Author: Katherine I. Knowles

Digital Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis

Originally, this (late) blog post was going to focus on my struggles with Bootstrap Studio as I continue work on my CHI project. But, over the weekend, as I was attempting to work on my map, I visited the Leaflet website to read up on some additional customization. Instead, I found this message:

Screenshot of the Leaflet homepage with a message regarding the founder's Ukrainian heritage and ways to support Ukraine

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. There have been many responses–some political, some scholarly, and some even memeified–but here I want to focus on heritage and digital humanities. In addition to the horrifying war crimes Russia has committed against Ukrainian citizens, there have also been direct attacks on Ukrainian heritage. On February 28, Ethan shared The Kyiv Independent’s breaking news update that Russian soldiers had burned a history museum, along with an article from Blue Shield International:

This article discusses the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols related to the destruction of cultural heritage in international conflicts. It breaks down the ways destruction of cultural heritage is an international crime, and highlights the gray areas in the language. At the beginning of the fellowship, we discussed Article 53 of the Geneva Convention in the context of the destruction of heritage during the Malian Civil War. However, I never anticipated that we would potentially see the necessity of Article 53 play out in real time during the course of this fellowship. While what is happening in Ukraine can be discussed on many social/cultural/political fronts, I want to focus on the way preservation of heritage has become one of the many unfolding discussions. In the days following the Russian invasion, several different projects and initiatives have cropped up in an attempt to digitally preserve buildings, artifacts, and other heritage objects that are at risk. 

Before we even get to the element of digital cultural heritage, I’d like to note how big of a role the digital has played more generally. With social media available to many, information and disinformation has been able to spread like wildfire in a way that has been somewhat unprecedented. The role of Russia in digital misinformation campaigns has been prevalent for almost a decade now–particularly demonstrated through the American election cycles and Brexit. In addition to the physical conflict taking place in Ukraine, there were fears that Russian hackers may take down the digital infrastructure. In fact, on February 26 the Vice Prime Minister and Minster of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted requests for volunteers to join the IT Army of Ukraine:

Many people have jumped at the chance to help Ukraine, both on the level of international governments uniting to bring swift sanctions against Russia and regular citizens across the globe who desire to help those affected by this conflict. However, as some have noted, a desire to help is not always enough. Some people in the West have demonstrated a severe disconnect from what’s happening via misguided memes, art, and think pieces. Contributing digitally has been one fairly easy way for people to engage with a tragedy on the other side of the world, and that has brought its own problems. On February 28, Alix Dunn posted a detailed thread on how having some technical skills and wanting to be involved is not enough:

This thread highlights a variety of issues about jumping into digital projects during a crisis without being prepared ranging from sustainability, to providing sensitive data to the wrong parties, and the issue of trying to build something without a deeper understanding of the situation. Data scientist Dr. Andrew Therriault wrote a similar thread, arguing that the potentially best way to help if you have tech skills is to make more money to donate rather than intervening with some sort of digital initiative that merely leads to more technical debt: 

https://twitter.com/therriaultphd/status/1497752566276530177

Some experts are also facing lash back for their advice on digitally preserving heritages. For instance, Dr. Sarah Parcak received some fierce Twitter criticism after posting about methods for the 3D preservation of buildings. Dr. Parcak pointed out that she was responding directly to the Ukrainian Minister of Culture’s pleas for assistance, but the responses to her tweet highlight some very important points. In what ways can we save heritage that is under imminent threat? How do we ethically engage with attempts to save heritage when human lives are at stake? Is there ever a truly appropriate time or place for suggestions of documenting heritage as war is waged?

This is not the first time–nor will it be the last–these kinds of questions arise.  Of course, these are just the examples that have come across my Twitter feed or been brought to my attention through discussions with my colleagues. The news and discussions will keep coming and the situation will continue to evolve. This blog is in no way a comprehensive look at the discourse around the role of the digital or the risk to cultural heritage in Ukraine. I am not an expert on Ukraine or Russia; nor am I an expert in digital cultural heritage (although I am studying it). 

Early today, news trickled out that Ivankiv Historical-Cultural Museum was destroyed. Until the Russian invasion is ended, Ukraine’s people and heritage are at risk, and people will be working to document both this world-changing time and records of the past.

