In attempting to understand the definition of Digital Humanities through these six introductory texts, it is clear that one sentence just won’t do it. However, a few key themes emerge. Digital Humanities uses digital and technological tools to build upon, rework and create productions of knowledge. Central to the idea of Digital Humanities is a sense of open access, inclusivity, and community. Furthermore, Digital Humanities cannot be defined without the mention of responsibility, as a newer field, to social justice and the demarginalization of certain communities.
Digital Humanities often includes building something new from existing data or knowledge as well as reworking the ways in which we approach and disseminate knowledge. Examples provided in the readings include mapping and other data visualizations, archives, virtual reality, and games. Lisa Spiro refers to a sense of play in the name of curiosity and experimentation. Digital Humanities also relies on the values of open access, inclusivity, and community. The use of open peer review processes, social media platforms such as twitter, and easily accessible archives allow for communication, collaboration, and the building of ideas. To this end, Digital Humanities is an organic field.
There is a responsibility as a new field as well as field built on community for the Digital Humanities to always be morphing into something better and more informed. This not only includes the values of diversity and inclusion but also the awareness of whose voices may be marginalized and the scholarly standards that may be privileged. Digital Humanities also aims to contextualize technology and the digital tools in use.
The Colored Conventions project showcases all the aforementioned themes. However, for my own understanding, it redefined the nature of building and the timeline of Digital Humanities. In the introduction to The Digital Black Atlantic, Josephs and Risam invoke Toni Morrison’s term of ‘rememory’ as a way of remembering that crucially links it to the present and the future.
In The Colored Conventions, modern digital tools are used to share how technology was used by Black Americans throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to organize, fight for their rights, and express their experience. Rather than taking archaic information and plopping it into a digital space, it translates the technology used in the past into something new and accessible. For example, in the exhibit ‘Black Women’s Economic Power: Visualizing Domestic Spaces in the 1800s’, black women’s use of physical spaces and print advertisements to gain financial freedom is highlighted. This is done through the digital tools of interactive mapping and archiving.
