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…
decolonizing DH
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: “Archives in the Anthropocene”
This talk by Purdom Lindblad is a great entry point for understanding how the concept of the Anthropocene relates to digital humanities. The “Anthropocene” is a term that refers to our current geological time period, in which human activity has been the main influence on the environment—a time defined by mass extinctions and climate change brought about through our own…
DH Read: “Colonial and Postcolonial Digital Humanities Roundtable”
In a post providing her Skype remarks from the Colonial and Postcolonial DH roundtable at the College of William and Mary’s Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities Conference, Roopika Risam argues that challenging colonialism in the “digital cultural record” requires “significant attention to how we are designing projects, framing the material in them, and managing the data that is part…
