Abstract
This article addresses the relationship of the disciplines of Modern Languages
and Digital Humanities in Anglophone academia. It briefly compares and contrasts
the nature of these “disciplines” – most frequently conceived
of as either inter- or transdisciplines – before going on to examine in some
detail the participation of Modern Linguists in Digital Humanities and that of
Digital Humanists in Modern Languages. It argues that, while there is growing
evidence of work that crosses “disciplinary” boundaries
between DH and ML in both directions, more work of this sort needs to be done to
optimise the potential of both disciplines. It also makes a particular case for
Digital Humanities to remain open to critical cultural studies approaches to
digital materials as pertaining to the discipline rather than focusing
exclusively on more instrumental definitions of Digital Humanities. This
argument is consistent with the concerns raised by other scholars with regard to
the need for heterogeneity of approach and in particular for increased cultural
criticism in Digital Humanities scholarship. Furthermore, we argue that this is
where Modern Linguists can make their most decisive contribution to Digital
Humanities research, offering what we term a “critical DHML” approach. We
illustrate our arguments with a range of examples from the intersection of ML
and DH in the broad field of Hispanic Studies, including the major findings of
our own research into digital cultural production in a Latin American context
conducted over the last ten years.
A global DH is not one that works
towards homogenizing all DH work but rather one that manages to make a
heterogeneous landscape enriching for all that participate.
[Galina Russell 2015]
In the Digital Humanities, cultural
criticism – in both its interpretive and advocacy modes – has been
noticeably absent by comparison with the mainstream humanities or, even more
strikingly, with “new media studies” (populated
as the latter is by net critics, tactical media critics, hacktivists, and so
on). We digital humanists develop tools, data, metadata, and archives
critically; and we have also developed critical positions on the nature of
such resources […]. But rarely do we extend the issues involved into the
register of society, economics, politics, or culture…
[Liu 2011]
The lack of intellectual generosity
across our fields and departments only reinforces the divide-and-conquer
mentality that the most dangerous aspects of modularity underwrite. We must
develop common languages that link the study of code and culture.
[McPherson 2012, 153]
Introduction
The decision of DHQ to start publishing a series of
special issues focusing on Digital Humanities “in different languages or regional traditions” is a very welcome
development. As Hispanists who have worked for the last decade on critical
digital culture/new media studies in a Latin American context this is an
initiative that we very much wanted to engage with, and we took as our
inspiration the special issue dedicated to Digital Humanities work “in Spanish”. What we address in this
article are issues that arose from this initial inspiration but which, however,
expand from this to ask questions about what Digital Humanities really is, and
what its relationship to Modern Languages (ML) might be; and a converse set of
questions about what is happening in Modern Languages and how greater engagement
with Digital Humanities is undoubtedly necessary. Our argument is therefore not
focused so much on a dialogue with other DH practitioners working in
Spanish-language contexts, but on a dialogue with the disciplines – most
frequently conceived of as either inter- or transdisciplines – of Digital
Humanities and Modern Languages in an Anglophone academic context.
We are mindful of the fact that scholars working in Anglophone Digital Humanities
institutional contexts are currently very open to, and encouraging, of DH
initiatives in other languages and contexts and are keen to foster the “global DH” that Isabel Galina Russell
(cited above) has called for (of this, more later). However, we would like to
argue that what scholars working within Modern Languages institutional
frameworks in Anglophone academia can contribute are a much more diverse range
of projects and materials conducted in languages other than English and that may
or may not self-identify as pertaining to “Digital
Humanities”. (Indeed, such materials and the way in which ML
scholars approach them are typically more readily embraced by media and
communications studies via denominations such as new media studies, internet
studies, or digital cultural studies than they are by Digital Humanities.)
Related to this expansion of projects and materials, Modern Linguists also tend
to approach their materials through the application of the still very useful
methodologies of the critical cultural studies scholar. Such methodologies are
of course not altogether lacking in DH, but critics such as Liu and McPherson
(cited above) have called for a deeper and more sustained cultural criticism to
be developed within DH, and this is one way that Modern Linguists can help shape
Digital Humanities as it develops.
[1]
In this article we therefore propose that the heterogeneity that Galina Russell
argues should be allowed to flourish in an ideal “global DH” also has to extend, as some have already
argued, to heterogeneity of approach within Digital Humanities itself, so that
cultural criticism of digital products and close textual analysis is accorded a
more significant role. Furthermore, we concur with Galina Russell that it is
time for all the various and different versions of DH to compare and contrast
their situatedness globally, hopefully eschewing the construction of any sense
of centre/periphery or “one true DH” as the exercise unfolds.
And moreover, as DH embeds itself within academia across the globe, it is also
time to be alert to the dangers of institutionalisation – of
“Balkanisation” – so that this new
(inter/trans)discipline does not lose the ability to speak in the vernacular of
the humanities, instead keeping alive the “common languages”
that allow it to dialogue with earlier (inter/trans)disciplinary frameworks such
as ML.
[2] We propose that a name for one such a common
language might just be “critical DHML”.
Definitions #1: Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities has developed rapidly over the past several decades, from
supportive “humanities computing” in the 1980s, through the adoption of the
now accepted “Digital Humanities” label from 2004 onwards [
Schreibman et al. 2004], to the much more self-possessed discipline that
it is today, with its own centres, networks, journals and self-identifying
Digital Humanists. Part of this latter phase of DH’s development have been the
illuminating and ongoing debates about its nature and shape, with debates on DH
discussion lists, and recent publications in the field – most notably
Debates in the Digital Humanities
[
Gold 2012] and
Understanding Digital
Humanities
[
Berry 2012]
[3] – that have sought
to reflect critically on the development and consolidation of the discipline,
flagging up some of the lacunae and aporias in its theory and praxis. While not
wanting to spend too much time going over very familiar ground for a
DHQ readership, we highlight below some of the key
issues and tensions in the definition of DH that help us to identify where ML
scholars might best fit in.
