Abstract
For many years, digital humanists have responded to Alan Liu’s call for critical
digital humanities. Projects such as #TornApart/Seperados and
#PuertoRicoMapathon and pieces like “Where is Cultural
Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”
[Liu 2013], “All the Digital Humanists Are
White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave”
[Bailey 2011], and “Beyond the Margins:
Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities”
[Risam 2015] have paved the way for socially conscious
developments in the field. At the same time, pressures from administrators,
institutions, and funding agencies often discourage critical engagement in favor
of tool development and/or “high tech” projects [Boyles 2018]. As such, we often attempt to adapt highly rewarded
tech skills, like text, sentiment, and big data analyses, for use in social
justice projects. While it is possible for these two aims to be compatible, we
do ourselves a disservice when we try to force them together. So, how should
teacher-scholars implement an intersectional digital humanities framework in the
classroom? Using my own classroom as a case study, I assert that one effective
strategy is through curation, which helps students investigate topics such as
race, gender, sexuality, disability, and socioeconomic status through the
careful selection, arrangement, and presentation of materials. Doing so teaches
students to think more critically about the act of curation, by encouraging them
to participate in knowledge construction as well as the dismantling of harmful
narratives and power structures. While this approach differs from the tool-based
pedagogy often utilized in the field, its emphasis on knowledge production,
critical thinking, digital literacy, and social justice gives students
proficiency in socially conscious methodologies that can be applied to any
project. Linking curation to making and breaking, two digital humanities
approaches to meaning-making, provides a method for interrogating “archives of humanity” and
developing a pedagogy grounded in cultural critique and social justice [Sadler and Bourg 2015].
“The means of production for the archives of humanity
are up for grabs, and within our reach is the possibility of new
production methods that resist the recreation of existing patterns of
exclusion and marginalization”
[
Sadler and Bourg 2015]
A few days ago, I was in Puerto Rico conducting interviews with citizens who
agreed to share their stories about Hurricane María. Knowing that I would only
be able to chat with a handful of individuals, I sought out people from vastly
different demographic groups, including those from a variety of geographic
locations, ages, educational backgrounds, and socioeconomic circumstances to try
to capture the broadest range of experiences possible. Curation, however, is an
inherently problematic process. No matter how many interviews I conducted, I
knew that I could not fully capture the trauma and pain caused by the hurricane.
I also knew that the narratives my research highlighted could shape, for better
or worse, public perceptions of the hurricane’s aftereffects. As Michelle
Caswell observes, “memory work is a
tool for political liberation”, but it is also a tool for social
oppression [
Caswell 2014]. Government entities have been making
information inaccessible to the public — like the Environmental Protection
Agency, which has removed all research pertaining to climate change from its
websites, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is planning to destroy
all records pertaining to immigrant abuse — and others are presumed to follow,
dramatically shifting the boundaries of what counts as public knowledge. Such
decisions demonstrate the responsibility borne by those who shape public
knowledge: journalists, archivists, technologists, scholars, and citizens. In
many ways, public memory is like an algorithm: both promote biased narratives
using a decision process that is not transparent to the public. As Safiya Noble
notes, “We are only beginning to understand
the long-term consequences of these decision-making tools in both
masking and deepening social inequality”
[
Noble 2018]. To teach our students about the structures underpinning our information
systems, we need to ensure they possess information literacy skills to assess,
critique, and respond to societal narratives and injustices. One of the best
ways to explore the consequences of meaning-making is to teach our students
about the processes that go into developing our archives, databases, and
information resources.
Although the phrase “history is written by the victors” is cliché, at its
core it reveals a deep truth about those in power: they shape what becomes
public memory through both the development of both mainstream media and cultural
memory. Scholars like Michelle Caswell, Ricky Punzalan, and Marika Cifor have
noted the ways in which archives tend to reify white supremacy through the
processes of description, appraisal, use, and dissemination. For this reason,
Caswell advocates for students and faculty members to “think critically about white
supremacy, with white people acknowledging their own roles in
promulgating it, and with all of us imagining ways out of it through
concrete action”
[
Caswell 2017]. Ellen Cushman echoes this call, encouraging scholars to familiarize
themselves with the problematic legacy of archives because “digital archives are beginning to
define the disciplinary work we do. As knowledge making increasingly
relies on digital archives, scholars need to understand the troubled and
troubling roots of archives if they’re to understand the instrumental,
historical, and cultural significance for the pieces therein”
[
Cushman 2013]. For this reason, it is crucial to develop approaches to archiving and
meaning-making that are grounded in social justice. “Making and breaking”
are two such methodologies. Not only do they build upon two key digital
humanities practices, but also they teach students to interrogate the “archives of humanity” in socially
conscious ways [
Sadler and Bourg 2015].
