PART I | Chapter 8
Intersectionality and Infrastructure
Toward a Critical Digital Humanities
Christina Boyles
Since Alan Liu’s clarion call in 2011, digital humanities has undergone a cultural turn that has reshaped many of the ways that we think about the relationship between technologies, oppression, and social justice. Texts like Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont’s edited collection Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities and Roopika Risam’s “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities” consider how the theories and practices within digital humanities tend to reinforce hegemonic notions of power and offer strategies for intervention and resistance. Their work begins to dismantle the divide between hack and yack, or theory and practice, which historically has structured and influenced many conversations about the future of digital humanities work. Martha Nell Smith has argued that these divisions were intentional, noting, “It was as if these matters of objective and hard science provided an oasis for folks who did not want to clutter sharp, disciplined, methodical philosophy with considerations of the gender-, race-, and class-determined facts of life. . . . Humanities computing seemed to offer a space free from all this messiness and a return to objective questions of representation.”1
The goal of critical digital humanities, then, is to weave considerations of race, gender, and sexuality into our theory and praxis. One powerful framework for doing so is intersectionality. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in 1989 to express how “the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism.”2 Developed specifically to address the multiple layers of oppression experienced by black women, the term is often used to describe the intersecting forms of discrimination an individual may face based on that person’s ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, or socioeconomic status. Risam has described the application of intersectionality to the digital humanities as follows: “intersectional Digital Humanities asks us to begin with the specificities of a data set, identify the layers of difference that intersect within it, and use that knowledge as a basis for project design.”3 This article expands on and adds to Risam’s model by offering methods for applying intersectionality to digital humanities infrastructure, including our history, our campuses, and our communities.
Many of my colleagues represented in this section of the book have outlined their desire to develop more inclusive digital humanities infrastructure on their campuses, and others have offered new ways of theorizing our relationship to our materials and tools. Each narrative intervenes in traditional notions of digital humanities by advocating for more inclusive practices within the field and/or by denoting potential pitfalls embedded in our current practices. Intersectionality contributes to these arguments by providing a framework that helps us understand how to implement these practices in ethical and inclusive ways.
Intersectionality and the DH Origin Story
The history of higher education is embroiled in racial capitalism. Risam has noted, “Stolen labor on stolen land generated capital for the university, wealth produced through the oppression of Indigenous and Black people, the essence of racial capitalism. . . . All the while, white scholars in the university produced knowledge to ossify the backbone of white supremacy that undergirds the nation.”4 Departments and fields without a clear commitment to dismantling these injustices only reinscribe them into their theories and methodologies, and digital humanities is no exception. Our origin story upholds the values of racial capitalism by emphasizing the tenets of Western logics as implemented by white male elites. This narrative also elides the harms wrought by these same processes. As Susan Hockey has noted,
Unlike many other interdisciplinary experiments, humanities computing has a very well-known beginning. In 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Robert Busa, began what even to this day is a monumental task: to make an index verborum of all the words in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and related authors, totaling some 11 million words of medieval Latin. Father Busa imagined that a machine might be able to help him, and, having heard of computers, went to visit Thomas J. Watson at IBM in the United States in search of support.5
While Father Busa’s concordance certainly offers an early and prominent example of humanities computing, citing it as the only source of the digital humanities is both exclusionary and reductive. Notably, the field’s resistance to cultural criticism meant that the problematic aspects of Busa’s work remained invisible for a whole generation of digital humanists. After sorting through photos in Busa’s archive, Melissa Terras shared that Busa employed a number of women to develop the punch cards for his concordance. She notes, “it shouldn’t be that surprising to us that women were so important in Father Busa’s pioneering computing project: in the early 1960s computer programmers were commonly women.”6 Their invisibility—and our understandings of these women as nameless, voiceless, and static—will forever impede us from gaining a full understanding of their contributions to the project.
