For this week, I wanted to explore how disability interacts with the digital humanities, and how conversations around disability can transform how we currently process knowledge. I know many disabled persons use online resources, like blogging, to present information about how they negotiate with disability.
I found the following article in my online travels: “Crippling the Archives: Negotiating Notions of Disability in Appraisal and Arrangement and Description” http://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.75.1.c53h4712017n4728 Although it has its problematic pieces, it pointed out many of the issues I saw in terms of knowledge collection, and who’s knowledge/story/etc. gets privileged.
As I continued, I found this amazing resource called #transformdh
Transformative Digital Humanities: Doing Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, Disability, and Class in DH
http://transformdh.org/about-transformdh/
From the website, “#transformDH is an academic guerrilla movement seeking to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects that push at its boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and inclusion.” (#transformDH Tumblr)”
Jeremy, they have a section on comics and zines!
I’m thinking about submitting a video that could be considered for their conference in Maryland this year: “Videos between three and ten minutes in length that share new ideas about gender, race, sexuality, class, region/nationality, and disability in digital humanities/digital studies.”
When I searched “disability” on their site, I found this sick nasty archive (yes, sick nasty!!):
“Digit(al) Shakespeares brings Deaf studies perspectives to bear on both disability studies and digital humanities. Deaf studies focuses on what the experience of deafness enables, rather than disables. Just as we can reconceptualize hearing loss as deaf gain, so we can reframe Shakespeare’s works as being at heart visual rather than auditory. This can lead to a richer experience of Shakespeare for everyone, regardless of hearing status. Throughout the video, clips illustrate the power of sign language to convey the Bard’s virtuosity in creating images through words. New media and technology allow Deaf people to share translations and performances of Shakespeare’s works across the globe. Digital archives can collect and preserve these, so they are available for Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing people to study and appreciate. Deaf and hard of hearing people also need access to digital Shakespeare archives based on spoken language via high quality captioning. Access should be built into digital archives from the start, so that it becomes a central element of the overall project design, rather than a problem to be solved at the end.”
http://transformdh.org/2015-video-showcase/digital-shakespeares-tyrone-giordano-and-jill-marie-bradbury/
And so, I posted the following comment on their site: “Very new to digital humanities (I’m currently getting my MFA at LSU and taking a grad seminar on Intro to Digital Humanities, where I hope to generate a web-archive of visual poetry by the end of the semester). As a disabled scholar, I LOVED the “Digit(al) Shakespeares” archive, and how it positioned deaf studies and visual studies, as well as challenged how we might orient to a longstanding literary work. I was wondering if you guys know of any similar archives/databases which center around or strongly include disabled voices? Doesn’t have to be in visual studies; I would love to look up anything you might offer. Thank you!”
So, we’ll see what happens! Looking forward to a response:)
Also, through #transformdh, I found this forthcoming collection that we can still all submit to (by April 1st haha), and I think it would be kind of awesome: http://buzzademia.com/
From the website: “This forthcoming edited collection will present a cross-section of international scholars using these new digital genres to articulate their ideas to undergraduate and general audiences. We describe this activity as Buzzademia, which we define as scholarship in the vernacular of the Internet. Consisting of a print book and digital companion, the collection will offer an archive of digital artifacts that represent the best of Buzzademia. Our aim is to contribute to the ongoing reimagining of the ways in which scholars and philosophers convey their ideas.”