Fortunately, there is work out there that addresses some of these questions and concerns. The Nimble Tents Toolkit–including its discussion of Rapid Response Research (RRR)–has been re-circulating in DH circles since the start of the invasion. According to the homepage, the Toolkit was produced in response to Hurricane Maria and a closely following earthquake to provide emergency responders with better maps. The section on RRR is intended to help scholars determine whether or not the project is wanted or needed as a response to the crisis and the ways in which this work can be done ethically. In a final note on hidden costs of conducting this kind of research, the Toolkit contributors note:

As our experiences show, wading into the waters of public information in moments of crises is a decision that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. First and foremost, it must be done with the safety of affected communities in mind. Researchers must also be aware that this work can be taxing on the spirit. Exposure to high levels of cruelty and injustice, for example, are probably best handled by those who feel prepared to fix their eyes on intimate horrors and still fight on with clarity of mind and a stout will. We urge you to take care of yourself, regardless of the situation, at the same time as you care for others—through the work. (Note adapted from “Textures” in Torn Apart/Separados).

Only time will tell the extent of RRR done in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the quality of the projects that arise out of it. In the interim, there are some digital cultural heritage projects that I’ve seen that I think are worth keeping an eye on:

If you’ve seen any other projects, please do share in the comments. 

It feels deeply absurd to bypass the powerful message on the Leaflet homepage to continue working on my map about Stratford-upon-Avon guidebooks while people are frantically trying to digitally preserve the cultural heritage of Ukraine. My next blog post will most likely be about my Bootstrap woes. I will not forget to stand with Ukraine. I will do my best to contribute ethically and responsibly. I will interrogate the various sources of information and the multitude of research projects that come across my screen, and I will continue to do so for the all crises as they arise in the coming days, months, and years.

This post was originally published at https://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/news-updates/

Ethical Engagements with Ownership and Digital Heritage: Examining Two (Connected) Case Studies

Back in my November blog post, I wrote about exploring copyright and ownership in digital heritage. In that post, I focused on UNESCO documentation explaining the various policies related to digital heritage. As I promised at the end of that post, I’m following up with a quick look at some articles and essays tied to the topic of ownership, copyright, and patrimony in digital heritage. This is by no means intended as an exhaustive literature review (as I had foolishly suggested before I remembered I’m supposed to be focusing on reading for my comprehensive exams), but I do hope to engage with a couple of examples I’ve encountered through my studies of how these ideas are put into practice.

In her 2015 article “Tribal Archives, Traditional Knowledge, and Local Contexts: Why the ‘s’ Matters,” Kimberly Christen examines the ways in which copyright and Creative Commons licenses do not necessarily meet the needs of Indigenous people when working digitally with Indigenous heritage. She discusses how the Local Contexts project, and particularly the Traditional Knowledge licenses/labels addresses these needs. These labels/licenses can be used in addition to copyright to emphasize cultural nuances alongside the legal elements of copyright.  In particular, Christen highlights how important these Traditional Knowledge licenses are, particularly for Indigenous communities. She writes:

Almost all the problems that now exist in relation to intellectual property law and Indigenous cultural materials have their legacies in the uneven and unequal research practices that rendered Indigenous peoples as subjects for research and study, rather than collaborators and owners of the research outcomes and products…Tradition Knowledge (TK) licenses and labels are one practical way to empower Indigenous and traditional communities to define the circulation routes and access obligations for their digital cultural materials.

Tradition Knowledge licenses do the important work of trying to protect cultural heritage materials as they move into the digital sphere. There are a variety of licenses and labels under this system, and Christen demonstrates the workflow that can be followed in determining which one is appropriate for certain heritage objects/practices. While they do not carry the legal weight of copyright, what these labels do is provide crucial context about the digital heritage objects they are attached to, and that context is generated by the community and helps fill in the blanks that copyright does not address or acknowledge. 

Christen, along with co-authors Alex Merrill and Michael Wynne in “A Community of Relations: Murkurtu Hubs and Spokes,” further interrogates ways of attempting to ethically engage with preserving Indigenous heritage as digital heritage where laws, Creative Commons licenses, and other methods of legal/formal ownership fail to do so. Christen accompanied members of the Warumungu Aborignal community on a 2002 visit to the National Archives in Australia which demonstrated a situation in which copyright and ownership does not correspond with ethical engagement with heritage. The authors provide a specific example of how layering a digital element onto heritage can further complicate issues of ownership, copyright, and patrimony:

During this visit, the Warumungu expressed both tension and relief when viewing the images and documents held in the National Archives. The tension centered on the violation of cultural protocols observed by Warumungu people in the distribution, circulation, and reproduction of their cultural materials. For example, images of the deceased were displayed online with no warnings; pictures of sacred sites lacked any connection to the ancestors who care for those places; ritual objects were disconnected from their original context. In addition to this archival material, the Warumungu community received thousands of photos from former missionaries, schoolteachers, and researchers. These digitally returned materials posed a challenge because they could be reproduced endlessly, accessed more easily, and distributed without consent or consultation.

