Introduction

Global DH in a Global Pandemic

While we are writing this introduction, many countries around the world are suffering the second or third wave of the Covid-19 outbreak. More than a year has passed since the first lockdowns, but despite the vaccination campaign in many countries, we have not yet reached dry land. We are navigating in exceptionally uncertain waters, facing a global crisis of unprecedented scale and magnitude. The economic, social, cultural, and psychological impact of the pandemic is of course deeply affecting also our academic, scholarly, and teaching communities (Pinto, “Didattica Blended”; Williamson, “Datafication and Automation in Higher Education”). From Europe to the United States, from Asia to Latin America, we do not know how our professions will look in one or two years from now. The issue is not only how many universities across the world will disappear or be forced to go online, but how this new “postpandemic condition” is going to shape education, culture, and knowledge as a whole. Whether the future of education and research will be partially or totally online (perhaps enhanced by 5G-powered Artificial Intelligence: Khan, “This Next-Gen AI Chip”), more than ever we know that our life will be entirely “digital.”

In this scenario, the role and scope of digital humanities (usually abbreviated as DH) are going to be completely rethought and reshaped, locally and globally. And a book on Global DH takes on a new meaning, challenging the geopolitical framework and assumptions considered “standard” only three years ago. We are observing how traditional images and representations of the Global South are changing even in mainstream Western media. And of course, the consolidation of China as a global (and imperial) power is complicating the North-South picture. From one viewpoint, there is no doubt that the pandemic had the most devastating effects on the most fragile groups in all societies, impacting more violently the informal economies of both the local and the global Souths.1 But there are also other effects. Western commentators reacted with increasing disbelief to the success of several Global South countries in “flattening the curve” and fighting the disease. It looks like the global health emergency has changed our perception at many levels, and what seems to be falling apart is the power of the West to project a positive and attractive image outside its threatened borders. Also, for these reasons, as noticed by African social scientist David Mwambari, the pandemic could be a “catalyst for decolonization”:

As the epicentre of the pandemic moved from China to Europe and now to the US, the weakness of Western neoliberal and neo-colonial systems has come to the fore. . . . As African countries started cancelling flights from former colonial countries and putting their citizens under quarantine, the myth of Western invincibility fell apart, alongside its corollary that only the Global South is susceptible to infectious epidemics. . . . While this new crisis might be another challenging moment for African peoples, after the epidemic is over, the continent will have the chance to become more autonomous and self-reliant, as the West focuses on its own survival. It will have the opportunity to wean itself off of exploitative neo-colonial relations. (Mwambari, “Pandemic Can Be a Catalyst”)

What is therefore emerging (or perhaps reemerging), as shown also by the North-South conflict in the European Union, is a new consciousness.2 As economic inequalities and social injustices become more visible in the West, the Global South may be leading a different and more inclusive vision of the world, based on its heterogeneous histories and economies, and on its social, epistemic, and biocultural diversities (Kloss, “Global South as a Subversive Practice”).

All these elements, along with the spread of online teaching dominated by the surveillance tools of Silicon Valley’s giants (Heilweil, “Paranoia about Cheating”; Kooyman, “Remote Education Does Not Require Giving up Rights”), call for a reassessment and perhaps a refoundation of North-South, as well as East-West, relations. In this refoundation, where will digital humanities find its place? Will it still be possible in the near future to separate geography from culture, research from politics, language from tools? We believe that this volume offers an adequate research framework for trying to answer some of these questions. But before summarizing the main ingredients of this collective effort, let us start by defining the background and central concept of this volume: the Global South.

The “Global South” and Beyond

“Global South” is a controversial label that has been traditionally used in the realm of sociology.3 Although the analysis of a North-South divide goes back to the “Southern Question” developed in the late 1920s by the Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci, its spread in the last fifty years reflects an obscure semantics based not on geography but on geopolitical biases and ambitions.4 In this book we are using it in the sense highlighted by Anne Garland Mahler, of the “resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject” (Garland Mahler, Global South), that is, as an alternative to Western epistemological canons and dominant discourses in the digital humanities (Fiormonte and del Rio Riande, “Dalla periferia dell’impero”; Kim and Stommel, Disrupting the Digital Humanities; Risam and Gairola, South Asian Digital Humanities).