Digital Humanities is most often conceived of as an
“interdiscipline” welding together computing and the
traditional humanities. With respect to the complex interdisciplinary nature of
DH, Julie Thompson Klein gives a very detailed account of this issue in her
Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in
an Emerging Field
[
Thompson Klein 2015]. Of particular interest, is her discussion of
two different types of interdisciplinarity at work in DH:
instrumental/strategic/opportunistic interdisciplinarity which seeks to foster
discourse between disciplines to “create a product” or “meet a designated pragmatic
need”, as opposed to critical or reflexive interdisciplinarity which “interrogates the dominant
structure of knowledge and education with the aim of transforming
them”
[
Thompson Klein 2015, 18]. Arguably, it is the latter form of interdisciplinarity that we, as ML
scholars, see as most clearly aligned with our own objectives.
Furthermore, we note that DH scholars have deliberately and productively sought
to leave the definition of DH as open as possible, with the editorial “welcome” in the first issue of
DHQ not stipulating the boundaries of DH, but rather inviting it to
be defined by its contributors [
Flanders et al. 2007, para. 5].
Others such as Alvarado have urged, in confessional mode, “Let’s be honest — there is no
definition of Digital Humanities, if by definition we mean a consistent
set of theoretical concerns and research methods that might be aligned
with a given discipline, whether one of the established fields or an
emerging, transdisciplinary one”
[
Alvarado 2012, 50]. This gesture towards transdisciplinarity, or disciplinary openness aimed
at addressing complex research questions that do not sit neatly within any
traditional discipline, is something that we welcome, and that offers rich
possibilities for cross-fertilisations with ML, as with a range of other
disciplines. Thompson Klein conceives of transdisciplinarity as a framework
which evidences similar critical potential to critical/reflexive
interdisciplinarity and she makes clear the relationship of a transdisciplinary
DH to some of the other fields of critical enquiry that are the basis of much ML
research: “
Transdisciplinarity in DH is also aligned with
‘transgressive’ critique and critical imperatives
in other interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies, media and
communication studies, women’s and gender studies […]”
[
Thompson Klein 2015, 21].
Yet, despite this disciplinary openness, scholars have at the same time
recognised that as DH takes shape, inevitably certain practices emerge and come
to be accepted as the norm. Indeed, the same
DHQ
editors noted earlier in their editorial that,
Digital Humanities is by its
nature a hybrid domain, crossing disciplinary boundaries and also
traditional barriers between theory and practice, technological
implementation and scholarly reflection. But over time this field
has developed its own orthodoxies, its internal lines of affiliation
and collaboration that have become intellectual paths of least
resistance.
[Flanders et al. 2007, para. 3, our emphasis]
Thus, as has been recognised widely by the DH scholarly community, even if rigid
definitions of DH are theoretically avoided, the academic practice that goes on
beneath the DH rubric creates a kind of common-law definition that quickly
acknowledges “orthodoxies” and “intellectual paths of least resistance”. If
these orthodoxies are starting to take shape, we now look at DH scholars who
have recently outlined the modus operandi of DH to see how ML might contribute
to these debates and position itself in fruitful dialogue with DH.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s work has been at the forefront of debates on DH’s shape
and its future direction, and her observations provide a particularly useful
delineation of the discipline, and, in our view, of where ML can fit.
Fitzpatrick argues that DH has two concurrent but quite different modus
operandi: one that “bring[s] the tools
and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic
questions” and another that “bring[s] humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on
digital media”
[
Lopez et al. 2015]. She notes elsewhere that such differences of
approach “often produce significant
tension”
[
Fitzpatrick 2012, 13–14], such that, for many “hard core” and quite pragmatic
Digital Humanists the second approach is separated off from DH to form a
“cousin discipline” that goes by the name of critical
cybercultural studies, internet studies or new media studies. Nevertheless,
Fitzpatrick goes on to make a plea for retaining the plurality of approach that
DH theoretically embraces:
The particular contribution of
the Digital Humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the
difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do as
well as to the ways that we communicate with one another. These new
modes of scholarship and communication will best flourish if they, like
the Digital Humanities, are allowed to remain plural.
[Fitzpatrick 2012, 14]
It is certainly true that the former of the two ways identified by Fitzpatrick
has seen exponential growth in recent years. From the preservation and archiving
of manuscripts via digital means to data mining methodologies for large corpora
of humanities materials, our broad field of the humanities has seen sweeping
changes to its practice, with digital tools enabling humanities research to
achieve a breadth and arguably also a depth never before seen. Robust models
have been put forward for DH as regards this first path, and new tools and
methodologies are constantly under development.
It is arguably the second of these two paths – the “bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital
media” – that has been under-theorised and under-represented in
debates on the nature and shape of Digital Humanities. This is not to say that
the scholarship is not taking place – a significant amount of work on digital
cultural production is taking place across a variety of disciplines –; rather,
the issue is that this scholarship, and the debates arising from it, do not
always find their way into discussions of DH. There are multiple factors that
have led to this, including the pragmatics of a field that is large and
unwieldy, and also the fact that scholars of digital cultural production might
not necessarily self-identify as Digital Humanists, and their publication
outlets, conferences, and arenas for debate may not coincide with those
preferred by Digital Humanists.
If Fitzpatrick set out a neat binary division in the modus operandi of DH, in an
alternative but complementary conceptualisation of what DH is, David Berry
conceives of it as a series of waves of development, arguing that
first-wave Digital Humanities
involved the building of infrastructure in the studying of humanities
texts through digital repositories, text markup and so forth, whereas
second-wave Digital Humanities expands the notional limits of the
archive to include digital works, and so bring to bear the humanities’
own methodological toolkits to look at “born-digital” materials,
such as electronic literature (e-lit), interactive fiction (IF),
web-based artefacts and so forth.
[Berry 2012, 4]
While these two waves synchronise with Fitzpatrick’s discussion of the
different modes of DH scholarship, Berry then goes on to argue that third-wave
Digital Humanities would constitute cases where as much attention is paid to
what difference the digital makes in the study of digital cultural production as
it is to the cultural aspects of the production itself. In other words, this
would involve supplementing “the humanities’ own
methodological toolkits” with theoretical insights from software,
critical code and platform studies.
