Columbia University’s Small Axe project, designed to increase “social, political and cultural criticism” in the study of the Caribbean, hosted the inaugural Digital Caribbean conference on December 4th & 5th. The second session of this panel brought together seven academics all grappling with the issue of how digital humanities can address the diverse and widespread nature of Caribbean culture, its diaspora and the region’s colonial legacy. As introduced by Kaiama L. Glover (Barnard College), the focus of this panel was to examine the new projects underway to increase scholarly communication across the geographically disparate field of Caribbean studies.
A major focus of the panel was on marginalization, or what Laurent Dubois (Duke University) described as an “illusion of completeness” that can be found in archives and which raised the real “danger of new levels of silencing” if conscious efforts were not made to include new voices in the archival record. Dubois’s Radio Haiti Archive is intended specifically to address this, preserving and digitizing the programming of Radio Haiti, particularly from the politically tumultuous years of the 1980s and 1990s in Haiti. Incorporating some of the only interviews with politically significant figures, the archive addresses access to these important materials. Similar issues from a much earlier period were addressed by Nicole Aljoe and Elizabeth Dillon (Northeastern University) in their Early Caribbean Digital Archive, which is digitizing material from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Describing their work as a “democratization of knowledge” they are currently working to digitize and highlight new sources, particularly slave narratives embedded in larger works. Expanding on Dubois’s approach, Aljoe and Dillon have not only digitized materials, but focused on encoding and visualization to re-contextualize their works. An example of this is their effort to extract slave narratives, utilizing Text Encoding Initiative guidelines to remove slave voices from larger books and allow them to be read independently. They have also focused on mapping as an access point for generating new narratives, largely adopting Franco Moretti’s approach of abstract mapping as the most effective means of visualizing these connections. (Moretti, 2007)
This emphasis on marginalization extends to work taking place with work facing current issues as well. Kevon Rhiney (University of the West Indies, Jamaica) and Johannes Bohle’s (Center for InterAmerican Studies, University of Bielfield) work on the Caribbean Atlas also focuses on sources that the creators felt have been neglected. The stated goals of their project is to provide, among other services, a platform for academics and non-academics to share materials and resources. Their perspective is one of a fractured community spread across three continents, something identified by Aljoe and Dillon as well, and the Atlas is intended to to help foster communication across these divides, ideally bringing in new perspectives. Also added to the conversation was the Museum of the Caribbean Diaspora by Roger Caruth (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania). An oral history project centered in Washington, DC, Caruth’s goal is to preserve the voices of the Caribbean Diaspora by interviewing a wide range of inviduals about their experiences. His practice of “snowball sampling” in which he asks interview subjects to recommend future participants, provided an interesting and organic look at the spread of the diaspora, reaching participants who might not otherwise have their voices heard.
The concept of voice also played a role on the panel, with Aljoe and Dillon specifically discussing their goals of making narratives “speakable” in the archival record. While their effort is largely constrained to providing access, the other scholars’ work is constrained by the issues of language. Dubois discussed his work with Creole language materials, while Rhiney and Bohle noted the difficulty they encountered working with articles in English, French and Spanish and the difficulty of translating their materials into these three working languages of the Caribbean. All the researchers noted concerns about accessibility and visibility of these materials and providing access in the appropriate languages, while preserving context, is something that the panelists were clearly grappling with.
Injecting a sense of criticism, Thomas Speer (Lehman College and Graduate Center, CUNY), also participated on the panel, speaking mainly of the difficulties faced by the digital humanities in this area. On language he noted the difficulty in obtaining funding for non-English projects. On the question of marginalization, Speer spoke at length about technical limitations to access, both in terms of internet availability and speed in the Caribbean, and in terms of the physical preservation of materials in the region, which he described as varying wildly between nations. He sought to highlight the role of collection, emphasizing that digital projects could only be effective when beginning from balanced sources and that the current state of archival practice in certain areas of the Caribbean might not allow for that. Speer also commented on the current state of digital publishing, which he described as “anarchical” and in which digital “flotsam” could receive a great deal of attention. This was in direct contrast to the other panelists approach to digital publication, particularly the views of Rhiney and Bohle, whose Atlas was explicitly positioned as a publishing platform for scholars outside of the academic press, or in their description as a peer-reviewed platform in the middle ground between an academic press and Wikipedia. The evidence of this debate on the panel helped to illustrate some of the concerns that still face digital humanities projects, and illustrated some of the practical effects of new types of peer review and authority control, or what was aptly termed by Michael Jensen as “Authority 3.0.”
It should be noted that despite the inclusion of “pedagogy” in the title of this panel, little discussion of the topic took place. Rhine and Bohle’s Atlas and Aljoe and Dillon’s Early Caribbean Digital both were described as classroom tools, offering students and educators new means of engaging these issues, but little discussion took place beyond that. The panel seemed to engage pedagogy at a higher level, examining how new sources could be introduced to the classroom, utilizing digital humanities projects as a means of communicating between the centers of the Caribbean studies fields. Dillon has utilized her project as a means for engaging students in scholarly production, but this was the only intensive use of a project presented during the panel. And while some panelists did discuss the use of analytics to track the impact of their projects, none discussed pedagogy outside of their personal classrooms.
It is clear that these panelists have turned to the digital humanities in their search for new tools to address some of the longstanding issues in the study of the Caribbean. These stem both from the diverse nature of the region and from the widespread nature of the field, which presents problems for scholarly communication. The digital humanities projects presented at the panel seem to engage many of the important questions, most significantly questions of whose voices are included and heard in the archival record, and set the stage for further exploration from students and educators alike.
Sources
Moretti, Franco. Maps, Graphs and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (Verso: New York, 2007)
Jensen, Michael. “Authority 3.0: Friend or Foe to Scholars?” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39.1 (2007), p. 297-307