Community Development Bias: 
Cultural Criticism and the Digital Humanities

Assignment 3, Part 2: Final Research Paper

Kimberley A. Ilott

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Athabasca University

MAIS623: Introduction to Trends in New Media - Digital Humanities

Dr. Frits Pannekoek

April 2023

​​

Cultural Criticism and the Digital Humanities

Abstract

In her 2012 (p. 140) writing McPherson pondered why the digital humanities were “so white”. The answer to McPherson’s question is not straightforward, systemic, racial, and cultural biases have white-washed cultural narratives for centuries, not just in digital humanities times. While these biases are centuries old, this paper will explore the historical ‘whiteness’ of digital humanities. I will discuss ethical considerations surrounding diversity and inclusion or lack thereof in the field, the varying socioeconomic challenges present which perpetuate inequalities, as well as the shift in attitude by the digital humanist community of practice toward the field of study that suggest a future where the removal of cultural blinders and the rectifying of erroneous narratives are possible. The breaking down of systemic inequalities within the digital humanities field will hinge on humanists considering how digital spaces and tools can facilitate diverse perspectives of humanities knowledge. As Burdick et al. (2012, p. 1) raised, the field of study can expand on the foundations of earlier generations of computational approaches to humanities research to capitalize on the potential and reach of the digitized realm. By encouraging diverse perspectives, curiosity, flexibility, and a critical disposition toward postcolonial literature, culture, and history, digital humanists can introduce “voices, stories, and cultural contexts that vary from their own” (Risam, 2019, p.92).

​

Introduction

Despite the increased visibility surrounding the lack of diversity and inclusion in the digital humanities field, cultural and socioeconomic inequalities remain prominent attributes of the field because of the engrained biases of those in authoritative positions within the digital humanities field. The course literature, as well as other scholarly articles and journals, suggest that the digital humanities field of study remains white, patriarchal, and privileged (McPherson, 2012, p. 155). The digital humanities field has, up to this point, remained closely tied to the historical orientation of the traditional humanities field. Digital humanities scholars, researchers, and practitioners use digital tools to catalogue, analyze, and study historical documentation more so than current works as suggested by Manovich (2016, p. 2), in part due to copyright, restrictions which were not present on historical humanities items. While analysis of current (twentieth or twenty-first centuries) humanities items has been on the rise, the field remains small in comparison to the analysis of historical content; historically, digital humanists have given more attention to “building archives and databases than to applying new computational techniques to the study of culture” (Manovich, 2016, p. 3). With that being said, one of the challenges digital humanists come up against when attempting to study culture is the legacy that historical abuses of communities and systemic inequalities have engrained within the vulnerable populations whom scholars are seeking partnerships with (Earhart, 2018, p. 369).

​

Although historical abuses of communities and system inequalities pose a significant hurdle to overcome in the digital humanities field, there are those embarking on the necessary reconciliation journey, such as scholars who are working in Indigenous studies. These scholars are leading the way in identifying “a set of best practices for all [others] who are working with historically marginalized communities, recognizing that an understanding of individual and group situatedness is crucial to digital humanities practices” (Earhart, 2018, p. 369). Earhart (2018, p. 369) suggests that best practices for the field must include both introspection and an understanding of the historical power dynamics that have been, and are, present within institutions and communities. As I have experienced throughout this course, and in my master’s journey, today’s digital humanities students are encouraged to think critically about inequalities in knowledge production when engaging with postcolonial literary and cultural texts (Risam, 2019, p.92).

​

Breaking down systemic inequalities within the digital humanities field will hinge on scholars and practitioners considering how digital spaces and tools can facilitate diverse perspectives of humanities knowledge. By encouraging diverse perspectives, curiosity, flexibility, and a critical disposition toward postcolonial literature, culture, and history, digital humanists can introduce “voices, stories, and cultural contexts that vary from their own and are underrepresented in the dominant cultural traditions of the Global North” (Risam, 2019, p.92). While increased diversity and inclusion have been observed in the field, cultural blindness and socioeconomic barriers continue to be present. In this paper, I will explore the historical ‘whiteness’ of digital humanities, the ethical considerations surrounding diversity and inclusion, the varying socioeconomic challenges that perpetuate inequalities, and lastly, the shift in attitudes toward the field of study that suggest future improvement toward the removal of systemic blinders.

