Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein

It used to be that “moment” was a metaphor. The introduction to the first edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities, “The Digital Humanities Moment,” documented the “rapid ascent of the digital humanities in the public imagination,” as well as the opportunities, challenges, and tensions that that “moment” had brought about (17). A full ten years later, the last three of which have taken place under the shadow of a global pandemic, we have learned that some moments remain anchored in time. January 9, 2020, the first confirmed death from Covid-19 in Wuhan, China. January 20, 2020, the first confirmed Covid case in the United States is reported. March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor is murdered by plainclothes police officers in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky. March 19, 2020, California becomes the first state to issue a statewide stay-at-home order prompted by the pandemic. May 25, 2020, George Floyd is murdered at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department; the next day, May 26, protesters take to the streets, prompting a wave of racial reckoning across the country. Meanwhile, on August 18, 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsome declares a state of emergency as the worst wildfire season in modern history sweeps up and down the West Coast. As it happened, these were also the months when the authors included in this volume began drafting their chapters; each time that we, the editors, returned revision requests or editorial queries, more of these world-altering moments had come to pass.

These moments were not metaphors. They represented the profound loss of actual lives—the lives of people with families and friends and communities who continue to grieve to this day. They also represent the collective failures of governments and social institutions to address the root causes of these tragedies: the intertwined pandemics of Covid-19, systemic racism, and climate change. Each of these moments was also a critical inflection point that required us—both as editors and as humans in the world—to recalibrate our own sense of what the future might hold. As two tenured professors, two white professors, two cisgender professors, two professors holding U.S. passports, the degree of uncertainty brought about by these ruptures in time exceeded any prior personal reference points. Yet for many others—including many academic workers—the possibility of immediate and wrenching change brought about by the failures of institutional support systems has been an ever-present threat. Adjunct professors, scholars of color, graduate students, and administrative staff, among others, have long been aware of, and lived with, the precarity of their positions and the tenuousness of any institutional support. As Tressie McMillan Cottom, the esteemed sociologist (and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 contributor) has often noted, “The institution cannot love you.” The precarious faculty that, according to a 2018 report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), make up more than 60 percent of the academic workforce have long been required to come to terms with this fact. Now, as a result of the pandemic, the tenured professoriate has finally begun to realize that support systems serving only a privileged few are support systems that serve no one at all.

How, then, to imagine another future for the university? How to imagine an academy in which a commitment to public scholarship, to anti-racist scholarship, to racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, to labor equity, and to collaboration across academic ranks might open up countervailing spaces of possibility—spaces where solidarity might be found? And what of the role of the digital humanities in this vision? What is the work we must do, and what are its limits?

We remain convinced that our field must keep its focus on building a vision of digital humanities that, as we wrote in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, “matters beyond itself, one that probes the stakes and impacts of technology across a range of institutions and communities.” We have been heartened by the proliferation of projects undertaken by digital humanities scholars that have employed a critical approach to technology in service of this broader vision. Consider the Visionary Futures Collective.1 It emerged during the pandemic with a focus on “increasing transparency in higher education; creating compassionate communities through shared vulnerability; and working collectively to shift institutional practices” so that the work of the humanities, and those who perform it, can truly thrive. Meanwhile, projects including the African American Digital and Experimental Humanities Initiative (AADHum)2 and the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon)3 have developed intentionally expansive mentoring programs for both graduate students and faculty, so as to redistribute the opportunities and the resources that typically accrue at well-resourced research-oriented institutions. Digital humanities scholars have also contributed their time and expertise to intervene in global political crises. One group of over 1,300 librarians, archivists, researchers, and programmers known as Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)4 has worked to identify and preserve the data and other digital content created by Ukrainian cultural heritage organizations should they be subjected to a digital or physical attack.

Projects like these sustain our belief that another future is possible—and, indeed, remains urgently needed—though hope for that future requires a critical and honest view of how we have arrived at this point. How can we work toward racial justice, for instance, if we are not willing to confront the racism of the past? In Ebony and Ivy, historian Craig Steven Wilder has shown how the history of the American college system is inextricably linked to the history of slavery in America. From its earliest beginnings, Wilder writes, the academy was not so much a bastion of free inquiry or harbinger of freedom as it was “a beneficiary and defender” of the slave trade and Indigenous dispossession (2). From its reliance on the labor of the enslaved in order to build college campuses to, a century later, its mobilization of research departments to promote racist scientific theories, the academy fostered the interests of the powerful few, and, as Wilder shows, stood with both church and state as the “third pillar of a civilization built on bondage” (11).

