[submitted by Miriam Peña Pimental]

RedHD: What does it mean to work on Digital Humanities in Mexico? How does Academia react to digital humanities? Conflicts, advantages, and ways to become a network in these conditions?

DóIorio Paolo, “Scholarsource: A Digital Infrastructure for the Humanities”, Switching codes, (ed.) Bartscherer, UChP, 2013, pp. 61-87.

Como parte de mi estancia posdoctoral, en una de las universidades más importantes de América Latina, me he enfrentado a la complicación que tiene ser Humanista Digital, principalmente para integrar este nuevo modelo de estudioso a al plano académico. Al mismo tiempo sigue siendo difícil explicar á por qué Humanidades Digitales?

[submitted by Patricia Peña]

Tecnologías para la libre comunicación, cultura, participación y acceso al conocimiento

“Internet nos permite acceder a un entorno vivo, casi orgánico de millones de inteligencias humanas que están constantemente trabajando en cosas que siempre tienen una relevancia potencial para todos los demás. Se trata de una nueva condición cognitiva a la que llamo Webness o inteligencias en conexión…”

( Derrick de Kerckhove, Webness: Inteligencias en Conexión.1999)

[submitted by Nikki Weickum]

Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211.

I am interested in national identities and civic practice in online spaces (and outside of them). More recently, I’ve been working on online petition sites that are often dismissed as “clicktivism.” In short, one of the arguments that Asen makes in the essay is that the anxiety over declining citizenship comes from a too narrow view of what civic practice is and should be, and subsequently of who counts as a citizen. There is not a significant amount of digital humanities work in my field, but this essay provides a useful entrance for me into work in the digital humanities and broader questions of access, race, gender, sexuality that come with hegemonic understandings of citizenship and its sanctioned practices.

[submitted by Paul McKean]

My entry point into the Digital Humanities was through a digital archive of data and data visualizations that was created by the Obama administration in order to support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Recovery.gov invites citizens, journalists, and transparency activists to participate in interactive data visualizations that chart the progress of the legislation and support the administration’s claims of “transparency and accountability.” By participating in the archiving and presentation of government data on the site, the users are asked to “see” the policy at work across the country.

The Digital Humanities can help us critically engage the rhetoric of this digital archive as well as similar projects ( http://www.data.gov/) that attempt to make government statistical systems “transparent” to citizens. Furthermore, DH invites us to engage the legibility of data visualization, the politics of seeing they invoke, and the ways in which government statistics function as institutional systems of representation and surveillance.