“A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names are not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, properties and music do not flourish. When properties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”

Confucius, The Analects -13

In this quote, Confucius presents a deep relation between work’s success and sharing a consistent understanding of language. This thinking is beneficial, especially when we need to define transdisciplinary areas of knowledge.

As a service designer who works in a strategic design studio and a scholar aiming to pursue an academic career, I constantly face the challenge of defining “design.” It is a challenge because Design is a field yet to mature, both in terms of being known and self-knowledge (PORTUGAL DO NASCIMENTO, 2020). Design is anything and everything, sharing its identity with other disciplines such as fine arts, architecture, engineering, information technology, marketing, advertising, handicrafts, the culinary arts, hair styling, and so on. 

The same thing happens with Digital Humanities, as its studies and practices are also fuzzy, blurry, complicated to delimit. Gold (2012) presents this field as a place of discussion between those who relate Digital Humanities to an area that explores new digital tools to aid relatively traditional scholarly projects and those who believe that it is a disruptive political force, with the potential to reshape fundamental aspects of academic practice. In my understanding, these definitions are incomplete, since both approaches are connected and interdependent.

I like the definition of Digital Humanities as a “trading zone” or “meeting place,” as it is proposed by Galison (apud GOLD, 2012). In using digital technologies to produce new epistemological possibilities in areas such as History, English, Art, Computer Science, Philosophy, etc., digital humanists have the power to engage in projects that evoke ethical, social, and political issues, transforming academic discussions into more collaborative and exciting conversations with the general public. In addition, I think that, as Stephen Ramsay points out, Digital Humanities is about building (or even more precisely, coding) things, enabling multimodal ways to access knowledge.

A project that exemplifies this definition is Gulu Sound Tracks, presented in the August 2021 edition of Reviews in Digital Humanities. Developed for both academic and non-academic audiences, it offers a collection of eight high-tempo audio tracks that remix Gulu’s familiar sound worlds to tell of the city anew. As an intersection of experimental ethnography, creative arts, digital humanities, and sound studies, it takes sound production as a mode of critical public scholarship that privileges openness, de-centering text-based knowledge forms to amplify the work and ideas of those that do ethnography. As a result, anyone with access to the internet can dive into Gulu’s environments and enjoy delightful music.

As a designer, I know the importance of discussions that aim to clarify collective understanding around practices, especially in broad and blurry fields of knowledge such as Digital Humanities. Therefore, as Confucius presents it, let’s be cautious and keep using language according to the truth of things. This way, we will work properly and see the results of efforts as digital humanists flourish.

References

CONFUCIUS, Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, verses 4-7, translated by James Legge.

GOLD, Matthew K. 2012. The Digital Humanities Moment In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press.

PORTUGAL DO NASCIMENTO, Luís Cláudio. 2020. Diseño en medio de feudos y campos: la oportunidad de la “rectificación de nombres” propuesta por Confucio en la Babel contemporánea de conceptos, términos y expresiones pegadizas recientemente forjados en el campo del diseño. In Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación [Ensayos] Nº 80, Buenos Aires.

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.

I’m delighted to welcome you to Introduction to Digital Humanities 2021! Here is our course description:

What are the digital humanities, and how can they help us think in new ways? This course offers an introduction to the landscape of digital humanities (DH) work, paying attention to how its various approaches embody new ways of knowing and thinking. What kinds of questions, for instance, does the practice of mapping pose to our research and teaching? When we attempt to share our work through social media, how is it changed? How can we read “distantly,” and how does “distant reading” alter our sense of what reading is?

Over the course of this semester, we will explore these questions and others as we engaging ongoing debates in the digital humanities, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, the question of whether DH has (or needs) theoretical grounding, controversies over new models of peer review for digital scholarship, issues related to collaborative labor on digital projects, and the problematic questions surrounding research involving “big data.” The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches.

Among the themes and approaches we will explore are evidence, scale, representation, genre, quantification, visualization, and data. We will also discuss broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship.

Though no previous technical skills are required, students will be asked to experiment in introductory ways with DH tools and methods as a way of concretizing some of our readings and discussions. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussions and online postings (including on our course blog) and to undertake a final project that can be either a conventional seminar paper or a proposal for a digital project. Students completing the course will gain broad knowledge about and understanding of the emerging role of the digital humanities across several academic disciplines and will begin to learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects.

Note: this course is part of an innovative “Digital Praxis Seminar,” a two-semester long introduction to digital tools and methods that will be open to all students in the Graduate Center. The goal of the course is to introduce graduate students to various ways in which they can incorporate digital research into their work.