This is a point that is best exemplified in some of Tara McPherson’s work where
she argues that we need to understand computer programming in order to perceive
the politics embedded in its development, and thus be able to critique the
resultant technologies for the ways in which they replicate those political
agendas. More specifically, McPherson argues that we need to grasp the way that
programming languages have typically been based on modularity and “lenticular logics”
[4] which curb
relationality and “privilege[…]
fragmentation”
[
McPherson 2012, 144], and that those same concepts also underpin the “covert racial logic” of the post-civil rights era in the
USA and account for the limitations of 1960s identity politics, such that the
architecture of contemporary computing is, from its very base, predestined to
best represent a particular, hegemonic worldview.
Furthermore, Berry also argues that third-wave Digital Humanities researchers
should endeavour to challenge unhelpful disciplinary boundaries, as well as
problematise “the ‘hard-core’
of the humanities, the unspoken assumptions and ontological foundations
which support the ‘normal’ research that humanities
scholars undertake on an everyday basis”
[
Berry 2012, 4]. This endeavour to challenge disciplinary boundaries is one which, as we
argue in this article, is pertinent to all of us, ML included. We would also
suggest that the particular “hard-core” of the humanities
that might be fruitfully challenged in ML would include national or area studies
paradigms that still structure our departments and research projects but that
need to be problematised in order to ensure that our research is capable of
analysing materials that exist beyond such paradigms, and that our teaching
remains relevant in a globalising Higher Education sector. In summary, this
third-wave Digital Humanities that is as critical of the digital as it is of the
cultural, and which is open to tearing down disciplinary boundaries as well as
internal orthodoxies where necessary, is essentially the basis for what Berry
and others now term a “critical” Digital
Humanities.
[5]
If, as these publications suggest, the time is ripe for some serious critical
reflection in this regard, we argue here that engagement with the discipline of
Modern Language studies and, in particular, with the work that is done by ML
scholars in the field of Digital Humanities understood most broadly, is
particularly relevant and can contribute productively to the further development
of DH.
[6] As DH
continues to mature and see itself less as providing tools, and more as enabling
critical ways of thinking, ML can contribute linguistically- and
culturally-specific cultural studies approaches to digital materials, a
contestation of assumptions regarding (unstated) Anglophone models of the
digital, and a re-thinking of area studies, all of which we set out below.
Definitions #2: Modern Language Studies
As regards the contributions that Modern Languages can make to the Digital
Humanities debates, recent interrogations within our own discipline mean that we
find ourselves in a position which encourages us to engage with these questions.
For, just as DH has been attempting to define itself, so too, ML has faced the
need to examine its own practice. In particular, a challenge for ML has been
taking up the gauntlet of the Worton report, which charged it very prominently
with the task of promoting a “clear and compelling identity for
Modern Languages as a humanities discipline”
[
Worton 2009, 37].
The need for Modern Languages to articulate its identity “as a humanities
discipline” whilst still negotiating its position as what is essentially
a transdisciplinary exercise – and with diverse forms of interdisciplinarity to
be found in the work of many individual ML scholars to boot – has been a
constant problem. ML has always had to grapple with this tension: on the one
hand, the specificity of ML-qua-discipline, and the need to articulate what ML
scholars have in common and that makes our research distinctive in comparison
with that conducted by scholars working in other disciplinary contexts; and on
the other, the fact that ML is, in effect, a multiplicity of disciplines (ML
scholars are, variously, historians, literary scholars, film studies scholars,
sociolinguists, and so forth). Indeed, indicative of this understanding of ML as
constituting a multiplicity of disciplines is the key change in our draft
subject benchmark statements in 2015 which moved from identifying the
“discipline” as “modern language studies” (as it appeared in the
previous 2007 statements) to identifying it as “languages, cultures and societies”, precisely in
order to clarify the range of humanities disciplines across which we work [
QAA 2015]. ML has thus been faced with the challenge of what Charles
Forsdick has called “prevent[ing] the
interdisciplinary from becoming the undisciplined”
[
Forsdick 2011, 42]. Those of us researching in Modern Languages of necessity start off from
this basis of multiplicity and yet (attempted) coherence: negotiations of our
identity as ML scholars,
and being constantly engaged in a trans-
and interdisciplinary exercise.
[7]
The trans-, as well as inter-, disciplinary nature of Modern Languages is perhaps
what makes us so difficult to “read” from the perspective of
other, often more consolidated, humanities disciplines. Indeed, to take this
statement quite literally, we may as frequently seek to publish our research in
gender or film studies journals as we do in those dedicated specifically to
Hispanism or Latin American studies, for example. Equally, particularly before
the very recent consolidation of Digital Humanities as a discipline with
departments, centres, journals, and so on, the use of digital technologies at
all stages of the DH research process often led to the circumvention of the
traditional circuits of cultural capital, providing greater flexibility, but a
research field that was more diffuse, multiple and ephemeral.
[8] And
perhaps because both Modern Languages and Digital Humanities share similar
issues with disciplinarity, and therefore with “readability”
– and this despite the general belief that both ML and DH are all about dialogue
and translation across (disciplinary and/or linguistic) boundaries –, this
should encourage us all in both ML and DH to strive to develop common languages
between us, to keep the doors open to dialogue even if we all also need to
strive to articulate coherent disciplinary identities for more pragmatic,
institutional purposes. Furthermore, this has to be seen as a two-way dialogue:
on the one hand, ML can benefit enormously from the insights of DH, which have
shown us new ways of working and thinking; on the other, as we argue below, DH
can also benefit from ML’s interventions in its debates.
Relationships: Where’s the ML in DH? Where’s the DH in ML?
