Digital Humanities: Concerns

Accessibility is a priority with all digital content, including digital humanities work. Digital humanities projects tend to be interactive and dynamic digital objects so it is imperative to follow accessibility guidelines.

• Hamraie, Aimi. (12 October 2018). Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice. America Quarterly, 70:3, pp. 455-482 (https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2018.0031)
• Web Accessibility Guidelines (W3C) 
• Williams, George H. (2012). Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities. Debates in the Digital Humanities.

Digital humanities projects tend to be a collection of complex digital objects. Comprehensively digitally preserving such projects is challenging because there are many moving parts, and no two projects are the same so developing effective workflows is contextual.

• Owens, Trevor. (19 Mar 2014). Digital Preservation's Place in the Future of the Digital Humanities. Personal blog.
• Samberg, R. and Reardon, S. Digital Humanities for Tomorrow: Opening the Conversation about DH Project Preservation. Digital Humanities at Berkeley.
• Thiede, M. (17 May 2017). Preservation in Practice: A Survey of New York City Digital Humanities Researchers. In the Library with the Lead Pipe.
• Webb, Sharon. (07 Oct 2015). Requirements and National Digital Infrastructures: Digital Preservation in the Humanities. Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies.

Gender and sexuality has a complicated role in digital projects.

• Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology
• Light, J. S. (1999). When Computers Were Women (Jennifer S. Light). Johns Hopkins University Press. 40(3), 455-483.
• Losh, E., Wernimont, J., Wexler, L., and Wu, H. (2016). Putting the Human Back into the Digital Humanities: Feminism, Generosity, and Mess. Debates in the Digital Humanities.

Data security and privacy is important even in a field prioritizing open content. Personally identifiable information of students, contributors, and included in any data used in a project needs to be secure.

• Cornell University Library. Privacy Resources. 
• Raley, R. (2013) Dataveillance and Countervailance. "Raw Data is an Oxymoron." pp. 121-145.
• Rousseaux, Francis & Saurel, Pierre. (Jan 2015). How Should Digital Humanities Pioneers Manage Their Data Privacy Challenges?. pp.75-91. IBSN: 10.1007/978-3-319-28868-0_5. 
• Student Privacy Project (EPIC)

Digital humanities projects often have significant support during project creation, but suffer from a lack of sustainability. The issue of who takes responsibility for maintaining projects is an ongoing issue in the community.

• DH at Berkley. Project Sustainability in DH: Collaboration and Community.
• Sustaining DH: An NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities
• Maron, N. L., & Pickle, S. (18 June 2014). Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start-up Phase. Ithaka S+R. https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.22548

Diversity in cultural heritage digital humanities projects has long been discussed in the community. As more of these projects develop it has been discovered that digital platforms, copyright laws, and open access concepts often cannot encompass how cultural heritage is communicated and recorded.

• Christen, Kimberly. (2012). Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Information Systems and the Question of Openness. International Journal of Communication 6.
• Liu, Alan. (2012). Where is the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities. Debates in the Digital Humanities.
• Local Contexts: Traditional Knowledge Labels 
• Mahony, Simon. (08 Mar 2018). Cultural Diversity and the Digital Humanities. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences
• 11:3, pp 371-388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0216-0
• Münster, S., Rinaudo, F., Tamborrino, R., Apollonio, F., Ioannides, M., and Snyder, L. (2018). Digital Humanities Meets Digital Cultural Heritage. (DH2018 Conference Proceedings).

All technology and media practices have an environmental impact.

• Dawson, Ted. (30 Oct 2016). Sustainable DH, or: Smashing things with Hammers. HASTAC.
• Gabrys, Jennifer. (2011). Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. University of Michigan Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dcbooks.9380304.0001.001
• Techno-Trash developed by Mél Hogan & Andrea Zeffiro
• Sinclair, Stéfan & Posthumus, Stephanie. (27 May 2016). Digital ? Environmental : Humanities. 

Digital labor often goes unacknowledged. Digital humanities projects are labor-intensive and require the work of project teams, collaborators, and sometimes even the public in crowdsourced projects. All labor contributions need to be acknowledged and compensated.

• Boyles, C., Johnston, C., McGrath, J., Morgan, P., Posner, M., and Rowell, C. (2018) Precarious Labor in the Digital Humanities. DH2018 Conference Proceedings.
• Di Pressi, H., Gorman, S., Posner, M., Sasayama, R., and Schmitt, T. (08 June 2015). A Student Collaborator Bill of Rights. HumTech at UCLA.
• Digital Labor (The New School)
• Risam, R., Snow, J., and Edwards, S. (2017). Building An Ethical Digital Humanities Community: Librarian, Faculty, and Student Collaboration. Library Faculty Publications.

The humanities has traditionally been predominantly white, and many digital humanities projects started on the same route. Diversity in digital humanities creation and projects, including as it extends to race, needs to be acknowledged.

• #transformdh
• Bailey, M. (Winter 2011). All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave. Journal of Digital Humanities, 1:1.
• Earheart, A. and Taylor, T. (2016). Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson. Debates in the Digital Humanities.
• McPherson, T. (2012). Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation. Debates in the Digital Humanities.