NYC DH week keynote

The following paper was delivered as the keynote address for the 2021 NYC DH annual conference to kick off NYC DH week.

Introduction

Before I begin, I want to thank Kelley Kreitz for her kind introduction, the members of the NYC DH Steering committee for their sense of trust and confidence in asking me to speak today–especially Madiha Choski, who was going to be the other half of this keynote conversation and who unfortunately came down with COVID last week. Thanks also to those of you who are signed in today for yet another “unprecedented” event to add to the long list of unprecedented events we’ve accumulated this past year. I’m sure the last thing anyone really wants on their Monday is another Zoom call. And yet, what’s true today, and has been true in many kinds of conferences and assemblies that have taken place this year, the number of people who have chosen to come is a testament to how critical people and social connection and support is to the work that we do. Essentially, I read attending a Zoom talk and conversation and breakout group discussions as a form of hope and joy as an act of resistance against so many forces this year that has made, in most cases, doing our work so much more challenging and necessary and fraught. 

Anecdote

Let me start, then, by setting the scene and describing briefly the series of events that led us to wanting to kick off a week of Digital Humanities community and coalition building under the umbrella of “care and repair” and which led to thinking about Care as a radical act in our NYC DH community, especially as it is framed by instances of crisis, trauma, and upheaval over the past year. 

October 2020, when the Steering Committee first met, seems like almost another world now, and that October felt like an altogether other world than the one we occupied at this event in February 2020. At the meeting were Jesse Merandy, Kimon Kirmedes, Elizabeth Cornell, Chris Alen Sula, Madiha Choski, Zach Coble, Stephen Klein, Kelley Kreitz, and myself. What stood out to us about the meeting, was how compelled we were to ask, “How are you?” and “Are you ok?” And no, not that superficial “How are you?” but the one that is looking for an honest answer, and we were likewise struck by how grateful we felt to hear each other answer. It was as simple and obvious and ordinary as it sounds–something we would not have imagined as “radical” by any stretch of the imagination. And, it’s really not. Except,that it is. What the events of the past year have underscored is how very radical even modest care work can be given the contexts in which it is deployed, and how showing up for one another in more modest circumstances, might also lead to showing up for one another in other ways.

As Kimon Kirmidas often reminds us in our meetings: “This Steering Committee is composed of some of the busiest folks in our community who still come together each year on a completely volunteer basis to do even more.” I’d add to this by saying that our work is an act of investment and faith that is often at odds with institutional values. That we even begin to pull this event together along with an online community, graduate student awards, and workshops is annually at odds with the transactional values of our home institutions–in other words, the primary function of our collective efforts is not to engage in academic and intellectual commerce, but to sustain the people and values who are most likely to be under duress given their institutional positions and demands. We’re not participating because it increases the value or the prestige of our home institutions or ourselves (though, it may have that secondary effect sometimes). Our coming together to ask and to share how we are, to create a week of free workshops and working groups across NYC, to recognize and reward graduate research in digital humanities, is instead a rejection of the narratives of scarcity and limited resources, a refusal of resource hoarding as a response to those narratives, and an act of joy and hopefulness in the pursuit of an otherwise–an idea that comes from Elizabeth Povinelli’s anthropological studies of the gift economy in which under duress, creating space for care is an act of hope–a kind of audacity that suggests that though we’re unable to completely divest ourselves from oppressive structural inequities and normative assumptions, our activities as individuals and collectives might lead us toward something better. 

It is this continual hope of an otherwise that has led us toward a “calling in” that is to say a place where we invite one another in to share who and how we are, to reconcile varied privileges and constraints of our situations, and to commit to a collective care that through success, error, iteration, and commitment might help make participation in the DH community across and beyond New York City more welcoming, reaffirming, and even sustainable in spite of (rather than in service of) our specific institutional situations. 

Setting this year in Context

As Kelley mentioned in the introduction, our hope is to focus collective attention and action on the relationship between individual digital humanists and NYCDH as a community of practice impacted by ongoing crises and traumas, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice and the surveillance state, budget austerity and scarcity, exploitative labor conditions, and rapid pedagogical transition that over the past year have exposed the ongoing inequitable conditions in which we have been doing our work. This list is far from exhaustive, but is the list where I’ll begin my talk today, retaining a focus on the more local for now. I want to reflect on what the small act of asking: “How are you doing? Are you ok?” in our steering committee meeting extends far beyond niceties to the opportunity for radical care as an act of hope. It is in microcosm a gesture from which the impulse to come together as a community of practice to truly see one another, recognizing and acting upon our mutual humanity becomes a first step toward solidarity and collective action. 