With regard to the benefits that Modern Languages has experienced in its
engagement with Digital Humanities, digital technologies have, in a variety of
ways, changed the way in which we research as ML scholars, across the whole
cycle of the research process, from textual preservation, through analysis, to
archiving and dissemination. Medieval manuscript scholarship was one of the
first areas within ML to embrace DH, with examples such as the University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Dictionary of the Old Spanish
Language project that started in the 1970s and developed its own
tagging system [
Nitti 1979]. Building on this early initiative,
the Liverpool
Cancionero project began in the
mid-1980s, using Madison tagging norms, and led to the
Electronic Corpus of 15th-Century Castilian
Cancionero Manuscripts, which included codicological MS
descriptions, digitised MS images and digital transcriptions of the corpus.
These two projects, pioneering in the field, led the way not only in making use
of digital technologies to bring together a dispersed corpus for the first time,
but also in developing tagging systems for medieval manuscripts that have
changed the way that scholars access such texts.
If the
Cancionero project is a prime example of how
ML scholarship has integrated DH tools in the analysis of manuscripts, and,
essentially, mobilised DH in relation to already existing (pre-digital) sources,
other projects have used DH tools and methodologies in the creation of their
corpora. Such is the case, for instance, of the HERA-funded collaborative
Travelling Texts, 1790-1914 project which undertakes
systematic scrutiny of reception data from large-scale sources (library and
booksellers’ catalogues, the periodical press), and thus uses DH approaches in
the creation of its data. In a similar vein, Kirsty Hooper’s digital history
projects, such as her
Hispanic Liverpool database
of nineteenth-century Liverpool residents who were born in the Hispanic world,
or her
Atlantis Project: Women and Words in Spain,
1890-1936, involving a database of bio-bibliographic information
about women writers in Spain, make use of databases to explore “what the details of forgotten lives can tell us
about wider questions in cultural history”. In these and other
projects, the advent of what are loosely termed “big data” approaches have
had a significant impact on how ML scholarship conceives of itself.
[9]
Corpus linguistics is another area within ML that has spearheaded DH approaches,
with the Real Academia Española’s
CORDE (
Corpus Diacrónico del Español) project – a textual
corpus of all time periods and geographical regions in which Spanish has been
spoken, up to 1974 – and the
CREA project (
Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) – a corpus of
contemporary Spanish, which takes up where CORDE leaves off – being two of the
leading and most widely-used resources. These, along with similar projects in
other of the Iberian languages – such as the
CICA
corpus of Old Catalán, or the
Corpus do Português –
have had a significant impact on the way in which ML scholars approach corpora.
Scholars such as Mark Davies have demonstrated how these large-scale databases
provide an “entirely new perspective on what
can be done with historical corpora”
[
Davies 2010, 142], allowing for a wide range of queries and the searching of topics in an
in-depth way that was not possible previously.
Yet archiving pre-digital corpora or creating new corpora from disparate
pre-digital materials, and the “big data” approaches that
such corpora facilitate, are not the only achievements of Modern Linguists
working with Digital Humanities approaches. Digital Humanities approaches in ML
also extend to the generation of new analytical methods, as seen, for example,
in the work of Hispanist and film studies scholar Catherine Grant who has
developed highly innovative video essays on films, both celluloid and digital.
These video essays are not just a way for Grant to disseminate her work in
public fora – via her Film Studies for Free or
(co-edited) Mediático blogs – but constitute a new
form of methodological approach in itself which allows her to view films
differently, for example allowing her to analyse excerpts of a film and its
remake simultaneously and thus discover things that older, less accurately
synchronic methods of comparative analysis arguably could not have revealed. The
innovation in Grant’s work, then, is her conception of digital interventions as
not purely instrumental tools, but as creative outlets that combine both
research and object of study. This innovative methodological development, and
others like it, has not yet been fully embraced by DH – Grant’s work, for
instance, has not yet been taken up by any DH companion or compendium –, but
arguably there is a fruitful conversation to be had about new digital analytical
and methodological approaches resulting from it.
All of these – and many others besides – are examples of how ML has benefitted
from DH tools and methodologies, and how ML in its various forms has engaged
with DH approaches. The bigger projects for corpora in particular are also
indicators of the growing ways in which these and other ML projects have had to
conceive of themselves as collaborative, involving computer scientists as much
as linguists, and requiring a re-thinking of the “lone
scholar” model. In this regard, DH is one of the drivers within a
general paradigm shift that has seen humanities scholarship more broadly move
away from this “lone scholar” model, motivated by a
generalised understanding that there is a need for more inter- and
transdisciplinarity, as we seek to answer bigger, more complex questions.
Digital Humanities tools and methods have, thus, contributed to the growing ways
in which we as ML scholars have re-evaluated our practice as researchers, and
have enriched our research field.
In this changing landscape of ML research, which in many cases relates to
existing manuscripts, records or corpora and how they may best be mobilised
through the digital, an emerging field has also been that of the digital as
object of study in ML. Profound and significant changes to our objects of study
have been wrought by digital creators and users living in other parts of the
globe, and working in a variety of languages. The large and vibrant communities
of digital practice in non-Anglophone contexts – from net artists and authors of
electronic literature, through to hacktivists and tactical media practitioners –
have made, and continue to make, significant contributions to the ways in which
we think about and use digital technologies today. Here, ML’s findings as
regards digital content creation in various locales and communities around the
globe can provide insights that would enrich DH, and contribute to its ongoing
shaping of itself as a discipline.
With regard to the ways in which DH has started to engage with ML, it is
important to note the significant efforts that DH associations have made to
include the pluricultural and the plurilingual [see [
Spence 2014, 53]]. The recent creation of both the Asociación de Humanidades
Digitales Hispánicas (HDH) in Spain and the Red de Humanistas Digitales (RedDH)
in Mexico are good examples of the growth of a self-identifying Hispanic DH. The
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) DH2015 conference, which was
held in Sydney, Australia, included papers in French, German, Italian and
Spanish as well as English, and the next ADHO conference will be held in Mexico
City in 2018. At the same time, there has been an active debate on DH discussion
lists about how heavily Anglophone a purportedly “global” DH
really is, with Hispanic DH scholars fighting back. Galina Russell’s recent
article [
Galina Russell 2014] provides an illuminating overview of these
debates within the DH community as it grapples with issues of geographical and
linguistic diversity, and summarises recent developments that have attempted to
create a more global DH community.