Moreover, this history elides the harms wrought by Busa’s project, particularly its use of classification technologies that advanced the aims of racial capitalism and the complicity of the men and women who worked on the project. Using technology developed by IBM, Busa’s concordance served as an endorsement of a tool used to perpetuate racism during apartheid. Michael Kwet has observed that “During apartheid, with Thomas Watson, Jr. now president, IBM New York leased its IBM South Africa subsidiary with specialized technology tailored for the apartheid state. In 1952, the apartheid regime ordered its first electronic tabulator to IBM South Africa. There is ample evidence their technology was used to categorize, segregate and denationalize blacks.”7
While these classification systems were implemented just after Busa launched his project, IBM had a long history of profiting from genocide. Kwet goes on to say that “Beginning in the 1930s, IBM New York, under the direction of its president, Thomas Watson, Sr., supplied Hollerith punch card systems to their IBM Germany subsidiary for use by the Third Reich. IBM machines were customized for the Nazis to efficiently track and sort groups targeted for persecution and genocide. Numbers tattooed on Auschwitz inmates began as IBM punch card system identification numbers.”8
It is crucial that we acknowledge the links between our field and the colonial capitalistic enterprise. It is only by unpacking these histories that we can develop new structures and processes that resist and refuse to cause harm to marginalized communities. Tuck and Yang offer us the framework of refusal, which “provide[s] ways to negotiate how we as [ . . . ] researchers can learn from experiences of dispossessed peoples—often painful, but also wise, full of desire and dissent—without serving up pain stories on a silver platter for the settler colonial academy, which hungers so ravenously for them.”9 Refusing can take many forms: focusing on structural inequalities rather than individual experiences, emphasizing failures to respond to injustices rather than the injustices themselves, and refusing to blindly reproduce the inequalities of the past.
We also can reconcile our problematic history by acknowledging its flaws and by recognizing the myriad other influences that shaped the foundation of the field. The speakers on the “Alternate Histories of the Digital Humanities” panel at the 2017 Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Conference outlined a handful of alternate histories that shaped digital humanities scholarship, including presentations on early digital scholarship in India, activist strains in early digital work, feminist media histories, and Busa’s female labor force. Each of these presentations demonstrated the ways in which digital scholarship is far more nuanced, diverse, and global than is depicted by the stories surrounding Busa’s project.10 They also were an invitation to the field, asking us to reconsider our relationship to both our origin story and its adherence to the values of racial capitalism.
Virginia Eubanks has noted that “we can create technologies that protect socially just values or we can build technologies that permit those values to disappear. We must actively choose the kind of technosocial worlds we want to inhabit.”11 The same is true for our histories.
Intersectionality and Our Campuses
If we fail to acknowledge the problems with our field’s history, we will only reinforce the errors of the past—benefiting from the labor of women and black and indigenous people of color (BIPOC) while barring their entry into the upper echelons of digital humanities. According to a 2017 report released by the American Council on Education, “The data show that women are not ascending to leadership roles, given that they hold a greater share of the entry-level, service, and teaching-only positions than their male counterparts. This is true for all women when looking across degree-granting postsecondary institutions; the trend is exacerbated for women of color.” Things are no different within the Digital Humanities. With the proliferation of alt-ac positions in the field and academic writ large, many of our colleagues are precarious. Boyles et al. have observed that
Despite the money and prestige that seems to come with the label, Digital Humanities is a field that relies on grants and temporary positions to establish credibility on campuses. As a result, DH laborers are frequently precarious across institutions. They occupy a startling range of positions: administrators, adjuncts, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, tenure-track and contingent faculty, librarians, archivists, programmers, IT and edtech specialists, consultants, museum curators, artists, authors, editors, and more.12
This precarity coincides with “an underrepresentation of women, of people of color, of folks who don’t identify with a heteronormative category in the Digital Humanities as it is recognized by the academy.”13 Both factors exacerbate the marginalization of scholars of color within the field. Collaborations with precariously positioned scholars and communities are some of the most innovative work in the field—like the Mapathon for Puerto Rico, the Torn Apart/Separados Project, and BlackWomenToo; the development of innovative teaching materials and curriculum through online forums including Humanities Commons and the HASTAC blog; and the organization of collaborative networks, such as HASTAC, FemTechNet, and SurvDH. Global Outlook::Digital Humanities highlights these interventions on a global scale by “break[ing] down barriers that hinder communication and collaboration among researchers and students of the Digital Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage sectors in high, mid, and low income economies.”14
In spite of their tremendous contributions to the field, precariously positioned scholars are rarely credited appropriately for their work. As Laura Braunstein observes, “Scholars who are used to the invisibility of traditional library services . . . find that digital projects expose hierarchies and bureaucracies that they don’t want to negotiate or even think about.”15 One of the most significant hurdles is the emphasis on single authorship in the humanities, which is an act that asks scholars to either erase the contributions of others or devalue the significance of their work. University hierarchies that emphasize the scholarship of faculty over that of librarians, alt-ac scholars, and community partners are equally damaging to collaborative digital work. Although upending conventional models may be challenging, doing so is necessary to prevent abuses of power and to ensure that the contributions of graduate students, librarians, and precarious scholars and community members are properly recognized.
