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Digital Humanities: Concerns

Concerns

As many digital humanists have posited, Digital Humanities and intersectionality have a unique and complicated relationship. The representation of these issues as they relate to DH are briefly described below with a few resources. Digital Humanities also maintains its own internal issues regarding sustainable, maintainable projects. Resources for issues in this category are also provided.

Accessibility

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.

Digital Preservation

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.

Gender & Sexuality

Gender and sexuality has a complicated role in digital projects.

Privacy

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.

 

Sustainability

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.

Culture

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.

Environmental Impact

All technology and media practices have an environmental impact.

Labor

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.

 

Race

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.