Within these attempts to ensure a greater linguistic and geographical diversity
in DH, ML can make important contributions as regards critical analysis of the
digital object of study. It is important to note that the first steps in this
process have already been taken, with pioneering scholars such as Paul Spence
who have aimed to bring digital critical cultural studies into the DH fold. A
scholar whose work straddles ML and DH, Spence set down in a recent article as
one of his six key proposals the need to “crear unas humanidades digitales verdaderamente
globales” (to create a truly global digital humanities)
[10]
[
Spence 2014, 52], and within the same article, argued for
bringing scholars such as comparative literature theorist Laura Borràs – and the
critical cultural studies that she represents – into the domain of DH.
[11] This impetus from Spence is one that we pick up on in this
article: we argue that one way of achieving this truly global DH is to bring the
critical cultural studies of ML into the DH fold, and we detail here what the
advantages of such a manoeuvre might be.
One particular way in which an ML-inflected approach to DH can be constructive is
in the study of (digital) objects. All too frequently, digital technologies,
their applications and their analyses have been developed in a predominantly
Anglophone environment. Notwithstanding some landmark volumes which have aimed
to contest Anglophone models, such as
Internationalizing
Internet Studies
[
Goggin 2009], or the multi-authored
Net
Lang: Towards a Multilingual Cyberspace
[
Maaya Network 2012], it still remains the case that digital culture theory is
dominated by the Anglophone. What ML can provide is a pluricultural and
plurilingual understanding of digital culture, an attention to cultural and
linguistic specificity, and even a questioning of some of the predominantly
Anglophone assumptions underpinning many of the purported
“universal” theories of digital technologies.
As regards the positioning of this research within DH, if, as DH scholars have
noted above, attention to digital cultural production remains relatively
underdeveloped within DH, but is, nevertheless, a key component of DH’s
development, then our work in this area can help to strengthen DH’s profile
overall. Furthermore, the cultural and linguistic insights that ML can
contribute are key to ensuring that DH’s approach to global digital culture is
as well informed and contextualised as possible. As we illustrate below, ML
approaches can help develop new insights into how these cultural forms are
negotiated by users crossing languages and cultures; we can offer relational and
situated approaches; and we can demonstrate how plurilingual and pluricultural
understandings of cultural heritage can bring enhanced understandings of these
cultural products.
A DH informed by ML approaches would, for example, look at the digital as object
of study, both in terms of the reconceptualisation of existing cultural formats
in their meeting with the digital, and in terms of the advent of new platforms
that have transformed our understanding of what a “text” is. It would offer
an analysis of new cultural forms being developed at the interface between
literary-cultural expression and new media technologies, exploring the
transformations in conventional understandings of genres and cultural-artistic
codes stimulated by the advent of digital technologies. And most importantly, it
would explore how these new digital genres – as varied as hypermedia fiction or
game art – do not build exclusively upon an Anglophone heritage, but respond to
and continue a rich tradition of cultural, literary and artistic experimentation
undertaken by writers, artists and thinkers working in many different languages
and countries.
Furthermore, an ML-inflected Digital Humanities would also allow us to consider
how some of the key terms regarding digital technologies might be inflected
differently in distinct cultural contexts. It would allow DH to engage more
closely with research that explores to what extent these new digital cultural
forms foster greater interaction and afford greater agency to the user, and what
the implications of this might be when users cross languages and cultures. Here,
Puerto Rican scholar Leonardo Flores’s leading work on electronic literature and
digital poetics [
Flores], and the work of Colombian
scholar-practitioner Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez on hypertext authoring systems
[
Rodríguez 2000], would be of particular use in tracing how
digital genres mutate and are re-worked by users according to their linguistic
and cultural contexts. Similarly, the co-edited work of Chilean poet and
theorist Luis Correa-Díaz and Hispanist Scott Weintraub [
Correa-Díaz and Weintraub 2010]
[
Correa-Díaz and Weintraub 2016], and of author and theorist Loss Pequeño
Glazier [
Glazier 2002] on digital poetics, along with the work of
the aforementioned Laura Borràs [
Borràs et al. 2010]
[
Borràs 2017 (forthcoming)] on electronic literature have been pioneering in
analysing how digital cultural forms are inflected and experienced differently
in different cultural contexts. Their work has helped move cultural and literary
studies forward by exploring how digital technologies make us re-think some of
our existing assumptions about genre, whilst at the same time reminding us of
the embeddedness of these digital technologies within particular socio-cultural
codes.
Perhaps even more significantly, an ML-inflected DH would allow us to explore the
ways in which a deep understanding of cultural and linguistic specificity can
help us to understand better – and even problematise – some of the assumptions
around the globalising nature of digital technologies. Building on our own
experiences as Modern Languages scholars, in which we have had to explore how
the implicit nation-state assumptions that conventionally underpin Modern
Languages practice need to be re-thought in the light of the opportunities
presented by digital technologies for a re-signification of locality, we can
offer an enhanced understanding of the digital-as-globalising debates. We can
explore how cultural identities that transgress nation-state boundaries may be
expressed and enabled through digital technologies, and how non-Anglophone or
plurilingual contexts might provide us with models for understanding the
processes of de- and re-territorialisation offered by many digital
technologies.
One potential way of opening up these debates between these multiple vectors –
between DH and ML on the one hand, and between digital tools and digital objects
of study on the other – has been the recent Writing Sprint organised in
collaboration with Liverpool University Press’s Modern Languages Open
platform.
