Additional Contributions: Digital Ethnic Studies
“Double and Triple Binds: The Barriers to Computational Ethnic Studies.” Computational Humanities, edited by Jessica M. Johnson, David Mimno, and Lauren Tilton, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming. [Link]
This chapter considers what I term the double and triple binds that serve as barriers to the development of computational ethnic studies scholarship. The double bind, in this case, is the challenge of undertaking scholarship using methods that are misunderstood within academic disciplines, while the triple bind references the additional lack of support for ethnic studies within higher education. The essay further offers suggestions for how we might better support the growth of computational approaches to ethnic studies.
“Digital Humanities.” Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data, edited by Nanna Bond Tylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio, & Kristin Veel, MIT Press, 2021, pp. 161-170. [Link]
This chapter argues that the core responsibility of digital humanities is building an equitable digital cultural record. It raises the issues inherent in that task for minoritized communities, details scholarly initiatives that have successfully been working to remediate these issues, and examines future work that still needs to be done.
“Data Fail: Teaching Data Literacy with African Diaspora Digital Humanities.” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy 18, 2020. [Link]
This article, written in collaboration with my undergraduate students Jennifer Mahoney and Hibba Nassereddine at Salem State University, explores our work creating data visualizations of pan-Africanist events held between 1900 and 1959. While our plans for data visualization did not pan out as we had imagined, the experience offered us the opportunity to examine the hows (and whys) of teaching data literacy in the context of African diaspora studies.
“Torrents of Tweets: Teaching the Ibis with Digital Humanities.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh, edited by Gaurav Desai and John Hawley. Modern Langauge Association, 2019, pp. 186-196. [Link]
This chapter discusses how digital humanities methods can be used to teach Amitav Ghosh’s novels in the Ibis trilogy. These include distant reading, n-grams, digital writing, and editing Wikipedia. The methods described in the essay are applicable to teaching other postcolonial writers as well.
The Harlem Shadows Project [Link]
This project, which I direct with Chris Forster, is an open access critical edition of Claude McKay’s 1922 poetry collection Harlem Shadows. The edition seeks to aggregate the most comprehensive set of documents related to the collection and make them available to readers of McKay.
“Telling Untold Stories: Digital Textual Recovery Methods.” Research Methods for Digital Humanities, edited by Lewis Levenberg, David Rheams, and Tai Neilson, Palgrave, 2018, pp. 309-18. [Link]
This chapter explores the use of the Text Encoding Initiative markup language to create digital editions that participate in textual recovery, based on my experience creating a critical digital edition of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows.
“Decolonizing Digital Humanities in Theory & Practice.” Routledge Companion to New Media & Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers, Routledge, 2018, pp. 78-86. [Link]
This chapter examines the critical task of addressing the hallmarks of colonialism in the digital cultural record while raising concern about the limits of discursive approaches to “decolonization,” particularly in settler colonial states like the U.S.
“Postcolonial Studies in the Digital Age.” The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates, edited by Jenni Ramone, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 105-24. [Link]
This chapter considers the possibilities and challenges of postcolonial approaches to digital humanities research methods. Topics covered include postcolonial perspectives on computing, participatory cultures of the internet, and computer-aided textual analysis.
“Breaking and Building: The Case of Postcolonial Digital Humanities.” The Postcolonial World, edited by Jyotsna G. Singh and David D. Kim, Routledge, 2016, pp. 345-362. [Link]
This chapter takes on the “hack vs. yack” debate in digital humanities, which pits theory and praxis against each other. The future of postcolonial digital humanities, I argue, lies in moving past the binary to build new digital archives, projects, and tools to negotiate the gaps and omissions in the digital cultural record.
“Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 359-67. [Link]
This chapter examines the insights of Black feminist discourse for conceptualizing reciprocal and redistributive approaches to the global dimensions of digital humanities and navigating a scholarly community that is diverse in geography, language, and participant demographics.
“South Asian Digital Humanities: An Overview.” South Asia Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 2015, pp. 161-175. [Link]
This article identifies the stakes and challenges of digital humanities for South Asianists. It considers successful projects in South Asian literary scholarship and cultural heritage that have engaged digital methods, emphasizing how digital representation negotiates the challenges of decentralized archives, unheard and subaltern voices, and diasporic histories.
“Revising History and Re-authoring the Left in the Postcolonial Digital Archive.” Left History, vol. 18, no. 1, 2015, pp. 35-46. [Link]
This article explores the role of colonial violence in archives and considers how digital humanities can respond to it. The postcolonial digital archive, the essay suggests, requires considering not only archival practices but also the forms of knowledge produced through the affordances and limitations of platforms.