Geographically, the Global South is understood as comprising Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Symbolically, it refers to all places located at the economic, cultural, and social margins of the industrialized world (Comaroff and Comaroff; Santos and Mendes, Demodiversidad).5 We recognize the existence of multiple Souths, those communities that are economically, epistemically, and ontologically excluded, regardless of their geographical location (Santos and Mendes, Demodiversidad). These communities have been systemically marginalized by economic and social systems and the hegemonic infrastructures of knowledge production (including technological ones), and have been deprived of the right to a dignified life. Southern margins have in common not just standardized dichotomies—that is, “development” versus “underdevelopment”—but a specific relationship to materials, technology, and conditions of work. For example, there has been an increasing awareness that our digital life and the green economy transition rely on mineral sources extracted mainly in China and the Global South at the expense of both workers and the environment.

The information communications technology (ICT) production process and material life cycle can be divided as follows: (1) extraction of minerals, (2) manufacturing and assemblage, (3) software engineering, (4) call center and other service work, (5) the digital labor of prosumers, and (6) disassembling the residuals of ICT and consumer electronics (CE). A materialist examination of this burgeoning wireless sector would reveal how invisible and vastly diversified forms of material labor are globally interlinked and to what extent the majority of material labor in the assembly and disassembly stages of ICT/CE—the lowest-paid stages in the industry’s global value chains—is located in the Global South (Chen, “Materialist Circuits and the Quest for Environmental Justice,” 121).6

But from Congolese coltan (Frankel, Robinson Chavez, and Ribas, “Cobalt Pipeline”) to Chilean, Bolivian, and Argentinian lithium (the “new oil”), the question is still how to prevent neocolonial looting and at the same time find a balance between the need for economic development and the protection of the environment (Gajardo and Redón, “Andean Hypersaline Lakes”; Leterme, this volume, chapter 24).7 Finally, the Global South is at the center of a “global data divide” (Arora, “Bottom of the Data Pyramid”; Ricaurte, “Data Epistemologies”), currently made worse by the coronavirus (Hilbig, “Global Data Divide”). These are all issues that digital humanities cannot afford to ignore any longer, since they involve our digital choices. Technology is neither neutral nor in neutral hands—just like the digital resources we create and distribute online every day.

Beyond exploitation and low income, our criteria for inclusion in the Global South have been epistemic and material asymmetries, leading to invisibility as well as cultural and linguistic underrepresentation in major DH journals, conferences, and organizations (Fiormonte, “Taxation against Overrepresentation?”; Díaz and Fiormonte, “Geopólítica de las humanidades digitales”; Risam, New Digital Worlds). This characterization has led us to include texts from eastern Europe and Russia, regions that have also been previously underrepresented. DH has been described using various metaphors—“big tent,” “trading zone,” “expanded field,” and so on—but it lacked one further step: the idea of digital pluralism linked to new geographical and geopolitical dimensions.

Despite some inevitable gaps, we have endeavored to build a different representation of DH based on cultural, linguistic, political, and ultimately epistemological diversity. The spread of formal and informal DH research groups, teaching programs, and associations across the globe has shown that an extended debate on the application of digital technology to the study of cultural artifacts is taking place in contexts, countries, cultures, and languages beyond the dominant centers of DH in the West. These debates reflect different visions of DH, including conversations in which the digital humanities is not a dominant concept in the development of technological approaches to the humanities. To quote Claude Alvares, “The idea that there may be alternative technologies in itself implies the idea of technological pluralism in place of the until now almost universally accepted technological monism. In this case each social system and each political ideology, indeed each culture would be free to develop its own particular line” (Alvares, Decolonizing History, 210).

Geopolitics of Knowledge, Epistemologies of the South

Perhaps one of the main goals of this collection is to make a small contribution to the reparation of the historical epistemicide (de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South) committed by Western industrialized countries through their complex discursive and material knowledge assemblages (Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space, 24). Epistemicide, “the systematic destruction of rival forms of knowledge, is at its worst nothing less than symbolic genocide” (Bennett, “Epistemicide!,” 154). Applied to DH, epistemicide refers to the way academic institutions, publishers, values, norms, traditions of thought, technologies, and standards have been used to render invisible the knowledge produced by communities of the epistemic South. This historical process of erasing epistemic plurality leads to epistemic injustice. The work of José Medina helps us understand how epistemic and social injustice are intertwined. According to Medina, epistemic injustice reinforces social injustice: “Social injustice breeds epistemic justice; or rather, these two kinds of injustice are the two sides of the same coin, always going together, being mutually supportive and reinforcing each other” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 27). Another important distinction is that epistemic oppression is not an equal-opportunity institution: it affects all of us, but not all of us equally (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 28). Epistemic injustice is a term introduced by Miranda Fricker, who in her seminal work analyzed two specific types of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice:

Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. . . . We might say that testimonial injustice is caused by prejudice in the economy of credibility; and that hermeneutical injustice is caused by structural prejudice in the economy of collective hermeneutical resources. (Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 2)

Both types of injustice described here can be easily witnessed in academia. And it is certainly not difficult to observe both phenomena occurring within the digital humanities (Bordalejo and Ray Murray, “If You Think You Know the Answer”), especially when we consider that epistemic injustices usually affect scholars from the epistemic Souths “in their capacities as knowers” (Sherman and Goguen, Overcoming Epistemic Injustice), and also as interpreters and knowledge producers.8

When epistemic injustices occur or are analyzed in a wide geographical context, we enter the realm of the geopolitics of knowledge. This deals with global inequalities in knowledge production (Chan et al., Contextualizing Openness; Reiter, Constructing the Pluriverse), as well as with the pervasive media industry (McPhail, Global Communication) and digital platforms that structure and manipulate our access to information, knowledge, entertainment, and so on (Birkinbine, Goméz, and Wasko, Global Media Giants; Fiormonte and Sordi, “Humanidades Digitales del Sur”; Graham, Digital Economies at Global Margins). In the past twenty years, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have learned how to exploit the once open architecture of the web, to take control of the technologies that regulate private consumption, and to dictate times and methods for the production of, and access to, digital knowledge.

The impact of GAFAM on the societies, economies, and politics of the Souths has been analyzed from different points of view.9 Although tech corporations and the academic publishing oligopolies work at different levels of the digital knowledge pyramid, they share some fundamental characteristics: they are all oligopolies, they thrive on massive and secretive data collection, and they are based in Western countries. With some exceptions, these phenomena are often underestimated by digital humanists, although they form the basis of our digital life both as scholars and as individuals.

As for scientific knowledge, the Western hegemony can be analyzed and articulated on many levels. We will consider here only two basic layers. The first consists in the linguistic and rhetorical-discursive advantages of the global and English-speaking North in the creation of academic knowledge. The second is based on the inequalities inherent in the infrastructures for the production and diffusion of knowledge. Obviously, these are closely related levels, but it is important to distinguish them. Inequalities of the first type have been studied in a pioneering work by Suresh Canagarajah, and his questions help us to summarize the main points of the problem:

• What precise role does writing play in the academic cultures of periphery communities?
• What other modes of knowledge production and dissemination are practiced in these communities?
• How are the conventions of academic communication in periphery disciplinary communities different from those of the center communities?
• What discursive and communicative challenges do periphery academics face in adopting the textual conventions of the center?
• In what ways do periphery experience and knowledge get reconstructed in the framework of center textual conventions? (Canagarajah, Geopolitics of Academic Writing, 101)

Although Canagarajah’s approach is based on a dualistic center/periphery model, which is today challenged by China’s forced entry into the “market” of scientific production (MoChridhe, “Hidden Language Policy”; Tollefson, “China Declared World’s Largest Producer”; Veugelers, “Challenge of China’s Rise”), we know that in the academic communities of excolonial countries, there is an acceptance of intellectual dependence that has its roots in school education:

Periphery students are taught to be consumers of center knowledge rather than producers of knowledge. Often this attitude of dependency develops very early in a periphery subject’s educational life. . . . Furthermore, Western-based (nonindigenous) literacy practices exacerbate this intellectual dependency. . . . From the above perspective it is easy to understand the feeling of many that the democratization of academic literacy should start in schools. (Canagarajah, Geopolitics of Academic Writing, 283–84)

Winning grants, directing research, developing a project, writing an article, and so on are all intellectual and discursive practices that depend on certain forms of representation and on undisputed standards set by the great “centers of knowledge” in the Global North.10 The self-proclaimed excellence of its universities, research centers, and so on is based on their power of persuasion and influence, on the structures and infrastructures of publishing, such as the private oligopolies of scientific publishing (Fiormonte and Priego, “Knowledge Monopolies and Global Academic Publishing”; Kiriya, “Études médiatiques dans les BRICS”; Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon, “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers”; O’Donovan, “What Is to Be Done”):

