Notes from Books for Citation

More incomplete notes from different sources, and sharing as usual in case of use/interest for others and to make these easier for me to find.


Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold. “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Pages ix-xv: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/51
Page xiii: “The 2012 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanitiesintervened in the discourse of the field by highlighting pedagogy as the neglected “stepchild” of DH, with several chapters arguing that teaching had been diminished in favor of research-focused projects (Brier; Waltzer). That volume included an entire section on “Teaching the Digital Humanities” as a way of redressing this lack. In the ensuing years, pedagogy has become a central point of concern and investment through institutional projects such as the DH Summer Institute (DHSI) and the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching Institute (HILT), grant-funded gatherings such as the NEH-sponsored DH at Community Colleges Institute and the Regional Digital Humanities Pedagogy Project, multiple journals focused on pedagogy such as The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and Hybrid Pedagogy, and emerging publications such as the HASTAC Pedagogy Project and Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments.Discussions of pedagogy routinely take place in social media through hashtags such as the Digital Pedagogy Lab’s #digiped. Given this saturation, we chose not to isolate discussions of pedagogy from other areas of the book and instead attempted a “baked-in” approach, where work on pedagogy from scholars is integrated into various chapters as theory (Fyfe), as practice (Selisker; Cordell), and as politics (Earhart and Taylor; Losh et al.).”
Kim Gallon. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 42-49: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 42: “Although work on racial, ethnic, and national difference is emerging in the digital humanities, discussions about the lineage of Black studies within the digital humanities are almost nonexistent.1 While a comprehensive history of the intersections between Black studies and the digital is sorely needed, it is outside of the scope of this chapter. Here, I seek to set in motion a discussion of the black digital humanities by drawing attention to the “technology of recovery” that undergirds black digital scholarship”
Page 44: “This tension is enacted through what I call a “technology of recovery,” characterized by efforts to bring forth the full humanity of marginalized peoples through the use of digital platforms and tools.”
Page 48: “Rambsy’s work stresses another key point: digital recovery projects that are either led by or heavily involve black scholars are particularly impactful in how they expand what we understand the digital humanities to be and its potential for critically thinking about power.”
 
Moya Bailey, Anne Cong-Huyen, Alexis Lothian, Amanda Phillips. “Reflections on a Movement: #transformDH, Growing Up.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 71-79: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 71: “3. We should shift the focus of digital humanities from technical processes to political ones, and always seek to understand the social, intellectual, economic, political, and personal impact of our digital practices as we develop them.”
Elizabeth Losh, Jacqueline Wernimont, Laura Wexler, Hong-An Wu. “Putting the Human Back into the Digital Humanities: Feminism, Generosity, and Mess.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 92-103: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 99: “So what do we have left if we shouldn’t settle for just being “nice” or “civil” or “respectful,” and we do not want to flatten a rich field into a homogenous discipline? In Designing Culture, FemTechNet cofounder Anne Balsamo lists the principle of “intellectual generosity” first among feminist virtues that include “confidence,” “humility,” “flexibility,” and “integrity.” Balsamo observes that intellectual generosity includes “the sincere acknowledgment of the work of others” and fosters “intellectual risk-taking and courageous acts of creativity” (Balsamo, 163). We would add that as of this writing, #BlackLivesMatter continues to underline the urgency of feminist anti-racism as a first principle.”
Alex Gil. “Interview with Ernesto Oroza.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 184-193: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 185: “Another concept, the “Moral Modulor,” refers to an individual who finds a way to make his or her environment livable—literally—with very few resources at hand.”
Page 185: “My favorite of Oroza’s concepts, “the technology of disobedience,” describes objects employed with complete disregard for their intended use: a tray used as an antenna, a clothes dryer used as a house fan.”
Amy E. Earhart, Toniesha L. Taylor. “Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 251-264: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 251: “In the previous volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities,one of this chapter’s authors, Amy Earhart, critiques the digital “canon that skews toward traditional texts and excludes crucial work by women, people of color, and the GLBTQ community,” advocating for an activist model of grassroots recovery projects to expand current digital offerings (316). This model could also help to allow broader participation in canon expansion. ”
Page 253: “We also followed the lead of GO::DH co-founder Alex Gil, who argues that diversity of approach is the key to access (see also chapter 16 in this volume for Ernesto Oroza’s interview with Alex Gil). Indeed, resources and support vary by borders and by institution and are fundamentally local. ”
Page 261: “Student exploration of the historical events through primary documents provides an important space for students to come to terms with such events and to position these historical events in relationship to current events. The creation of digital canons where such events are erased allows us to believe that such acts are random occurrences of a few individuals rather than systemic actions that have origins within American culture. Through careful attention to historical inequities within our institutions, with the attention to power dynamics between students, faculty, the university, and our communities, our project provides a model of digital humanities engagement with complex issues of race and social justice while also providing needed expansion of the digital record.”
Miriam Posner. “Here and There: Creating DH Community.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 265-273: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 266: “For me, community happens when people are genuinely invested in seeing each other succeed. ”
Page 269: “At UCLA, we have had better success with immersive training—dedicated days or even weeks that people have set aside to train themselves. After a year of unattended workshops, I was shocked when we announced registration for a two-day grad-student bootcamp3 and had to close registration in an hour because we were full. The demand is there—we just were not offering the training in the right format. This kind of training is effective because it is intensive and people clear the decks for it—but it is also effective because it is fun. People want to hang out with and get to know other people who are interested in similar things, and that is just not going to happen in an hour-long library workshop. A two-day long bootcamp, and even a week-long training opportunity, is not the ideal. The ideal is long-term collaboration with people you come to know and trust over the years. So I would recommend following up an immersive training event with a working group or some other regular meeting place where people can see each other and continue to build relationships.”
Wendy F. Hsu. “Lessons on Public Humanities from the Civic Sphere.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 280-286: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 282-283: “At a lecture at the Columbia Global Center in Amman, Jordan, Gayatri Spivak argues that “the task of the humanities is to teach literature and philosophy in such a way that people will be able to imagine what a socially just world should be.”3 Spivak’s [page 283] evocation places humanistic thinking in the realm of social justice and imagination. Imagination is in essence an interpretive act, and interpretation provides the foundation for the humanistic practices of visioning, speculating, and reflecting.”
Page 284: “Humanists, I urge you to leverage your knowledge of the digital as a tool of community building. Working, listening, and making in proximity with communities will bring us closer to the co-imagination of a socially just world.”
Roopika Risam. “Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 359-367: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 365: “The digital divides that shape the digital humanities do so unevenly. Local contexts matter and reflect linguistic, cultural, and social difference. Each location, as well as local communities within national contexts, is uniquely constituted in a matrix of intersecting factors that shape practices. The barriers to speaking of a truly global digital humanities are great, from significant differences in practices to the overdetermining influence of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada to the dominance of English. As black feminist responses to the rise of theory suggest, the growing popularity of scholarly conversations risk flattening difference unless they carefully privilege diversity, multiplicity, and plurality. Only by defining, situating, and building on local contexts can we understand what digital humanities looks like at the global scale.”
 
