In thinking about “what is lost and gained, or what is enabled and disabled, when the archive/collection/edition is or goes digital,” in light of this week’s readings, I’m most struck by how many things actually remain the same. In particular I’m talking about the apparent transparency of whiteness.
All of the readings this week embody this cultural lens, but I think McPherson, Cohen, and Bolter and Grusin are particularly interesting in considering this, and I might also refer to the Folsom et al debate. In just 350 words, I will not be elaborating on any of the claims or observations I’m about to make, but I’m happy to discuss more if you’re interested.
I read Cohen first since it was the first hyperlinked reading. I had high hopes for a piece titled “Design and Politics in Electronic American Literary Archives,” but I was ultimately disappointed. Cohen asks that we “engage with these politics consciously and explicitly” and admits that “as both editors and designers, we encode protocols of power in the systems by which our literary past is circulated and accessed.” I find it problematic that he would say all of that yet still skirt around issues of race, his race and the race of his collaborators, even when bragging about the “heterogeneity” of the team. Even his nods at language diversity and representations of indigenous populations are presented in a way that allows whiteness to remain transparent.
McPherson’s piece was more interesting for the simple fact that Vectors is about creating new content using the technology to innovate research and the communication of research in innovative ways. I think this inclination to look at how technology allows us to create new work rather than just viewing it and using it as a way to preserve old work and the explicit investment in race, gender, and social justice is why this article and the projects discussed within it give me more hope than any of the others for the possibilities of DH. Yet even in this article, McPherson takes her own whiteness for granted, leaves no space for a discussion or reflection of how the racial position of those creating these projects matters regardless of their good intentions.
Finally, when Bolter and Grusin discuss the idea of transparency and immediacy by explaining that it’s “ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation” and that there’s a “tension between looking at and looking through,” I really picked up on the whiteness continuity in all of these texts. The authors are all looking through whiteness and, more significantly, see no need to look at it. For racial bodies coded as “other,” however, race is not transparent, but quite opaque, readily apparent to look at and seemingly impossible to see through. There’s the idea that “colored” lenses are more obviously mediated, more obviously lenses, but that white lenses are actually transparent and thus taken for granted as “unmediated” reality or “immediacy,” as Bolter and Grusin explain it.
Paradoxically, when DHers become transparent about their racial positioning, their race is no longer transparent.
As I look at the Janus face of DH, it’s “Archival Histories and Digital Futures,” to take from McPherson, I see no loss of white supremacy.
In the spirit of transparency, I really debated about whether to post on this topic instead of something more “techy” or “literary,” and I know my interpretation of the prompt might be a bit idiosyncratic, but I’m interested in how the “metadata” or “coding” of race is transmitted from more analogue eras and spaces into digital eras and spaces and gets translated into and through digital media.
