We spent our first year as DH Fellows tracking and discussing the blog posts that filtered through DH Now, and were asked to track specific themes. I decided to follow posts where DH and activism intersected, especially as the recent campaign, election, and administration made political conversations hard, even irresponsible, to ignore. Before Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, the grey literature of DH had had a slightly more intellectual focus. There were certainly many people thinking about critical theory in DH, but those advocating for DH as activism in its own right was not as visible of a conversation. Of course, there are some exceptions here, most obviously in the form of media scholars, and particularly those who incorporate feminist critical theory into their work (for instance the #TransformDH community that formed in 2011). Aside from these groups, much of the DH discussion was focused on how to study or support activists working in the age of multimodal movements like Black Lives Matter. Not surprisingly, the discussion has become not only more critical but more urgent. It seems that DH scholars from all disciplines started to take stock of what we do well—promoting open access knowledge with a balance between theory and praxis (although not always an equal balance)—and found new ways to deploy those skills as acts of resistance.

What we see now is representation from a large group of digital humanists—archivists, educators, artists, historians, media scholars, librarians, literature scholars, sociologists, and others—working towards common political goals. Not only is DH facing a large-scale crisis over funding and resources (nothing new except for its scale), but, more importantly, over the emergence of a rising tide of fascism and anti-intellectualism. For example, conversations about open access have shifted focus from intellectual goals to political ones. Pedagogical posts are refocusing on ways to not only promote computer literacy, but also how to teach strategies of resistance in the era of misinformation. In this new climate, public engagement, critical studies, and activism are informing each other, and seem to be working to break down the disciplinary boundaries that have divided digital humanities into distinct fields of theory and practice. It is probable that the narrowing of these gaps is part of DH’s natural evolution as a field, but the current administration certainly seems to have sped up the process. This selection of posts that follows is a very small sample of the many groups and voices working to reshape DH into a field of resistance.

Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice (February 29, 2016)
This report from the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University represents an early, concerted effort by scholars to explore Black Lives Matter and other web-based activist movements. With attention to the various groups and platforms involved in the fight against police brutality, this report explores the nature of protest on the open web and how multimodal approaches to activism can work to level the playing field for oppressed groups.

Creating Culturally Sensitive Solutions to Digital Violence (September 29, 2016)
This post, from the Digital Media + Learning Central blog, announces the Center for Solutions to Online Violence. This effort, funded by DML, seeks to find new ways to address intersectional experiences of violence online. This post showcases the project’s PI, Jacqueline Wernimont who speaks to the importance of applying feminist theory as we approach archives of knowledge and spaces of digital learning in order to build trust and foreground safety. From Wernimont: “a person’s ability to navigate what is an increasingly complex digital life is really important…We have to attend to those costs and how they are differentially born by particular people first — not as an afterthought.”

Ed-Tech in a Time of Trump (February 2, 2017)
This post by Audrey Watters on Hack Education traces computing machines to their military roots— “Command. Control. Communicate. Intelligence.”—and interrogates the implications of these ideas on our educational systems. She connects the potential uses of student analytical data collection to prior fascist attempts (both in Nazi Germany and the US) to track, control, and eradicate groups of people. She calls for a reevaluation of the relationship between student and institution, and implicates higher education institutions within the growing surveillance state. Watters’ desire is clear: “Now is the time for an ed-tech antifa, and I cannot believe I have to say that out loud to you.”

Our Work, Our Selves: Using Our Tools for Resistance (February 16, 2017)
This post by Des on Hack Library School calls for archivists to realign their personal and professional goals with their political ones, and provides a brief historiography for inspiration. The title, a reference to the landmark feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves (now a digital source for knowledge about and access to women’s health care), plus the choice to open with an Audre Lorde quote situates this post squarely within a long tradition of feminist theory in DH activism. The questions raised here are meant to inspire ideas for HLS’ first Twitter Chat, and represents how new groups are forming as a reaction to the Trump administration.

The Urgency of Public Engagement (February 26, 2017)
In this post, Katina Rogers joins a number of scholars in reacting to the anxieties of the Trump administration’s effect on DH, and on the Humanities largely. Drawing from her experience as Director of Administration and Programs of the Futures Initiative at CUNY, Rogers calls for a new framework of academia in which we no longer prioritize insular paths to tenure, but rather recognize and reward outward paths to work with and serve communities. She centers the relationship between “innovation, equity, and public engagement” as one that can transform academia from an ivory tower to a public resource. She calls not only for a cultural shift, but for a concerted effort to train graduate students to pursue public-facing work.