​

Historical Biases in the Digital Humanities Field

Digital humanities scholars, researchers, and practitioners have struggled to acknowledge the importance of cultural contexts as well as the heterogeneity of contexts and users of technology (Cocq, 2022, p. 4). As identified in the introduction of this paper, Risam (2019, p. 92) raises concerns about the imbalance of cultural representation, voices, and context between the Global North and Global South in the digital humanity field. Cocq (2022, p. 4) echoes Risam’s (2019, p. 92) sentiment through her stressing the urgency for acknowledging and rectifying the historical lack of global diversity and associated inequalities observed in the digital humanities. While the term ‘bias’ provides a connotation of direct person-to-person interaction or intention, consciously or subconsciously, we learned through the course material that there can be bias engrained in the digital tools or computations employed by practitioners. As McPherson (2012, p. 143) states

Certain modes of racial visibility and knowledge coincide or dovetail with specific ways of organizing data: if digital computing underwrites today’s information economy and is the central technology of post-World War II America, these technological ways of seeing and knowing took shape in a world also struggling with shifting knowledge about and representations of race.

 

A person only needs to look at any sort of news outlet to see examples of how today’s society continues to struggle with shifting knowledge about and representation of race, as well as other minority populations (such as the disabled community). Racial formations have, historically, served as fundamental organizing principles of social relations on both the macro and micro levels (McPherson, 2012, p. 143); whether it is recognized or not, racial, and socioeconomic status components have infiltrated our technological constructs in the postcolonial (1945 onward) era.

​

The institutionalization of covert racism, as well as the rhetoric of colour blindness, in our databases and computation systems, is not so much intentional as it is systemic. As McPherson (2012, p. 149) highlights, how the organization of information and capital in the 1960s continues to impact humanities work, digital or otherwise. The 1960s was a powerful era, technology was beginning to blossom, while struggles, and subsequent shifts, related to racial justice and democracy were mainstream. Many of the new societal constructs and technological advances of the era hinged on computation as one of the primary delivery methods for these new systems related to socioeconomic statuses; it is not a far reach to suspect and understand that cultural and computational systems and structures are related to one another in how society, even today, operates (McPherson, 2012, p. 149).

​

An example of racial and socioeconomic biases perpetrated by, as McPherson (2012, p. 155) states, a white, patriarchal, and privileged population against those who are deemed to be less than is the aftermath of the deadly category five, Hurricane Maria, which struck the northeastern Caribbean in autumn 2017. The hurricane “exposed the cruelties of neocolonialism in Puerto Rico, highlighting the United States government’s tepid response and indifference to the [territory]” (Risam, 2018, p. 1). The environmental and humanitarian disaster that was Hurricane Maria reaffirmed how societal constructs continue to be tied to systemic inequalities and colonial viewpoints revolving around a rich, white, racial narrative; Puerto Ricans, United States citizens, were cut off from necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and health care, and relief came not from large government bodies but from grassroots humanitarian efforts. As digital humanists begin to dive into twentieth and twenty-first-century cultural dynamics, scholars have identified that the Western world has historically driven the digital humanities field. Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 1) reviewed the prevalence of digital humanities centres globally, of the 190 centres, most are located in North America, Australia, and Europe, while there is a handful in Asia and South America, and only two in Africa. Aiyegbusi’s (2018, p. 1) findings reinforce the narrative that digital humanities activities are driven by the Western world and challenge the narrative that the field is truly an interdisciplinary practice. The continued perpetuation of this disproportionate field dynamic has resulted in African scholars, as well as scholars in other lower socioeconomic status countries, viewing the digital humanities field as a Western phenomenon (Aiyegbusi, 2018, p. 1) with a specific narrative and scope, that can only be practicable only in technologically advanced areas of the world, thus instituting and continuing cycles of inequalities, losing out on cultural voices, imagery, and context. As the field continues to expand, it will be imperative that the systemic systems that have historically enabled rich countries to participate more in digital humanities scholarship and practice, in comparison to their poor counterparts, are dismantled.

