Bodies of Information Debates in the Digital Humanities Matthew K
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Bodies of Information Debates in the Digital Humanities Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, Series Editors BODIES of INFORMATION INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont Editors Debates in the Digital Humanities University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London A different version of chapter 24 by Sandra Gabriele was previously published with Natalie Z. Walschots in French as “Une vue de quelque part: Concevoir le plus vieux jeu du monde,” in Le témoignage sexuel et intime, un levier de changement social?, ed. M. N. Mensah (Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2017). The author gratefully acknowledges PUQ’s permission to publish this version. Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Losh, Elizabeth M. (Elizabeth Mathews), editor. | Wernimont, Jacqueline, editor. Title: Bodies of information : intersectional feminism and digital humanities / Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont, editors. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2018] | Series: Debates in the digital humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018020494 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0610-8 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0611-5 (pb) Subjects: | MESH: Information Technology | Feminism | Humanities—trends | Information Dissemination—methods Classification: LCC HQ1154 (print) | NLM W 26.5 | DDC 305.420285—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020494 For Tycho Horan with much love and admiration for the many digital feminisms that can be generated by the printing press For all the women and nonbinary people who continually fight to simply live their lives fully and deserve to be seen, heard, and respected. I love to you. This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh ix Part I Materiality 1 “Danger, Jane Roe!” Material Data Visualization as Feminist Praxis | Kim Brillante Knight 3 2 The Android Goddess Declaration: After Man(ifestos) | micha cárdenas 25 3 What Passes for Human? Undermining the Universal Subject in Digital Humanities Praxis | Roopika Risam 39 4 Accounting and Accountability: Feminist Grant Administration and Coalitional Fair Finance | Danielle Cole, Izetta Autumn Mobley, Jacqueline Wernimont, Moya Bailey, T. L. Cowan, and Veronica Paredes 57 Part II Values 5 Be More Than inaryB | Deb Verhoeven 71 6 Representation at Digital Humanities Conferences (2000– 2015) | Nickoal Eichmann- Kalwara, Jeana Jorgensen, and Scott B. Weingart 72 7 Counting the Costs: Funding Feminism in the Digital Humanities | Christina Boyles 93 8 Toward a Queer Digital Humanities | Bonnie Ruberg, Jason Boyd, and James Howe 108 Part III Embodiment 9 Remaking History: Lesbian Feminist Historical Methods in the Digital Humanities | Michelle Schwartz and Constance Crompton 131 10 Prototyping Personography for The Yellow Nineties Online: Queering and Querying History in the Digital Age | Alison Hedley and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra 157 11 Is Twitter Any Place for a [Black Academic] Lady? | Marcia Chatelain 173 12 Bringing Up the Bodies: The Visceral, the Virtual, and the Visible | Padmini Ray Murray 185 Part IV Affect 13 Ev- Ent- Anglement: A Script to Reflexively Extend Engagement by Way of Technologies | Brian Getnick, Alexandra Juhasz, and Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel) 203 14 Building Pleasure and the Digital Archive | Dorothy Kim 230 15 Delivery Service: Gender and the Political Unconscious of Digital Humanities | Susan Brown 261 Part V Labor 16 Building Otherwise | Julia Flanders 289 17 Working Nine to Five: What a Way to Make an Academic Living? | Lisa Brundage, Karen Gregory, and Emily Sherwood 305 18 Minority Report: The Myth of Equality in the Digital Humanities | Barbara Bordalejo 320 19 Complicating a “Great Man” Narrative of Digital History in the United States | Sharon M. Leon 344 Part VI Situatedness 20 Can We Trust the University? Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities | Amy E. Earhart 369 21 Domestic Disturbances: Precarity, Agency, Data | Beth Coleman 391 22 Project | Process | Product: Feminist Digital Subjectivity in a Shifting Scholarly Field | Kathryn Holland and Susan Brown 409 23 Decolonizing Digital Humanities: Africa in Perspective | Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi 434 24 A View from Somewhere: Designing The Oldest Game, a Newsgame to Speak Nearby | Sandra Gabriele 447 25 Playing the Humanities: Feminist Game Studies and Public Discourse | Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett 466 Contributors 477 index 481 Introduction Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh I believe in data, but data itself has become spectacle. — danah boyd, Data & Society: Points We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything. — Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons he manuscript for Bodies of Information came into being in the liminal space between the final days in office for the first black president of the United States of America and the simultaneous concussion waves of nation- Talism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism that appeared to set the stage for hostility to academic institutions, scientific inquiry, journalistic investigation, political inclusion, public investment, digital rights, and network neutrality.1 Within weeks of the 2017 White House inauguration, an important federal endowment that had supported the work of many of the practitioners represented in this volume was threatened with defunding. Innovative academic scholarship in and about digital environments was also disparaged by a president who relished expressing his dis- dain for projects that he singled out like “a wolf video game” or scholarly research on “Internet romance.”2 Increasingly global, digital humanities organizations struggled to come to terms with authoritarian governments ignoring human rights violations and the needs of hundreds of millions of migrants and displaced persons struggling to survive in a bleak biopolitical landscape. This volume also emerges in an era when the tasks of intersectional feminisms, of coalition building, and of communal care and repair are recognized as increas- ingly important areas in the humanities.3 Yet as women and feminists who have been active in the digital humanities since it was called “humanities computing,” we are often astonished to see forms of intellectual engagement that confront structural misogyny and racism relegated to the status of fringe concerns. Even as leaders of digital humanities labs are finally being outed for sexual harassment or systemic discrimination, trivialization of feminist methodologies continues. For example, in 2016 we both participated in a panel on feminist infrastructures at the annual Digital Humanities conference organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities [ ix x ] jacqueline wernimont and elizabeth losh Organizations and convened in Kraków, Poland. This panel was grouped together with other marginalized efforts as part of the “diversity” track, which was located in a separate building from the edifice that housed most of the conference sessions. Such spatial arrangements communicate value and can establish barriers, peripheralizing even a panel of assembled digital humanities luminaries in positions of relative privilege, including the director of the Australian Humanities Net- worked Infrastructure (HuNI) project, the head of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, the director of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) in the United States, and the principal investigator of the Institute for High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS). Despite the profile of the panel, there was a clear sense that a feminist conversation about infrastructure was not valued in the same way as other similar panels at the event. While we felt that exclusion fairly keenly, we also were aware that as members of a panel of white women from Canada, the United States, and Australia, we were and are not subject to the full force of exclusion that our trans and women of color colleagues system- atically experience. Indeed, the existence of the “diversity” track and its location was particularly notable given the extensive efforts of scholars of color in particular to ensure that the event was not a “parade of (white) patriarchs” as was the opening of the same annual meeting a year before in Australia.4 A few months before the summer conference, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities” by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). According to the authors, as “neoliberal tools,” digital humanities initia- tives are a means for serving the ends of cultural conservatism and political reaction within increasingly