Given the prevalence of digital archives in producing and communicating meaning,
it is crucial to train our students to understand the ways in which
organizations — corporations, government entities, and community groups — often
use the processes of selection, preservation, and publication to reinforce
Euro-capitalist views of the world, or what Malea Powell terms “the project of the imperial
archive in the Americas”
[
Powell 2008]. Having students practice the skills of collection, curation, and
publication highlights the types of choices that archivists and information
systems make every day. Furthermore, students have the opportunity to both
critique and intervene in these systems through their own processes of
collection development. These skills are particularly crucial for members of
marginalized communities who are often the target of misinformation and bias. As
Moya Bailey aptly observes, “marginalized groups have often
used media production to challenge dominant scripts within mainstream
outlets, and the rise of digital platforms makes this task even
easier”
[
Bailey 2015]. She goes on to describe the incredible work of black trans women on
Twitter who participate in a “curation
process that also works to enrich the lives of those participating”
in order to make their community, as well as members of the public, more
knowledgeable about the lived experiences of trans individuals [
Bailey 2015, par. 3]. These women developed their own
strategies for controlling and disseminating narratives about the black trans
community.
Some scholars also have developed models for promoting social justice in the
archives. For example, Michelle Caswell advocates for community-based human
rights archives that enable citizens to have a voice in what is preserved, how
it is disseminated, and who has rights to the information. La’el Hughes-Watkins
similarly promotes a model of reparative archives, which “repair past injuries […]
by normalizing acquisitions of the oppressed, advocating, and utilizing
primary resources that reflect society and that provide a means to
disengage with and prevent recordkeeping that systematically removes or
intercepts the voices of the ‘other’”
[
Hughes-Watkins 2018]. Each of these models places marginalized individuals and groups in
control of their own narratives to counteract the inaccuracies and biases of
mainstream culture. Communities such as these have lasting implications for
their participants; Jessica Marie Johnson notes that
DH has offered people the means
and opportunity to create new communities. And this type of community
building should not be overlooked; it has literally saved lives as far
as I’m concerned. People – those who have felt alone or maligned or
those who have been marginalized or discriminated against or bullied —
have used digital tools to survive and live. That’s not academic. If
there isn’t a place for this type of work within what we are talking
about as digital humanities, then I think we are having a faulty
conversation.
[Johnson 2016]
Echoing the call for public digital humanities, scholars like Johnson,
Noble, Risam, and Gil, note the need for socially conscious approaches to social
issues. Recent projects, such as Torn Apart/Separados
[1], BlackWomenToo
[2], the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)
[3], and the Internet Archive
[4], demonstrate the ways that
we as scholars, technologists, and citizens can help shape public knowledge by
pushing against inaccurate or harmful narratives. Partnering with librarians,
archivists, and technologists — the keepers of our information — is crucial to
these aims. As such, “it is important for archival
education to implement concrete steps that include recruitment of
students from diverse, historically marginalized communities;
encouragement of culturally sensitive classroom environments; pluralist
approaches to diverse ontologies and epistemologies; and an ongoing
analysis of power both inside and outside the classroom”
[
Caswell et al. 2012]. The problem goes far beyond archival education; many of the systems that
provide information to the public are grounded in racist and sexist ideologies
that reinforce the values of white supremacy. Since “only about 2 percent of open source software developers
are women”, the current state of technology development “is incompatible with the idea of a
feminist future for library discovery software” and for the
technological landscape at large [
Nafus, Kreiger, and Leach 2006]
[
Sadler and Bourg 2015]. For these reasons, it is vital to introduce
students, particularly those in programs like women’s and gender studies,
African American, Latinx, and/or Indigenous studies, and sexuality studies, to
humanistic approaches to information ethics. One such approach is through
curatorial and archival practice.
