[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.

[submitted by Jessica Landau]

The Charles J. Belden Photography Archive at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

The digital archive of the 1920’s and 30’s photography of Wyoming based photographer Charles Belden has been a path into the digital humanities for me, and not just for the obvious reason that I now interact with these images through a digital space. His photography is also interesting because of the ways in which it visualizes the American West through the modern lens of photography, creating geometric forms out the landscape and livestock. In some senses, Belden’s images seem to anticipate the digital, both in their quality and quantity. I am intrigued by the ways in which technology shapes the way we see and even the way that vision can be re-shaped by digital platforms almost 100 years later.

[submitted by Ana Lucic]

McCarty, Willard. (2005). Humanities Computing. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

The Women Writers Project. http://www.wwp.brown.edu/

Unsworth, John. Knowledge Representation in the Humanities Computing. http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/KR/KRinHC.html.

The concept of modeling as proposed by Willard McCarty in his book Humanities Computing was at the same time useful and very intriguing as I was getting more interested in transformative interventions that Digital Humanities or Digital Studies allow.

Women Writers Project archive is an example of applying a TEI model on literary works written by women writers and the opportunities that this model offers for representing, understanding, reading, and preserving the works of women.

[submitted by Gimena del Rio Riande]

1. De la Filología al la Posmodernidad, by Joaquín Rubio Tovar

2. Working Together, by Douglas Engelbart and Harvey Lehtman

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it”

“Quasi nanos gigantum humeris insidentes”

“Yo lo que quiero es construir puentes, que es lo mismo que herramientas, que es lo mismo que textos, con otros que los quieran construir conmigo”

[submitted by Melissa Seifert]

Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics” Cultural Politics 1.1 (2005): 51-74.

Most of my research focuses on the physical and performative communication strategies employed in moments of political activism. Dean’s essay works as one path into DH, allowing me to explore digital activism and the implications of what Dean calls “the post-political formation of communicative capitalism.” She raises important questions about the political impact of networked communication technologies arguing that digital spaces are depoliticizing and that they normalize our acceptance of unresponsiveness, in lieu of mass communication.

[submitted by Ned Prutzer]

Like many of the pieces I study, Nold’s map represents how subjectivity enters into affective computing in encountering technological infrastructures and cities as systems of ideology. I feel that, in relation to the Digital Humanities and Digital Studies, such works help unravel why critical approaches are needed for such representations and the archives they draw from, as they can contain interesting ideological nuances that magnify standing debates on the intersections of affect, data, and surveillance.

[Contribution by Fabian Prieto-Nanez]

I would like to present a database of Intangible Cultural Heritage that we worked on with Fundacion Erigaie in Colombia in 2007. I want to stress the process of designing this database with available technologies (MS Access) and further discussions that emerged on technical knowledge restrictions. What was at the center of our design was a critical approach to state categories for classifying Intangible Cultural Heritage, something that we projected into our tools for classifying and gathering information.