What do I mean by “DH Reads” and how is it different from my blog? In this part of my site, I use RRCHNM’s PressForward plugin to share online content that I find useful, meaningful, or thought-provoking. I am interested in what decolonizing digital humanities would look like, so I plan to focus on conversations around ethics and activism in DH.…
DH Read: COVID-19 Roundups
After taking over as Managing Editor of Digital Humanities Now and retaining all of the daily responsibilities of Site Manager, I haven’t really had the time to reflect on DH reads here. However, I wanted to share a couple of roundup posts I put together for DHNow in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. These unprecedented circumstances have prompted a…
DH Read: “Post-Custodial Archives and Minority Collections”
In a post on Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage’s blog (based on a talk given to new CLIR fellows), Lorena Gauthereau discusses “the importance of minority archives” and the idea of postcustodianship. As Gauthereau explains, “archives have historically functioned as mechanism of colonialism. They have helped to structure our understanding of history and the nation in a way that also structures…
DH Read: “Digitization ≠ Repatriation: When Digital Humanities Provides Access But Not Restitution”
In this follow-up blog post to an article on Hyperallergic, Sarah E. Bond argues that: An examination of the Ethiopian cultural heritage held in the libraries and museums of Britain can perhaps demonstrate a seminal point about digitization and the digital humanities more broadly: Digital editions can never fully replace an analog object. No matter how many manuscripts we digitize…
DH Read: “Are you scared yet? Meet Norman, the psychopathic AI”
This article from the BBC by Jane Wakefield reports on a “psychopathic” algorithm created at MIT “as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from ‘the dark corners of the net’ would do to its world view.” The algorithm is trained to interpret abstract shapes. Trained on images of people dying, Norman (named after Norman Bates)…
