#AcaWriMo accountability post 14 (Nov 21). Shifting away from death this week to read the edited collection /Alternative #Historiographies of the #DigitalHumanities/ edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, available as an #OpenAccess e-book from #Punctum Books.

Kim's introduction "Media Histories, #Media Archaeologies, and the Politics and Genealogies of the Digital Humanities" does the hard work of laying out succinctly the problematic history and historiographies the collection's essays are resisting, reframing, and speaking back to. She begins with the way that the early engineers and developers of Silicon Valley viewed the digital world they were building as a "version of the American West" steeped in the values of settler colonialism (17), supporting this point with an analysis of the use of master/slave language for disks and programs into the present (18).

This focus on power and violence continues as Kim moves on to discuss the dependence of digital development on its military usefulness, highlighting systems of digital mapping whose development has been funded thanks to military support (19-20) and which continues to be intertwined with settler-colonial ways of being (20).

Kim characterizes the volume as "engag[ing] with three main historical methodologies--media archaeology, the discussion of historiography in relation to "big data" and big humanities/digital humanities; and the discussion of silence and history making" (21). This is accomplished through six sections: Presents, Histories, Praxis, Methods, Indigenous Futures, and Black Futurities (24-29). The contributions throughout these sections, Kim asserts, share a focus on dynamics of power (23-24) and call on scholars in the field to "re-set discussions of the #DH and its attending straight, white origin myths" (24).

#academodon #histodons #litodons

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/alternative-historiographies-of-the-digital-humanities/