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Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities

Jan 23, 20254 min read

Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities

Bibliography

Risam, R. (2019). Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities. In B. Bordalejo & R. Risam (Eds.), Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (1st ed., pp. 13–34). Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781641890519.003

Notes

Notes

Intersectional questions pertain the field of digital humanities. Despite recognizing the need to be more inclusive, digital humanities are still white and male-dominated.

I didn’t understand the problem behind theory versus practice.

Go to annotation“The relationship between theory and praxis is integral to the digital humanities. Connections between the two appear in the archives built, corpora analyzed, oral histories recorded, and geographies mapped.” (Risam, 2019, p. 15)

DH is prone to Go to annotation“retrohumanism that does not account for recent developments in the humanities, like cultural studies, feminism, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, or queer studies.” (Risam, 2019, p. 15)

A way to counter that is to Go to annotation“reviving digital textual recovery work and identifying the omissions of the canon” (Risam, 2019, p. 15)

Go to annotation“This article proposes that intersectionality is a viable approach to cultural criticism in digital humanities, enabling us to write alternate histories of the field that transcend simplistic “hack” vs. “yack” binaries.” (Risam, 2019, p. 16)

There is already a rich history of intersectional DH projects and research since at least the 2000ends. All with their own critiques and concerns.

Go to annotation“These concerns are vital to the analytical work of digital humanities, the computational technologies developed or used to produce scholarship, and the ways projects are designed.” (Risam, 2019, p. 22)

DH is also prone to being monolithic, having the need to define itself and exclude those at the margins of it’s field.

Go to annotation“Therefore, it is incumbent on those at the centre of digital humanities to understand the position of those whose work dwells in the peripheries, to understand the historical legacies that link knowledge production with the denigration—even the destruction—of that which is other.” (Risam, 2019, p. 22)

  • embrace the messiness of

    Go to annotation“authorship, production, and reception: race, class, gender, and sexuality.” (Martha Nell Smith)

“More recently, Smith has issued a call to integrate feminist, critical race, sexuality, and class-based analysis into digital humanities, particularly in digital archival practice. Such an approach would address questions like “How have these items of knowledge and the organizations and working groups who made them come into being? Who has stakes in their presentation? What is visible in these new media archives and what might not be? Can what is invisible but relevant be known to users of new digital archives?” (Risam, 2019, p. 22)

Because of priviledge and non-difference (all-whiteness), DH had the vibe of being super nice.

“1. Let’s think about ways to build communities of underrepresented people 
 2. Let’s acknowledge that we all do racist and sexist stuff sometimes 
 3. Let’s talk about when our niceness could be shutting down important conversations 
 4. Let’s believe people when they tell us they feel uncomfortable.” (Bianco, “This Digital Humanities.”)

Go to annotation“As Bianco has suggested, computational scholarship already is “a radically heterogeneous and a multimodally layered—read, not visible—set of practices, constraints and codifications that operate below the level of user interaction.”56 In that layer, operations of intersectionality may be visible if we look for them. Accordingly, Bianco notes, “Our ethics, methods and theory are not transparent in our tools, unless you have the serious know-how to critically make them or hack them.”57 While digital humanists themselves may have access to that layer by virtue of technical skill, users engaging with digital humanities scholarship may not.” (Risam, 2019, p. 24)

Intersectionality should be seen/used as tool/methodology itself within DH.

Go to annotation“Key here is making the intersecting phenomena that shape a project visible even though they may not be readily understood.” (Risam, 2019, p. 26)

Go to annotation“painful work must be done too. This includes looking more closely at digital humanities projects, opening the black boxes to examine the imprints of intersectionality on archive, code, metadata, database, and more.” (Risam, 2019, p. 31)

See also