Brian Greenspan. “Are Digital Humanities Utopian?.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 393-409: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
Page 403: “Following Dean, I suggest that digital humanists’ repeated emphasis on failure, community, collaboration, and images of totality are really partial drives expressing a desire for something else: namely, a social order entirely beyond capitalism and its underpinnings in the academic, scholarly publishing, and high-tech industries. What the digital humanities really want is communism, which Dean defines as “our collective steering of our common future for our common good” (Communist Horizon, 87). Nor will a greater commitment to crowdsourcing and open access alone fix the problem: as Dean notes, “capitalism is a system that constitutively exploits people, not one that constitutively excludes them” (Communist Horizon,105), and expanding participation in itself only extends the reach of the existing scholarly, educational, publishing, and intellectual property regimes. Digital humanists’ embrace of a participatory ethic intimates our utopian desire for a more inclusive totality, even as it plays into the exploitation of surplus labor that governs the system of proletarianization. Not unlike the contemporary Left, we are willing to engage the idea of the crowd only when it is divested of its unruly character and historical associations with the revolutionary proletariat. The ideology of participation without condition, regulated through crowdsourcing platforms and protocols for accessibility and interoperability, allows digital humanists to indulge in “a fantasy of multiplicity without antagonism, of difference without division” (Communist Horizon, 228).”
Page 404: “ That is where DH comes in: we are uniquely positioned to critique the ways that new media exacerbate the enclosure of immaterial labor both inside and outside of the academy, and to develop, test, and implement the platforms and protocols through which networked communities are identified, engaged, and empowered to contribute to the common. Participatory and crowdsourced projects have the potential to challenge the flexible notions of work that Grusin rightly blames for precarity in the academic workforce, but only if we take participation to mean a great deal more than performing the free labor of deciphering captchas, metatagging HTML, Mechanical Turk piecework, or other forms of “crowdmilking” (Scholz). If DH projects are to be collective in a committed and redemptive sense, rather than merely fetishes of democratic liberalism, then they need to focus on the struggle, antagonism, and violence that attends capitalism everywhere (Dean, Communist Horizon, 61), including our classrooms, scholarly associations, publishing consortia, and other sites of knowledge creation and mobilization. We need to recognize the mechanisms through which intellectual property law constrains digital productivity, how digital collections remediate conventional archival powers and privileges, and the ways in which our projects both produce the common and enable its enclosure. We must ensure that the open-access archives and tools that we build and give away are autonomous from the system of rent—not by merely exploiting information networks or taking our exodus from them, but by adapting these tactics into robust strategies and protocols that foreground, discourage, and resist the expropriation and valorization of the common.”
 