In response to these concerns, Christen collaborated with the Warumungu community to create a community-driven digital archive called the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive. The content management system for Murkurtu embeds issues of patrimony into its very design–”traditional owner” is in fact one of the status levels that can be assigned to individuals. Murkurtu also incorporates the Traditional Knowledge licenses described above in order to provide cultural context to archival materials–particularly ones where the copyright is no longer owned by the community. The CMS for the archive is now open source, and the creators hope it can create a new standard for community engaged, ethical digital archival practices for cultural heritage materials. 

Obviously, this is just a quick look at two connected instances of attempting to create an ethical framework for understanding and incorporating patrimony over digital heritage that may be overlooked by copyright and legal ownership. However, these case studies can be useful in imaging how, as a field, digital cultural heritage can imagine new ways of developing and creating community involved digital heritage projects while acknowledging complicated notions of ownership that are often skewed by colonialist frameworks.

This post was originally published at https://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/news-updates/

Introducing the “Stratford-upon-Avon Affects Map” Project

In my last blog post, I had indicated that I would use this month’s post to continue with my exploration into copyright and ownership in relation to digital heritage; however, I will continue that series in the new year. Instead, today I would like to introduce my fellowship project that I will be working on next semester the (very tentatively titled) Stratford-upon-Avon Affects Map.

This project will serve as a pilot for my larger digital dissertation project involving mapping affect, performance, and cultural heritage in Stratford-upon-Avon. At this phase, the focus of the project will be on data regarding emotions, feelings, and affects as described in guidebooks for the town. As Julia Thomas states in her monograph Shakespeare’s Shrine, “the guidebook constructs a community of ‘pilgrims,’ of visitors linked across time and circumstances in their tours of the same buildings, witnessing of the same scenes, and experiencing of the same emotions” (125). This deep map will not only provide information on theatres and cultural heritage sites as affective spaces, but how the different places that act as sites of performance in a town such as Stratford-upon-Avon can operate as a collective space of memory.

By the end of the fellowship, this project will consist of a website containing an interactive, multimedia map. The map will primarily focus on properties and monuments related to Shakespeare, and each point will include information regarding the expected affect to be produced based on how it is described in guidebooks for the city. There will be an “About” page that provides contextual information about Stratford-upon-Avon, spatial practice, and affect theory and a description of how it connects to my dissertation project. Additionally, there will be a page titled “Future of the Project” outlining next steps. This website will be accessible to the general public. Users will be able to click specific points on the map that are tied to important buildings, monuments, and other cultural heritage sites in Stratford-upon-Avon. This will pull up information regarding how visitors are instructed to interact with and react to the sites based on guidebooks. 

While the primary audience of my project will most likely be other Shakespeare scholars, I am hopeful that this project will speak to a wider global audience. Many people have feelings–whether good or bad–about Shakespeare, and I aim for this project to begin to dissect how Stratford-upon-Avon has been a kind of pilgrimage site used to reinforce bardolatry since the Victorian period. At this stage of the project, it seems unrealistic to expect any sort of audience contribution, but eventually I am interested in coding Stratford-upon-Avon’s various monuments through visitors’ affective responses to these sites.

I’m tentatively planning to build the project in Leaflet, since that is what we used for the last rapid development project of the semester. However, I’m sure the technical side of things will continue to evolve as I attempt to put my idea into practice. I’m looking forward to updating the CHI community on how the project develops over the coming months.

Work Cited

Thomas, Julia. Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-upon-Avon. Penn, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

This post was originally published at https://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/news-updates/

Exploring Copyright and Ownership in Digital Heritage

This year, I am a GA for Humanities Commons, a networking site for humanities scholars. As part of my assistantship, I help clear deposits for the Commons’ non-profit, open-access repository CORE. Over the last several months, I have gained more experience in learning the intricacies of intellectual property, copyright, and ownership. While the Commons’ focus is not specifically on digital cultural heritage by any means, since I’m working with an open-access repository at the same time as I am participating in the fellowship it has made me wonder more about the specifics of copyright and ownership in digital heritage projects. Throughout the fellowship, ownership has been a topic consistently referenced in lectures, but is still one I feel I need to explore further. We have discussed the issues related to ownership of actual physical heritage artifacts and sites, hybrid sorts of projects, as well as born-digital cultural heritage projects; however, it has not been the primary focus as we’ve been working our way through rapid development challenges and familiarizing ourselves with digital methods. In my next couple of blog posts, I hope to take a closer look at copyright and ownership in digital cultural heritage.