Why am I mentioning this? Because the overwhelming feeling of care and solidarity that we felt at that moment is also what we collectively agreed was most needed and also most possible to achieve this week–that what New Yorkers–now past the one-year anniversary of the first recorded COVID-19 case in the New York Metro area–needed was the opportunity truly to ask and to hear from one another “How are you doing? Are you ok?” This week provides us with a chance to recognize, call for, and demonstrate an ethic of care when the need for repair feels most urgent and–frankly–daunting. What the past year has made most stark and apparent is the racial injustices that have long been part of our institutions and where digital surveillance, public health crises, and economic disparities have sparked wider public outrage and attention–but also have elicited the basest and most dehumanizing aspects of public life. The result has meant increased vulnerability, emotional labor, and distress. We have seen our teaching and pedagogical values challenged as many of us try to balance our commitment to people, to embodiment and connection and dialogue with issues of safety, health, and well-being. Often for those in digital humanities roles that means making choices we otherwise would prefer not to make or to become complicit in choices that in any other time we would have more options to resist, such as decisions to use proprietary, or opportunistic enterprise “solutions” to problems that are at their core social and fiscal. The people most likely to be here, at this talk and participating in this week’s events, are also more likely than not to occupy vulnerable, or contingent positions–graduate students, librarians, staff, or faculty who take on the lion’s share of committee work, whose positions are in some way under threat, in question, or under siege–and that is all before we get to the question of immigration status. For many of those in the NYC DH community, including more than ½ of the graduate students I work with–the Trump administration’s callous and opportunistic approach to the pandemic has led to a reliance on digital technologies that often legitimize zenophobic federal policies, leaving students and colleagues in a perpetual state of anxiety and uncertainty. 

Moreover, this year has lain bare something else that we have always known, but that has been conveniently elided as institutions of higher learning, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations have faced austerity measure after austerity measure–our professional lives and our personal lives, our intellectual lives and our physical selves, our roles as digital humanists and the other roles we play in our personal and professional lives are not separate. We see this playing out in conversations about “personal responsibility” and risk with regard to the coronavirus. Our lives as people who care for family members–children or parents, partners or spouses, neighbors and others–are not separate from the work we do, especially when the work we do this year entered into our homes, breaking down any semblance of barriers that we might have erected for the purpose of necessary self preservation. 

This breaking down of boundaries and the consequent impact that affective labor has had on faculty and staff is occupied much public conversation in places like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed–the majority of them either valorizing faculty willingness to over extend themselves, or pointing to self-help tips and tricks that turn structural failures into personal ones. In reaction to this, Lee Skallerup Bessette’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in October titled “The Staff Are Not OK” makes this point quite clear. She writes “It’s time higher education started paying attention to the health and well-being of the staff members whose work has pulled campuses through the Covid-19 crisis.” Bessette points to the way that staff are often tasked with the emotionally exhausting work required to transition faculty from face-to-face teaching to remote instruction. She explains: “Most of us just spent our summers working overtime to ensure that the campus was ready–in whatever format that entailed–for the fall. Many staff members were required to put their health and safety on the line to be on the campus, while others had to fight for the right to work remotely. Hiring freezes have meant more work with fewer people. Wage freezes and furloughs have stretched us to our limits.” And I might add that as the statistics bear out, many of these staff positions are held by women who, as a bevy of other Chronicle articles have pointed out, are falling behind in their research productivity balancing work with care taking, especially of young children who are participating in remote instruction themselves. Where there was the illusion of boundaries between the personal and the professional, between home and work–the past year in more ways that one has exposed the false pretense of that binary. And yet, even exposed, the response from most institutions has overwhelmingly been through the language of self-determinism and personal responsibility. 