The United States and the United Kingdom publish more indexed journals than the rest of the world combined. Western Europe, in particular Germany and the Netherlands, also scores relatively well. Most of the rest of the world then scarcely shows up in these rankings. One of the starkest contrasts is that Switzerland is represented at more than three times the size of the entire continent of Africa. The non-Western world is not only under-represented in these rankings, but also ranks poorly on average citation score measures. Despite the large number and diversity of journals in the United States and United Kingdom, those countries manage to maintain higher average impact scores than almost all other countries. It is important to note that the 9,500 journals included in this map do not represent the entirety of all published journals. (Graham et al., “Digital Connectivity,” 14)

It is interesting to note that the issues raised by “epistemic sovereignty,” by the dominant position of the English language, and by the cultural and geopolitical dimensions of knowledge infrastructures have been discussed recently in many scientific fields, including the international climate-change research community:11

The North-South division of labour in the IPCC is significant, framing and shaping climate change knowledge. . . . [D]eveloping country researchers express a common Global South concern over the privilege of a form of climate science that is based nearly exclusively on the work of laboratories and modelling centres in the Global North. (Hochsprung et al., “Infrastructural Geopolitics,” 63, 68)

The Knowledge G.A.P. (http://knowledgegap.org) project focuses its research precisely on this type of inequality. On its site you can read important discussions on the relations between Open Access (OA), emerging countries, and paywall publishing. The problem is not only access to knowledge but also how hegemonic forces define and control it to their advantage. In 1983 Eugene Garfield, the scholar who introduced the notion of the impact factor, argued that Western journals controlled “the flow of international scientific communication almost as much as Western news agencies monopolize international news” (Guédon, “Open Access,” 9). Jean-Claude Guédon discussed the arbitrary foundations of the global system of academic research and showed how all scholars, acting on the stage of a manipulated international competition, are evaluated on the basis of their contributions to the mainstream journals (Kieńć, “Authors from the Periphery Countries,” 125).

Today, the strategy of knowledge monopolies is not to close or limit flows but rather to perpetuate their own hegemony by institutionalizing the dependence of the South on the North, and by maintaining the subordination and invisibility of locally produced knowledge:

Given the current momentum of the Open Science and Open Access movements, we must also remain cautious of the rhetoric used to promote “open knowledge,” and challenge the growing popularity of technocentric and modernization approaches to science that neglect the socio-political dimensions of knowledge production. The over-emphasis on technology leads to a dependence on the services and products developed by companies monopolizing the market, and the continuation of economic orthodoxy in the planning and design of science and development policies. While academic publishers have indeed developed effective infrastructures for knowledge sharing, they continue to function on the basis of social exclusion and the enclosure of knowledge, working against the notion of a knowledge commons in which every individual has the ability to manage, access, and produce knowledge that concerns them. (Albornoz, Knowledge G.A.P.)

So as far as knowledge diversity and knowledge commons are concerned, OA can treat the symptoms but cannot cure the disease. And the disease is the result of epistemic and unequal information flow (Britz and Lor, “Moral Reflection”; Chan et al., Contextualizing Openness; Pickover, “Patrimony, Power and Politics”) that began with the modern (effectively Western) model of the world imposed by colonization (Echeverría, Ilusiones de la modernidad). Many researchers have shown that research assessment criteria and tools, like the universally adopted Scopus or Web of Science, tend to exclude or marginalize research produced outside the West, and increasingly also from southern and eastern European countries (Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations; Shearer et al., “Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications”). These global publishers lay down de facto standards that impose a Western/modern model of science and the humanities taken as universal, rendering all research engaged with local problems, environments, and territories epistemologically negligible and materially invisible.

But the good news is that many regions of the epistemic South, like Latin America, have been struggling to reverse this trend and have started to create their own OA scholarly infrastructures: for example, platforms like Scientific Online Library (SciELO: http://www.scielo.org), Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal (Redalyc: http://www.redalyc.org), LA Referencia (http://www.lareferencia.info), and recently AmeliCa (http://amelica.org/), which presented itself as the Global South’s challenge to the European Plan S. These instruments play a fundamental role in the open and free dissemination of academic research published in the Hispanic area. As opposed to Europe and the United States, in Latin America OA has struggled to establish itself as the model for academic communication, offering visibility and enhancing scientific production at the regional level (Alperin and Fischman, Hecho en Latinoamérica). Although even in these regions there is still much work to be done to build a diverse scholarly communication system, Southern DH journals are all published using OA, for example Humanidades Digitales (http://revistas.uned.es/index.php/RHD/index) and other local publications, such as the Italian DH Association journal (https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/) and the Portuguese-speaking Revista Humanidades Digitais (https://revistas.uminho.pt/index.php/h2d/issue/view/30).

