A quote that resonated with me in The Digital Humanities Moment was by Stephen Ramsay from his talk “Who’s In and Who’s Out” from the 2011 Modern Language Association Convention, “If you are not making anything, you are not . . . a Digital Humanist.” I feel like I am still new to the DH field, but if this statement is true, the sites presented for this weeks ‘sites to explore’ justify this sentiment. 

Torn Apart/ Separados is a site I was first introduced to at NYCDH ’19. The project was powerful to hear about then and is still remarkable to explore. Alex Gil spoke about the project at the conference, and its intent, and I immediately thought to myself “how can one person do all of this research by themself?” As I soon found out, and continue to realize, great work is usually a collaboration between many minds. The layout to the map is simple and straight to the point. The visitor to the site is prompted with a note of the sites purpose and then left to explore the thousands of plots on the map. A legend at the bottom showcases the three different sized and colored points. The top header allows the viewer to observe additional visualizations, change between the two versions created, read a description of the project, showcases allied organizations, bibliography, and the 100s of researchers and contributors to the site.

Caribbean Digital was another informative site to explore. During our first class I was thinking if there was already a DH presence in the Caribbean. This site confirmed to me that, yes, there is. One of the first aspects of the conference I searched for was the location. It was wonderful to see that the site of the conference was held within the Caribbean. One of the first links when brought to the site directs the viewer to a YouTube channel with videos of sections of the conference. Which I feel is important for allowing a greater audience to enjoy and feel included. Another exciting aspect was that you could go to older versions of the conference’s webpage.

Create Caribbean Projects and ECDA both confirmed my thoughts on DH in the Caribbean. They had numerous projects to showcase detailing the locations rich history with pedagogical tools to encourage the creation of more projects.

Torn Apart / Separados is an amazing example of how technology can be used to vividly depict a story. Through the publicly available data  powerful visualizations depict  a complete picture of immigrant detention. The data may be impure and imprecise but the visualizations  have successfully  painted a whole picture. It throws light on the flow of money (ICE money) from individuals to well-known companies and businesses.

“Equal Opportunity Oppression” pie charts depict the participation of people of color, women, and women of color in ICE contracts. Care was taken to show that there should be more participation from ‘other’ groups in ICE detention policy.

The Caribbean Digital prioritize Caribbean history, literature and arts, through various research projects. To preserve and make Caribbean a place where knowledge is accessible to everyone various multimedia projects containing  images, text-documents, newspaper clippings, Parliamentary documents, audiovisual recordings, and other resources that appropriately depict the history of the place were included. The coding program, workshops aim to make the youth digitally at par with the world. Technology works closely to bring alive the rich history of the Caribbean.

The ECDA is a collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images.

The rich collection includes novels, poetry, history all brought together to give a complete glimpse of the place. The materials in the archive are primarily authored and published by Europeans, but the ECDA aims to use digital tools to “remix” the archive with the contributions of enslaved and free African and indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world.

The readings this week were an introduction to me on both Digital Humanities and Caribbean Studies (I use this broadly and for a lack of a better term) since I haven’t had any in depth experience with either field. I decided to keep my reflections about the individual sites to a top level impression as I’m interested to see the varying viewpoints that are brought to the table.

The Torn Apart/Separados project as mentioned in “A DH That Matters” in the 2019 Debates in the Digital Humanities this project is an example of how the Digital Humanities can be used to ally with activists and create projects that will use data to “amplify the voices of those most in need of being heard.” The project is very rich in data and offers visual representations of the flow of money through ICE in the past few years thereby shedding light on individuals and companies that keep immigrant detention centers running. The three Debates in the Digital Humanities introductions demonstrated how the field has evolved since 2012 – growing from a very new field trying to define itself and what being a digital humanist means (2012), to becoming more established but still wrestling with what the field’s focus is (2016), and currently being able to expand beyond the – albeit very broad – definition of DH projects to partner with outside fields (2019).

The Create Caribbean site has a list of DH projects that focus more on pedagogy and educational materials as opposed to strictly research orientated projects. In terms of the Caribbean, this most reminded me of the section “The Challenge of the Digital Black Atlantic” in the Digital Black Atlantic Introduction. Josephs and Risam discuss the difficulties of marrying Caribbean/black studies and digital humanities, one example which is systematic barriers such as the lack of opportunities to learn digital skills, such as coding, in order to participant in scholarship. Create Caribbean offers the Create and Code program which addresses this issue by fostering digital literacy to students in Dominca and is an example of trying to close this gap.