Foregrounding the Question (March 15, 2017)
This post by professor Elizabeth Lenaghan argues not only for computer literacy in undergraduate writing seminars, but to find ways for students to engage with questions of source verification. Her approach, in her words: “we examine the way that concepts such as truth, authenticity, and originality—though often presumed static and absolute—are constantly shifting and morphing in relation to time, context, and audience.” They focus on both identifying and creating “media hoaxes, plagiarism, and remix culture” in order to develop the skills to easily recognize these in their online practices. Although she has been teaching this way since 2013, she argues that it is even more critical in our current “post-truth” era.

Teaching Digital Rhetoric in the Age of Fake News: Media Literacy and Source Evaluation in the First-Year Writing Classroom (March 17, 2017)
This post by composition instructor Elizabeth Fleitz argues for a new conception of digital literacy in the composition classroom. She first makes a plea that we not take the idea of “digital natives” for granted by assuming they have the skills to both use and assess their online worlds. In order to provide her digital native students with the skills to assess web content, Fleitz employs the strategies of fact-checkers in the classroom. She argues that not only does this fulfill requirements for students to learn to question and challenge sources broadly, but will equip them to develop political ideas and identities in the age of fake news.

What is the role of the digital humanities in transforming and responding to the arts? (March 2017)
Art has largely been considered a realm of political action, while the humanities has largely been seen as one of knowledge production. This survey question posed by MediaCommons received several answers from vastly different disciplines—artists, art historians, ethnographers, ecocriticism, #TransformDH feminist scholars, and others—demonstrating the ways that similar concerns are connecting DH scholars across disciplines. One respondent, Jarah Moesch who identifies as a “queer artist-scholar” offers this answer: “Perhaps, then, these rigid lines between so-called disciplines are actually the ‘problem’…I am also wary of the idea that the Digital Humanities should somehow transform “The Arts,” that this type of scholarship should necessarily play a role in art, while not considering how art might also transform the Digital Humanities.”

How Libraries Can Trump the Trend to Make America Hate Again (April 24, 2017)
In this post, Jarrett Drake, an important voice for archivist-activists and advisor for the Documenting the Now community and toolkit, argues that not only do libraries have a responsibility to serve the needs of their communities, but that this agenda should—must—extend into activism. In his words: “libraries should be on the frontlines to fight fascism because the control of information and ideas is central to the spread of fascism, and thus libraries will be forced either to endorse that spread or encumber it.” He traces earlier moments when libraries and librarians were active voices against oppressive regimes and ends with three main calls to action: assert authority, center communities, and never normalize.

We ended our first year as Digital History Fellows in the Public Projects Division. As someone with career goals in Public History, I was most excited to get to work in this division. However, doing this year-long rotation through the Center allowed me to witness the strengths of all three. I was able to work with projects I wasn’t familiar with, and become more familiar with ones I was, as well as gain a broad understanding of digital humanities work. It was also interesting to see how the various parts of the Center function with distinct tasks, work styles, and guiding philosophies, yet come together to create one cohesive Center.

Over these last six weeks we were able to experience the many and varied projects that the Public Projects division balances. First, we got familiar with Omeka, one of the legacy projects of the Center. With the help of other graduate students, we learned how to install Omeka sites on our own server space provided by the Center. This is certainly a useful skill to take with us, along with the command line practice we received in the Research Division and Clio II. We were also given access to an Omeka S dev site that allowed us to also play with the some of the new features this platform offers. In particular, I spent some time with the CSV import function by putting together a spreadsheet with metadata for various early jazz album covers. The CSV import creates distinct items for each row, and allows for batch uploading of collections. Practically, having the content in the form of a spreadsheet will help in the future when sites need to be re-built quickly for new rounds of testing.

Speaking of testing, we also spent a fair amount of time working with previous DH Fellows to test new plug-ins like batch editing and comment blocks, or bugs reported in the Omeka forum. We had done a bit of testing while in the Education Division, so I was mildly familiar with the process. However, the kind of testing we did in Public Projects necessitated a very organized strategy between several of us to replicate issues and determine exactly which actions were causing the site to break. Thanks to our testing guru, Jannelle Legg, I learned how to organize a testing process to track and pinpoint our actions separately and together, and to provide useful feedback for the dev team.

