"Race, Otherness, and the Digital Humanities"

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2014

Smith. .. the degree to which American society has embraced and absorbed computer technologies is astonishing. The degree to which the changes provoked by computers leave prevailing inequalities is troubling. 1 At a time when postcolonial, feminist, critical race, sexuality, queer and class critical inquiries have had such a profound effect for decades in the humanities, the configurations of mainstream, major agency-funded digital humanities often appear to be framed by the politics of exclusion and occlusion that diversity-embracing scholars and theorists have worked so long to transform. In 2014, this is still so persistently the case that emerging feminist scholars imagine that queer worlds must be built in the 'digital margins', and 'The Digital Humanities as a Historical "Refuge" from Race/Class/Gender/Sexuality/Disability', an open thread on the Postcolonial Digital Humanities scholarly blog, provoked sometimes quite volatile responses. That thread was in response to my article, 'The Human Touch, Software of the Highest Order', which made the point that 'humanities computing [now digital humanities] seemed to offer a space free from all this messiness [of gender, race, class, sexuality concerns] and a return to objective questions of representation'. 2 Several of the open thread responses denied that there is any kind of diversity problem in digital humanities, and decried a 'blind focus on identity politics' (May 11), in turn provoking a Africanist queer theorist to tweet 'Non-experts in postcolonial, queer, feminist, critical race theories are holding forth unaware'. 3

The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2024

Current conversations around the manifestations of artificial intelligence have led to binary viewpoints that either predict apocalyptic visions of imminent human obsolescence or forthcoming machinic sentience and technological singularity. Amid these polarized perspectives, the materiality of massive digital infrastructures that regularly exploit vulnerable labour forces and the environmental costs driving such emerging forms of digitality are being systematically erased. As a field bridging humanistic enquiry and computational methods, digital humanities finds itself at the epicentre of such debates around the potentials and pitfalls of what artificial intelligence and its futures imply for scholarly and humanistic practices. Therefore, this chapter identifies and reviews interventions from 2023 and early 2024, across both discursive and physical locations, to show how current disciplinary conversations in digital humanities must emerge from both traditional and unconventional sites, which navigate the intersections between artificial and human domains, while emphasizing the provocations and issues that will shape the future of the field.

Journal of Global Indigeneity , 2021

The logics of digitisation: race, cyberspace, and digital settler colonialism This paper will investigate how settler colonialism is extended online through the Internet, becoming "digital settler colonialism", a term I have coined, that then encourages white supremacist violence offline. Digital settler colonialism, I argue, refers to the production, maintenance and use of the Internet to extend settler colonialism and reiterate the power of the white sovereign online. The white cursor of technology, the Internet, becomes a tool used to "eliminate the native", Indigenous subjects, and in addition, to "exterminate the Other", such as Black and racialised Muslim subjects, to extend the legacy of the white settler state. Where we understand that settler colonialism both marks the racialised body and colonises land, I argue that the Internet extends this through its digital operations while appearing racially neutral. This will be evidenced through the exploration of independently archived computer mediated material and drawing on disciplines of whiteness, settler colonial and critical race and Internet studies to purport that studies of racism online necessitate a media and race specific approach that is encompassing of the offline structures that maintain racial violence. I direct my attention to systems that can reiterate the settler state-such as the Internet-rather than Internet users, investigating to what extent settler colonialism is built into the Internet.

South Asian Review, 2019

Lateral, 2017

Introduction to Part II of the forum, "Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities." Here, emergent scholars respond to essays by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Julie Avril Minich, and Jodi Melamed, each of whom elaborated on the alternative possibilities of dealing with the legacies of settler colonialism, new materialisms, disability, and institutionality in Part I, published in Lateral 5.1.

Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2024

This book analyzes the tensions that arise when the numerical, predictive exactitude of digital computing embraces the humanities. Such tensions are thrown into frequent and sharper relief, whereas the sciences proceed on the basis of skepticism, and the humanities proceed on the basis of interpretation, criticism and dialectical engagement with given issues. In addition, the pervasive nature of digital computing heightens the risk of overshadowing the humanities. The authors argue for a critical turn in digital humanities.

Coll. Res. Libr., 2022

Whether this work is worthwhile or not is an open question. Another consequence of the vast scope of Beller's investigation and the constraint of putting it all into a single volume is that certain aspects of the analysis and argument appear ungrounded and vague. At timesand this is also a function of his very difficult style-it is unclear whether Beller refers to a concrete material reality, a theoretical construct, a metaphor, or perhaps all three at once. In many ways, these two weaknesses are a result of Beller's obvious passion and excitement for the project, as words and ideas fall over themselves in the urgency of their expression. But the work would have benefited from more space and more clarity of expression. The kernel of Beller's project is that "the history of the commodification of life [is] a process of encrypting the world's myriad qualities and quantities" (6) and that "what we today call digitization began more than seven centuries ago with commodification" (17). This work will be of interest to anyone working in the area of digital services, education, information management, and technology from a critical perspective. There are plenty of compelling ideas in here, not the least of which is the offering of a program to "secure victory-in the form of a definitive step out of and away from racial capitalism-for the progressive movements of our times" through the "decolonization of information, and therefore of computation, and therefore of money" (7). This book can be recommended for anyone interested in the critical theory of information, with the caveat that it will require a disproportionate amount of work to intellectually come to grips with Beller's extensive engagement with his material and to excavate what is significant or useful. More specific to librarians is Beller's contention that the business-asusual of racial capitalism and the world computer are insufficient for survival and revolution. Librarianship's focus on technological solutions, and even the progressive politics of much of Digital Humanities, must directly confront the mechanisms of technological oppression Beller describes. "The politics, expressivities, pedagogies, practices of relation, and media of value creation and distribution adequate to the task of redesigning the entanglements of culture and economy remain to be collectively realized" (254), Beller writes, and this might stand as a mission statement for academic libraries committed to real social transformation. As challenging as this book is, library workers can draw valuable lessons about the relations between racial capitalism, technology, and information work, lessons concerning both the immensity of the challenges we face and the importance of addressing them.

ATEE Spring Conference 2020-2021, 2021

Technological artifacts represent the historical-cultural products able to mediate our relationship with a world in continuous and rapid transformation. They, therefore, act as intermediaries with the environment around us and especially with the Other with which we are in "connection". Therefore, while technology is affected by the cultural influences of those who produce it, it also directly affects the process of individuation of subjects, social organization and politics, re-proposing and amplifying power relations. In a digitalized capitalist universe, where the dominant paradigms of reference are still white, cisgender, and able-bodied men, the proposal is to adopt an intersectional approach - one that simultaneously takes into account variables of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability - to reread the bias of cultural choices and responses provided by algorithms

Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, 2018

The pervasive belief in gender balance in digital humanities prompts the question of how the field might appear if it could be analyzed across a broader set of perspectives. This chapter considers data gathered through a survey of self-described “digital humanists” to understand the current situation of the field. It concludes with some suggestions that might improve the position of women and minorities within digital humanities.