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.