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The point that I’m trying to make here is that in October, when the NYC DH Steering Committee came together to meet and we asked each other “How are you? Are you ok?” For some of us, it was the first time that we’d been asked that question with a genuine interest in the answer. Not with a redirection to self help or the implicit desire to ask something more of one another. It was at this moment that we felt a resurgence of hope for what NYC DH could be. A network of care that transcends the institutional exigencies, austerity measures, and competitive values of intellectual commerce. One that resists the capitalist myth of limited resources that lead to hoarding and competition. What NYC DH could offer is an otherwise–a space where we can reaffirm our humanity, share the resources we have, and focus on the ways that minimal collective effort could lead to interpersonal connection and opportunities for something better.

Before going any further, I also want to name an obvious disconnect here between the fact that I’ve mentioned talking about racial injustice as one of the major contributors to the past years’ crises and trauma and the fact that my lived experience position me in ways in which I can speak with authenticity about the toll that racial inequity has taken on DH communities of color. In fact, there are many women and people of color who are part of our NYCDH community who have been working at the intersection of race, social justice, and digital humanities for a long time and who could speak with the power of experience and expertise. That point did not escape the members of the Steering Committee as they thought about who should speak today, and I want to address the situation directly. Obviously, it would make sense to have one of the many scholars of color in our community giving this talk, but we also recognized that doing so would potentially add to the disproportionate burden of affective labor many women-identifying Black Indigenous People of Color are taking on and while perhaps such a thing is more reasonable when we could compensate them for their time, this year we did not feel that we would be able to do so adequately enough to reward them appropriately for the work involved. 

So, I’m not going to use my time to try to describe a situation or affective labor that is not part of my lived experience. I am instead directing my remarks toward how we might come to think of radical care, following and citing the leadership of Black feminist philosophers, pedagogues, and poets. I want to encourage us, especially those of us who are white, to focus our attention on how participating in acts of radical care can lead us to exposing and dismantling structures of white supremacy in digital humanities practice. How might someone like me, a white, CIS, straight, alt-ac digital humanist, pursue liberation during these challenging times, when individual and collective action confront the normalizing forces of institutionalized oppression? And, by extension, what might we do as a community to act in solidarity and recognition that there is much to be done to help lift one another up as we move forward toward what I’ve already referred to as an otherwise. 

Scaffolding

What I intend to do over the next 30 minutes or so is to consider what “radical care” might be in the context of NYCDH. What makes care “radical” and what are the normalizing forces that delegitimize care work, threatening to make affective labor an agent of oppressive structural regimes rather than a vehicle for solidarity and change. Then, I’ll consider the kind of activities that projects I’ve been involved in and those that others, like Madiha, have been participating in–looking at sites of radical care that already exist within our NYC DH community. Finally, I’ll turn toward Opportunities that I see for “radical care” moving forward that draw on past work and imagine a more hopeful “otherwise” of inclusive digital humanities practice in the future. From that point, we’d like to open the conversation up more broadly to include other members of the Steering Committee and their thoughts regarding the possible futures of radical care in the NYCDH context, and then open conversation even further again through breakout groups… that may echo the questions posed to the working groups who will be meeting on topics throughout the week. 

Defining Radical Care

Conversations framed by a feminist ethics of care, particularly Black feminism’s ethics of care, since 2016 have become commonplace. They focus on the affective, economic, physical, and professional toll that the Trump Administration had on institutions of higher education, legitimizing acts of white supremacy, state violence, and surveillance on campuses across the United States. Then, in 2020 when the coronavirus began to spread rapidly across the US, what might be considered an ethics of care expanded considerably, under the increasingly transactional and financial pressures placed on many of us by the institutions where we work. In an interview with Yes! Magazine in February 2016, Angela Davis comments, “I think our notions of what counts as radical have changed over time. Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension—all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles. That wasn’t the case before.” But as we all know, the entry of a liberatory or radical concept into the popular lexicon is generally accompanied with the dilution of the real purpose of the term. So, let me take a few moments now to parse between the popular and oppressive valences of an ethics of care in contrast to the self and community-sustaining ethics of care that Davis describes as “radical.”