UNESCO first adopted its Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage in 2003 as a response to the increase of heritage being created or re-imagined online and the risks associated with changeability of the internet. In this document, under a section entitled “Measures Required,” “Article 6, Developing strategies and policies” reads:

Strategies and policies to preserve the digital heritage need to be developed, taking into account the level of urgency, local circumstances, available means and future projections. The cooperation of holders of copyright and related rights, and other stakeholders, in setting common standards and compatibilities, and resource sharing, will facilitate this.

However, this is the extent to which the document references copyright/ownership. Of course, one could defer to the guidelines that more generally refer to world heritage, but it brings up interesting questions about distinguishing a physical or tangible object/artifact/etc. from a digital copy or representation. In this instance, it seems that the focus is placed on the cooperation of the copyright holder of the initial heritage object, and it makes me wonder how this fits in with the rights and restrictions on the creator of the digital object.

UNESCO expanded some of the ideas laid out in this 2003 document in the 2015 Recommendation Concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage Including in Digital Form. Now, the UNESCO website encourages users to consult this document in relation to the 2003 Charter. This much lengthier document addresses concerns related to the preservation of all documentary heritage, specifically citing technology obsolescence as one of the core reasons for the need of such a set of guidelines. In its “Policy Measures” section, it is recommended that:

Member States are encouraged to periodically review copyright codes and legal deposit regimes to ensure they are fully effective, with  limitations and exceptions, for preserving and accessing  documentary heritage in all its forms…

This point seems fairly broad in scope, which is perhaps good when it’s trying to encompass such a vast body of artifacts and sites, but what does it mean for heritage/artifacts/objects that might cross accepted borders and boundaries? Whose copyright laws are followed? Perhaps this fits in with other policies/guidelines outlined elsewhere.

Additionally, in the “National and International” section, which is where I went after considering the above questions, it is suggested that:

Member States  are  invited to  facilitate  the exchange  between  countries  of  copies  of  documentary  heritage  that relate  to their own  culture,  shared history  or  heritage, and of  other identified  documentary  heritage,  in  particular due to their shared and entangled historical nature or in the framework of the reconstitution of dispersed original documents, as appropriate, which has been the object of preservation work in another country. The exchange of copies will have no implications on the ownership of originals.

This idea of exchange is particularly interesting to me, especially considering complicated histories of heritage being dispersed through colonialism. What does a framework for ethically sharing digital heritage look like? How might this complicate notions of repatriation (or how has it already)–will institutions view the sharing of digital copies as enough? I definitely want to familiarize myself with these policies further, and I’m interested in reading case studies where issues related to these points have arisen. 

Although things may change, I’m considering focusing my next blog on a brief literature review of research related to the handling of copyright and ownership in relation to digital cultural heritage to see if I can further understand the nuances of these issues.

This post was originally published at https://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/news-updates/

Thinking Through Hybrid Digital Heritage

Last week, the CHI fellows cohort started our second rapid development project. We are building a project pitch website based on our “Project Version Document” from the first challenge (see Micayla Spiro’s post for more on that project!). For our site, my group decided to revive the Museum of London’s London Wall Walk that was launched in the 1980s. The original Wall Walk consisted of plaques providing information at twenty-one different places along the London Wall, and we proposed to incorporate a QR code at each location to allow the public to access records of artifacts from the area of the plaque that are housed in the Museum of London collections. This idea came from a desire to incorporate a digital component to an outdoor activity so we could further explore methods for developing a more hybrid approach to digital heritage. 

In lectures for the fellowship, we have explored a variety of hybrid examples of cultural heritage initiatives. Some of these include The Engine Shed’s augmented reality map and the National Museum of Finland’s interactive timeline. In many cases, this allows users to digitally mediate their interaction with a physical space. While these examples were primarily what inspired our idea for reviving the Wall Walk with a digital component, we also discussed smaller scale hybrid heritage initiatives such as Museum in a Box that made us consider ways of bringing collections to the community rather than bringing them to the collections. 

In my research, I’ve been working on exploring the ways in which affective responses to cultural heritage sites can be represented digitally. This rapid development project has made me consider whether my problem has been trying to divorce the physical sites from affect. I have been trying to decide how to represent affect digitally on a map; however, I now wonder if it might be better to focus on representing affect digitally in a physical space. If my argument is focused on demonstrating the affective resonances at cultural heritage sites, perhaps I should investigate a more hybrid approach to incorporating the two.  

Last year for an independent study on digital humanities, cultural heritage, and affect, I came across Jessica Hoare’s article for the International Journal of Heritage Studies titled “The practice and potential of heritage emotion and research: an experimental mixed-methods approach to investigating affect and emotion in a historic house.” Hoare used tools such as heart monitors to measure participants’ affective responses to a cultural heritage site. Here, the digital intervention was to measure response to a physical space and collect and collate data. I had originally considered incorporating affect into my research in a similar way; however, now I wonder if I can move away from translating the physical to the digital to creating meaning in a physical space through the use of digital tools. 