Page 405: “The truly dark side of DH is its fear of radical social change, which prevents us from recognizing emergent scholarly and pedagogical protocols as what they might yet become: raw materials for building another world entirely.”
Domenico Fiormonte. “Toward a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 438-458: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
 
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Richard Grusin, Patrick Jagoda, Rita Raley. “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 493-509: http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2
 
Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh. “Problems with White Feminism: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities.” Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research. Eds. Crompton, Constance, Richard J. Lane, and Raymond G. Siemens. New York: Routledge, 2016: 35-46.
Page 36: Does the rhetoric of making and breaking suppose that home computing is an individual, rather than familial experience, such that tinkering and taking apart carries little risk of damaging family member access? If the user has a platform for personal computing available on a cell phone, what is being assumed about this person’s access to network coverage, affordable data, and the robust hardware and software of the latest devices? Do white digital humanists understand “terms of use” agreements as relatively neutral, although those who have suffered from a long legacy of unjust medical experimentation, real estate covenants, and appropriation of intellectual property may justifiably have more suspicion of fine print? In encouraging users to explore corpora in databases, is the dominant subjective position rewarded, even if alternative narratives are uncovered?
Page 41: Angel Nieves’ observation that having constant electrical power creates different conditions of possibility for digital cultural work.
Page 43: As digital humanists, we need to move from a focus on populating the archive to a focus on animating the archive to get beyond a politics of minimal representation. For example, the Schomberg Center for Black Cultural Research at the New York City Public Library describes itself as “the largest of collection of artifacts that recognize the social, cultural and artistic accomplishments of LGBTQ people in the black community.” This is a laudable project, but very little of the collection is available online, and most of the curation is handled by paid professionals, although the center does maintain an active blog. How could members of communities of color become invested in potential digital humanities projects? As Ellen Rooney observes, twenty-first-century feminisms need to do more than just be “additive.”
Page 43: Furthermore, white feminists too often uncritically accept class differences between manual work and knowledge work that are inevitably marked by race as well. Curtis Marez has attempted to disrupt this binary by showing how agricultural laborers with the United Farm Workers were early adopters of new media technologies in the campaigns of Cesar Chavez, and Alex Rivera and Ricardo Dominguez have explored forms of Latino futurism that complement a rich body of work in Afrofuturism that renarrates the story of the digital divide.
 
Una Marson Selected Poems. Ed. Alison Donnell. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree Press, 2011.
Donnell, Alison. “Introduction.” Una Marson Selected Poems. Ed. Alison Donnell. Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree Press, 2011. Pages 11-39.
Page 11: “[Una Marson] She is now recognized as the originating force behind the now famous BBC Radio programme, Caribbean Voices, that launched the career of so many of the Caribbean’s ‘great’ male literary figures, and sometimes noted as having acted as a secretary to HIM Haile Selassie shortly after Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. The irony of her historical framing as a female facilitator to make repute can be gleaned by fuller attention to both her life and her written works.”
Page 21: “Indeed, her life may be read as a conscious attempt to follow C.L.R. James’s edit for West Indians to ‘write ourselves into history’.”
Page 22: “Marson’s own little magazine project, The Cosmopolitan A Monthly Magazine for the Business Youth of Jamaica and the Official Organ of the Stenographers’ Association, was first published in May 1928. It was the earliest Jamaican periodical to have a woman editor-publisher and its gender politics was explicit, with an editorial statement proclaiming: ‘This is the age of woman: what man has done, women may do’.”
Page 22-23: “She invoked cosmopolitanism as a way of being open to the world, both near and far, and was critical of those Jamaicans blind to the lives of the majority population with whom they had daily contact but whom they did not properly recognize as co-citizens: ‘We have endeavored to foster a ‘COSMOPOLITAN’ [cosmo- splits to page 23] spirit, a wider vision, a more charitable and tolerant attitude among all sections of our small society. We abhor narrowness, snobbishness and such things which do more to engender strife and unhappiness than all the other causes put together… we must build up a clean, thoughtful and artistic Island literature’ (Cosmopolitan May 1930, p. 5). From the start of her publishing career, social justice and cultural transformation were linked ideas. Marson’s intellectual energy was never abstracted from her reading of a world in need of change.”
Page 23: “Her interest in pan-Africanism developed during this period, fostered by her close association with Sir Nana Ofori Atta, and African king from northern Ghana, whom Marson met in 1934.”
Page 24: “In 1935 her internationalism and conviction on issues of women’s rights meant that she was the first Jamaica and first woman of African descent invited to speak at the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship Conference in Istanbul and, in the same year, the first black woman invited to attend the League of Nations at Geneva.”
Page 24: “Her time spent in Britain offered Marson an enabling context within which to develop her ideas on black unity and women’s rights.”