​

The historical and systemic biases within the digital humanities field penetrate the digital pedagogy realm just as much as they do with global economic systems and societal norms. As an example, the field of study has built little knowledge “of the unique issues associated with research and teaching by and in the [Indigenous Peoples] context” (Guiliano & Heitman, 2017, p. 1). The lack of knowledge about the systemic and historically contentious relationship between Indigenous Peoples and colonists continues to cause generational trauma across the Indigenous populations. Digital humanities scholarship has suffered due to these continued traumas, resulting in the non-existent “best practices, guidelines, or even suggestions about the process of working in digital environments with [Indigenous] communities” (Guiliano & Heitman, 2017, p. 2). For the breakdown in digital humanities pedagogy related to Indigenous studies, Guiliano & Heitman (2017, p. 1-2) outlined five reasons for the continued systemic bias

1. Funding for [Indigenous] studies research institutionally has focused on the production of traditional scholarly products (e.g., monographs).

2. [Indigenous] studies as a discipline [have] remained underfunded institutionally which bars many institutions from hiring staff, faculty, and [Indigenous community] members to work together to teach and research.

3. Funding for cultural heritage organizations including [Indigenous] archives, libraries, and museums, has focused on preservation and access to analog materials…rather than embracing the spectrum of digital and analog materials that document [Indigenous] life.

4. The diversity of academic disciplines [that] participate in [Indigenous] Studies is broad and, as such, lends itself to fragmentation and a lack of information exchange about digital products, tools, methods, and pedagogy.

5. Digital [Indigenous] studies most frequently [are] only encountered by scholars and community members at the end of the development cycle as the project is released and they begin to encounter ‘actual’ users.

 

When one stops to look at the prevalence of historical, systemic biases, along with the racial undertones, of today’s societal dynamic, it is evident that the digital humanities field mirrors the reality of the human experience and technological constructs built upon a foundation of micro and macro aggression toward those who are not ‘white’ or are different from the societal definition of ‘normal’. Similar to those who have been excluded due to racial and socioeconomic biases, people with disabilities have not gone unscathed by the systemic constructs engrained in the digital humanities field and society at large. Hamraie (2018, p. 461) highlights how accessibility compliance for the disabled community emerged from medical and legal institutions rather than disability activism. In the United States, accessibility standards were instituted based on white, male, disabled veterans, who sought to overcome their disabilities, thus regaining their ability to be productive citizens (Hamraie, 2018, p. 461). Stemming from institutionally collected accessibility compliance data, digital humanities continue to foster the narrow narrative to which the data is built (e.g., people with disabilities are white, cisgender, and physically fit) (Hamraie, 2018, p. 461), thus perpetrating specific imagery for the representation of disabled people. Historical biases cemented in systemic systems cause digital humanists to overlook important projects which would provide society at large with an accurate window into a disabled person’s life as well as the multi-faceted dynamic of the disabled community, irrespective of their productivity measurement against an archaic social confine.

 

Ethical Considerations: Diversity and Inclusion

As Risam (2018, p. 4) identifies, “the opportunity to intervene in the digital cultural record – to tell new stories, shed light on counter-histories, and create spaces for communities to produce and share their knowledge should they wish – is the great promise of digital humanities”. This promise has been missing from mainstream field dialogue, due to the many diversity and inclusion challenges, as well as historical relationship sensitivities between communities, thus obscuring the opportunities for the improvement of the digital cultural record. Without a diverse and inclusive field of study or practice, the field’s “value for humanistic inquiry [as well as] its role in developing and sustaining the digital cultural record of humanities” (Risam, 2018, p. 4) is ignored. As described previously in this paper, digital humanities have historically been whitewashed, ignoring sizable portions of the global population, and erasing their unique stories. Western practitioners and scholars alike have to capitalize on their access to digital technologies to change the narrative, “creating new competing, overlapping, and contestatory digital worlds that jostle one another to tell the rich story of humanity” (Risam, 2018, p. 5).