Based on a combination of these ideas, I’m wondering about incorporating “data visceralizations,” as described by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein in their open-access book Data Feminism, into physical heritage sites. I may still need to collect affective data, but I’m curious to explore examples of locating data in a place and developing it into an experience rather than something purely visual. I’m looking forward to exploring this idea further throughout the fellowship.

This post was originally published at https://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/news-updates/

Hello, CHI community!

My name is Katherine Knowles, and I am a member of the CHI Fellows cohort for the 2021-2022 academic year. I am a third year PhD student in the English department here at MSU, and I am also pursuing the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate. Previously, I have worked at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as a Researcher and Project Manager in the IRIS Digital Humanities Center. Although I’m only in the comprehensive exam stage of my program and things may still change, my dissertation is tentatively titled “Bodies as Space: Imagining Place and Producing Heritage through Shakespeare’s Plays.” I received my MA in Shakespeare Studies from the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute in 2016, and I received my BA in English and Music from Hanover College in 2015. My research interests include early modern drama, cultural heritage, and affect theory.

As a scholar of early modern drama and performance, my work interrogates how affect is produced and maintained at theatre cultural heritage sites. I am interested in performance spaces; with artists and audiences not just enacting everyday life, but a curated performance of texts important to cultural memory that adds a new layer to spatial practice. Stratford-upon-Avon has become a popular site of performance and a space of cultural memory by reimagining the town as Shakespeare’s childhood home and how that would have impacted his writing, despite the fact he never wrote in Stratford. The famous cultural heritage industry that has defined the town for over a century is not necessarily a perfect recreation or representation of Shakespeare’s childhood in the town, but rather a construction of how the Victorians (and many people since) have imagined Shakespeare. Thus, the town has been transformed into a space of shared cultural memory through people’s interaction with the place. It is a produced space developed through the affective response of the people who pass through both the cultural heritage properties and through the town’s theatre.

By participating in the CHI Fellowship, I hope to develop a set of skills that will help me develop a method for representing affect digitally and provide the basis for a digital project that will serve as a chapter of my dissertation. Additionally, this fellowship will help expand my experience outside of the English department to more specifically operate within a framework distinct to cultural heritage. I hope to someday work in a heritage institution related to literary heritage and performance, and I believe that the CHI program will help me articulate the importance of the interaction of tangible and intangible heritage and attempt to represent this important synthesis digitally. This fellowship will not only provide me with practical experience in developing a digital project designed for engaging with the public through cultural heritage, but also in a way that is mindful and encourages ethical research practices.

The ultimate goal of this project is to find ways to develop a visualization that will convey the affective atmospheres of these locations in Stratford-upon-Avon rather than merely provide artifacts that can be experienced visually. By layering affect onto visualizations, those who interact with them also take in the information as it is mediated by the emotions and also in physiological ways outside of seeing. In mediating the history of these places digitally, I hope to develop a project that will represent the changes in the affective atmospheres throughout times as different bodies–including a multitude of gender identities, BIPOC, and disabled bodies–are allowed access to these spaces in ways that were historically unthinkable. The shared stories, memories, and heritage of these spaces are much more than their physical locations, and this project will demonstrate how these elements are constructed. Currently, I imagine this project developing as a deep map of the affective atmospheres of these places. Users will be able to see how these sites all connect across space and time to develop a complex and nuanced narrative of the theatrical cultural heritage of Renaissance England. 

Of course, as I work my way through the fellowship my project ideas will most likely change. I look forward to comparing this first blog post with my final one to see how things evolve throughout the year.

This post was originally published at https://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/news-updates/

Reflection

In the first blog post of this semester, I began with this diagram mapping research questions and methods:

In some ways, I my ideas have remained the same. I’ve stuck with mapping, although I am looking into options other than networks to represent affect. I’ve also narrowed the scope of my project–I’m focusing on Stratford-upon-Avon rather than England as a whole. However, the level of preparedness I feel now versus in that first week of the semester is nearly indescribable.

In both our first and last classes, we were asked about what anxieties we had going into this course. Mine was that I was unsure if I’d be able to come up with my own idea to plan a detailed enough project to write the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement grant proposal. Even though I had previously worked in a DH center as a project manager–which included being involved with grant writing–I was always just shaping other peoples’ work into a cleaner format. Coming up with my own idea was difficult, but by the end of the course I felt that I was much more clear on the process of formulating a digital project.

