Week 12: Making the Case for the Black Digital Humanities: Recovery, Redress, Reciprocity

    This week, we're looking at case studies regarding the understanding of the black community within the realm of digital humanities. The evolving nature of the realm of digital humanities poses lots of questions involving the cultural tone and expression involving digital tools. Here, specifically, understanding black history and cultural connotations implies a new level of understanding within black digital humanities. 

"Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities"

     Kim Gallon argued that any connection between humanity and the digital therefore requires an investigation into how computational processes might reinforce the notion of a humanity developed out of racializing systems, even as they foster efforts to assemble or otherwise build alternative human modalities. She calls this relationship a “technology of recovery,” or the effort to showcase the stories of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools. she cites recent notions of activism taking place solely in the digital realm, citing Twitter and other social media platforms as digital tools that fit into her category of "technologies of recovery". Gallon ultimately makes the her critiques of digital humanities in the categorization of humanity as defined by the digital humanities; "What do we do with forms of humanity excluded from or marginalized in how we study the humanities and practice the digital humanities" (Gallon, 2016)? Gallon ultimately is saying she believes the guidelines and definitions for digital humanities are too structuralized for black humanists, with tools that should be used to showcase the political relationship of black suffrage and oppression (Gallon, 2016). 

"Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads."

    Jessica Marie Johnson promotes the idea that black digital scholarship is a product of previous eras and the perception of black history. I garnered from her work that humanists and researchers prioritized the data of black death and despair over centuries of history, but simply digitalizing them does not create new light on the subject. Rather, instead, it creates a replica of what already exists: data without further understanding of the black struggle for freedom, equality, and life itself (Johnson, 2018).  Johnson gives a histography of the thought of black studies, highlighting Blasingame, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Gutman, showing how their work provided a cultural look into the lives of slaves and the middle passage. Johnson, however, shows that in digitalization of data from slave ships, context for the experience of the Middle Passage was expanded upon, but  the digital tools could not account for the dehumanization and moral complexities spoken about by Africans in the stories it described (Johnson, 2018). 

"Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities,"

    Safiya Umoja Noble poses the questionable usage of digital tools and what they promote in scholarship of black digital humanities. Noble argues that we should be focusing on digital projects that that have been “defanged” of any possibility for societal transformation of racial oppression, revamping them to showcase the complete relationship between racist systems and freedom movements for black men and women (Noble, 2019). Noble shows the lack of inclusion by highlighting how databases and digital projects can showcase the linear history of black culture, but intentionally without ideas surrounding intersectionality and political climate; Digital projects, suggested by Noble, should move towards a social discussion of transformation in the realm of digital humanities, rather than just the creation of a new data set (Noble, 2019). 

“A Generative Praxis: Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics”

The work of Julian C. Chambliss and Scot A. French directly reflects Edward L. Ayer's challenge to identify the deeply rooted cultural questions embedded in traditional narratives and heritage. Specifically, they employ digital technologies with a focus on the public to create new methods and sustainable, new records for archives for future scholarly research. They specifically mention Kim Gallon's ideas circulating the creation of a cultural understanding in opposition to a new data set; In the case study of the preservation of Eatonville's notable artifacts led by the Preserve the Eatonville Community (PEC), the project leaders wished to use existing artifacts to explore and create a wider sociocultural framework that showcases ideology and the significance black community activism within the Eatonville community (Chambliss, French, 2022). Specifically looking at the Advocate Recovered project, letters and documents employed methodology that not only recovered lost data, sorting it and digitalizing it, but it also discovered new information and created a wider understanding of racial relationship between social engagement, property, and black politics within Central Florida (Chambliss, French, 2022).  

References

 Kim Gallon, "Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities, " Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016.

https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled/section/fa10e2e1-0c3d-4519-a958-d823aac989eb\

Jessica Marie Johnson, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads." Social Text 1 December 2018; 36 (4 (137)): 57–79.

 Safiya Umoja Noble, "Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities," in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/5aafe7fe-db7e-4ec1-935f-09d8028a2687

Julian C. Chambliss and Scot A. French “A Generative Praxis: Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics,” in Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, Vol. 39 (2022).https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/39/a-generative-praxis/