These are not only examples of what José Medina calls “epistemic resistance” but also projects and practices that represent and embody the epistemologies of the South.12 Southern epistemologies “concern the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experiences of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (Santos, End of the Cognitive Empire, 1).

Light and Shadow of the Global Expansion of DH

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, DH has experienced a significant “global turn” that has begun to challenge many aspects of our field. It is now common in mainstream DH publications and at conferences to reflect not only on the benefits and innovations of global expansion but also on its “dark sides” (Chun and Rhody, “Working the Digital Humanities”)—that is, on how digital practices can marginalize or make invisible scholarship carried out in regions or by people and cultures that either lack access to state-of-the-art digital infrastructures (Albornoz, Knowledge G.A.P.; Barringer and Wallace, African Studies in the Digital Age; Pickover, “Patrimony, Power and Politics”) or are normally misrepresented by mainstream network tools (Ballatore, Graham, and Sen, “Digital Hegemonies”; Bhattacharyya, “Words in a World of Scaling-up”; Noble, Algorithms of Oppression). In his foreword to A Companion to Digital Humanities, Roberto Busa highlighted the importance of the global dimension of DH, but it was not until the 2010s that DH biases, imbalances, and barriers of a different nature started to be analyzed from a global (and geopolitical) perspective, especially beyond Anglo-American academic circles.

Scholars based outside the United States and United Kingdom (Clavert, “Digital Humanities Multicultural Revolution”; Dacos, “Stratégie du sauna finlandais”; Fiormonte, “Towards a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities”; Galina, “Geographical and Linguistic Diversity”; Ricaurte, “Geopolitics of Knowledge and Digital Humanities”; Rodríguez-Ortega, “Humanidades Digitales”; Sánz Cabrerizo, “Digital Humanities or Hypercolonial Studies?”) have discussed the epistemic and political consequences of the English-speaking hegemony in DH. At the same time, scholars working in both North American and European academic institutions have introduced a critical approach to DH from a range of different perspectives: postcolonial studies, race, gender, intersectionality, cultural diversity, digital commons, digital pedagogy, digital divide, politics, and so on (Applegate, Guerrilla Theory; Bordalejo and Risam, Intersectionality in the Digital Humanities; Earhart, “Digital Humanities Futures”; Gil, “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make”; Gil and Ortega, “Global Outlooks in the Digital Humanities”; Golumbia, “Postcolonial Studies”; Honn, “Never Neutral Critical Approaches”; Koh, “Letter to the Humanities”; Liu, “Where Is Cultural Criticism?”; Mounier, Humanités numériques; McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?”; Priego, “Globalisation of Digital Humanities”; Risam, “Other Worlds, Other DHs”). It is also now common to develop attempts at regional or community-level descriptions, for example Sneha (Mapping Digital Humanities in India) and Chaudhuri (Bichitra) for India, Risam and Gairola (South Asian Digital Humanities) for South Asia, Fernández l’Hoeste and Rodríguez (Digital Humanities in Latin America) for Latin America, and the DARIAH-CLARIN course registry for Europe.13 However, data collected by different sources (Díaz and Fiormonte, “Geopólitica de las humanidades digitales”; Weingart and Eichmann-Kalwara, “What’s Under the Big Tent?”) has shown that the voices most often heard in mainstream conferences, events, and publications are still those coming from Western (and especially anglophone) institutions.

The debate on global DH made a considerable shift in 2013 when Global Outlook Digital Humanities (GO::DH) emerged from within the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations’ (ADHO) Special Interest Group (SIG). GO::DH raised awareness of the importance of modeling DH as a field seen from multiple “peripheral” perspectives, something that was addressed by ADHO in its 2015 annual conference in Australia dedicated to Global DH, and later in a panel on DH diversity organized at DH2016 in Krakow (O’Donnell et al., “Boundary Land”). Evidence of this trend has been reinforced by other experiences and initiatives, such as the annual Global Digital Humanities Symposium at Michigan State University,14 TransformDH (which also celebrated an unconference in 2015),15 Postcolonial DH (where the idea of the global intersects with other topics, such as feminism, minority representation, etc.),16 the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD) 2016 conference on “Local Constructions in Global Contexts,” the Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Digitales del Sur network promoted by a group of southern European institutions,17 and of course by the 2018 conference in Mexico City, which marked a new way of conceiving and organizing DH conferences.18