[12] Focused around
the key topic of “Modern Languages and the Digital”, the writing sprint
explored how digital technologies are changing the shape of Modern Languages
research and publishing, and asked how the conceptual, methodological and
practical bases of Modern Languages research are having to adapt to the
challenges of the digital. Key to the Writing Sprint was the bringing together
of scholars working both in Modern Languages and in Digital Humanities
institutional contexts, and with expertise across the whole range of the
research process, thus putting into dialogue digital ethnographers with big data
scholars, digital editors with digital critical scholars, and so forth. The
Writing Sprint thus aimed to open up these dialogues from tools to objects of
study, and one of its main findings was the need for us to be working
collaboratively – across institutions, across disciplines, and across languages
– and that an in-depth and critical engagement with the digital is central to
this collaboration.
Within this broad context of the contributions that ML scholarship has made to
the development of DH, we now move on to some specific examples of our own work
in the field of Latin American digital culture studies in order to draw out the
connections with the paradigm of “critical” Digital Humanities, working
with a hybrid Modern Languages and Digital Humanities framework that one might
like to term a “critical DHML”.
Latin American Digital Cultural Production
Our first publication, the anthology
Latin American
Cyberculture and Cyberliterature
[
Taylor and Pitman 2007], was intended as no more than a
“toe-in-the-water” collection of essays to explore new
forms of literary production, but in retrospect it marked a much more
significant change in terms of our disciplinary identities. The shift to look at
Latin American engagement with the internet revealed to us the need to move on
from an albeit well-contextualised literary studies disciplinary approach – the
discipline in which we were both trained – to a cultural studies one, and to
others still further removed from our original schooling, in order to embrace
the increasing variety of the materials and practices we wanted to study.
[13] Given
that we are scholars of Modern Languages, the (trans/inter)discipline, the
concept of shifting from one discipline to another, as well as from one language
to another as we move across the dominant languages of the region, sat well with
us, and this increasing diversification of disciplines continues in our more
recent work.
[14]
Our key findings from the collection were that it was possible to conceive of
Latin American cultural producers as often choosing to strategically resist new
technologies, albeit while simultaneously using them, and that they had reason
to do this because of their non-conformity with the neo-colonialist rhetoric
underpinning most Anglophone discourse concerning
“cyberspace” (qua “new frontier”), and
that they even made claims for the need for “new architectures of
language”
[
Martín-Barbero 2000, 69] that went as structurally deep as code. As Raúl Trejo Delabre has argued:
“the formats for making and organising
websites have been determined by technology and subsequently by the customs
of the biggest community of Netusers in the world; i.e. the citizens of the
United States”, and thus “there is no Latin American
language in which to express our specific content in
that global hall of mirrors that is the Internet”
[
Trejo Delabre 1999, 330, original emphasis].
In a comparable way to the consolidation of European languages in the region such
that it is impossible for most to speak in anything but “the master’s
tongue”, it is probably too late for Latin Americans, or indeed
any of us, to develop a form of programming that overcomes modularity and
lenticularity [see [
McPherson 2012]] – not even open source
software can really offer such a radical revision of the paradigms of
computational culture, it seems. However, it also became apparent through our
work on this collection, how Latin American writers, for example, might attempt
to resist, however ironically, the modularity that underpins the functioning of
hypertext [see [
Pitman 2007]]. In this way our collection sought
to offer a postcolonialist critique of the presence and use of the internet and
associated technologies in the region and one that tried to dig deeper than a
superficial critique of representation on computer screens. Furthermore, if we
read “Latin Americans” as “raza”,
[15] or at the very least as a
differently situated (and very large) group of people to “white” US
citizens, this collection provides copious examples of academic work in the
broad field of Digital Humanities that does not focus on “white” subjects,
and some that explicitly focuses on the role that race, as well as gender and
other identitarian vectors, plays in such cultural production. In this way we
can be seen as having made an early contribution to the recently emerged fields
of critical/postcolonial Digital Humanities.
In our 2012 book, Latin American Identity in Online Cultural
Production, we set forth an important confrontation of Latin
American cultural studies and digital culture studies, and proposed a
theorisation of a post-regional approach to Latin American (digital) cultural
studies. Our volume brought into dialogue two disciplinary fields – namely,
internet studies and Latin Americanism – and, working in negotiation between
these two disciplines, we proposed an innovative theoretical model for
understanding how the defining discourses of Latin America are reconfigured
online. Our contention in this publication was that Latin American digital
culture, and the theoretical and analytical models we proposed for it, engage
with some of the central issues that are at the heart of both internet studies
and Latin Americanism today. The questioning of the project of area studies, and
of Latin American studies as one such area within that, has been widely debated
since the 1990s, and represents a potential troubling of the very foundations on
which, ostensibly, we Latin Americanists base our research, demanding a
re-assessment of what it means to engage in Latin American studies in our
contemporary, globalised world. However, we went on to argue that to talk of
Latin American online cultural practice is not an outright paradox, but rather
emblematic of new forms of rather more deterritorialised Latin Americanism which
take into account the problematisation of area studies. Indeed, we argued that
it is at the intersection of these two developments – on the one hand, a rise in
scholarly debates on Latin American (popular) culture and new media, and, on the
other hand, the deconstruction of the term “Latin America” itself – that
the study of Latin American online cultural production lies. This, then, was our
contribution to challenging through internet studies a key aspect of “the ‘hard-core’ of the
humanities” that Berry hoped critical/third-wave Digital Humanities
would address.
In a more recent publication, our research has explored the need to re-think some
of the assumptions around globalising digital technologies when looking from a
ML perspective. Taylor’s 2013 volume engaged with one of the most topical issues
in discussions about the internet in recent years: the extent to which online
content can be understood as rooted in a particular place. Taylor’s book
explored this issue taking as examples a vibrant community of Latin(o) American
artists to investigate how, in their online works, they engage in re-imaginings
and representations of offline place. Building on and dialoguing with recent
debates on tactical media, as well as upon the rich Latin(o) American-specific
heritage of the resistant appropriation of hegemonic tools in a broader sense,
the book demonstrated how networked digital media offers the possibilities of
rethinking place and territory, and how Latin(o) American net artists make
creative use of this possibility. The book’s two overarching questions –
firstly, the role that digital technologies play in allowing for the formulation
of place-based affiliations, and secondly, how alternative modes of expression
and dissemination enabled by digital technologies may be appropriated to give
voice to oppositional or resistant discourses – are, we argue, of particular
relevance to DH today. The book’s potential contributions to DH therefore
include an awareness of the rootedness and of the (cultural, linguistic, ethnic)
specificity of how, where, and why digital technologies are used, coupled with
an understanding of how these digital technologies are used to express profound
social, political and ethical concerns.