For me, the most useful and interesting part of the class was experimenting with the various digital tools during the asynchronous course and reading the case studies of projects that have used them successfully. I had used a few of them before, or experimented without direction. By actually having data to work through, it made my exploration more practical and I gathered a better understanding of what the different software could do. I’m hoping at some point to take a deeper-dive into Python, and I applied to a Python for Humanists summer school that I am still waiting to hear back on. Of all of these lessons, I probably enjoyed the mapping unit. Not only did this help me form the basis of my own project, but I found Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich’s article “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market” describing their own project combining mapping and networking enlightening. It helped me decide that this wasn’t what I wanted to do for my own project, it helped me better clarify my research questions and determine my own methodologies.

In terms of next steps, I found out today I was accepted to the Immersive Visualization Institute (IVI) for this summer. I will being working in the 360 Degree Panoramic Room in the Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab. I’m hoping to use this time to begin thinking through the ways I can represent affect in my visualization, and also due to it’s pedagogy element I can start thinking through what that proposed element of my project might look like. I am also in the process of completing my application for the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Fellowship. If accepted, I hope I would be able to turn the wireframe I have into a fully-fledged protype of the Stratford-upon-Avon portion of my digital dissertation project. Although I don’t need it for the graduate certificate and I am techincally done with course work, I am hoping to talk to my advisor about possibly taking the Digital Humanities Pedagogy class offered next spring. I’d be interested to see how I can work some of the tools and methods we learned this semester into my own classroom.

One of the things I was most surprised by was how much my grant proposal project changed in the last month of the course. In addition to meeting with both Dr. Leon and Dr. Fitzpatrick to discuss ways to improve the project, the feedback from my classmates after they watched my pitch video was incredibly valuable. Originally, I had proposed a Level I project collecting data to eventually create a multimedia map. By the final draft, I was proposing the creation of a layered deep map that showed the town of Stratford-upon-Avon at significant points in history and included pins at locations that link to archival material related to the performances that occured there. Additionally, I was better able to articulate what I was looking for in representing affect in the visualization (after a quick re-read of Data Feminism). Although I do not have enough data to make a protoype per se, I did determine that I wanted to create the map in Omeka S and include a project blog along with lesson plans.

It seems incredible that at the beginning of the semester I only had a vague idea of how I wanted to incorporate a digital project into my dissertation research, and now I do not only have a fully fleshed-out idea but one with an actionable plan in place. Overall, I really enjoyed the course. I appreciated the nice balance of reading through the theoretical approaches and case studies alongside acutally trying out the tools. I look forward to seeing how I can build on this class during the rest of my time at MSU and beyond.

Global DH

After nearly a year of work, it’s hard to believe the Global Digital Humanities Symposium is finally here! I first became involved with the Symposium as a presenter in 2018, and I joined the planning committee in 2019. This year, I’m also a member of the communications subcommittee and the volunteers subcommittee. During the Symposium this week, I’m handling the conference’s Twitter account which has been a new experience, but it has been really interesting to see all of the conversations about the presentations that are going on out there on social media. Anyhow, on to this week’s readings…

In Alex Gil and Elika Ortega’s chapter “Global Outlooks in Digital Humanities: Multilingual Practices and Minimal Computing,” they discuss the challenges of translation in DH spaces and suggest possible solutions through their work with Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH). They discussed the origins of GO::DH as developed out of a need for de-centering the Global North in DH communities. Primarily, the organization works to facilitate the establishment of relationships between DH communities across the world. Some of this work involves finding ways to circulate scholarship across language barriers, and Gil and Ortega site some of their objectives as being “focused on valuing the character of the community, showcasing its multilingual and multicultural wealth, raising awareness about the different academic cultures and norms, and processing ways to ensure local-global work is reviewed in a culture- and language- sensitive manner” (27). Through their creation of a Translation Toolkit, GO::DH is able to address some of these goals and identify that the DH community spans many languages and many volunteers are willing to help with translations. They advocate for minimal computing as a way for increasing access.

Roopika Risam’s chapter “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice” positions decolonization as a process and one that can be facilitated through digital technology. Like Gil and Ortega, Risam points to the de-centering of the Global South and Indigenous cultures in DH communities and recognizes the continual colonial violence that occurs without conscience efforts to destabilize current hierarchies. She suggests that …

when invoking the relationship between decolonization and the digital humanities–the central question is not how digital humanities itself could be decolonized but how digital humanities has contributed to the epistemic violence of colonialism and neo-colonialism. This is evident in both its implication in colonial forms of knowledge production and the ways digital humanities has contributed to historical processes of decolonization. Its further possibilities lie in resisting neo-colonialism in projects and tools. (Risam 80).