As Kate Theimer notes, curatorial practices differ among archivists and digital
humanists. While archivists are concerned primarily with the principles of
provenance and original order, digital humanists often view archives as “online groupings of digital
copies of non-digital original materials [...] purposefully selected and
arranged in order to support a scholarly goal. Some prominent examples
of this kind of usage are the Shakespeare Quartos Archive
[5],
the Rossetti Archive
[6] and the William
Blake Archive
[7]”
[
Theimer 2012]. Students in my “Race & Gender in the Digital
Humanities” course discussed these varying definitions to gain a
richer understanding of the institutions and organizations that shape our
cultural memory. We spent much of our time examining the ethics of collecting,
curating, and disseminating resources, with a particular focus on the risks
inherent to such work. As Purdom Lindblad notes,
There is an inherent violence in
archival work — silencing and obscuring of people and sources, creating
and sustaining hierarchies through collection practices that value some
voices and experiences over others, through naming practices, controlled
vocabularies, and description, as well as hiding/devaluing the labor
involved in this work […] How can we deconstruct this silencing and
archival violence, to build an anti-violent, anti-racist, woman-ist,
practice instead?
[Lindblad 2018]
To address these questions, the class brainstormed strategies for
interacting with materials pertaining to potentially vulnerable communities.
Rather than develop archives of their own, students curated resources around the
social movements we had been studying in class, including #BlackLivesMatter,
#SayHerName, and #ProtectPlannedParenthood. This created opportunities for
students to ask key questions surrounding information maintenance and management
like “What should be preserved?”, “How should this information be
presented to the public?”, and “Who has control over this
information?” At the same time, curation encouraged students to become
experts on their subject, by asking them to review and critique a variety of
sources about their particular topic. Amelia Jones argues that “curating
constructs
certain kinds of historical narratives, or in some cases intervenes in
existing narratives. As such […]
curatorial practice is one
of the most important sites for the constitution of both historical
narratives […] and feminist theories of curating”
[
Jones 2016]. While Jones’ work focuses on feminist art, her argument applies to the
broader power of curation — the promotion of new, or previously undervalued,
narratives and the deconstruction of outdated, and potentially harmful,
stereotypes. These acts of construction, or making, encourage students to take
ownership of their projects, not only by curating materials but also by gaining
a richer understanding of them.
Digital humanities similarly values the processes of making and breaking.
Notably, Roopika Risam advocates for a digital humanities that “brings together the ethos of
making, building, and creating of the digital humanities with critiques
of imperialism in regimes of knowledge and power that emerge from
postcolonial studies”
[
Risam 2016]. Doing so in the classroom allows students to critique unethical power
structures and to produce narratives focused on social justice. Making, however,
is not simply a tool for digital humanists. In
Teaching to
Transgress, bell hooks asserts that “transformative pedagogy involves
student-centered, holistic, and praxis-oriented approaches that allow
students to create their own knowledge. Transformative pedagogy involves
a ‘revolution of values’”
[
hooks 1994]. In other words, construction can be a pedagogical process that ties
digital humanists’ love of “making” to activists’ drive for
social justice.
At the same time, recent digital humanities scholarship has emphasized the
importance of critique via “breaking” or
“deforming.” Risam notes, “knowledge is produced by the act of
dismantling. We might view the results as radical, emancipatory acts
that free new forms of knowledge from the persistent forms in which they
are trapped, just as the ideal of decolonization offers hope of how a
change in episteme may be possible”
[
Risam 2016]. The deconstruction of material goods and of harmful narratives similarly
highlights the intersection of digital humanities scholarship with activism by
encouraging a dismantling of both tangible and intangible expressions of
power.
To encourage students to engage in the processes of making and breaking, I
designed the course around prevalent social movements in the United States.
Course readings paired the work of feminist activists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana
Castillo, and Roxane Gay with the works of critical digital humanities scholars
such as Alan Liu, Roopika Risam, and Moya Bailey. Students were asked to draw
connections between these readings and an existing social movement of their
choice with groups forming around issues such as reproductive rights, civil
rights, and contemporary feminist politics. Using these topics as a foundation,
these groups developed four digital projects throughout the semester, each of
which was designed with the goal of both creating new models of knowledge and
dismantling narratives of oppression:
- Case Study - For this assignment, students were
asked to bring in a piece of pop culture (a song, YouTube, video,
excerpt from a movie or television show) that was related to the course
topic for the week. They provided context for their pop culture artifact
to their peers, presented the artifact to the class, and then led a
discussion about the issues raised by the media and its connection to
course content.
