Old School Values for the Digital Humanities

I continue the opening for my talk for the Re:Humanities, an undergraduate conference on Digital Humanities run by students at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford, with these observations about how I also bring to these online project old values and methods from outside of or before the Internet (or at least my life online), which are equally valuable to think through why and how undergraduates should make and research online. These are rooted in my training in and commitment to a feminist, queer, anti-racist, activist, integrated media studies pedagogy:

VALUES

  • a premium on literacy and democracy
  • In a place where process, visibility, voice and community dominate

METHODS

  • Commitment to collectivity and collaboration over individual
  • Produce structure with transparency
  • Processes like pedagogy and self-reflexivity
  • Anchor activity in lived places and experience
  • Positionality: one’s individual and shared orientation
  • Dismantle Binaries, Honor Intersectionality
  • Experiences, voices, representation of women, people of color, queers  are a given, a priority, are a priori
  • Value Ordinary People over corporate power

ACTIVIST/ACTIVATED USERS

  • Agency: for viewer/user
  • Shared vocabulary: political and artistic
  • Shared authoring