Perhaps the most relevant confirmation of how the global dimension of DH had an impact on its organizational core is the process initiated in 2016 to change the governance and the financial model of ADHO. Although all these developments were important and necessary, since they reflected the variety of conversations that have been going on for a long time outside the Western DH core, they cannot change the history of that organization. ADHO was born out of a post–World War II geopolitical framework—namely the British-American structural alliance between the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), founded in London in 1973, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), founded in the United States in 1978. There is no doubt that, especially after the admission of new constituent organizations like the Taiwanese Association of Digital Humanities, the Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa, and the Red de Humanidades Digitales of Mexico, ADHO became a more inclusive and diverse organization.19 However, the ADHO infostructure is still firmly monolingual: its website, its flagship journal DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, all reports, all proceedings, and internal discussions are conducted and delivered in English. This infostructure gives an undue advantage to anglophone members during, for example, negotiations and transactions (Fiormonte and del Rio Riande, “Por unas Humanidades Digitales globales”). Finally, the access mechanism of the community remains extrinsically cooptative and intrinsically exclusive. “Constituent organizations” still exercise the right to decide who can access it or not. This “law” is the source of what in political science is commonly called “representational inequality.” ADHO follows the same model as many other global organizations and consortia around the world, and recalls what the international law scholar Martti Koskenniemi defines as the practice of universality: “Universality still seems an essential part of progressive thought—but it also implies an imperial logic of identity: I will accept you, but only on the condition that I may think of you as I think of myself” (Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 515). These deeply rooted cultural and historical legacies can explain why “the operations of ADHO . . . position it as a ‘global’ organization while it remains, in fact, an organization of the Global North” (Risam, New Digital Worlds, 65).

What still seems lacking is a coordinated response from the Global South that could go beyond current models, exploring new approaches based on a South-South dialogue (Santos and Cunha, Proceedings of the International Colloquium) and investigating the many digital innovations and experiments realized in recent years in various parts of the Global South (Barandiaran and Vila-Viñas, “Flok Doctrine”; Chan, Networking Peripheries; Della Ratta, Dickinson, and Haugbolle, Arab Archive; Guilherme and Dietz, “Introduction. Winds of the South”; Nyabola, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics).20 Most of the books, journals, conferences, events, and so on mentioned above are based, produced, and delivered in Western countries and presented in English. Most of the scholars involved, although some of them are originally from Global South countries, use English as their primary working language and enjoy the benefits of working in Western institutions. This also means that they agree to play by the rules of the system (just as we are doing right now, in editing this book). It does not mean that they, like us, are not free or earnest in what they write but it does mean that they have not experienced, or have been forced to remove, the pain of writing and thinking in a foreign language, the pain of submitting themselves to an endless process of scrutiny and judgment that is always a reflection of an imbalance of power. Scholarly communication today exists and is made possible at the expense of epistemic justice: an original violence, a “colonization of the mind” from which it is always difficult to recover. In the words of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, to suppress or degrade the languages of the colonized also means to marginalize his or her own memory and to universalize the memory carried by the language of the colonizer:

How did we arrive at this acceptance of “the fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature,” in our culture and in our politics? . . . How did we, as African writers, come to be so feeble towards the claims of our languages on us and so aggressive in our claims on other languages, particularly the languages of our colonization? Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 9)

The Global South and Global DH still have a long way to go on the road to epistemic justice.

Structure and Content of the Book

Toward a DH Pluriverse

As explained throughout the Introduction, this volume is intended to provoke a reflection on the place of digital humanities at a time when many systems are collapsing: the environment, the economy, health, education, science, information, politics. However, this collapse can also be an opportunity to reframe the basic assumptions of DH as an expanding field in critical times.

Arturo Escobar argues that we are witnessing the crisis of a specific type of world and the series of practices that have contributed to its construction: an ontological crisis of the West-oriented, rational, and modern model of the world, determined by capitalism, rationalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and racism. This kind of world stifles all other forms of living and thinking, “relegating them to non-existence, in reality to ontological and epistemic extermination” (Escobar, Sentipensar con la tierra, 15).

