Decolonial and intersectional digital humanities: at what cost?

Art Inquiry. Recherches sur les arts, 2022

The Art of the Americas exhibition (March – July 2018) at the Max Chambers Library, University of Central Oklahoma (UCO), USA, questioned the practices of assigning cultural objects to different academic disciplines and separate museums. The exhibition brought together diverse cultural objects from North, Central and South America. Using the exhibition as a threshold and a lens, this paper opens a broader conversation on decolonising museums that challenge the knowledge-building system in academic institutions. First, Shikoh Shiraiwa, curator, revisits Art of the Americas to re-examine his motives and positionality. Secondly, Olga Zabalueva dwells on the theoretical implications and importance of constantly re-assessing decolonial efforts. Third, we both explore how ingrained racial hierarchies have crystalised in certain academic disciplines. As a result, we further elaborate on the criticality of challenging institutionalised scholarship, concluding with theoretical pursuit of cultural and socially sustainable museum practice for the future.

School of Information Student Research Journal, 2019

Literature illuminating the relationship between contemporary art and historical archives around the turn of the twenty-first century and how these interactions inform the evolution of archives in a digital multicultural age is the topic of this review. The literature reveals the extent to which art has been a means for members of marginalized groups to address their representation in historical archives, and also a means for archives to connect with a broader audience. Collaborations between artists and historical archives add new dimension to the debate about the nature of the archive as a creation in and of itself, and in turn the question of whether participatory culture may be a necessary component in achieving more complete representation of all segments of the community. Types of relationships explored in this review include: the questioning of and re-imagining of the archive by artists, particularly those from marginalized groups; the blending of art and digital archives; an...

There is a severe lack of representation of Mexican American artists in important American institutions. This, coupled with the hindrance of identity politics and a resistance to diversity, have made the art market for Mexican Americans practically non-existent. In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution created a Latino Task Force and recognized 148 years of neglect. Raul Yzaguirre, the Chican@ activist and chair for the task force explains, “when it came to the presentation of the culture and achievements…we simply do not exist.” Not only did the exclusion of Latin@ artists and curators alienate audiences of Mexican descent, but also Mexican American artists because they could not “see [themselves] as contributors to this nation.” Considering the influence the Mexican muralists had on American modernism in the 1920s-1940s, the omission is surprising. Currently the US population includes close to 55 million people of Latin@ descent — Mexican Americans account for more than half of this number at 64 percent — shifting the majority in areas of the American Southwest. Although the artists of the Chican@ Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s challenged the status quo and began to forge their way into the mainstream art world, this task is left incomplete, in large part because they are missing a supporting art ecology of dedicated historians, curators, museum directors, gallery owners, and collectors. This paper is largely informed by the research of art historians George Vargas and Adriana Zavala, who tie the status of the art market of Mexican Americans to a lack of education on the topic. In her comprehensive 2013 study titled “Trajectories in Academic Discourse: Absenting the Latino in the so-called ‘Latin Boom,” Zavala found that in a ten year period between 2002-2012 there was a 400% growth in the number of doctoral dissertations produced focusing on Latin American topics. However, when focusing on the Latin@ art subgroup, research did not exist, which she attributes to “the difficulty of finding encouragement and mentorship within departments of art history.” In conclusion, recommendations are made for teachers, museum educators, and galleries to employ research and educational methods that would reposition Mexican American art and help grow its market and collectorship.

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2023

I open my contribution by underscoring the urgent assertion that it is impossible to conceive of "race" as a finite, even overdetermined, taxonomy of human social experience just as we concede that there is not, and cannot be, a single or fixed definition of "the digital humanities" (Nyhan, Terras, and Vanhoutte 2013, 7). I make this opening claim as "critical race theory" is a sociopolitical flashpoint across the USA as that country abandoned Afghanistan while forging a defense alliance with the UK and Australia (AUKUS). In a related vein, the latter has witnessed an explosion of violent Indophobic and anti-Asian violence over the last two decades. I begin with such observations since the digital milieu too has a transnational context, and one that is, moreover, linked to situated, fiscal interests. This is perhaps more the case in the digital milieu than in the traditional arts, humanities, and social sciences as the former have had much more time to crystallize into the global, human psyche through both overt and surreptitious networks of domination. It thus behooves dominant sites of the digital humanities (DH) to experience, in Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel's words, a "disruption" wherein: … feminist critical race theory, black, indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC) bodies disrupt the narratives of mainstream white feminism by having voices, by creating counternarratives, by calling out the frameworks of the hegemonic center. Thus, we take … the productive "disruption" in the same vein, to decenter the digital humanities. (2018, 22) Many digital humanists deeply invested in multivocal social justice platforms and projects recognize ambiguity in the term "digital humanities" despite its demonstrated, familiar orientations towards privileging canonical data. Such data, as usual, has been produced by scholars whose lived privileges re-map the exceptionalism of institutional knowledge (straight, white, male, bourgeois, non-disabled, neurotypical). Indeed, in the words of Deepika Bahri, we may interpret this unsurprising characteristic of DH as echoing technology of conquest (Bahri 2017, 97). This ambiguity has been compellingly commented upon in the context of race, gender, and trends of domination by several respected scholars, including, among others, Lisa Nakamura (2002), Amy Race, Otherness, and the Digital Humanities RAHUL K. GAIROLA (MURDOCH UNIVERSITY) CHAPTER FIVE