​

Digital humanists must continually apply a diverse and inclusive lens to their work, seeing the world through the eyes of those in different environments than themselves. Furthermore, Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 12) suggests that the digital humanities field can become a global phenomenon, as long as digital humanists become, and remain, aware of “the economic and social milieu of other countries, [being] sensitive to the differences in orientation and culture while finding ways to include diverse voices in the global discourse”. Diverse and inclusive practices do not need to be extensive, digital humanists can institute collaborative vehicles for discourse through the forming of focus groups, aligning incentives to encourage scholarship, and organizing or participating in conferences that have a multinational presence to build an inclusive global community of practice. Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 12) notes that while “pinning down” a definition for the digital humanities term that the larger humanities community agrees upon may not be feasible, the lack of a commonly accepted definition should not equate to a lack of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility; working to make the definition dilemma a non-issue will help non-Western countries have a seat at the proverbial digital humanities table.

​

When practitioners work to add a diverse and inclusive lens, many could look to the writing of Aiyegbusi, who has called out the systemic challenges faced by Africa, thus prohibiting the continent’s active participation in the digital humanities field. The scholar speaks to internal and external factors that make a community resistant to global integration; combined, these factors “hinder not just the spread and development of digital humanities as a field in Africa but also its recognition as a universal mode of acquiring and enhancing knowledge” (Aiyegbusi, 2018, p. 4). Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 4) goes on to highlight that external factors are intricately linked to the economic state of the various developing African countries, while the internal factors, which restrict the spread of the digital humanities field, are controlled by the field’s community. External factors are deeply rooted and are not easily changed nor affected by globalized digital humanities work, as they revolve around economic, political, social, and cultural systems (Aiyegbusi, 2018, p. 5). While the field of study does not directly impact the external factors, there is a duty to capture these factors, displaying the hardships of the people who live in these challenging countries where poverty runs rife, leaking into other systemic issues such as technological connectivity, water supply, or the overall dismal well-being of a population.

​

Ethics concerning diversity and inclusion in the digital humanities field are entirely dependent upon the ethical and moral compass of the practitioner. As a community of scholars and practitioners, a global, wide-focused, understanding of best practices to ensure diversity and inclusion would be a significant benefit to the field of study. Returning to Aiyegbusi’s (2018, p. 5) writings on Africa’s digital humanities challenges, it is important to understand what internal and external factors are facing those in the field in other parts of the world; many researchers in Africa “still rely on conventional methods of inquiry, because most of the technological tools that are required to reshape the traditional methods are not readily available” (Aiyegbusi, 2018, p. 6) thus putting this population of digital humanists at a disadvantage when compared to their Western counterparts. As highlighted by Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 6), issues such as excessive cost and poor infrastructure (systemic external factors), which make it difficult to access the Internet in some African countries, are related to African digital humanists’ inability to access affordable, standardized digital humanity tools, resources, and methodologies (internal factors). As the digital humanities field expands, the community as a whole will need to remove its copious blinders to ensure fair and equitable access to field basics as well as to ensure global participation. “In addition to careful attention to ownership, [digital humanists] must consider how [their] digital representation and manipulations impact knowledge production… [digital humanists] need to recognize that there is more than a set of [technical] specifications that represent best practices” (Earhart, 2018, p. 373) and that narrowly focused work may not accurately, fairly, or ethically represent marginalized communities’ understanding of preservation, knowledge, or cultural context. With this lens, taking into consideration the immense variation in digital humanist external and internal factors, as suggested by Aiyegbusi (2018, pg. 5), the digital humanities’ “best practices might be better understood [if championed] as ethical guidelines of practice” (Earhart, 2018, p. 373).

