My DH Story: An invitation

In the Summer of 2014, I agreed to helm a large Mellon Digital Humanities grant awarded to the Claremont Colleges. I had not authored the grant application (this effort was led by my colleague Jacque Wernimont, now at ASU), so first I read it to ascertain that I could shepherd its several categories of support in good faith. More importantly, I needed to evaluate my own comfort level with becoming a face of DH in/for Claremont, again obviously something I decided to take on, but in this case with a more complex back-story (my DH story below), one I am about to unroll here in hopes that it might prove illuminating for those who are in the earlier stages of developing their own (this prosthelytizing, or at least tutoring about DH being obviously one of my main roles as grant administrator, and of DH itself).

I have an open-hearted, big-tent approach to the digital humanities whereby I believe that all humanists are most likely digital, only they don’t know it or don’t want to know it. By this I mean they are probably using digital methods in their teaching, research or publication and/or they are considering the digital, as humanists in their teaching, research or publication, but perhaps they are not fully aware of or interested in the conversations in the newly developing field of DH that applies to said activities.

Given that every humanist is a digital humanist in that they probably email, read and watch things online, use the Internet for their teaching, and/or use digital machines to record, store, write, and publish, what use could such a completely capacious definition serve? As far as the grant is concerned, I’d suggest there are two important outcomes from such openness. And then, as far as my own DH story, I’ll add a few more. Here in Claremont (and across the humanities), a generous DH allows for:

• new opportunities for inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary connections and collaborations in relation to themes, methods, tools, and outcomes
• new opportunities for funding, publishing, teaching, and other professional possibilities connected to a growing interest in DH in a time of humanities scarcity
• new opportunities to learn, refine, and question digital possibilities within our worklife as humanists, and as citizens of academia and the world

My own DH story suggests that such opportunities are stimulating and generative. I came to DH a doubter; or better said, it came to me. In a 2009 blog post entitled, “Digital Humanities,” I wrote:

Tara McPherson asked of us our relation to the term “digital humanities,” and I said I had always thought of myself as a media scholar, artist, and activist but would be pleased to also take on this newer title. However, after spending a few days amongst digital humanists of various home disciplinary stripes, I believe that this inter-disciplinary field holds much in common with earlier practices enabled through the work of scholars who have pressed at the intersections of academia and art and/or activism.

Shortly thereafter, and with McPherson’s help and that of the Vector‘s team at USC (and more Mellon and also NEH funding), I built and then published my born-digital, free, online “video-book” Learning from YouTube (MIT Press, 2011). That publication led to many more “DH” possibilities. I was invited to write, present, interact, and challenge the digital themes and methods raised by that project in that it critically considered and also used digital platforms and tools for teaching, writing, research, and publication. While my more longstanding homes in Media Studies, feminist and queer studies, and activist academia certainly embraced this new project, I found that invigorating conversations about critical or activist Internet studies were as often as not happening around the edges of DH. In fact, I’d suggest that librarians and people in Rhetoric have been at this for much longer than most of us other humanists and I really enjoyed the conversations I was having as a “DH” person with scholars who I was meeting in these fields through DH.

Since then, I’ve engaged in any number of projects I’ll gladly call DH (and other things)—if it will have me—that further situate my teaching, research, and writing at what I hope are the most critical edges of the Internet (often tipping off, I must admit):

• I taught Learning from YouTube for the fourth time this Spring, and I had hoped to add a practicum where some of my Claremont students would have taken the class with ten inmates at Norco California Rehabilitation Center as part of the larger Prison Education Project (hence the tipping off I spoke of above), thereby challenging our understandings of the power, relevance, and reach of YouTube (and the Internet more broadly) given that some of the students in the class would have been denied access to the web as an integral feature of their punishment. While this was cancelled by the Prison at the last minute, I ended up writing about the relations between social (in)justice and social media twice at a site called Lady Justice. And the class allowed me to refine my on-going thinking about new and social media and feminism.
• FemTechNet, which I co-facilitated with Anne Balsamo during its inception in 2012, is an international collective of artists, activists, academics, librarians, technologists and students that has conceived and successfully run the DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course), a feminist rethinking of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Class). I have taught the DOCC twice to Claremont students.
• My current research project is Ev-Ent-Anglement: an experiment in a digital embodied collective feminist media praxis committed to intentionaly recutting the fragments of ourselves otherwise strewn willy-nilly across the Internet.
• I have taught Visual Research Methods every year at Claremont Graduate University since 2011, where graduate students across several humanities disciplines learn how to “provide a theoretical and historical background for considering three scholarly traditions—from the arts, humanities, and social sciences—that research about and/or with visualization tools (cameras; digital media) and/or visual objects (art, photography, film, video, digital media).” See this blog post where students in the second iteration of the course define DH. That year I added the really useful (and available online for free) anthology Debates in the Digital Humanities (Matthew Gold, ed.). I highly advise it for doubters or newcomers.
• My class, linked site, and public performance, Feminist Online Spaces, attempts to “build and link principled sites in collaboration.” It builds from my criticism of YouTube (a corporate enterainment platform that we’ve been given for free) to imagine, interrogate, and inhabit other kinds of Internet spaces and communities, especially those built outside the dominant logics of corporate capitalism.
• And of course, I blog here and elsewhere, and have since 2007: an integral part of my digital life, and one I require of my grad students in VRM (to build and write an “academic blog” among other digital things).

Over the next four years of the DH@CC grant I look forward to hearing the DH Stories of many of you here in Claremont, and those we will meet elsewhere. And I use this blog post as an invitation to hear your Claremont DH stories.