At its core, “radical care” resists dehumanization, whether the origin of that dehumanization is institutional, corporate, economic, technological, or racialized. In other words, care is the radical and fundamental act of preservation, a strategy for survival and change rooted in the recognition that caring is an inherently political act that calls into question who cares and for whom. In particular, there are two forms of care that I want to focus in on today: self care and collective care. When Audre Lorde insists in A Burst of Light that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,”she is not talking about the form of self-care that we might find discussed in popular publications today that consider, for example, how universities can promote “wellness campaigns” to help individual faculty and staff manage their mental and physical health while working extended hours, from home, without childcare. For Lorde, self-care while fighting liver cancer became an act of defiance in a system designed to deny her humanity as a Black, lesbian woman with a voice. Sarah Ahmed extends Lorde’s assertion by saying that “for those who have to insist they matter to matter: selfcare is warfare.” 

However, as I’ve already mentioned, self-care in the context of Covid-19 on campuses is typically formulated as the need to “take care of one’s self” in an abnegation of the responsibility that institutional pressures and demands play in creating the need for self-care. Self-care in the institutional context is an activity for which advice is provided through workshops, emails with resources, or HR campaigns that unburden the institution of their complicity in overloading faculty and staff with enormous amounts of affective labor resulting from transitioning from face-to-face to virtual  learning with very little time or increased class sizes or patron’s unwillingness to wear a mask. Of course, there is a place for self-care in an ethic of care–but that for care to be radical, it must resist the inclination to do so in order to smooth frictions that make the academic industrial complex continue to chug along unabated. 

Importantly, self-care may be more radical for some than for others, therefore, a radical ethic of care also depends upon an assertion of collectivity and shared action in the face of forces that are purposefully individualistic and unnecessarily competitive. Situations, for example, where the desire to reopen and the personal health and safety of the faculty and staff are at odds, normalizing the logic that self-care and collective well being cannot coexist. And whether we acknowledge it or not, this is a similar logic to that of a white supremacy which prevents class solidarity. 

I would argue that radical care in this moment, and in the context of NYCDH resists these false binaries by creating connections across and among institutional, professional, and geographic boundaries and differences to lift up and to care for as opposed to self-investment and interest–not as a solution to resource scarcity, but as a means of surviving it. 

Importantly, a radical ethics of care is not about charity. It is not about those of us at institutions with better endowments and more resources participating in some sort of “savior” fantasy. Radical care in the context of NYC DH looks more like mutual aid, fueled by reciprocity and recognition of the shared strengths and expertise that our various formations, experiences, and perspectives provide. Finally, radical care in the context of NYC DH is not the same as “agreement.” What is “radical” in this context is that the energy that animates our community operates outside our individual institutional values. It is the collectivity across the roles that we play at our institutions, and our coming together to share with, to care for, to show up for one another. It is the collective recognition of shared–which is not to say the “same”–struggles and values that helps to create a sense of kinship and concern that is also sustaining. 

Sites of “Radical Care” in DH 

From here, I’d like to pivot to examples of digital humanities driven by an ethic of radical care from my and Madiha’s experience, across NYC DH and beyond it. The examples that I’d like to draw from, however, may not be explicitly covid-related–though some are. What these projects do provide is a way to think beyond the current crisis toward a more sustainable and collective future–one in which the lessons of the present remain with us as we navigate beyond it to what we hope to be a better place.

Covid Maker Response – Resource sharing

The first example, though, is a project that Madiha Choski brought to fruition–the Covid Maker Response. I’m going to mention it here, in hopes that Madiha will be able to elaborate upon it later, but if not I want to make sure that it’s front and center in your mind to go back to and learn about. In March, when New York City’s activities ground to a halt and hospitalizations skyrocketed, as we all know, many hospitals faced a shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPE. Dr. Pierre Elias, a Cardiology fellow at Columbia University, contacted Madiha to ask whether or not the libraries’ 3D printers were able to produce face shields. Choski researched various patterns, requested permission to go to campus and to bring 3D printers to her home, and she began printing and assembling the shields. Choski organized her library colleagues and campus and community volunteers to the point that they could print 1,000 face shields per day and deliver them to local hospitals. Reaching out to 3D printing companies MakerBot and Tangible Creative, they were able to improve the speed and efficiency of the visor production. 

The Covid Maker Response is an excellent demonstration of the way in which resource sharing and collective action in conversation with communities in need can work in solidarity. 