Risam offers a variety of potential steps to decolonization through a combination of theory and practice. She emphasizes the importance of understanding DH in local contexts, which stems from postcolonial theories. The DH community also needs to reckon with the fact that methods of knowledge production/transmission that are developed in the Global North are not the only way of doing things.

The interview with Chao Tayiana Maina, “Digital History, Grit and Passion…” posted to the People’s Stories Project blog provided excellent context for the keynote she gave at the opening of the Global Digital Humanities Symposium on April 12. I was particularly interested in Maina’s response to the question: “How would you define the term ‘digital humanities’ in line with your development of ADH?” She replied:

I’m trying to stay away from the more academic descriptions, but I see African Digital Heritage as a way to rethink, to re-animate, to respond. At the centre of everything is the culture, and technology revolves around that. I’ve always been very clear about centering the history and then the technology as opposed to saying, ‘wow, I have this cool new gadget, what history do I apply to it.’ When I think about digital humanities, I think about humanities as being the core part, and digital being an interface, or a supplement that works to strengthen the humanities as opposed to the other way around.

-Chao Tayiana Maina

This definitely came through during her keynote, in which she discussed the ways in which context is key in dealing with archives. In particular, Maina noted that working within colonial archives involves unpacking oppressive frameworks and working to develop empathy. She warned listeners of the risk of replicating colonial violence through digitization practices, and emphasizes that digital humanities practitioners must be extremely deliberate when working with these materials and developing projects from them.

I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the Global Digital Humanities Symposium this week, and plan to start exploring the presented scholarship through a decolonial lens.

Algorithms, Surveillance, and Data Ethics

This week’s unit on algorithms, surveillance, and data ethics took an intriguing look at the various ways people are monitored and represented in the digital sphere. I somewhat knew of the prevalence of these issues in DH in a sort of an abstract way previously, but they started to come into focus more when I read Ruha Benjamin’s edited collection Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life as part of my ENG802 Race, Gender and the Human class in Spring 2020. It provided a vast number of examples of how surveillance operates in society and particularly targets marginalized communities alongside generative ways of responding. The book felt particularly relevant at the time do to the massive shift online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’ve been wanting to learn more since then.

Sharon Block’s article “Erasure, Misrepresentation and Confusion: Investigating JSTOR Topics on Women’s and Race Histories” for Digital Humanities Quarterly describes the various ways in which the academic journal database JSTOR’s algorithm often mislabels scholarship relating to women and BIPOC issues and how their attempts to rectify the issue are passive by relying on scholars to do the extra work of reporting these incorrect classifications. Block points to several searches in which she pulled up essays about Women’s History where the top keyword was “Men.” Rather than acknowledge there might be a problem in need of fixing, JSTOR responded by saying that the term just happened to be used more which, with a search of the text, Block was able to prove was false with female-associated words being used much more frequently. Similarly, Block found that JSTOR often problematically conflates terms associated with Black women, skewing the perceptions of articles in their database and misrepresenting Black women’s histories. Block acknowledges that while faculty might be able to deduce these problems and work around keywords, scholarship is ultimately being misrepresented and is at risk of being misused by students or non-academic researchers attempting to navigate JSTOR’s search.

In her essay “Finding Fault with Foucault: Teaching Surveillance in the Digital Humanities” for The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, Christina Boyles outlines the importance of separating theoretical conversations of Foucault from surveillance, particularly when teaching students who are fairly new to the topic. Although Boyles herself initially used Foucault when helping student conceptualize what surveillance means in society, she has realized that this approach is not fully representative of today’s surveillance state and how it disproportionately impacts Black and Brown bodies. Boyles advocates for adopting a decolonial approach for understanding surveillance and developing ethical communal values for dealing with issues of surveillance. She suggests that this can happen by implementing lessons that incorporate assessments of non-digital as well as digital modes of surveillance and by implementing an ethics of care while maintaining awareness of positionality and levels of risk.

