DH, Race, and Alterity

Friday, April 21, 1:30-2:45 pm
Williams 013 (“Common Room,” basement level)

Building A “Republic of Letters” Beyond Anglocentrism: A Conversation with Alex Gil

Digital Scholars is pleased to welcome Alex Gil for its final meeting of the semester. Gil joins us via videoconference from Columbia University, where he is Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Butler Humanities and History Division of the University Libraries (with affiliate status in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures). Informed by his specializations in twentieth-century Caribbean literature and textual studies, Gil’s own postcolonialist fantasies have spawned large-scale projects that attempt to re/discover the multilingual and multinational scope of DH work, including the Global Outlook:Digital Humanities (GO:DH) initiative, and “Around DH in 80 Days,” launched in 2014 to “address[] the challenge of multi-directional and reciprocal visibility in an asymmetric field.”

“Around DH …” began as a Scalar-based, crowd-sourced mapping project, and ultimately featured hundreds of submissions from scholars around the globe. These and other of Gil’s projects simultaneously stem from and support three goals: (1) building digital platforms that support “minimal” editions of literary texts; (2) fostering open-source platforms to support postcolonial translation and pedagogy; and (3) making pathways for digital humanists to contend with a diverse intellectual kósmos.

Participants are invited to read the following in advance of our meeting:

• Gil, Alex. “The (Digital) Library of Babel” 06 June 2014 Keynote Address at DH Summer Institute, Victoria, B.C.
• Triad of “Thought Pieces” in Minimal Computing: Alex Gil, “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make” 21 May 2015; Jentery Sayers, “Minimal Definitions” 02 October 2016; and Anne B. McGrail, “Open Source in Open Access Environments” 17 February 2017
• Argamon, Shlomo, et al. “Vive la Différence! Text Mining Gender Difference in French Literature.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.2 (2009).

and to browse the following projects:

• Six Archipelagos
• Ed
• The Library Project
• Open Syllabus Project.

For additional context or related conversations, participants are also invited to read:

• McPherson, Tara. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” Chapter 9 in Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (2013 online edition)
  
• Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” Chapter 4 in the Gold and Klein, eds., Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016 online edition)

All are welcome! We hope you can join us,

-TSG

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