​

Socioeconomic Status Impacts

Much like ethical considerations digital humanists need to institute in their practices and as a global community of practice, digital humanists need to consider the socioeconomic status impacts field activities may provide. Recalling an earlier example in this paper, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. While the United States government was slow to react to the devastation against a population of its citizens, humanity groups rallied. A mapathon was organized by volunteers to “digitally connect and create urgently needed data for [the various] communities…so that local and international decision-makers [could] use these maps and data to better respond to [the crisis]” (Missing Maps, 2023). The Missing Maps (2023) global organization, whose founders include the Canadian Red Cross, the American Red Cross, the British Red Cross, and GIScience, depend on volunteers to create up-to-date maps globally to enable the success of humanitarian initiatives around the world when responding to a disaster. Risam (2018, p. 2) stated that the Puerto Rico Mapathon demonstrated how a digital cultural record can have a substantial impact on people’s lives. In the instance of Puerto Rico, “intervening in the digital cultural record is an acute matter of life or death in the Anthropocene, where the stakes of race and colonialism play out in the medium of environmental disaster, on the bodies of Puerto Ricans” (Risam, 2018, p. 2).

​

Digital humanities projects revolving around mapping access have helped to identify methods for laying racial and socioeconomic inequality information within the deliverables, highlighting how digital humanity methodologies, such as strategic sociospatial practices, are powerful influencers for governing bodies impacting broad architectures of inclusion beyond accessibility (Hamraie, 2018, p. 479). While Hamraie’s (2018, p. 460) positioning is targeting disability activism, the questions asked in accessibility mapping can be applied to socioeconomic barriers: what barriers are present, for whom, and under what conditions? Digital humanists can craft narratives surrounding these questions, consciously creating frameworks for activism or action, and leading the way for socioeconomic impacts. These impacts often challenge the digital cultural record, as Risam (2018, p. 2) highlights, as cultural records contain gaps, omissions, and a colonial dynamic, all of which perpetuate chronic problems of “epistemic violence, [contravening] cultural survival for communities whose languages are underrepresented, histories are suppressed, and stories are untold” (Risam, 2018, p. 2-3). Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 3) echoes Risam’s (2018, p. 2-3) sentiment, going a step further to advocate for cultural community members to be integral project team members. As raised by Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 3), the absence of cultural voices during the lifecycle of a digital humanities project “tends to create a disconnect between the project and the targeted audience and users and may reduce accessibility and incorporation into academic circles”. Furthermore, cultural and socioeconomic representation within a project team can assist with stagnating the loss of cultural heritage, literature, and language. Aiyegbusi (2018, p. 3) suggests that the “extinction of languages and other cultural traditions can be delayed or halted” when the right demographic representation is included.

​

Looking at Indigenous studies, as an example, barriers to digital fluency in the study field can vary and include obstacles such as cultural rules regarding sensitive materials, the advanced technical expertise required, cost barriers related to digital infrastructure, and issues of community engagement, but importantly the largest barrier is trust (Guiliano & Heitman, 2017, p. 2). Indigenous communities have not yet been able to capitalize on the socioeconomic impacts, for better, that the field of digital humanities can foster. As Guiliano & Heitman (2017, p. 2) suggest, it is an easy narrative to believe that the slow “uptake of digital humanities methodologies and pedagogy in the academic, cultural heritage, and [Indigenous] communities [are] one of lack of information or funding”, however, the reality observed by Indigenous digital humanities project researchers is that the slow uptake is a result of “cultural barriers to access, display, and analyze across [different] types of digital materials that [challenge] abilities to leverage digital tools, resources, and approaches” (Guiliano & Heitman, 2017, p. 2). When reviewing the evidence related to socioeconomic status impacts, and general betterment of human lives, stemming from digital humanities activities, the field has failed to adequately account for and represent a large number of cultures and populations. Entire demographic categories have been taken for granted, or worse, wiped from the historical-cultural record fully when scholars or practitioners think about society; digital humanists’ innate desire to group people into categories and compare them to social, economic, or cultural indicators, has historically been detrimental, eliciting an ‘us versus them’ stance between many of the so-called groupings. As the field of digital humanities expands, scholars and practitioners must adequately articulate how, and cultivate support for, the breaking down of demographics by gender, ethnicity, age, education, income, and place of living (urban, suburban, and rural) impacts a person’s, or collectives, overall well-being (Manovich, 2016, p. 10).