CUNY Distance Learning Archive – Pedagogy and Archives

In Spring 2020, students in Matt Gold’s doctoral seminar “Knowledge Infrastructures” had planned to “explore the emerging nexus of critical infrastructure studies and critical university studies, focusing on the infrastructure of scholarly knowledge.” When campuses closed and face-to-face learning was rapidly transformed to meet the demands of remote and virtual learning, Gold’s class developed a collaborative and timely project in response to the ruptures and displacements that students, faculty, and staff were feeling. The archive catalogues the wide range of mixed messages faculty and students received about next steps, partial and quixotic guidance on grading, course format, and schedules, and privileged the lived experience of students and faculty in their collection practices. This is a stark contrast to what one might find if you were, for example, to look over CUNY’s websites and archives of memoranda, and demonstrates in practice principles that Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein describe in Data Feminisms, “Elevate Emotion and Embodiment” Data feminism teaches us to value multiple forms of knowledge, including the knowledge that comes from people as living, feeling bodies in the world.” 

What the CUNY Distance Learning Archive commemorates is the embodied experience of teaching and learning in the midst of a global health crisis that is differentially animated among members of the CUNY community, preserving the sense of precarity, uncertainty, and resilience that–while heralded–is likely to go unrecognized and rewarded once financial and resource scarcity and calls for austerity resume–as was the case in Fall 2020, when adjunct faculty contracts were not renewed, when minimum class enrollment was increased, and faculty sabbaticals and research time was reduced or postponed. 

NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project

A similar project at Columbia University is the “NYC Covid 19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive,” at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics. The project focuses on New York as a city of neighborhoods, illuminating and documenting the social structures that shape our experience of the pandemic. Building on lessons learned from the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, a composite of oral histories, diary entries, survey data, and mapping visualizations to convey the differential ways in which the pandemic has impacted New Yorkers in their daily lives. 

Digital Humanities Research Institutes – Professional development and research

I’m going to shift a bit to talk about a project of my own in which sustainable growth and resource sharing created professional development opportunities that reach digital humanities practitioners in locations where there might be limited local resources. The Digital Humanities Research Institutes (GCDRI) is project that I lead at the Graduate Center received funding long before the Covid-19 pandemic, and we were in the process of soliciting and evaluating applications when campuses shut down and travel came to a halt. The Digital Humanities Research Institute is the second of its kind, and like the one that came before it, was based on a curriculum and pedagogy developed by CUNY graduate students–namely the GC Digital Fellows (a program that I direct)–for CUNY students, faculty, and staff. 

What we discovered is that working with a population of CUNY students, faculty, and staff offered us a unique perspective into the barriers that many face when learning technology skills for the first time. We were also increasingly cognizant of the fact that it takes a lot of resources to do community-building and workshop development in digital humanities–resources that are uncommon at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, small liberal arts colleges, independent libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations, and community colleges. So our NEH Digital Humanities Research Institute was designed to take the workshop materials and pedagogical approach that we had developed and make it usable to those who did not have the same opportunities but who faced similar pressures. 

The model worked exceedingly well. In 2018, sixteen emerging digital humanities practitioners came to the Graduate Center. As a part of our application process, we asked for letters of support from each applicant’s institution, which helped to secure a commitment on behalf of their institution to recognize and value the applicant’s labor. We offered a week of core digital skill workshops and panels, and then worked with each participant to begin to develop a local version of the institute that they would offer on their campus. 

In other words, the Digital Humanities Research Institute is based on the fundamental value that resources are meant to be shared, and through sharing and collective practice, we create more opportunities. Where professional disenfranchisement, resource scarcity, and disciplinary siloing serve as dehumanizing forces in digital humanities practice–like many DH projects–we believe that radical care means acting in opposition to those narratives to create connection, to share, and to support activities across institutional boundaries, which in effect creates a more sustainable and humane community of DH practice. As Freire says, “The only effective instrument in the process of re-humanization is humanizing pedagogy.” 

But responding to the health threat that COVID presened us with difficult choices about what our core values as an institute are, and how we might remain true to those throughout our “pivot.” How do we center the humanizing forces of dh pedagogy and labor while offering the institute safely and remotely? 

Our decision was to lean to a commitment to solidarity, collectivity, and resource sharing. Rather than simply moving the institutes online, synchronously, over Zoom, we overhauled the curriculum to provide access to greater numbers of people. We revisited the curriculum to consider the additional demands that  transitioning to asynchronous learning might entail, and creating a more robust, user-friendly, and resource rich interface so that our institute participants, whom we hope to work with this year, will be able to offer similar workshops at a safe social distance.

