Supporting Efforts to Diversify DH

This is a talk session, co-proposed by Alana Kumbier, Kelly McElroy, and Lydia Willoughby.

 We’re interested in identifying ways in which academic librarians can support projects to diversify DH. Some of our framing questions include:

• How do we connect our skills and knowledges with projects that originate within the academy as well as in our communities?

• How do we help students, faculty and staff discover projects & resources that represent diverse experiences, histories, and modes of cultural production? What can we do to connect our patrons with online digital collections of radical, queer, POC, alternative press materials (contemporary & historic)?

• How can we help eliminate barriers to access for people who want to create DH projects?

• How can we design adaptive and accessible systems that foster community use of technology for users with diverse digital literacies?

• How can we help ensure that DH projects are accessible, aware of multiple ontologies, accountable to communities being documented, and open to participation?

• What great resources, projects, or collectives do we know about that we’d like to share with others?

• What ways can we collaborate with partners and key community stakeholders to promote, market and fund our DH projects?

• Do we want to form a working group, identify a project we could work on together?

Our proposal is motivated by (and builds upon) calls to create DH projects that draw on a set of critical theoretical and activist genealogies that include:

• Queer theory & activism

• Critical race theory and anti-racist theory & activism

• Indigenous studies & activism

• Feminist theory & activism

• Disability studies & activism, and

• Postcolonial studies

These calls have been articulated by a number of groups, in different contexts. Online, we can see evidence of this work in sites created by the #transformDH Collective, from NITLE discussion of Women’s Studies, Gender Studies & DH, by #DHPoco (a Postcolonial Digital Humanities project), THATCamp Feminisms West and THATCamp Feminisms East, and the Diversity in DH discussion at THATCamp SoCal 2011.