I’ve been thinking a lot about how theory and DH speak to each other, particularly as this course is the theory seminar this semester. We’ve read a range of different kinds of theories in Digital Humanities, but I keep coming back to questions about identity, praxis, and DH.
I came across “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities” by Roopika Risam in Digital Humanities Quarterly, which I think outlines a lot of the different debates and critiques going on in DH. We’ve read a lot of the different theorists/critics, discussions, and specific articles she mentions throughout her piece. I like her article in particular because of how she’s outlining these debates as well as situating her own critique of DH through intersectionality by drawing heavily from critical race studies and feminist theory. Risam is also thinking here about how theory and praxis work together, which is something that DH is (or at least should be) thinking about consistently.
Risam’s article focuses strongly on theory and debates within DH, but then I also wanted to find an article that puts some of these theories into practice through a specific DH project, so I found “Speculative Praxis Toward a Queer Feminist Digital Archive: A Collaborative Research-Creation Project” by Dayna McLeod, Jasmine Rault, and T.L. Cowen in A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. The three authors discuss their theoretical and political investments in DH and queer cultures, as well as their experiences of creating a collaborative DH project called “The Cabaret Commons.” They used the Scalar platform to archive queer and feminist performances from a cabaret in Montreal. I love how they are approaching the project with a queer feminist theoretical underpinning and putting it into practice through DH. I also really appreciate all of the questions they are asking about the process of creating the project itself.
