Digital Humanities: Critical DH

Critical DH

Many digital humanists argue that the relationship between Digital Humanities and intersectionality is both distinctive and complex, as the field grapples with issues of power, representation, and accessibility in digital spaces. This relationship is further shaped by the ways in which technology can both reinforce and challenge systemic inequalities, making intersectional approaches essential for critically engaging with digital scholarship. The exploration of these issues as they relate to DH are briefly described below with a few resources. Resources for issues in this category are also provided. A good place to start is with the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, which includes articles on a variety of topics in critical DH.

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.

Web Accessibility Guidelines (W3C)
Hamraie, Aimi. "Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice." American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2018): 455-482. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2018.0031.
Williams, George H. "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities." In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Gender & Sexuality

Gender and sexuality has a complicated role in digital projects.

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology
DREC: Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory
Light, Jennifer S. "When Computers Were Women." Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455-483. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1999.0128.
Losh, E., J. Wernimont, L. Wexler, and H. Wu, "Putting the Human Back into the Digital Humanities: Feminism, Generosity, and Mess." In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Wernimon, J. and E. Lost, eds. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

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.

Cornell University Library. Privacy Resources.
Raley, Rita. "Dataveillance and Countervailance". In "Raw Data" is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman. MIT Press, 2013.
Rousseaux, Francis, and Pierre Saurel. "How Should Digital Humanities Pioneers Manage Their Data Privacy Challenges?" Artificial Intelligence for Knowledge Management (2014): 75-91. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28868-0_5.
Student Privacy Project (EPIC)

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.

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. (2015). A Student Collaborator Bill of Rights. HumTech at UCLA.
Keralis, Spencer. "Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities: or, The Classroom Is Not Your Crowd." In Disrupting the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel. Punctum Books, 2018.
Risam, Roopika, Justin Snow, and Susan Edwards. “Building an Ethical Digital Humanities Community: Librarian, Faculty, and Student Collaboration.” College & Undergraduate Libraries 24 (2017): 337–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2017.1337530.

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.

Christen, Kimberly. "Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Information Systems and the Question of Openness." International Journal of Communication 6 (2012), 2870–2893.
Liu, Alan. "Where is the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities." In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Local Contexts: Grounding Indigenous Rights.
Mahony, Simon. “Cultural Diversity and the Digital Humanities.” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11, (2018): 371-88. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0216-0.
Münster, S., Rinaudo, F., Tamborrino, R., Apollonio, F., Ioannides, M., and Snyder, L. Digital Humanities Meets Digital Cultural Heritage. (DH2018 Conference Proceedings).

Environmental Impact

All technology and media practices have an environmental impact.

Gabrys, Jennifer. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. University of Michigan Press, 2011.
Miya, Chelsea, Oliver Rossier, and Geoffrey Rockwell, eds. Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0213.
Ryan, John, Lydia Hearn, and Paul Longley Arthur. “The Digital Environmental Humanities (DEH) in the Anthropocene: Challenges and Opportunities in an Era of Ecological Precarity.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 17 (2023).

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.

Earheart, A., and T. Taylor. "Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson." In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
McPherson, T. "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation." In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Risam, R., and K. B. Josephs, eds. The Digital Black Atlantic. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Risam, R. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv7tq4hg.