- Text Analysis Essay - For this assignment,
students needed to upload a variety of scholarly and popular texts on
their group topic to Voyant
Tools, a program that highlights the words and trends within
the articles in graphical form. In an accompanying essay, students were
asked to analyze the trends in the texts and to make an argument about
how the rhetoric used in these pieces shapes our culture’s understanding
of that particular social movement. Essays were roughly 1000 words in
length and included screen shots from Voyant.
- Timeline Project - For this assignment, students
were asked to create a timeline of their social movements using Timeline JS. Groups
selected content for the timeline by focusing on a specific theme or
series of events within their social movement. Since Timeline JS allows
for the integration of web pages, Google maps, YouTube videos, audio
clips, Twitter posts, and images, these timelines link to a robust
collection of resources on a particular topic or social movement.
- Final Project - For this assignment, students
were asked to create a digital advocacy project pertaining to their
social movement. Students could select from a wide range of technologies
or projects to do so, including the development of Twitter bots, Tumblr
pages, podcasts, public service announcements, videos, websites, and/or
Kickstarter campaigns.
While all of these assignments encourage students to engage in
curatorial practices, some projects were more effective than others. After
gathering student feedback and reflecting on the course, I found that the
successful projects were the ones that allowed students to engage in making,
breaking, or both. These activities lie at the core of information ethics and,
as I have discovered, are powerful tools when developing socially conscious
digital humanities pedagogy.
Making
Case Studies: The course began with low-stakes projects that
asked students to construct narratives surrounding the readings and/or their
social movement. The first project was the case study, in which students used a
pop culture artifact to spark class discussion on a particular text or theme. On
a basic level, the case studies helped students gain a deeper understanding of
course content. One student commented, “I enjoy the case studies because I am
able to apply the readings to popular media and media that I'm familiar with
when in some cases, I have no idea what the examples in the readings
actually are.” On a more advanced level, the case studies asked students
to reflect on course readings and construct a narrative on how those topics play
out in the United States’ contemporary culture.
For example, one student played FCKH8’s video “
Potty-Mouthed
Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism”, which asks viewers
to choose if they are more uncomfortable with young girls swearing or with the
endemic of sexual assault in the United States. She then tied the video to
Roxane Gay’s
Bad Feminist, which discusses the
challenges of living by feminist ideals in a world full of anti-feminist media.
As both texts use discomfort as a means of garnering readers’ attention, the
majority of the class period was spent debating the effectiveness of this
rhetorical strategy in garnering support for feminist causes. Since the class
discussion was largely theoretical, students focused on the structural and
technical elements of the two pieces rather than content.
In contrast, the next student group played the music video for Rihanna’s “
Man
Down”, which depicts the singer as a victim of sexual
assault who copes with the trauma by killing her attacker. As in the previous
example, this video was played in conjunction with
Bad
Feminist. Both texts emphasize the horrors of sexual assault, as
well as its gendered and racialized components, and assert that existing legal
and social structures protect the aggressor over the victim. Rather than
focusing on the structural elements of the texts, this conversation revolved
around the everyday realities of harassment, stalking, and assault.
Although both students completed case studies on Bad
Feminist, the resulting class discussions differed greatly. Since
students curated their own pop culture artifacts, they were able to select
materials that aligned with the themes and topics they found most valuable in
the source text. In doing so, they shaped and structured class discussions in
the ways they found to be most meaningful. By engaging with topics that students
found most pertinent, the case studies encouraged them to become deeply invested
in course content.
Annotated Bibliography: As the semester developed, students
were asked to develop an annotated bibliography on their social movement. To
ensure that students would have a rich and nuanced understanding of these
movements, they were asked to read and analyze a variety of sources, including
scholarly sources, popular publications, and new media materials. These
annotated bibliographies served as the foundation for their advocacy projects,
giving them a depth of knowledge on their social movement. Inherent in this
assignment was the act of meaning-making, as students gained a new awareness of
their topic by reading and curating materials. As such, the annotated
bibliography provided them with the foundation needed to
“break” oppressive cultural narratives surrounding their
advocacy topics.