We’re currently user testing the institute’s curriculum website, which you can access at https://curriculum.dhinstitutes.org. 

DH Week Workshops

The Digital Humanities Research Institutes in large part take their cue from the kind of energy and ethic of care that has mobilized DH Week workshops for the past six years. Each year, we put out a call to those in our local DH community to offer workshops that are free and open to the public on technologies, topics, methods, tools, and projects in digital humanities, and each year we receive an overwhelming response from those who are willing to share their time and expertise. Just as importantly, we receive hundreds of registrations for those workshops. This year, I believe we have something in excess of a thousand registrations–demonstrating not just the richness and diversity of DH practice in and around New York (and this year also Abu Dhabi), but also the keen interest and need for opportunities to learn. 

Where institutions facing budget cuts and austerity measures are typically unable to support cross registration for their local workshops, NYC DH achieves a powerful act of solidarity and resource sharing that promotes connection and collective professional support. More akin to “mutual aid” than “charity” the reciprocity of NYC DH week workshops is a powerful testament to how we as a community can work across institutional, professional, and fiscal silos–a practice that recognizes our shared humanity and need for connection and support. 

Opportunities for Radical Care

The projects I’ve listed so far fall far short of the many examples of an ethics of care at work in DH practice. They are meant to be suggestive, and a starting point for what we hope will grow into a larger conversation across breakout groups today and working groups throughout the week. We are eager to hear from those of you here about the work that you have done to resist narratives of scarcity, the false logic of self-care to support structural inequities, and to reassert and humanize humanistic teaching, research, and service over the past year. 

But before I turn things over, I wanted to share with you a few projects and examples outside of our NYCDH community that might offer us insights into how we as a community of DH practice might approach radical care moving forward. For example, where are there opportunities for collectivity, critique, self-care, and change that will bring us in greater solidarity with each other and those among us for who “have to insist they matter to matter” in our daily practice. 

DPLA’s Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection

One example of a project where I see a transformative ethic of care in practice that we might learn from is the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection and Portal, a collaborative project hosted by the Digital Public Library of America. The project aggregates materials related to Black Women’s Suffrage from across 4,000 institutions. While the number of items in the collection continues to grow, so too do the number of curated exhibits and contextualizing documentation, such as timelines. The project, developed in collaboration with the Amistat Research Center, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, Tuskegee University Libraries, among others, provides us with an example of how digital curatorial practices can work toward liberation and social justice. The project led to DPLA’s creation of a “Statement on Potentially Harmful Content.” Born out of a collaboration with researchers, scholars, and librarians, the Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection surfaces materials, along with metadata and descriptive practices that may be harmful. (https://blackwomenssuffrage.dp.la/harmful-language-statement). While the statement acknowledges the existence of racist and misogynoir views, it also affirms DPLA’s commitment to working with the communities impacted by harmful collection and metadata description, informing users of its presence, revising descriptions and standardized descriptive terms by supplementing them with more respectful terms or by creating new standardized ones, and by continuing to research, listen to users, and share their work. The project invites users to report instances of harmful content, as well. 

The project is also noteworthy also for its approach to aggregation. A close collaboration between DPLA’s Shanee Y. Murrain and Audrey Altman and subject area experts ranging from librarians to scholars in African American History created an algorithmic aggregator built upon a combination of boolean operators and human curation. Working together, they assembled key boolean search terms that could help automatically filter items deposited into DPLA, through a process of trial, iteration, and revision, the process demonstrates how collaborations across disciplinary, professional, intellectual, and personal difference can work towards liberation. 

ACH’s Resource on Anti-Racist Technical Terminology and Portraits in DH

ACH, like many other organizations and institutions over the summer, crafted a statement on Black Lives Matter as the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Rashard Brooks, and too many others brought long-standing frustration over white supremacy in policing practices into the foreground of media attention and popular culture. Acknowledging the many calls that scholars of color in Digital Humanities, such as Moya Bailey, have made for a field-wide reckoning around the role that technologies have had in institutionalizing racial oppression, the Association for Computers and the Humanities is working to fulfill its stated commitment. Through a community-sourced initiative, Executive Committee members have produced a living document that addresses racist language common in technology use. (https://ach.org/toward-anti-racist-technical-terminology/) Accompanying the project is an open Zotero group library with readings that address the racialized language of technology tools and methods.