The current development of DH reflects this model, still dominated by practices that reproduce the dominant Western epistemologies, methodologies, technologies, and cultures. However, a number of initiatives are emerging to resignify the field of DH through situated knowledges (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”) in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, a growing body of work and thought provides a promising view of future scenarios that move beyond the geographically specific to new concerns of general and global relevance. According to Escobar, “for those who no longer want to be complicit with the silencing of popular knowledges and experiences by Eurocentric knowledge” (Escobar, Sentipensar con la tierra, 12), it is imperative to challenge the monolithic idea of a universal epistemology. Inspired by experiences like the Zapatista movement, we should strive to pursue a broader spectrum of digital practices, in “a world where many worlds fit,” a pluriverse that reflects the richness of epistemological and cultural diversity.

This call should be translated into a new agenda and roadmap to reflect critically on our own practices across the multiple dimensions of DH. Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s “sociology of absences,” we should uncover and identify those absences in terms of DH: what is constructed as “non-existent or as an invalid alternative to what exists” (Santos, “Para uma sociologia das ausências”). We should defy and disobey the epistemological operations that produce absences (Escobar, Sentipensar con la tierra, 16), seeing DH instead as a relational practice covering a multitude of forms of being, thinking, and feeling (Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”). Our project is also an attempt to generate epistemic delinking (Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience,” 174) and “epistemic justice” in the use and design of technologies.21 From our perspective, this would imply, first of all, acquiring an awareness of our own epistemic anchors—that is to say, what epistemic traditions we defend and reproduce; and on that basis, to analyze our terms of reference, our interpretive frameworks, our ways of understanding the relationship between humanities and technology, and the subjects we privilege as the key to our interpretation of reality (Causevic and Sengupta, “Whose Knowledge Is Online?”). Second, it would imply rethinking the possibility of making alternative epistemologies visible—epistemologies with new objects, methodologies, and pedagogies, prizing forms of knowledge that are not visible in the institutional, technological, cultural, and linguistic canon. Third, it would also imply rethinking intersectionality and decoloniality as possible frameworks for critically questioning our objects of inquiry. What epistemologies are we privileging with our practice? What memories are we preserving? What bodies are we excluding?

Digital humanities can also be understood as an assemblage of technical and sociocultural infrastructures: platforms, protocols, standards, code, cultural norms, values, politics, history, languages, memories, paradigms of knowledge production. This raises further questions for the practice of digital humanities: What infrastructures do we promote? From what sociotechnical paradigm? For what purpose? In what context? Under which values? Whom will they benefit? Will they serve the needs of the communities that are going to use them? How long will they last? The ultimate question is: Whose knowledge is valued? In recognizing that epistemic differences are still ignored and that, as we observed earlier, we are far from reaching epistemic justice, we would like this volume to help meet the urgent need for epistemic reparation toward the digital-cultural practices of academics and practitioners at the margins of the world.

Notes

This introduction is the result of a long and fruitful discussion between the three editors. As for material drafting, sections 1, 2, and 4 are authored by Domenico Fiormonte; section 3 is coauthored by Domenico Fiormonte and Paola Ricaurte; and section 6 was written by Paola Ricaurte. Section 5 was jointly authored by the three editors, and the final editing is the work of Sukanta Chaudhuri. We are particularly grateful to Desmond Schmidt, who helped us to improve the text and skillfully translated many passages that were originally written in Italian or Spanish.

1. Projections are constantly changing, but according to the UN International Labour Organization, “The continued sharp decline in working hours globally due to the Covid-19 outbreak means that 1.6 billion workers in the informal economy—that is nearly half of the global workforce—stand in immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed” (ILO, “ILO: As Job Losses Escalate”).

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2. Rankin, “EU Leaders Clash.”

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3. The term Global South “has traditionally been used within intergovernmental development organizations—primarily those that originated in the Non-Aligned Movement” (Garland Mahler, Global South). It was later adopted by global institutions and organizations like the UN and the World Bank.

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4. Gramsci, in his 1926 essay, “The Southern Question,” “began with the idea that southern Italy had, in effect, been colonized by capitalists from northern Italy. Gramsci explored the difficulties southern peasants and northern workers faced in forging an alliance with one another” (Dados and Connell, “Global South,” 12). Interestingly, the idea of “North vs. South” exploitation was revived recently by both progressive and conservative political and intellectual groups (the so-called sovereigntists and/or Eurosceptics), which have accused the EU, particularly Germany and France, of plundering and colonizing the Italian economy, and especially the Italian south. A detailed socioeconomic account of this process, that involves all the “PIIGS” countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain; see below), is provided by the Italian historian Andrea Del Monaco, who argued that “the economic austerity transformed southern Europe in a German colony” (Del Monaco, 67). The irony is that many far-right movements, both in Europe and the United States, have been using Gramsci’s concepts quite consciously, while the left has completely removed his analysis (for the US alt-right movement, see, for example, Nagle, Kill All Normies).

