Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave
- 2 Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities
- 3 You Build the Roads, We Are the Intersections
- 4 Digital Humanities, Intersectionality, and the Ethics of Harm
- 5 Walking Alone Online: Intersectional Violence on the Internet
- 6 Ready Player Two: Inclusion and Positivity as a Means of Furthering Equality in Digital Humanities and Computer Science
- 7 Gender, Feminism, Textual Scholarship, and Digital Humanities
- 8 Faulty, Clumsy, Negligible? Revaluating Early Modern Princesses’ Letters as a Source for Cultural History and Corpus Linguistics
- 9 Intersectionality in Digital Archives: The Case Study of the Barbados Synagogue Restoration Project Collection
- 10 Accessioning Digital Content and the Unwitting Move toward Intersectionality in the Archive
- 11 All Along the Watchtower: Intersectional Diversity as a Core Intellectual Value in Digital Humanities
- Appendix: Writing About Internal Deliberations
- Select Bibliography
- Index
11 - All Along the Watchtower: Intersectional Diversity as a Core Intellectual Value in Digital Humanities
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave
- 2 Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and Digital Humanities
- 3 You Build the Roads, We Are the Intersections
- 4 Digital Humanities, Intersectionality, and the Ethics of Harm
- 5 Walking Alone Online: Intersectional Violence on the Internet
- 6 Ready Player Two: Inclusion and Positivity as a Means of Furthering Equality in Digital Humanities and Computer Science
- 7 Gender, Feminism, Textual Scholarship, and Digital Humanities
- 8 Faulty, Clumsy, Negligible? Revaluating Early Modern Princesses’ Letters as a Source for Cultural History and Corpus Linguistics
- 9 Intersectionality in Digital Archives: The Case Study of the Barbados Synagogue Restoration Project Collection
- 10 Accessioning Digital Content and the Unwitting Move toward Intersectionality in the Archive
- 11 All Along the Watchtower: Intersectional Diversity as a Core Intellectual Value in Digital Humanities
- Appendix: Writing About Internal Deliberations
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This problem is significant because it indicates the failure of the traditional model for scholarship adequately to describe serious intellectual work in humanities computing, whose scope cannot be delimited in the same way and to the same extent as the traditional kind … A new definition of scholarship, demanding new abilities, would seem to follow.
The Bonfire of the (Digital) Humanities
Digital humanities came close to imploding as an organized discipline in the 2015– 2016 academic year. The origins of the dispute lay in the deliberations of the program committee for Digital Humanities, the annual, usually very competitive, international conference organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and held in 2016 in Krakow, Poland. What criteria, this committee asked itself, should we use for accepting or rejecting submissions? Should we privilege “quality”— presumably as this is measured by success in the conference's traditionally highly structured and quite thorough peer review process? Or should we privilege “diversity”— defined largely in terms of ensuring that speakers from as wide a range of demographics as possible are given slots at a conference (and in a discipline) that has been accused of skewing heavily toward white, Northern, and Anglophone men? Or, as one member of the committee put it with forceful clarity in an email:
There's a solid consensus that the conference is there in order to hear from diverse groups, but whenever one opts for diversity, it usually means opting for less quality (otherwise there would be no issue), so the danger is that one loses sight of this, very central goal of the conference.
Email is an informal medium, and it would be unfair to take the position expressed here and later circulated by others on social media as having been considered in the same way as this chapter or other formal presentations that have referred to this email since this controversy first arose. As Steven Ramsay has noted of his own apparently unintentionally provocative comments on the belief that coding is the core activity within digital humanities, “All quotes are by nature taken out of context.”
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- Information
- Intersectionality in Digital Humanities , pp. 167 - 184Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019