If digital humanities is to live up to its identity as a big tent, it needs to embrace broader definitions of collaboration or embrace another metaphor altogether. Debates about whom to include in the big tent often reinforce old notions about the fields, methods, and people suited to digital scholarship and fail to decenter those in positions of relative power—white, typically male, faculty members with technical skills. Now is the time not only to discuss more options for inclusion but also to enact them through transformative change. Doing so will require a unanimous effort from all parties involved, including administration, faculty, staff, and students. One way may be to leverage the digital humanities cluster hires that have become increasingly popular in institutions of higher education. These groups often work closely with digital humanities labs, specialists, librarians, and administrators, and as such may be able to unify behind ethical notions of collaboration and authorship.
Another way to promote a healthy ethic of collaboration is to outline ownership expectations at the onset of a project. By using a memorandum of understanding, contributors can discuss their desired ownership of a project prior to its development. Doing so ensures that all involved parties are on the same page before investing significant time and resources in a project. Building equitable ownership into this agreement can prevent or alleviate future discussions about who has the right to promote or publish the project. It also encourages participants to be invested in a project through a clear acknowledgment of their labor. The Modern Language Association and American Historical Association have taken steps to promote these types of collaboration by releasing guidelines for the evaluation of digital work; however, these statements do not explicitly address issues pertaining to collaboration. This, then, is a site where our infrastructure needs to be amended.
Issues of equality and collaboration are not limited to digital humanities, but they are a common feature of large-scale digital work. As such, digital humanities is primed to address these issues through thoughtful critique and experimentation. Jessica DeSpain notes that while “these rules may not seem revolutionary, they do go against the grain of current DH research practices that emphasize a lead scholar with a team of graduate students working on the most adaptable digital platforms and designing tools as needed.”16 Jacqueline Wernimont reinforces this call, stating that “[p]art of what is at stake for students is their own sense of agency—it is not always clear how they might intervene in an academic context where traditional hierarchies still largely dictate what counts as good or useful scholarship.”17 In other words, advancing an equitable model of digital humanities requires a deconstructing of traditional hierarchies, which requires utmost collaboration and a shared creative vision.