   Many visible and invisible southern margins exist also within Western borders (Santos and Mendes, Demodiversidad, 6). For example, the derogatory term “PIIGS” first appeared in 2009 in The Economist: a good example of how neoliberal (and mostly Anglo-Saxon) cultural and economic colonization spares no one.

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5. Bello, “How Thailand Contained COVID-19.”

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6. We have known for a long time “that media technology has contributed to climate change, pollution growth, biodiversity decline, and habitat decimation—the constituents of our global ecological crisis” (Maxwell and Miller, Greening the Media, 2). On the illusory immateriality of the green technologies and the current global race for rare earth elements and metals, see the detailed investigation in Pitron, Rare Metals War.

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7. “Lithium-ion batteries are expected to make electric vehicles and renewable sources of energy, like solar and wind power, feasible and (eventually) affordable” (Barandiarán, “Lithium and Development Imaginaries,” 381).

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8. “As I understand it, insensitivity involves being cognitively and affectively numbed to the lives of others: being inattentive to and unconcerned by their experiences, problems, and aspirations; and being unable to connect with them and to understand their speech and action. This kind of insensitivity is at the core of the epistemic injustices” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, xi).

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9. For an overview see, for example, Singh, “Developing Countries in the Emerging Global Digital Order”; Casilli, “Digital Labor Studies Go Global”; and Donner and Locke, “Platforms at the Margins.” On the impact of Facebook’s Free Basics project, see Nothias, “Access Granted.” For post-Covid-19-related developments, see Gurumurthy and Chami, “3-Point Agenda for Platform Workers.”

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10. “Large-scale repositories reconfigure collections of many individual texts into ‘big’ textual data, then the combined actions of focusing, and of expansion of depth of field, that are afforded by large-scale inquiry can, in certain situations, render some non-western languages less visible. We wish to make it clear that this loss of visibility is not due to willful neglect or intentional suppression of any kind. As we will show, it is, instead, caused by a different problem, which is the following: hegemonic forms of representation of knowledge presuppose a homogeneous, rationalistic and standardized categorical order as their condition of possibility” (Bhattacharyya, “Words in a World of Scaling-up,” 32).

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11. The recent Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication promotes, among other things, “language diversity in research assessment, evaluation, and funding systems” (https://www.helsinki-initiative.org/).

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12. “Epistemic injustices (such as unequal access to and participation in knowledge practices, vitiated testimonial dynamics, phenomena of hermeneutical marginalization, to name some central ones) call for epistemic resistance, that is, for the use of our epistemic resources and abilities to undermine and change oppressive normative structures and the complacent cognitive-affective functioning that sustains those structures” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 3).

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13. https://registries.clarin-dariah.eu/courses.

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14. http://www.msuglobaldh.org/.

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15. http://transformdh.org/5.

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16. http://dhpoco.org/.

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17. http://cshdsur.es/que-es-cshdsur.

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18. See also the 2020 call for papers “Digital Humanities Laboratories: Global Perspectives” (https://pawlickadeger.com/2020/04/16/cfp-edited-collection-on-digital-humanities-laboratories/).

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19. For the latest implemented ADHO governance changes, see https://adho.org/announcements/2019/new-adho-governance-and-leadership.

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20. It should be noted, however, that the perception of the real political reach and responsibility of ADHO may be influenced by a global context characterized by an increasing skepticism (if not declared hostility) toward the so-called US media imperialism (Boyd-Barrett, Media Imperialism). The influence of this empire stretches from pre-internet media to present digital platforms and applications, from Hollywood to scientific publishing, and so on, that are all considered forms of cultural colonialism: “Whereas mercantile colonialism sought to control cheap labor and the hands of laborers, electronic colonialism seeks to influence and control the mind” (McPhail, Global Communication, 13).

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21. “I would like to introduce the notion of ‘cognitive equity’—that is, a new way of understanding racial equity issues that does not only revolve around statistics, legislation, or access to institutions, but rather inscribes directly a vision of multicultural and multiracial equity into technologies, products, and emergent practices in their usage” (Roth, “Looking at Shirley,” 127).

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