Postdigit Sci Educ (2020) , 2020

Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología,, 2024

This article offers a critical analysis of the use of the term “archive” in discussions about visual arts in Ibero-America between 2011 and 2022: Why has this term gained currency in the Ibero-American art world during the last decades? What is it used for? How do artworks function when they are understood as archives? What are the main themes in these discussions? We propose to frame our analysis in four inter-pretive hypotheses. 1) The use of the term “archive” in discussions on contemporary Ibero-American visual arts can be understood through the model of the machine, that is, in terms of certain functions the archive performs. 2) Archives in Ibero-American visual arts have three basic functions: collecting, montaging and mobilizing. 3) Ar-chives are communitarian machines: they emerge from communities, create commu-nities, and require communities for their operation. 4) Archives are time machines: they shape our memory and our future. Understanding archives as machines allows us to see how artistic practices and discussions about archives in Ibero-American visual arts are linked to shared aspirations to come to terms with violent pasts and histories of exclusion, with the need to strengthen public deliberation, and the will to defend democracy. In this region, the relationships between art and archival have made it possible to read history against the grain and to coordinate the work of artists, archi-vists, communities and cultural managers with the concrete demands of social move-ments and their need for recognition. The poetics of archive in contemporary Ibe-ro-American art is oriented towards creating the new, not towards repeating the past

Through a combination of interviews and research center site visits, the following topics were explored: • The role of art history research centers in supporting digital art history • Challenges in art history teaching, research, and scholarship in the digital realm • Access to digital tools, services, and resources needed by the discipline • Digital pedagogy in art history • The role of digital publishing in the discipline • Current and potential partnerships • Sources of innovation in the field • The role of funding agencies in supporting digital art history.

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI)

This introductory article serves as an editorial for the special issue, Documenting Transborder Latinidades: Archives, Libraries, and Digital Humanities, for volume 6, issue 4, edition of The International Journal of Information, Diversity, and Inclusion (IJIDI). The article lays out some of the fundamental issues and terminologies that are at the heart of the interrelationship between archives, libraries, and the digital humanities, and how they intersect with the lived and documented realities of transborder latinidades. The paper also provides a roadmap and summarization of the core arguments in the articles and case reports of this special issue.

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

A pressing problem in archival preservation of information on electronic art, and any possible virtual conservation of such artifacts in Latin America, is the lack of strategic initiatives in the field. Unfortunately, a certain so-called ‘history of digital art’ has not been constructed in the southern continent; neither is any ‘history of digital art in Latin America’ valorized per se in the literature on contemporary art. The creation of databases and sets is inevitable as Latin America transforms into an economic power. Intelligent and user-friendly archival platforms are urgently needed. The potential of a 5G empowered mining for retrieval of dynamic contents in new media arts is immense and would further point to the aesthetic needs of the future.

Research Review International Journal of Multidisciplinary, double-blind peer reviewed/ refereed/ online journal, 0

Postcolonial Digital Humanities focuses on how digital technology can either reinforce or undermine colonial legacies in scholarly study, archiving, and cultural production. This study shall discuss how DH tools, platforms, and methodologies are used to address representation, power relations, and knowledge formation in postcolonial contexts. The other main focus of this study is the idea of digital-age decolonization, which comprises critiquing the biases found in digital infrastructures and proposing alternative frameworks that give priority to under-represented voices and non-Western epistemologies. This study shall illustrate how DH can either support Eurocentric narratives or serve as a platform for decolonial praxis by taking into account a number of important PDH initiatives, including digital indigenous archives and postcolonial literary databases. At the core of this inquiry is the question of who has the power to preserve, interpret, and disseminate information. The report shall conclude by outlining PDH's potential as platforms for activism, resistance, and rethinking global knowledge systems. Reorienting the DH profession towards an ethics of justice, equity, and inclusivity in the development and dissemination of information is one of the ways they advocate for a certain amount of engagement with digital tools and platforms.