblings of stolen children; and children, now adults, looking for their biological families. They provided their testimonies and all the documents that they have been able to gather during their searches. They worked closely with us to prepare their cases for public viewing.

This map is our initial cartographic visualization of ten of the medical institutions supposedly implicated in the disappearances. The sites are marked by pins or numbers. The numbers indicate that we have included more than one site in a given city. By clicking on the pins, the viewer can read a brief description of the centers and a summary of one of the cases associated with it. The viewer may also access the case as it appears in our archive by clicking on the victim’s name.

A bit of background on the crime:

During the first years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1940s), the abduction of children was state-sanctioned. The targets were the offspring of incarcerated “red women.” The children were allowed to stay with their mothers in prison until they turned three and, then, they were taken away and sent to state institutions. Often, they were given as a “gift” or sold to regime-sympathizer families. The practice of separating the children from their biological families was inspired in the eugenic theories and experiments of Franco’s chief military psychiatrist, Antonio Vallejo Nágera, trained in Germany.

By the early 1950s, Franco’s state-terror practices had crushed dissidence. “Red mothers” were no longer supplying children for reallocation into other families. Nevertheless, the same networks that had aided the regime in its cleansing and purging process –Catholic orders, members of the medical establishment and civil servants– continued separating mothers from their newborns until the 1980s, when Spain had already transitioned into a democratic state. The victims in this phase of the crime were working class women, which the regime suspected of harboring deep-seated resentment against the elite, and single mothers. They were told that their newborns had died at childbirth or shortly after. By forcefully giving their children away to families of better means and more solid religious and ideological credentials, a large number of potentially disrupting individuals was shifted to families that would educate them within the principles of order and obedience to the dictatorship.

General comments:

While I was planning the map, my expectation was that developing it would be a straightforward task: locating the institutions and adding pins… Easy! I was even doubting that the whole exercise would add any relevant information to the project itself. This changed as I began to work.

It was not a quick or easy process. Most of the institutions have changed names, sometimes locations too. I had to conduct quite a bit of research to gather the most basic information about some of them.

As I searched the Internet, images of inaugural ceremonies appeared here and there: Franco, his wife (holding ostentatious bouquets), their military sycophants,… A visually rich context began to emerge, highlighting the entanglement of the medical sector and the dictatorship.

The institutions original names betrayed the political context in which they were created: one name honored the dictator; another honored the founder of the Spanish fascist party; most of them had religious names, as corresponded to a Catholic totalitarian State.

The buildings’ photographs show the regime’s propagandistic efforts of the 50s and 60s. They also reveal the dictatorship’s institutionalization of medicine: Franco’s biopolitics, as Foucault would have it.

Some of the institutions’ convoluted histories parallel those of their files: lost, hidden, burnt, flooded… unavailable. The imposing presence of the massive brick constructions suggests the enormity of the fight that the victims have taken on.

The future life of the map:

I created this map for our Intro class, but I found that the cartographic visualization of the project data is useful for the project itself. The institutions’ data are connected to the participant’s cases within Dédalo (the project’s software), so, in the future, the map will provide project viewers with another access door, and a different type of information, for all the cases we have collected in each institution.

Our next steps will be to complete the map and to integrate it with the rest of the project data before publishing it.

Building the map:

Sources:

• The names and locations of healthcare institutions provided by our project participants.
• Our participants’ recounts of their cases.
• Old and current photographs of the institutions (taken from the Internet; most of them under Creative Commons Licenses).
• Information about the institutions (taken from the participants’ testimonies and documents, and from Internet sources)

Tools:

• Leaflet library. Note: Paco and Álex use Leaflet with Dédalo, so I didn’t have to install it. Lucky me!

• Dédalo. Dédalo is the software with which we manage the entire project: audiovisual testimonies, documents and photographs. I use Dédalo to create a case for each participant, to document her/his search process, to transcribe the testimonies and to index them with the help of a thesaurus.

Processes:

• Creating a record for each of the healthcare institutions to be located in the map.
• Uploading the images into each file. Dédalo compresses them and prepares them for publication.
• Completing as much information as possible about each institution: dates, old and new names, description.
• Adding a brief summary of a victim’s case to each institution description and a hyperlink to the digital archive.
• Finding the institutions’ locations in the map and marking them.
• Publishing the map.

A Puerto Rican friend once told me that one of her earliest memories of school in the island was of a teacher showing a map to the class and explaining that “Puerto Rico is a tiny island, the smallest island in the Greater Antilles.” Thus were reduced to nothingness the 1,500 years of Puerto Rican history in the mind of one of its young citizens.

“Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential,” writes Mark Monmonier (p.1).* As representations of three dimensional realities, maps need to distort them in order to be manageable and useful. These distortions are the result of certain decisions, and those decisions carry political weight. Maps are not neutral.

Digital cartography, Monmonier further explains, has democratized what once was a very specialized craft. But, mind you, it has also made dilettante cartographers more vulnerable to the backstage doings of “programmers, marketing experts, and other anonymous middlemen” (p. 2).

Map distortions, however, can be put to interesting uses. In “Visualizing Sovereignty,” Yarimar Bonilla and Max Hantel (2016) walk us through the “mangle” (Presner!**) of mapping Caribbean political history digitally. In order to represent how the concept of sovereignty played out in the region, they developed a series of maps that kept getting closer to a dynamic and open-ended understanding of independence and self-determination –an understanding hardly conveyed by canonical political science and geographical borders.

Bonilla and Hantel played with size, color and scale; they made all islands equal in size in order to disrupt “the equation of smallness with inferiority and the analytical irrelevance usually attributed to those residing in a ‘small place'” (oh would my Puerto Rican friend love this map!). In the end, their work seriously questions the political canon by demonstrating that sovereignty cannot be equated with territorial independence, and it is certainly not a linear process.

The intersection of cartography and the digital world has the potential to profoundly revise and enrich political concepts that have become static and lost explanatory power. Digital cartography may also radically change our understanding of historical processes. In Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761, Vincent Brown and his team have created a dynamic spatial reconstruction of the 1760s Jamaican slave insurgency that reveals strategy, planning and coordination. The colonial record, by contrast, brushes off the revolt as a random series of skirmishes.

While imperialistic history distorts or buries “non-white” history, Google Earth diffuses and dissolves “non-white” places (“Dividing lines,” Mayukh 2017). Google Earth’s unmarked territories are akin to the treasure of unmarked histories that digital cartography may reconstruct.

As I look for a map to illustrate this post, I browse through the Benson Latin American Collection of maps drawn by native Mexicans under Spanish colonial occupation, and I wonder what would colonial maps look like had they been drawn by Spanish women-settlers of Perú, by Aztec female healers or by Ghanaian women forcibly working on the sugarcane plantations of the not so small island of Puerto Rico. Will digital cartography help us visualize that?

• 

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.