This is one aspect of the past that the field of digital humanities must directly confront—and, in fact, has already begun to engage through projects such as the student-led Penn and Slavery Project.5 Since 2017, this project has documented the University of Pennsylvania’s connections to slavery through an augmented reality tour through the Penn campus. The app reveals the university’s complicity in claiming people as property and stealing their knowledge, labor, and skills. In one especially powerful feature led by Penn doctoral history student Breanna Moore, users are led to the Class of 1949 Bridge (otherwise known as the “generations bridge”) on campus. Using the app, the user sees superimposed on the bridge a quilt from Moore’s family; by clicking on different parts of the quilt, users see and hear two dueling histories: one of Moore’s familial generations, who were enslaved, and the other, of generations of enslavers, among whom were two Penn alumni. This fusing of the personal and the historical, particularly around a campus monument to a past characterized by unequal access and the pains of slavery, is especially powerful—and even more so as it is made possible by students like Moore, who put the moments that their ancestors lived through in conversation with the country’s continuing saturation in the ideologies and practices of white supremacy.

From where we sit as editors, in the United States, we continue to see the impact of this racist and discriminatory past, as school boards ban books and the teaching of “critical race theory,” as political figures interfere in the faculty and curricular governance of public higher educational systems, as elementary school teachers are prevented from speaking about gender fluidity—or even, in Florida, saying the word “gay”—and as affirmative-action admissions policies built to redress historical inequalities come under attack. The political and social circumstances that make such attacks possible are both a cause and an effect of the hollowing out of the educational institutions that might otherwise promote critical inquiry, encourage informed debate, and protect academic freedom. This present crisis of the university, as Roderick Ferguson reminds us, is similarly rooted in long-standing historical antagonisms and can only be addressed when members of university communities see themselves as a part of, rather than in positions of superiority to, the variety of publics they engage with their work.6 It is here again that we see the digital humanities with a key role to play—through projects that extend our views back to social and political movements of the past and that speculate about alternative possible futures, as well as through actions aimed at bolstering the infrastructures—social as much as technological—that will be required as we collectively map our way forward, from pivotal moment to pivotal moment.

What might such interventions look like? One example comes from the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, which has produced a comprehensive report, The National Monument Audit, that tracks public statuary across the United States in an effort to “provide a means to keep self-evaluating who we are as a nation in our public spaces” (1). Its other efforts involve public art installations, community-based archives, and open data repositories, each rooted in a particular place and led by the people who best know its history and are therefore best positioned to imagine its future. Here we see digital humanities practices blending with public history, participatory design, and civic art-making and becoming richer and more capacious in the process. Projects like these, which are grounded in history, culture, and context and which open up possibilities that extend beyond university walls, represent one of the most compelling models of the work that DH can do.

The Monument Lab offers one example of the reach and impact of DH ways of thinking; another is the set of projects dedicated to the documentation of Latinx oral histories and stories, which have grown in scope, power, and visibility in recent years. DH colleagues at the University of Houston and the Arte Público Press, for instance, were able to bring international focus to their long-standing work by hosting the 2021 Association for the Computers and Humanities Conference. The U.S. Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Center and the Arte Público Press have been home for much of that work and their own DH projects.7 The USLDH seeks to recover and present histories related to Latinx literary traditions. Of the twelve collections that make up the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Digital Collections, for instance, one topic is “Spanish Fighting Fascist Spain,” which documents activist efforts to resist fascism, and another is “Feminismo Internacional,” which contains archives of the eponymous newspaper. Elsewhere, scholars and archivists Maria Eugenia Cotera, Linda García Merchant, and Marco Seiferle-Valencia, along with their student collaborators, have created the Chicana por Mi Raza.8 This archive includes oral histories, photographs, and documents related to Chicana feminist practitioners during the civil rights era. A central aspect of the archive’s collecting practices involves visits to, and long conversations with, feminist activists as part of an in-situ documentation effort that digitizes personal collections in the context of personal and community work. This method of collecting makes such archival materials, which previously might have been lost, newly available in digital form, but it does so within an overall framework of care, personal empowerment, and community-based knowledge practices.

As we chart a way forward for the digital humanities from one moment to the next, we also find powerful calls to action emerging. It is notable that this volume contains multiple essays, two of them manifestos, that emphasize the need for people of color and other historically marginalized groups to guide the field: the Feminist Data Manifesto-NO, the U.S. Latinx Digital Humanities Manifesto, and Relation-Oriented AI, among others, call on DH practitioners, and users of data and digital technologies more generally, to be more intentional in connecting their work with social justice imperatives. Each of them, in different ways, asks readers to step back, examine their assumptions, and bring back to their work the insights of feminist scholars, Latinx critics, and Indigenous communities, respectively.