Breaking
Timelines: After students had developed a rich understanding
of their social movements, they were able to continue the process of
deconstruction, which gives them the opportunity to disprove and dismantle false
narratives surrounding their topic. The group studying reproductive rights, for
instance, created a timeline to depict and address the series of videos claiming
that Planned Parenthood sold fetal tissue to researchers. To debunk this claim,
they listed each accusation against Planned Parenthood regarding the sale of
fetal tissue (2000-present) alongside the findings from each subsequent
investigation. In each case, they were able to show that investigators were
unable to find evidence of wrongdoing. This project, therefore,
“broke” the narratives surrounding Planned Parenthood and
replaced them with new, more ethical accounts.
Similarly, a group focusing on civil rights modeled their project after
#SayHerName, a group that protests the disproportionate amount of police
violence experienced by black women. These students built upon existing
#SayHerName resources by developing a timeline to bring attention to women of
color who have been victims of police violence. To “break”
media narratives that claimed these individuals were
“criminals” who “deserved”
mistreatment, this group provided a detailed description of each individual,
incident, and police activity. Doing so humanized each of the women and
disproved claims that they were engaged in criminal behavior. Thus, this project
helped students deconstruct myths surrounding police violence in the United
States.
By allowing students to participate in making and breaking, the timeline project
not only allowed students to curate resources but also showed them how they
could be used to interrupt harmful narratives. Since this project utilized both
making and breaking, it was easily the most powerful and effective pedagogical
tool in the seminar. Students in the course confirmed this assertion, noting
that the timeline project was their favorite in course evaluations.
A Lesson Learned
Text Analysis: Although each of the assignments in this
course were designed to develop students’ understanding of and engagement with
curatorial practices, the text analysis assignment failed to do so in a
meaningful way. One reason may be that this project did not encourage the
students to either “make” or “break”
information about their topic. Another reason may be that pressures from other
scholars, administrators, institutions, and funding agencies often discourage
critical practices in favor of “high tech” projects [
Boyles 2018]. As such, we often attempt to adapt highly rewarded
tech skills, like text, sentiment, and big data analyses, for use in social
justice projects. While it is possible for these two aims to be compatible, we
do our students and ourselves a disservice when we try to force them together.
Such was the case with this project.
For this assignment, students were asked to gather a number of posts from popular
media sites on the topic of their social movement. Students were then asked to
enter these sources en masse to Voyant Tools so that they could search for
trends in the data that were not evident during a preliminary reading. Although
students completed these tasks without issue, many of them demonstrated a sense
of frustration with the exercise. Rather than helping them gain a new
understanding of the intersectional issues, the assignment reconfirmed their
existing analyses of the texts. One reason may be that popular publications
heavily rely upon buzzwords and hot debate topics for their material. As such,
the group working on reproductive rights saw trends surrounding the terms
“fetal tissue”, “sale”, and “fake”. Likewise, the group
focusing on police brutality to black women noted the frequency of terms such as
“say her name”, “black lives matter”, “violence”, and
“criminal.” As such, both groups felt that the data reconfirmed their
understanding of their individual topics rather than giving them a strategy for
making new forms of knowledge or breaking down oppressive narratives.
Making and Breaking
Final Projects: For the final projects, students were asked
to create a piece of digital advocacy pertaining to their group topic. Leaving
the requirements intentionally vague, I was surprised to see students gravitate
toward curation projects. While selected tools varied — Tumblr, Instagram,
Wordpress — each of the final projects compiled fact-checked resources and made
them accessible to audiences outside of academia. When I asked the students
about these choices, they unanimously cited their interest in producing and
sharing information that would both redress existing disinformation campaigns
and reach broad public audiences.
Students gravitated towards social media, believing that their contributions to
public knowledge could help alleviate the widespread dissemination of
misinformation. While the effectiveness of this strategy is complicated by
algorithms — the automated processes that determine what we see online —
students believed that promoting and amassing more ethical information had the
potential to shift the ways our technologies determine the value of information.
Moreover, students’ own systems of knowledge were shifted. Rather than merely
summarizing or analyzing a topic, they developed work that combined the
processes of making and breaking — carefully selecting resources that would
break down harmful social biases about their topic and constructing new, more
ethical narratives. Students cited their previous work, particularly the case
studies and timelines, as moments where they developed an understanding of how
curation can be used in service of social justice projects. More importantly,
they found effective strategies for carrying this work into the future,
including applying for library school, volunteering at local community
organizations, and developing digital campaigns around issues like campus sexual
assault and racial bias. Their engagement suggests that making and breaking
provide an effective means of teaching information ethics and social justice.