Intersectionality and Our Communities
The need for ethical practices extends beyond academia to include the communities with which we interact. While many digital humanities projects examine the behaviors of a particular community, very little digital humanities scholarship discusses how to best interact with community partners. As a result, digital humanists often have little to no knowledge of how to best engage with communities. Moya Bailey, in her talk “#robinhoodfail: The Ethics of Public Scholarship and the Digital Liberal Arts” at Grinnell College, outlined the ways in which academic infrastructure runs counter to community engagement. She noted that many projects require travel and long-term commitments with little to no up-front compensation. As a result, each collaborator must make a significant commitment to the project in terms of both labor and finances. Reimbursement processes may provide a modicum of relief from these financial burdens, but they are often long and unwieldy, particularly for entities without a clear connection to an academic institution. Most community members cannot afford to forgo their liquid assets for the duration of the reimbursement, so many of them simply do not participate in academic collaborations, even though their input is highly beneficial to scholarly projects.18
To address this issue, grant agencies need to be more flexible in their funding and reimbursement policies. In his inaugural report, Earl Lewis, the former president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, emphasized the role of increasingly diverse digital scholarship, stating, “We do foresee significant modifications to our grant making priorities. Perhaps the biggest change, especially for a foundation that has prided itself on being quiet, will be the production of an annual report that synthesizes the very best scholarship on the value of diversity to social and civil life in democratic societies.”19 On the basis of the organization’s recent funding habits, it seems that this new mission will include support for community-engaged research, teaching, and programming. According to the Mellon Foundation’s grant database, the organization has funded the following projects since December 2016: public humanities initiatives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rhodes College, Davidson College, Carleton College, and the University of California-Santa Barbara; community-engaged tool development such as the LLILAS Archives at the University of Texas-Austin; community-based projects such as the crowd-sourced photographic archive at New Mexico Highlands University; my own project, the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico; and services for the public such as the development of the Mukurtu content management system at Washington State University.20
Individuals also need to adopt intersectional methods into their work with community partners. One option is to implement postcustodial approaches to data collection into our digital humanities projects. The Society of American Archivists defines postcustodial archiving as “the idea that archivists will no longer physically acquire and maintain records, but that they will provide management oversight for records that will remain in the custody of the record creators.”21 In other words, community groups retain the rights to their own data, thus upending traditional scholarly models in which community data is colonized and commodified. Michelle Caswell et al. view postcustodial archiving as a way “to conceive of and build a world in which communities that have historically been and are currently being marginalized due to white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, gender binaries, colonialism and ableism are fully empowered to represent their past, construct their present and envision their futures.”22 Postcustodial practice can extend beyond archiving work to include any project dependent upon the data of others. By establishing collaborative, horizontal relationships between participants and archivists; keeping records locally accessible to invested communities; and focusing on human rights, community development, and social justice, postcustodial praxis provides numerous strategies for implementing intersectionality into our methodologies.
Moreover, scholars and practitioners need to listen to their communities’ acts of refusal. One of the best ways that we can ensure that the work we are doing is transformative, ethical, and inclusive is by listening to the needs of our community collaborators. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research,” offers powerful models on how to work with communities and establish healthy and professional boundaries.23 We must remember that our community work is valuable only if it is driven by community needs and if it is beneficial to the groups with which we interact.
The Iroquois Great Law of Peace outlines the concept of seventh-generation stewardship, in which individuals and communities consider the implications of their decision-making for seven generations into the future. Applying this notion to the digital humanities in its present state is alarming. We are capable of sustaining the field for future generations, but we must make it more accessible, inclusive, and meaningful for those who have been kept on the margins. We need to ask ourselves, “How can we develop an ethical framework that is focused on our relationships to people rather than data?” and “How would this transform our work with our communities and institutions?” The answer lies in our pursuit of ethical practices, and intersectionality offers us one such model. By taking intersectional approaches to digital humanities, particularly our history, our campuses, and our communities, we can transform the field into something that is not only valuable today but will benefit and sustain future generations of scholars.
Notes
Smith, “Human Touch Software,” 4.
Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1243.
Risam, “Beyond the Margins.”
Risam, “Ethnic Studies Now.”
Hockey. “History of Humanities Computing,” 4.
Terras, “For Ada Lovelace Day.”
Kwet, “Apartheid in the Shadows.”
Kwet, “Apartheid in the Shadows.”
Tuck and Yang, “Unbecoming Claims,” 812.
Earhart et al., “Alternate Histories of the Digital Humanities.”
Eubanks, Digital Dead End, 85.
Boyles et al., “Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities.” 693.
Johnson, “Digital in the Humanities.”
Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, “About.”
Braunstein, “Open Stacks.”
DeSpain, “Feminist Digital Humanities Pedagogy,” 65–73.
Wernimont, “Whence Feminism?”
Bailey, “#robinhoodfail.”
Boyles, “Counting the Costs.”
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 2013.
SAA, “Postcustodial Theory of Archives.”
Caswell et al., “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing,’” 56–81.
Tuck and Yang, “Unbecoming Claims.”
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