​

The Future of Inequalities in Digital Humanities

While there is still much work to be done to break down the systemic and covert racism, cultural degradation, and stigma associated with certain socioeconomic status indicators, the recent and current dialogue surrounding diversity and inclusion, cultural safety, and systemic barriers is encouraging. This awareness of digital humanities field grievances has deep roots within the traditional humanities field of study. As Risam (2018, p. 3) writes

These ‘new’ methodologies… are not conjured out of thin air by digital humanities practitioners but are built on the histories and traditions of humanists knowledge production that have been deeply implicated in both colonialism and neocolonialism. In response, postcolonial digital humanities [attend] to the practices necessary for engaging faculty, librarians, students, and those employed by galleries and museums in the vital work of deconstructing these influences and remediating digital cultural [records].

 

Today’s digital humanists sit in the uncomfortable and seek answers or some semblance of understanding with the unpopular questions related to power, globalization, and colonial and neocolonial ideologies that have shaped the digital cultural record via the internet (Risam, 2018, p. 12). The full extent of the internet’s impact on the digital humanities field and its ability to foster critical dialogues that challenge the status quo has yet to be realized but the medium does allow digital humanists to grasp a more fulsome lens on the field’s deficiencies. To move forward with a critical lens toward the injustices of the past, digital humanists must thoughtfully cultivate a new diverse, and inclusive dynamic that changes the digital cultural record. As observed with the Puerto Rico mapathon example, the organizers of the digital humanities activity recognized the contribution that they could have on disaster relief, and the lives of its citizens, through the improvement of Puerto Rican maps, thus populating the country’s digital cultural record with a different narrative.

​

In the efforts to disrupt the dangerous, and incorrect, digital humanities narrative that surrounds culture, socioeconomic status, and specific population segments, digital humanists not only need to ensure their behaviour models the way, but they also need to champion the dismantling of the historical systemic technological systems that have engrained biases engrained within their constructs. The continued growth of critical methodologies must involve familiarity with code languages, operating systems, algorithmic thinking, and system design; literacy in databases, algorithmic patterns, computations, and interfaces will bring in hybrid practitioners, such as programming humanists, activist scholars, and critical race coders (McPherson, 2012, p. 154). As McPherson (2012, p. 154) boldly stated, many digital humanists rarely go outside of their “normalized, modular…[black] box” and that “scholarly practices tend to undervalue broad contexts, meaningful relation, and promiscuous border crossing. While many [digital humanists] identify as interdisciplinary, very few…extend that border crossing very far” (McPherson, 2012, p. 154). While there is the promise for increased scope of the current digital humanities confines in the Western world, digital humanists cannot forget that the forward leaps made possible by enhanced educational systems, decentralization, diversity, and inclusive practices are not the norm in many parts of the world, an example of which is Africa where centralized education and conservatives stances are the societal and operational system norms (Aiyegbusi, 2018, p. 1).

​

With increased awareness comes the inherent ability for change, knowledge is a key driver behind increased awareness, and although digital humanities are often associated with research, digital pedagogy should not be underestimated. The next generation of digital humanists will understand the influences of colonial power that have shaped cultural narratives through omissions and historical inequalities; the hope is that the next generation can use this knowledge to “intervene in the absences in the digital cultural record” (Risam, 2019, p. 90) through the use of data to question accepted cultural norms or concepts, challenging the way digital humanists think, see, understand, and ultimately act on the findings that surround them in the field (Manovich, 2016, p. 14).  In contrast, it is imperative that digital humanists also realize that “for historically marginalized communities, institutions have, with some rare exceptions, been exploitive. This legacy will alter the way [practitioners] structure partnerships and should [enable critical thinking] about ownership, control, and openness” (Earhart, 2018, p. 386). Most importantly, the global digital humanities community of practice should remember that each data point is a representation of a human interaction, culture, or knowledge system, and the exploitation of data equals human exploitation. The digital humanist community must develop commonly accepted ethics of practice, enabling a consistent application of open dialogue, careful consideration of technological structures, and the development of prosperous and equitable partnerships (Earhart, 2018, p. 386).