Safiya Umoja Noble’s highly influential book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism has played a big role in shaping scholars’ understandings of problematic algorithms (and was in fact mentioned by Block and Boyles in their work). Noble demonstrates the ways in which algorithms display bias and the danger of separating this technology from the people who program it. In particular, Noble highlights how Google Searches demonstrate racism by generating results that are harmful to BIPOC groups–for instance, her search of the term “black girls” initially primarily produced pornographic sites, although Google has since fixed this. She complicates the notion that search engines are apolitical, and points to the way searches are primarily controlled by paid advertisers despite the fact that very few users of search engines are aware of this fact. Noble attempts to address the ethical issues of portrayals of identity on the web along with the right to be forgotten. She also problematizes terms such as the digital divide, and discusses the issues of placing the responsibility of placing the responsibility on younger generations to fix the situation when there are plenty of female and BIPOC coders, social scientists, and humanists who could help improve the field. Yet, Google continues to brush of responsibility, claiming it cannot control the algorithm even when it has demonstrated that if there is enough push back (or laws made against certain search results) it can influence the algorithm–although this also leads to issues of what is being recognized as being excluded. Ultimately, Noble hopes that “this book can open up a dialogue about radical interventions on socio-technical systems in a more thoughtful way that does not further marginalize people who are already in the margins. Algorithms are, and will continue to be, contextually relevant and loaded with power” (171).

Open Access and Scholarly Communication

I was excited to finally get to the unit on open access, as it’s something I’ve been somewhat aware of but haven’t fully had the opportunity to explore. When I worked at SIUE’s library, I was able to sit in on some meetings and learn about the university’s green open access option: the SPARK institutional repository. I also was able to learn a bit about the open access publication requirements of certain funders, but this was very specific context.

In Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future, Martin Paul Eve breaks down the current trends of open access in the communities and addresses the stances of both the pro-OA and anti-OA points of view on a variety of issues. Eve provides a helpful introduction that breaks down commonly used terms around open access (including green vs gold, subject/institutional repositories among others) and traces the history of open access from its inception through its more prominent presence in the sciences to the ways it has slowly been incorporated into humanities publishing. Personally, I found the chapter “Digital economics,” the most useful as it explores the benefits and risks of open access publishing. It discusses the commercialized aspects of the academic publishing business and the costs of different models on both the publisher and user sides of journals and monographs. The most eye-opening element of this chapter for me was the discussion regarding economic capital versus social capital:

…systems of economics and value in scholarly communication/publishing are determined not solely in financial terms but also in the exchange of symbolic capital…although interdependent, these systems can be broken down into questions of quality and value as socially ascribed and questions of finance in terms of labour value and capital (even if the latter are, also, social at their core). (43)


Ideas of symbolic value, specifically in terms of perceived prestige, permeate the rest of the book’s discussion on open licensing, monographs, and innovations in open access. The book ends with discussions of looking forward to the future of open access and different possibilities for feasible models in the humanities; however, it was published in 2014 so it would be interesting to further explore the progress that has been made since then.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “Giving It Away: Sharing and the future of Scholarly Communication” explores open access within the humanities with a call for openness and generosity. The essay points to complex nature of open access in the scholarly communication in that while many publications are for an audience of a small group of fellow scholars, the work is necessary to continue research within the community of academics. Fitzpatrick acknowledges the limitations of cost in scholarly communication and addresses some of the issues of the exclusivity of information in the ivory tower. Thus, she proposes an ethical way of participating in scholarly communication:

We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learned from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can only give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligation we owe one another, an obligation that derives from what we have received. (355)

This pushes against the capital of perceived prestige that Eve pointed to as one of the biggest barriers to open access in his book, and through the spirit of “giving it away” is the only way to eliminate profit from the equation. Fitzpatrick proposes multiple possible models for moving in this direction, and closes with a series of questions asking readers to spur them into action to be part of this solutions.

The chapter “Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities” by Melissa Terras goes in a slightly different direction from the other readings this week by exploring the ways in which the public is engaged in humanistic research activities through crowdsourcing projects. Terras breaks down the major issues of crowdsourcing, identifying two key problems: information management and ideation. To explore the issues and benefits of crowdsourcing in the humanities, Terras investigates several heritage projects that rely on this method of gathering or sorting information. While institutions fear the risks of potentially bad or mismanaged information (possibly due to volunteer beliefs), it is suggested that they should rather view crowdsourcing as a manner of fulfilling missions of creating and maintaining digital collections. Ultimately, “crowdsourcing in the humanities is about engagement, and encouraging a wide, and different, audience to engage in processes of humanistic inquiry, rather than merely being a cheap way to encourage people to get a necessary job done” (430). While issues of ethics and sustainability do arise, Terras believes that these can be prevented within the digital humanities with mindful efforts to build bridges between communities and scholars in the humanities.

Since I’m still in the early stages of my PhD program, I have not given much thought to publications. However, this week made me consider the choices I will need to make as I begin to submit to journals. Issues of prestige have definitely been on my mind as I am constantly wary of the job market and see where my peers publish their work, and it makes me wonder how to navigate negotiating open access. I was given hope with the suggestion in Eve’s book that early career scholars in 2014 were already more aware of and thinking of open access options, and now that I have more information I can start making a plan as to how I will ethically publish my work when the time comes.