Conclusion
All of these instances discussed above – our own and those of other scholars –
demonstrate the potential for the further development of a “common
language” between ML cultural studies and critical DH in which
more of us working in these two disciplines ought to seek to achieve fluency.
The development of this kind of common language may also prove to be an
important factor in helping to avoid disciplinary
“Balkanisation” as DH settles into traditional
institutional structures. For as long as scholars of both Digital Humanities and
Modern Languages continue to be able to conceive of themselves as promoting a
“critical” or “reflexive”, rather than
instrumental, strategic or opportunistic, kind of interdisciplinarity, and/or a
transdisciplinarity that is transgressive, critical and genuinely open to other
perspectives, to borrow Thompson Klein’s terms cited earlier, then at an
epistemological level, they will be capable of working together and speaking the
same language. On a more pragmatic level, they will need both a political
climate, within and beyond Higher Education – a climate that, for example, does
not seek to manage the dialogue between disciplines as one might a business
enterprise –, and the kinds of resources – most importantly, time – that are
conducive to creative, speculative engagement with other points of view that
may, or may not always, bear fruit.
Indeed, as Modern Linguists we have seen our own discipline re-think itself over
recent years in ways that seem promising with regard to avoiding Balkanisation.
In both institutional structures, where individual language departments have
been reconfigured into schools or departments of languages (or bigger) – meaning
that individual language areas move out of “silos” to work
together – and in intellectual debates about the nature of ML, which have
increasingly led us to understand ourselves as being located across disciplines,
ML today straddles conventional departmental structures and disciplines in ways
that are conducive to reaching out to DH and to the development of a
“critical DHML” language.
This hybrid “critical DHML” language is what many more young
academics ought to be speaking, and there are already many positive signs that
it will, indeed, be the language spoken in our classrooms and conferences, and
written in our academic journal and blogs. These signs include the increasing
numbers of adverts for lecturing posts (mainly in the USA) that specifically
seek academics who work in both Digital Humanities and Latin American/Hispanic
studies, and those for postdoctoral or postgraduate study in Hispanic Studies
where an interest in DH methodologies is an explicit criterion for appointment
or where the research programme is co-supervised between a DH and an ML
scholar.
[16] They may also be discerned in the
existence of the growing volume of joint DH and ML conferences and other events
within Anglophone academia;
[17]
and in the emergence of new or reconfigured research
“centres” such as the recently established Latin American
and Latino Digital Humanities initiative at the University of Georgia (UGA) and
the recently reconfigured Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures in the
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds.
To return to DHQ’s initiative to start publishing
special issues dedicated to Digital Humanities “in different languages or regional traditions”, which was the
original motivation for this series of reflections on the relationship between
DH and ML, perhaps a parallel initiative is what is also necessary: one that
does not seek to separate off work written in modern foreign languages and
dealing with differently situated materials into discrete entities (special
issues) because surely this is also evidence of what McPherson termed the logic
of “lenticularity” or what we discussed
above under the rubric of “Balkanisation”. What we really
need, among other things, is a special issue dedicated to “critical
DHML” that probes further the common language that binds us.
Beyond that, the next steps for achieving such a hybrid language are both
pragmatic and intellectual. Following on from our discussion of ways to avoid
disciplinary “Balkanisation”, pragmatic next steps will also
include continuing to forge dialogues through shared trans- and
interdisciplinary workshops, panels, conferences and public engagement events
that bring together our two disciplines, and that ensure that ML is embedded in
DH, and vice versa. These developments, coupled with a commitment to equipping
the next generation of researchers, through doctoral training and postdoctoral
opportunities, as fully-fledged hybrid DHML scholars, are essential in
developing our shared language and, eventually, in normalising it. Intellectual
next steps include ensuring that both ML and DH are attuned to thematic working.
The current shifts in the UK research environment, with the increasing need to
work collaboratively, and to address global challenges that cannot be solely
answered by any one discipline or methodology, offer fruitful opportunities for
the development of our shared language. The continuing development of the
synergies between ML and DH, and of thematic working that cuts across
disciplines and methods, can help situate both ML and DH at the forefront of
approaches to these global challenges.
Notes
[1] To be clear, Modern Languages is not
the only other discipline with which DH should enter into dialogue, nor do
we seek to claim that it is, absolutely, “the most
relevant” discipline for DH. Nevertheless, as academics
situated within Modern Languages institutional frameworks, we are most
interested in exploring areas where we think ML can help expand the
objectives of DH and where DH can help ML expand its own disciplinary
horizons.
[2] While DH and ML share an epistemological basis in inter- and/or
transdisciplinarity, and some of our argument relies on comparisons and
suggestions made on this basis, we also seek to move beyond considerations
about the nature of disciplinarity and disciplinary change per se in order to place the emphasis more
firmly on the relationship between DH and ML in its particularity. The study
of disciplinarity, even with specific reference to DH, is already extensive
and we will refer to this as necessary to advance our arguments. For now, it
is worth mentioning that research in DH and ML can be either
interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary and we will henceforth use this
terminology selectively, depending on the argument being advanced. Where we
do not wish to advance an argument based specifically on the distinction
between inter- and transdisciplinarity, we will refer to them simply as
disciplines. We would also note that quite often terms such as
interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are used almost interchangeably
in the work of otherwise very accomplished critics, thus complicating any
easy definitions.
[3] We are mindful of the fast pace at which new
volumes and/or expanded editions of volumes about DH are being published.