​

Conclusion

As identified in this paper, there has been a significant amount of growth in the digital humanities field of study, enabling the confines of old to crumble, but digital humanist work is far from over. The continued conversations surrounding diversity, inclusion, and accessibility, as well as the racial undercurrent that still impacts today’s societal operations, perpetrate the uncomfortable and often disastrous dialogue related to cultural socioeconomic injustices and disparities. By highlighting the why behind the lack of diversity and inclusion in the digital humanities field, this paper highlighted the pain points and gaps, as well as potential corrective action, related to the cultural and socioeconomic barriers in the field. Without a common digital humanities definition that digital humanists can agree on, specific principles and guidelines about ethical best practices must take centre stage; while it may seem backward to have definitional work “[conclude] before global participation is achieved, for some of the intellectual communities beyond the West, the definitional ambiguity promotes apathy” (Aiyegbusi, 2018, p. 8).

​

For continued diverse and inclusive work within the digital humanities field, rectifying erroneous and dangerous cultural narratives, field scholarship must capitalize on the realization that involving a wide array of partners, such as community, cultural, governmental, and the general public, results in “a form of scholarship that… applies the knowledge and methods of the humanities to pose new questions, to design new possibilities, and to create citizen-scholars who value the complexity, ambiguity, and differences that comprise the global cultural record” (Presner et al., 2014, p. 143). The larger digital humanities community of practice will need to move past the debates of what is or is not digital humanities, who is a digital humanist or who is not, and whether the field of study revolves around “making or theorizing, computation or communication, practice or politics” (Spiro, 2012, p. 16), instead, the community must focus on the critical analysis of the global cultural record. Thus, creating a form of scholarship and practice that helps the next generation of digital humanists better understand the politics and power of knowledge production, as well as the role, as practitioners, that they will have in the creation of the digital worlds of the twenty-first century, giving voice to those that have been silent for too long.

​

References

Aiyegbusi, B. (2018). Decolonizing digital humanities: Africa in perspective. In E. Losh & J. Wernimont (Eds.), Bodies of information: Intersectional feminism and digital humanities (pp. 434–446). Minneapolis, MN: the University of Minnesota Press.

Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Presner, T., & Schnapp, J. (2012). Humanities to digital humanities . In Digital humanities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Cocq, C. (2022). Revisiting the digital humanities through the lens of Indigenous studies—or how to question the cultural blindness of our technologies and practices. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 73(2), 333-344.

Earhart, A. (2018). Can we Trust the University?: Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities. U of Minnesota P.

Guiliano, J., & Heitman, C. (2017). Indigenizing the digital humanities: Challenges, questions, and research opportunities. In DH.

Hamraie, A. (2018). Mapping access: Digital humanities, disability justice, and sociospatial practice. American Quarterly, 70(3), 455–482.

Manovich, L. (2016). The science of culture? Social computing, digital humanities, and cultural analytics. Journal of Cultural Analytics, 1(1).

McPherson, T. (2012). Why are the digital humanities so white? or Thinking the histories of race and computation. In M. Gold (Ed.), Debates in the digital humanities (pp. 139–160). Minneapolis, MN: the University of Minnesota Press

Missing Maps. (2023). About. Retrieved from https://www.missingmaps.org/about/

Presner, T., Shepard, D., & Kawano, Y. (2014). Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Risam, R. (2018). New digital worlds: Postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy. Northwestern University Press.

Risam, R. (2019). Postcolonial digital pedagogy. In New digital worlds: Postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy (pp. 89–114). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Spiro, L. (2012). This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities. Debates in the digital humanities, 16-34.

​