Digital Humanities, much like academic libraries and humanities faculties, suffers from the underrepresentation of practitioners of color. All too often, lack of representation in professional practice in these areas is framed as a “pipeline” problem: blaming a lack of diversity on the inaccessibility of training or pathways to education. However, research by scholars like Frank Tuitt points instead to a culture problem: it’s the lack of promotion, support, solidarity, mentoring, and professional opportunity, not to mention community–essentially the hostile structural and social climates in which we work–that are more likely to lead to librarians, faculty, and DH practitioners leaving the field. Projects, then, like “Portraits in DH” are designed to raise the professional visibility of scholars of color, not only promoting the work of emerging and established figures in digital humanities who are BIPOC, but also creating a sense of connection and visibility across institutional settings. I would challenge us to do the same, creating more explicit opportunities for professional recognition and growth, as well as connection and mentoring, to support digital humanities work by local faculty, students, librarians, and staff who are BIPOC. 

Valuation and Evaluation as an Ethic of Care

Again, my list here is meant to be suggestive and far from comprehensive, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least gesture to the ways in which Digital Humanities work is often connected to conversations about what we value in the humanities and how we value it. Valuation and evaluations, as Kathleen Fitzpatric points out in her new project (https://kfitz.info/leading-generously/), which builds in practical ways on her recently published Generous Thinking, is intrinsically connected to leadership. Characteristically, Fitzpatrick is writing and thinking out in the open on her blog, and Leading Generously is a challenge to action–not just for digital humanists, but to all humanists, to examine what agency we have and what values we want to see in the academy and cultural heritage organizations of the future. Similarly projects such as the Mellon-funded Humetricss project (https://humetricshss.org/) are hosting workshops and leading conversations among humanists, digital or not, to come together and form a sense of solidarity around “values-enacted frameworks for understanding and evaluating aspects of the scholarly life well-lived.” I’ll note in the interest of full disclosure that my spouse is one of the co-PIs of the project, along with Chris Long from Michigan State, but the preponderance of the Humetricss team is now or was at some point New York City-based. <https://humetricshss.org/about/the-team/>. And it might be worth considering how their “Workshop Kit” might be something that future NYC DH events could make use of to energize cross-institutional conversations about building a local digital humanities practice that shows up for one another in solidarity across institutions reinforcing one another’s work as we strive to create a more humane environment in which to do our work. 

Working Groups

My purpose in highlighting these projects is forward looking and action-oriented. When we agreed upon “Care and Repair” as a theme for this week, we wanted to move beyond the affective sense of connection and solidarity toward actions–tangible ways in which we, as a community, could operate out of an ethics of care to share resources, to create space for solidarity, and to mobilize collective action. We imagined that this activity might take any number of shapes, and so we added a new element to the schedule, working groups that will meet on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons. These meetings, facilitated by NYC DH Steering Committee members, center on an aspects of our shared professional, personal, research, and teaching lives as digital humanists: such as advocating for humanities and digital humanities within institutional settings, setting up diverse and accessible classroom communities with digital tools, and strategies for undertaking interdisciplinary scholarship and working collaboratively. 

But we don’t need to stop there, and I encourage you to consider areas where you can contribute. Is there a need for solidarity and collective action that you are interested in and want to pursue? If so, following this talk, we’ll be opening up breakout rooms and creating space for networking and conversation, and we encourage you to use this time to connect with other practitioners and members of the NYCDH community and begin these conversations, and let us know how we can be helpful. 

In conclusion, I want to recognize the enormous amount of affective and uncompensated labor that goes into putting an event like NYC DH on. Thank you to the members of the NYC DH Steering Committee who have put untold numbers of hours, care, and attention into making this event possible. 

Finally, what makes care in the context of NYC DH radical is that it is an act of joy. It is neither charity nor self-help. As fellow NYC DHer Micki McGee writes, the structural oppression of the “care economy” depends upon low- and no- wage care workers without whom our fragile systems of productivity would collapse–but NYC DH has the potential to resist the false logic of a “care economy.” Through reciprocity, information and resource sharing, solidarity formation, and collective action we can and might still find new ways to stand up for one another and for an otherwise that is promised but never assured.