As a part of the upcoming Columbia MESAAS graduate student conference “Paradigmatic Conflict and Crisis” (Feb. 28 and March 1), there will be a roundtable entitled “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities?” focusing on methods for scholars who specialize in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa and who use approaches often associated with the Digital Humanities. The group is still looking for presenters who might be interested in discussing their work at any stage of development. Please contact Wendell Marsh (whmarsh at gmail dot com) directly as soon as possible.
Even if you don’t want to present, but are interested in the topic please contact him anyway as even though it is a niche within a niche, thinking about a global Digital Humanities is important and pressing work. Wendell, along with a few other people on campus, would like to cultivate the community of interested people.
Abstract:
The Digital Humanities has emerged as a particular orientation to the use of technology in producing and presenting knowledge. Sometimes thought of as a sort of methodological toolbox from which scholars in humanistic disciplines can produce and present their scholarship in novel and tech-savvy ways, DH simultaneously introduces their work to new audiences while establishing their relevance in a fast-paced, media-rich, and data-driven world. However, a critique of DH has emerged that highlights the ways in which the formation of this field has developed from a fairly North American (and to a lesser extent North Atlantic) tradition of scholarship, technological innovation, and digital consumption. Accordingly, DH is increasingly embedded in departments that focus on Europhone literatures, cultures, and histories. When the DH toolbox has been opened for research projects on the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, the chosen tasks have often been limited to issues such as representations of identity via technology or the use of social media in political resistance.
What is at risk in using tools made to do work for different geographies and traditions? Joining the rising of voices that express the concerns of scholars who work in areas and topics often neglected by people who work in DH, participants of the roundtable discussion “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities” at the Paradigmatic Conflict and Crisis conference will address this question. Presenting participants will be given the opportunity to discuss the unique issues that scholars working in non-europhone languages and in Area Studies face when attempting to tap into the potential of computational methodologies, digitalization, peer-to-peer collaboration, and other resources and approaches associated with the Digital Humanities. Specifically, participants will try to move beyond the current critique to suggest how might digital scholarship from and on Africa, the Middle East, and Asia might look.