As DH continues to evolve and expand, it draws in many different methods and practices, from the archival projects mentioned above to community platform building for scholarly communication, quantitative literary analysis, game studies, critical mapping, text encoding, and more. The variety of work associated with the digital humanities has long been both its greatest strength and its most vexing puzzle: How can such different types of work be considered part of the same field? To what extent is DH a coherent (or even semi-coherent) whole? We believe that “digital humanities” as a term remains meaningful, even as smaller communities of practice characterize their work in new ways. Digital scholarship and practice in the academy remains drawn together by a certain boundary-bridging impulse, whether between the humanities and the digital, between the university and other publics, between scholarship and action, or other seeming (but not actual) divides. Our field is also supported and sustained by the larger formation of DH and the professional/scholarly organizations, events, and publications associated with it. These organizations, the activities they promote, the artifacts that they produce, and the people they bring together push the field forward, infusing it with new orientations and ideas.

At different speeds and to different degrees, some things are indeed changing; DH, for instance, is finding its way into K–12 spaces, as in the teaching guides associated with the Colored Conventions Project.9 Although there remain relatively few degree-granting DH programs, many colleges and universities now explicitly engage DH in some way, from faculty-led centers to library-led initiatives. And yet the field remains very much Anglocentric—in spite of significant efforts toward supporting tools for multilingual DH and elevating models of DH from a range of locations in the world. We have come to realize, as series editors, that the one constant of DH is people—a shifting and distributed (and for that reason responsive) web of connections, social, institutional, and geographic—who are united in their desire to ensure that the field can match the vitality and breadth of those who wish to place themselves in it.

As we draw together in this expansive vision for the future of the field, we must acknowledge the people who are no longer among us. The last few years have been particularly painful for the DH community, as three colleagues have left us too soon: Stéfan Sinclair, associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University; Rebecca Munson, assistant director for Interdisciplinary Education at The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton; and Scott Enderle, digital humanities specialist at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Stéfan, Rebecca, and Scott left indelible impressions on our field and on many of us personally; they were brilliant, active colleagues whose loss we mourn on personal and professional levels. We send our deepest condolences to their loved ones, families, and friends. We hope that the strong array of work in this volume lives up to the high standards Stéfan, Rebecca, and Scott set for themselves and for the field.

This book is the fourth general volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities (DDH) series that has appeared since 2012 (other annual volumes were published in 2016 and 2019). The series includes both these general volumes and volumes on specific topics. Recent special volumes have included Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, edited by Jentery Sayers (2017); Bodies of Information, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (2018); The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam (2021); People, Practice, Power, edited by Anne B. McGrail, Ángel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier (2021); and Global Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, and Paola Ricaurte (2022). We have an exciting lineup of future special volumes forthcoming: What We Teach When We Teach DH, edited by Brian Croxall and Diane Jakacki; The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities, edited by Simon Appleford, Gabriel Hankins, and Anouk Lang; Computational Humanities, edited by Jessica Marie Johnson, David Mimno, and Lauren Tilton; and Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities, edited by Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies. The wide-ranging nature of these special topics allows each volume to explore a vital issue to the field. Moving forward, we encourage potential volume editors to reach out to us with ideas for other books, particularly those that engage the future of DH as it navigates tensions around the continued evolution of the field.

As the Debates in the Digital Humanities series continues to evolve, we will retain certain aspects of our original vision—namely, that all books in the DDH series will continue to be published online in an interactive format on Manifold, each arriving in an open-access format three months after print publication. The first volume of the series, Debates in the Digital Humanities, served as the prototype for Manifold itself; the platform is now being used by over thirty publishers, including Cornell University Press, Verso Books, Brown University, Indiana University Press, the University of Virginia, Arte Público Press, the City University of New York, the University of Minnesota Press, and many others. The Debates instance of Manifold has new features such as reading groups that can be used to create course spaces and to connect comments from students in a class or book club to each other. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting the development of Manifold, and we are delighted to be working with the University of Minnesota Press, whose willingness to experiment with new forms of scholarly publishing have shown impressive risk-taking and bravery. It is vital to us that our work, and the work of our authors, appears in open-access formats that allow readers across the world to engage with DDH texts free of charge. In this way, in our moment-to-moment lives, the work of this series might serve as an anchor, even if we do not know what tomorrow will bring.