In between testing, we also were introduced to Public Project’s long-running Papers of the War Department project. This project has two main parts. One, it is a digital collection that attempts to reconstitute the records lost when the War Department caught fire in 1800 by bringing together thousands of documents from archives around the country into one digital collection. Two, the Scripto tool developed at the Center turns this collection into a crowd-sourced transcription project in order to make the items searchable for researchers. Laura and I were give usernames and were asked to dig around the site to explore the various materials available, and then to transcribe some items to understand the process. The Public Projects Division continues to maintain Papers of the War Department and is still receiving new transcriptions from users and keeps an updated blog. It is an example of how the Center is not only good at developing new projects, but maintaining older ones to keep them accessible and relevant.

Our final task in the division was my favorite, as it allowed me to fuse my interest in music, public, and digital history. For the last three weeks, Laura and I helped with preliminary research for the Hearing the Americas planning grant. This project will attempt to contextualize a collection of early recordings digitized in the Library of Congress’ National Jukebox, so the bulk of our research was exploring musicians and songs that appear in this collection. Laura and I spent a lot of time working collaboratively to piece together the biographies of several musicians and genealogies of songs that not only revealed connections between people in the early music industry, but within larger themes in American history. I am looking forward to continuing this work over the Summer and during my second year as a Digital History Fellow in the Public Projects Division. Not only do I get to explore topics and themes that are interesting and relevant to my own research, but I get to witness, almost from start to finish, the process of writing a grant proposal that leads to the kinds of projects Laura and I have worked on over the last year.

Our final rotation of the year was in the Public Projects division. We had the chance to try out Omeka S, help with Omeka testing, get familiar with Papers of the War Department, and do some research for Hearing the Americas.

One of our first tasks was to participate in testing the Editorial Plugin for Omeka. Simulating realistic scenarios required having several people work on testing at the same time and communicating with each other about what we were each doing, so the process was much more lively and enjoyable than one would normally associate with the word “testing.” Getting to discover issues as part of a group was a very satisfying experience, especially because I could see how useful this plugin will be for people working in groups. Along with this testing, I also got to play around with Omeka S and do an Omeka install on my server space. All of this was a great way to gain more familiarity with Omeka and to learn some of the features that I haven’t needed to use in the past. Doing the Omeka install, I also got to brush up on using the command line.

After a few weeks working with all things Omeka, we were introduced to the Papers of the War Department. In part, it was helpful to learn about it because I had seen others at the Center working on the project but didn’t really know much about it. But it was also helpful to see what it takes to keep a project running after it’s launched and the funding has run out. Because Papers of the War Department is a project that makes use of crowdsourcing ,we were asked to create an account and try our hand at transcribing some of the documents during our downtime from Omeka testing. As someone who studies the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I don’t find many opportunities to transcribe eighteenth-century handwriting, but I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed it, despite how illegible it looked at first glance.

In the last few weeks, Jessica and I have been attending meetings for Hearing the Americas and getting some research done for the project. The goal for Hearing the Americas is to expose the commercial and transnational roots of jazz, blues, and country, focusing on the early years of the American recording industry. Right now, the team is still working on the planning phase (with the help of a Discovery grant from the NEH), so we were tasked with researching a few individual singers and musicians to get a sense of how much information is available in the secondary literature and in primary sources. Jessica and I split the list, and after several days spent leafing through books in the library together, we’ve surprised ourselves with how much we’ve learned and accomplished in such a short amount of time. I think our productivity has been fueled partly by how fascinating the topic is and partly by getting to work together on this. Doing academic research is usually a pretty solitary activity, so it’s been fun to be able to bounce around ideas and share interesting finds with someone. With our new knowledge on the subject, we’ve been able to contribute to the meetings and provide suggestions on important themes to pursue, so it’s been valuable to experience firsthand the challenges, questions, and conversations that shape a project in its early stages.

It’s sad to find that our time in Public Projects has come to an end and, with it, our first year of the fellowship. But thinking back on my nerves and confusion at the beginning of the year, I am proud of everything that I’ve learned and accomplished, and I am looking forward to returning next year as a second-year DH Fellow.

