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Adasme on Fiormonte and Chaudhuri and Ricaurte, 'Global Debates in the Digital Humanities' [Review]
Fiormonte, Domenico; Chaudhuri, Sukanta; Ricaurte, Paola, eds.. Global Debates in the Digital Humanities. Debates in the Digital Humanities Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Illustrations, tables. 400 pp. $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781517913250.$35.00 (paper), ISBN 9781517913267. 
Reviewed by
Hernán Adasme (George Mason University)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (July, 2024)
Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60518
Published ten years after the first volume of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Global Debates in the Digital Humanities addresses the global landscape of the digital humanities (DH) with a particular focus on its structural and epistemic imbalances. The central focus of the volume is the Global South. For the editors, the Global South signifies more than just geographies adversely affected by capitalism and globalization; it also represents a site that offers an “alternative to Western epistemological canons and dominant discourses in the digital humanities” (p. x). Global Debates in the Digital Humanities aims to confront the “epistemic and material asymmetries” that have hindered the Global South’s participation in DH, both by building a “different representation of DH based on cultural, linguistic, political, and ultimately epistemological diversity” and by critically reflecting on the issues and debates affecting the field since its global turn (p. xvi). The volume testifies to the transformations of DH during the last decade. While the first volume of the series, the eponymous Debates in the Digital Humanities (edited by Matthew K. Gold, 2012), addresses exclusionary practices within a growing “DH community” without mentioning the concept of the Global South, the current volume inspects a worldwide environment of digital humanistic knowledge that has reproduced the inequities of contemporary capitalism. According to the editors, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the structural asymmetries faced by DH outside the North Atlantic world, marking a historical juncture and a chance to analyze how the “role and scope of digital humanities ... are going to be completely rethought and reshaped” in its aftermath (p. ix).
The volume begins with a meticulously curated introduction that outlines the theoretical framework and historical context of the topic. The rest of the book is organized into three sections. Roughly speaking, the first section explores a plethora of global exclusionary features anchored in the current DH field. The opening four chapters examine the connection between power and knowledge by highlighting how colonial structures reproduce certain epistemic patterns in language modeling, archival practices, academia, and queer studies. These patterns render the South both invisible and exterior to Western academia. According to the authors, although DH has failed so far to decolonize humanistic knowledge, it does indeed offer ways to break the transitive relationship between neocolonial power and epistemic uniformity. The remaining essays in the first section feel out of place, as they consist of surveys on the development of DH in Russia, China, and Poland. Although they posit an interesting historical thesis—the trajectory from computational linguistics to DH outside western Europe—the centrality of the nation-state in their narratives lies in tension with the calls for a decolonial DH showcased in the earlier essays. In these three national surveys, the role of nation-states in both reinforcing power hierarchies and reproducing epistemic homogeneity is poorly explored. The final essay of the first section broadens the theoretical discussion by situating DH in a wider framework of a historical “techno-episteme” that moves beyond particular critiques of DH. Although it offers a refreshing perspective that addresses the big picture and proposes actionable strategies within local DH fields, it further exacerbates the imbalance of the entire section.
The second part is composed of ten essays rooted in digital research projects from the Global South. The chapters in this section leverage digital projects as a foundation to examine the epistemic, conceptual, and, in the majority of cases, technical and budgetary challenges involved in developing concrete digital humanistic knowledge from the Global South. While most of the chapters present case studies, some would have been more appropriately placed in different sections of the book. For example, Dibyadyuti Roy and Nirmala Menon’s “No ‘Making,’ Not Now: Decolonizing Digital Humanities in South Asia” aligns more closely with the national and regional surveys of DH presented in the first section, and Diana Barreto Ávila’s “Manuscripts Written by Women in New Spain and the Challenge of Digitization: An Experiment in Academic Autoethnography” resembles the first-hand accounts showcased in the first two chapters of the volume. In spite of this, the second section presents remarkable digital research agendas that may deliver on the promise of decolonizing the epistemic outlook of the field. Prominent examples include Maira E. Álvarez and Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla’s “Borderlands Archives Cartography: Bridging Personal, Political, and Geographical Borderlands” and Ernesto Miranda Trigueros’s “In Tlilli in Tlapalli / In Xochitl in Cuicatl: The Representation of Other Mexican Literatures through Digital Media.” In these projects, conceptual frameworks and methodological strategies coalesce, offering a novel way of understanding and digitally representing the borderland and transnational nature of migrating texts and the complexities of Mexico’s Indigenous literary traditions.
The third and final section, titled “Beyond Digital Humanities,” explores the affordances of the field from a point of view that both precedes and extends beyond the conventional scope of academic research. This section is ambitious and captivating as it explores efforts to democratize and decolonize knowledge beyond traditional research environments. As a result, it prompts an important inquiry: how much will DH lean on social praxis rather than traditional academic roles? Although this question is unexplored, most of the chapters here represent concrete endeavors to highlight nonacademic ways DH couples with local practices to produce knowledge and, most importantly to the section itself, social change. Carolina Dalla Chiesa and Leonardo Folleto’s “On Gambiarras: Technical Improvisation à la Brazil” and Anita Gurumurthy and Deepti Bharthur’s “Messy Empowerment: Mapping Digital Encounters in the Margins” are prominent examples of DH beyond the academy; the former uses DH and pedagogy to both enhance digital literacy in young women and foster gender inequalities awareness in India, and the latter highlights how a local strategy to solve material and technological deprivation in Brazil—the Gambiarras—can be used to build communitarian digital art. Other chapters in part 3 would have benefited from inclusion in previous sections. That’s the case with Tim Unwin’s “On Language, Gender, and Digital Technologies,” whose theoretical intentions align with the first section of the collection, and Gimena del Rio Riande’s “Digital Humanities and Visible and Invisible Infrastructures,” which presents a digital infrastructure case within an academic setting, emphasizing how resource scarcity can be overcome through ingenuity.
In conclusion, this volume emerges as a groundbreaking and fundamental overview of the current state of DH in the Global South. It illuminates the distinctive challenges prevalent in these regions—such as the epistemic position of the Global South, the glaring disparities in digital infrastructure and funding, and the valorization of local knowledge—and links them with a comprehensive body of critical literature. Although some of the essays seem misaligned within the thematic divisions of the volume, the organization achieves the goal of highlighting theoretical and practical aspects of the practice of DH. An index would be a great addition to future volumes, to ease the reader’s navigation within a volume that covers vast regions and multiple topics. Although covering the vast Global South in a single volume is challenging, future iterations of this series would enhance the field by including contributions from such areas as North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, and East Asia.
Despite these criticisms, the volume stands as a significant academic contribution, offering a profound and engaging exploration of DH topics and striving to represent the broad and often marginalized voices of the Global South with considerable depth and breadth. Global Debates in the Digital Humanities might serve as a crucial map for the South to, as Cédric Leterme suggests in the final chapter, not catch up with the North but instead “chart its own course, starting by decolonizing its digital imaginary to open up new and alternative paths” (p. 310).
Citation:
Hernán Adasme.
Review of
Fiormonte, Domenico; Chaudhuri, Sukanta; Ricaurte, Paola, eds..
Global Debates in the Digital Humanities.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2024.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60518
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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