Roopika Risam

Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth

Launched through an FY 2019 Performance Incentive Fund grant from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education ($100,000), the Viking OER and Textbook Affordability Initiative provides a campus-wide programmatic approach to faculty development that raises awareness, facilitates expansion, and fosters innovative creation of Open Educational Resources (OER), lowering the cost of course materials for students. The initiative has saved students more than $600,000 per semester in course costs and was recognized in 2021 for its contributions to the $7M of textbook savings that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has realized through investment in OER initiatives.

Co-written with Amy Earhart and Matthew Bruno, this article uses citation analysis to uncover the role of gender in digital humanities citation practices. An examination of citations in Digital Humanities conference special issues from 2006-2015 demonstrates gender bias in citational practices. Quantifying the impact of gender on citations, the essay argues, is one approach to understanding gender inequalities within digital humanities communities and generating solutions to promote the broadest representation of digital humanities scholarship in scholarly communications.

Social Justice and the Digital Humanities was created as the culminating project in the HILT 2015 De/Post/Colonial Digital Humanities course I taught with micha cárdenas. Designed as an invitation to discuss and implement digital humanities methods that put justice and equity at the center of digital scholarship, the project offers users a series of creative and critical precepts for project design around access, material conditions, method, and ontologies and epistemologies for scholarship.

Drawing on postcolonial and linguistic theories of language, this article examines the challenges of understanding and interpreting local contexts for scholarly communications. It proposes that the concept of the “DH accent” provides a lens for mediating between local and global definitions of digital humanities scholarship and can help resolve the ethical challenges of misrecognition.

This article explores the challenges of evaluating digital scholarship and examines a new approach for validating it on the basis of its emphasis on collaboration, phased approach to development, and public access. It makes the case for moving away from reproducing the hierarchies and values of print knowledge and away from traditional notions of what academic work looks like.