All year, the DH fellows have been looking through the aggregated content of DHNow and selecting interesting posts to discuss at our weekly meeting with Dr. Robertson. The process has been a great introduction to the variety of people, projects, and discourses that make up the field of digital humanities, and it’s enabled me to identify and track key themes and trends over the course of the year. I quickly became interested in questions of ethics in DH, gravitating especially toward posts and projects that take an Indigenizing and/or decolonizing approach.

Indigenization transforms academia and public scholarship by integrating Indigenous voices, knowledge systems, histories, and cultures and by empowering the success of Indigenous students, scholars, and communities. However, as Skylee-Storm Hogan and Krista McCracken explain in Doing the Work: The Historian’s Place in Indigenization and Decolonization, “Indigenization cannot be attempted without first making space to decolonize what types of knowledge the academy sees as legitimate, otherwise projects have the potential to become tokens used to absolve settler guilt.” Indigenization requires decolonization—identifying and challenging colonial systems in order to shift power relations and transform the structures of settler society.

So what would decolonizing and Indigenizing DH look like? What does the process demand? Is decolonizing DH even possible or are colonial systems and structures too deeply embedded in the web and digital tools? The posts below ask or attempt to answer these questions. Although they do not all directly address Indigenous histories and cultures, they are all part of a growing conversation about the need to challenge colonial power in digital humanities.

Doing the Work: The Historian’s Place in Indigenization and Decolonization by Skylee-Storm Hogan (Kanien’kehá:ka) and Krista McCracken. Although not specifically directed at DH, this is a very relevant and useful overview of what historians can do to Indigenize and decolonize their teaching and research practices.

Exploring Indigenous Data Sovereignty through Water Governance by Kelsey Leonard (Shinnecock). In this introductory post to her work at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, Leonard explains that, “Digital scholarship can aid Indigenous Nations in our efforts to decolonize water governance regimes and enhance coordination for the management of transboundary waters” and that her “digital scholarship aims to digitize the work of Indigenous Nations and our water protectors as they fight to (re)claim inherent sovereign rights to govern our waters.”

Why We Need to Talk About Indigenous Literature in the Digital Humanities by David Gaertner. This post makes the argument that, “Indigenous lit scholars resist DH because the concerns Indigenous communities have about the expropriation of data have not been taken seriously. Those concerns will not be taken seriously until decolonial critique is actively installed at the foundations of DH theory and methodology and settler scholars need to start taking up some of this labour.”

Remediation, Activation, and Entanglement in Performative (Digital) Archives by Jacqueline Wernimont. This post is a critical reading of Performing Archives: Edward S. Curtis and the ‘vanishing race,’ a digital book project that Wernimont directed. The project features the (often staged) photographs of Native Americans taken by Curtis, an ethnologist and photographer who believed he was documenting a “vanishing race.” Wernimont concludes that the project does not do enough to “decenter” Curtis and instead “largely activated memories of oppression and settler knowledge systems.”

The Practice of Play by Tim Sherrat. This post describes how Sherrat “multiplies contexts”—hacking, breaking, and playing with data and digital resources—to challenge the power of the colonial state’s power of surveillance and reverse its gaze.

Data and Humanism Shape Library of Congress Conference by Mike Ashenfelder. This post is a summary of talks given at the Collections As Data Conference in September 2016. Some of the talks address such topics as the repatriation of digitized objects, bias in metadata practices, and the Traditional Knowledge Labels tool.

Speculative Collections by Bethany Nowviskie. In this post, Nowviskie asks, “How can we design digital libraries that admit alternate futures—that recognize that people require the freedom to construct their own, independent philosophical infrastructure, to escape time’s arrow and subvert, if they wish, the unidirectional and neoliberal temporal constructs that have so often been tools of injustice?” In another post, Nowviskie calls for design experimentation to answer this question and describes five possible axes along which we should run this experimentation.

A Life Reduced to Data by Tim Sherrat. In this post, Sherrat points out that as historians investigate questions of identity using historical datasets (the Australian census is his example), we need to remember that, “In some cases we are the beneficiaries of systems created for the surveillance and control of suspect populations.” Although he argues that we can “turn these systems on themselves,” we must “make that decision and engage accordingly.” As he asserts, “There is no neutral position.”