While the volumes noted here were some of most significant at the time we
started to write this article, we will consider newer volumes and expanded
editions of volumes such as Gold’s in due course.
[4] McPherson
describes both the “racial
paradigms of the postwar era” and the evolution of programming
languages as evincing “lenticular logics” because, like the “3-D” images on
lenticular (ridged) postcards that you can tilt to see different
perspectives, or even completely different images, such that it “makes simultaneously viewing the
various images contained on one card nearly impossible”, both the
racial paradigms and the programming languages evidence “a way of seeing the world
as discrete modules or nodes, a mode that suppresses relation and
context. [… that] manages and controls complexity”
[McPherson 2012, 144]. With respect to race in particular, she argues that a society that
structures its approach to race through “lentincular logics”
“secure[s] our
understandings of race in very narrow registers, fixating on
sameness or difference while forestalling connection and
interrelation”
[McPherson 2012, 144]. She also makes a compelling case for the way in which programming
languages have evolved following the same logic in order to manage
complexity through rules of modularity, separation, simplicity and so on
[McPherson 2012, 145]. [5] For more on Berry’s arguments regarding critical
approaches to the digital see [Berry 2014]. [6] ML is not the only discipline that has been slow to be embraced by
DH but by now it is the most conspicuous in its absence from debates in the
field. In Svensson and Goldberg’s Between Humanities
and the Digital
[Svensson and Goldberg 2015], the editors do much to expand the
disciplinary horizons of DH, reaching out to the often overlooked
disciplines of religious studies/theology and archaeology, for example. It
is also pleasing to see the development of Postcolonial DH over the past
several years (cf. the Postcolonial Digital
Humanities website, http://dhpoco.org, edited by Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam).
Nonetheless, in both Svensson and Goldberg’s compendious volume, and in Gold
and Klein’s 2016 significant update of Debates in the
Digital Humanities
[Gold and Klein 2016], which is also notable for its inclusion of black,
and black feminist readings of DH, Modern Languages never features as a
discipline at all, with the issue of DH projects that exist in other
languages being glossed over as a simple issue of translation. [7] It is worth noting that this growing
debate about ML as inherently interdisciplinary and as offering
transdisciplinary approaches takes place against a backdrop of growing
suspicion about disciplinary boundaries; see, for instance, Sandra Harding’s
reminder of the constructed, situated nature of all knowledge, and her
critique of authoritarian moves to police the boundaries of disciplines
and/or suggest that in and of themselves they can offer a “theory of everything”
[Harding 2015, 122]. Her appeal for a “disunited”
and “heterogeneous” approach to the
construction of forms of knowledge is kith and kin with transdisciplinary
dialogue and critical interdisciplinary approaches. [8] Examples of
the circumvention of traditional circuits of cultural capital offered by
digital technologies include the use of social media platforms for
dissemination of research findings, or the use of blogs and wikis as
publishing tools instead of traditional editorial outlets.
[9]
Deriving initially from the physical sciences to refer to projects involving
very large quantities of data (such as the one petabyte of data per day
generated by the Hadron Collider) that exceed our capabilities to deal with
it, “big data” approaches are also being developed within the
humanities. Although big data definitions in the humanities are still being
agreed upon, we draw on Andrew Prescott’s reflections on big data in the
humanities as involving projects when data is on such a scale that the
“tried and trusted” approaches must be re-thought,
and meaning a “shift in the
cultural record that we have to deal with” [quoted in [Messner 2015]]. We do not, by this, mean to suggest that big
data approaches are necessarily entirely novel, or that they necessitate the
overthrowing of all our conventional humanities methodologies. Rather, we
take on board Prescott’s reminder that one can argue that big data goes back
to classical antiquity [quoted in [Messner 2015]]; and
Hitchcock’s exhortations that, in the rush towards big data approaches, we
must not forget the “small data” approaches that have always
characterised Humanities methodologies as well as “remember the importance of
the digital tools that allow us to think small”
[Hitchcock 2014]. [10] All
translations from Spanish are our own, unless otherwise indicated.
[12] The writing sprint process itself can be seen at the writing
sprint blog Modlangdigital: The Modern Languages Open
Writing Sprint, https://modernlangdigital.wordpress.com, and a summary of the
experience has now been published as a more static piece on the Modern
Languages Open platform [Taylor and Thornton 2017]. [13]
The shift is evident in the rather awkward title that balances the field of
“cyberliterature”, which is what we had originally set out to write
about, with that of “cyberculture” conceived most broadly.
[14] Incipient in the first collection were attempts to move
towards a more sociological approach – internet ethnography, as it is most
often called – as various scholars sought to explore projects for digital
inclusion or examples of digital activism, and this research thread
continues to this day in Pitman’s work on self-defining “digital indigenous peoples” in Brazil, or
particular social media groups based around technofeminist concerns or
sexual identities. Our colleague Tori Holmes’s work is also significant for
its work in developing internet ethnographic frameworks for working with
digital content produced by favela residents in Brazil [see [Holmes 2013]]. [15] The word “raza” in
Spanish means “race” but it is also used more broadly to mean a
“people” and when Latin(o) Americans refer to themselves as
“raza” they tend to mean the latter, thus including all different
racial groups within Latin American society under this rubric, although
sometimes privileging a certain mixed “white” Spanish-indigenous
American racial profile at the same time.
[16] For example, a postdoctoral position was advertised at the
University of Warwick in 2015, in conjunction with Kirsty Hooper’s AHRC
funded project “Imperial Entanglements: Transoceanic
Basque Networks in British and Spanish Colonialism and their
Legacy”, for a candidate interested in DH methodologies. King’s
College London now offers co-supervised PhDs in “Digital
Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies”, for example,
with one supervisor based in the relevant ML department and the other in the
Department of Digital Humanities.
[17] One notable example of this was the 2010
“Exploring the Archive in the Digital Age”
conference at King’s College London which included contributions by staff
from what was then still the Centre for Computing in the Humanities as well
as those from across the traditional humanities departments and was
organised by the Department of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies.
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