Finally, The Caribbean Digital did not seem to link to any DH projects (unless I missed them?) but gave descriptions about the different panel discussions. The workshop on Digital Decolonization was presented by two panelists from Northwestern who referenced the Early Caribbean Digital Archive which we also needed to look through. I have to admit, as an archivist, I was most excited to look through this site, however, in terms of archival theories and best practices it left me somewhat confused. This particular site will take longer to unpack for me personally which is beyond the scope of this post. In terms of how it related to the readings, the ECDA is another example of DH pedagogical tools since there are resources for teachers, exhibits based off of the archive, and examples of student projects. I looked through the exhibits and most of the content is based off of Western European materials and wonder how much of the narrative produced challenged the Eurocentric view of history in the Caribbean, or if this is solely based on a lack of available materials.

The readings and sites to explore this week, perhaps precisely because they were juxtaposed, presented interesting parallels between Digital Humanities and the Black Atlantic. Both seem to find themselves in constant pursuit of definition. Both, in that effort, struggle with the benefits and drawbacks of inclusion and exclusion. Both, too, contain in their very DNAs a vital pluralism of disciplines and denizens.

As I poked around in the last site assigned, the Early Caribbean Digital Archive out of Northwestern, I found myself drawn to the exhibit on Obeah, a religious power forged from the mix of spiritual traditions over time and across space in the Caribbean and an idea brand new to me. The more I read about Obeah, the more it sounded like DH as presented in the three intros to Debates in the Digital Humanities: a potentially powerful and mutable force for resistance and social change.

One section of the exhibit is entitled “Is Obeah religion, science, or cultural practice?” Its opening lines sound similar to the 2012 Debates intro, as the ECDA explained: “The answer to this is complicated, and it might depend on who you ask. For some, it is distinctively one of these things, for others, it might be a combination of them all.”

In other sections, the ECDA exhibit refers to the two most prominent responses to Obeah by the colonial powers: ridicule and fear. I’ve heard both from academic colleagues in response to DH.

The initial inception of the ECDA predates Debates, yet in the following lines I hear echoes of Matt and Lauren’s 2016 call to consider what it means to expand the field:

“While Obeah is not uniform or universal in its practice, it is inclusive. Because of the endless iterations of cultures, ethnicities, and colonizers coming together, all with different roots and belief systems, it would be nearly impossible to have uniformity in any way within the Obeah community. Instead, it sought out acceptance of all practices of Obeah.”

https://ecda.northeastern.edu/home/about-exhibits/obeah-narratives-exhibit/where-does-obeah-come-from/

It’s not much of a stretch to read these lines with equal truth when Obeah is replaced by DH and “cultures, ethnicities, and colonizers” are replaced by “disciplines, methods, and practitioners.” Like Obeah, DH seems stronger for its reach than its roots.

The ECDA goes on to say:

“This exhibit also foregrounds politics of gender and age in relation to obeah. Because of the nature and inclusivity of its practice, obeah was a mode of empowerment and social mobility for blacks, both free and enslaved, of a variety of different genders, marital statuses, and age groups. The history of obeah is often primarily oral and, as this exhibit shows, is also one that shifts to fit the circumstances of its people across time, location, and colonial situation.”

https://ecda.northeastern.edu/home/about-exhibits/obeah-narratives-exhibit/

While perhaps less directly applicable, these lines too seem to mirror the growth of DH—one that seeks dialogue with and input from a range of areas of interests and expertise, of identities and stages of career, and of speeds and scopes. DH, like Obeah, is flexible in form which allows it a kind of shape-shifting ability in its work for social good in response to social ills.

While these parallels may be reductive, one thing is for certain: the ECDA is a clear example of good that DH can do because of its ability both to utilize and to distance itself from traditional disciplines. It has digitized sources from far-flung archives. It provides these sources for free and without registration hurdles to the internet-enabled public (without much demand on bandwidth, as far as my exploration can tell). It offers several lenses through which to explore the collection, encouraging a broad range of interpretation. And, it explicitly seeks to “decolonize the archive.”

Of course, the EDCA also makes some of the ethical missteps the Debates intros unflinchingly recognize: the ECDA is in English only, it was birthed in a well-funded and American university, and many of its early project alums seem not to be of Caribbean origin or descent. So, while the ECDA is already of real use, so much of its continued success may rest on its ability to address these issues. As the 2019 Debates intro entreats us, “As individuals and as a field, we must interrogate our work to ensure that we are not ourselves complicit in the neoliberal practice of naming problems in order to evade their resolution.”

*Note: please excuse the amateur and possibly excessive use of links in this post. It’s about the only “extra” thing i know to do on a blog post besides enter text, and I might have gotten carried away.

What jumps out at me most about the websites is that the ECDA and Caribbean Digital sites reflect more traditional humanities endeavors of pedagogy and research—with a high degree of political consciousness, aims, and praxis—while the Create Caribbean and Separados sites strike me as something more like an “application” of digital humanities in the service of socio-political transformation and activism. The former sites are driven by scholarly disciplinary interests while the latter ones arose as responses to “real-life” needs.

