New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy

by Roopika Risam

The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge. 

New Digital Worlds traces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon. 
 

Genres: Research, Professional Development

184 pages, Paperback

Published November 15, 2018

Reviews

[Antonio · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great introduction to critical digital humanities in a broad sense and to postcolonial digital humanities more specifically. The author defines "postcolonial digital humanities" in the introduction and presents her main thesis: postcolonial dh must write back the oppression and power structures both in content and method, that is, must go beyond representation and interrogate digital methods, algorithms, project designs, etc. The first chapter is devoted to situate postcolonial dh into a broader frame that includes decolonization and critical code studies. Chapter two focuses on the gaps and omissions present in the digital archive. Chapter three goes beyond representation and interrogates knowledge production in the field of DH by looking at its centre and peripheries, and the dominance of English language. Moving on, in chapter four, the author discusses how to integrate this approach into the class with assignments and larger projects. The last chapter reflects on the "two cultures" and the crisis of the humanities while interrogating what "human" means nowadays, unmasking racial bias in algorithms and artificial intelligence, and criticizing how the mere concept of "human" means in fact "white, male and European". The book closes with a "Call to action", where the author encourages dh scholars to avoid replicating exclusions and instead "seize control over the means of digital knowledge production". In conclusion, addressed mainly to scholars, this book presents a short and fair account of critical approaches to dh and engages with current debates that aim to democratize the digital cultural record.

[Kristy Cherry-Randle]

Very succinct ways to think about how to incorporate postcolonial theory into digital humanities.