For this week, I was trying to look at spaces that formally reproduced the ideas they put forward about community. It’s one thing to talk about collaboration and accessibility. It’s another formally implant those ideals into the very structure of what you’re creating. I really liked the questions Heather asks in her post: 1) Who is participating? and 2) Where? In what spaces? And so, I found two resources which, I believe, are thinking critically about their inclusive frameworks, and the way we think about participation, hierarchies, and power dynamics, especially in the academy.
Transformative Digital Humanities: Doing Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, Disability, and Class in DH
Sarah and I have posted about transformDH for our weekly blog post assignments, and I think it could be an important resource to explore for the entire class. Their about statement reads as follows: #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)
This forum uses Tumblr, has a video showcase, and hosts a thatcamp. And so, it’s thinking about the different ways a space can be accessible, transformative, and multi-dimensional, which I think is important for us in generating final projects.
What relationship does the digital humanities/academy have to social media activist movements?
We’ve had some brief discussions about how the digital humanities are being used in the academy, and how they are being used outside of that sphere. But, this piece looks at the parallels and connections between the two, and how we can form community around activism and digital platforms. And, it does so in a way which incorporates multiple voices, through its formal structure on “MediaCommons: A digital Scholarly Network”. This is the setup of the overall discussion, taken from their site:
- What role does the academy play in determining whether it is our place to theorize social media activist movements? Is it even our place to theorize these movements?
- How might digital humanities work with social justice movements such as #blacklivesmatter?
- How could the digital humanities translate the rhetoric of such movements into our scholarly conversations while preserving their core ethos of activism and social justice?
- What lessons about technology use can digital humanists learn from movements such as #blacklivesmatter?
- How can scholars rethink their own roles as academics in digital spaces in order to become more involved with activist movements?
The project will run from approximately March 14th through March 25th. Responses are 400-600 words and typically focus on introducing concepts for larger discussion, with the idea that interested individuals will read and respond daily to engage authors in digital conversation. Proposals may be brief (a few sentences) and should state your topic and approach. You may submit as an individual or offer up a special cluster of responses with others.
And so, we have a multi-perspective, short commentary that opens itself up to these larger conversations. Those who contributed think about the ways the academy interacts with larger social issues, specifically in the ways digital humanities are functioning.
Another model worth checking out: http://fembotcollective.org/