All of the sites reflect an awareness of the political power of digital humanities and a commitment to using that power for social transformation, as well as a commitment to maximizing the opportunities afforded by the multidisciplinary nature of DH.

ECDA states its aims:

The ECDA has two primary related, overarching goals: the first is to uncover and make accessible a literary history of the Caribbean written or related by black, enslaved, Creole, indigenous, and/or colonized people. Although the first step in this process is digitization, the ECDA is more than a digitization or cataloging initiative. Rather, we aim to enable users—both scholars of the Caribbean as well as students—to understand the colonial nature of the archive and to use the digital archive as a site of revision and remix for exploring ways to decolonize the archive.

Produced in 2011, the website emerged as an archiving project, which understood its potential for use in decolonization, from within its own disciplinary perspective, while adopting a critical approach to the status quo of the discipline, and also looking outward. This resonates with the intro to the 2012 Debates volume, The Digital Humanities Moment:

Indeed, fault lines have emerged within the DH community between those who use new digital tools to aid relatively traditional scholarly projects and those who believe that DH is most powerful as a disruptive political force that has the potential to reshape fundamental aspects of academic practice.

ECDA aimed to accomplish both. It is primarily a Caribbean Studies project website, but it recognizes DH as a way to “disrupt… the academic practice” of the discipline.
I see the relationship between Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities in the SX/Caribbean Digital conference websites as being more integrative. I might be over-reading the chronology as indicative of development, but I see this site (or is it a collection of sites?) as incorporating the stage described in the intro to the 2016 volume, Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field. The content, descriptions, and documentation of the conferences reflect an expansion of the “Big Tent”, in practice (scope and scale) and in the expanded metacognitive discourse about the definition, scope, and scale of DH. (Thanks to Zach Muhlbauer, who brought up the “metacognitive” aspect of DH, and the term, in our breakout group in class in Week 1).

Although it was launched at roughly the same time as the Caribbean Digital site, in 2014, the Create Caribbean website strikes me as embodying the motivations and mentalities outlined in the intro to the 2019 Debates volume, A DH that Matters.
Both Caribbean Digital and Create Caribbean reflect the multidimensionality and “openness” described in the (draft) intro to “Digital Black Atlantic,” and the conscious effort of creating a language that is true to the realities experienced and perceived by those whose identities place them “inside” the spatial, temporal, and cultural categories encompassed in the term “the Caribbean” and its diasporas, and also comprehensible to those viewing and analyzing the data through the lenses of various academic disciplines.
In their expansiveness (or, “capaciousness”– a word I heard a lot of in our first week of classes), I see both websites as accomplishing an integration that David Scott associates with Brathwaite: “a conceptual framework of Caribbean studies that combined the ‘social arts’ with the ‘social sciences.’” I understand Scott’s description of Brathwaite as a form of supplementation: adding humanities to the social scientific approaches he inherited (Smith’s pluralism, and Best’s and Beckford’s plantation society theory). But Scott also calls for a radical questioning and revision of the social scientific framework. I see Create Caribbean as such a corrective transformation. In some ways, it strikes me as an inversion of the initial colonialist project of instrumentalization and weaponization of scholarly inquiry. But, as a humanist, I am relieved to see the prominence of the social arts in its projects and methods.

In this respect, Torn Apart / Separados – xpmethod forces me to stretch my conception of digital humanities. I opened the site in its version 2, and the graphics struck me as much more commercial than scholarly:

But the description of the tools, collaboration, and methods easily convinced me that this too is DH. The need for this project underscores what I see as the core of DH– understanding and implementing responsibility in the gathering and processing of information.

We’re delighted to welcome you to Introduction to Digital Humanities 2019! Here is our course description:

In this introduction to the digital humanities (DH), we will approach the field via a Caribbean Studies lens, exploring how an understanding of the digital based in the growing area of digital Caribbean studies might shape the larger field of DH.

The course aims to provide a landscape view of DH, paying attention to how its various approaches embody new ways of knowing and thinking, new epistemologies. What kinds of questions, for instance, does the practice of mapping pose to our research and teaching? How does the concept of mapping change when we begin from the Global South? When we attempt to share our work through social media, how is it changed and who do we imagine it reaches? How can we visually and ethically represent various forms of data and how does the data morph in the representation?

Over the course of this semester, we will explore these questions and others as we engage 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.

Central themes in the course will emerge from our focus on the Caribbean — in particular, how various technologies and technical approaches have been shaped by colonial practices; how archives might be decolonized and how absences in the archives might be accounted for; and how concepts like minimal computing might alter the projects we build.

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.