Mechanized Margin to Digitized Center: Black Feminism's Contributions to Combatting Erasure within the Digital Humanities

Abstract

Computational analysis and digital humanities are far from neutral processes and sites unimpeded by the political, social and economic context in which they emerged and are utilized. As an interdisciplinary field, the digital humanities have transformed the relationship of humans to computers broadly conceived. At the same time, the methods, theories, perspectives and the concomitant digital tools developed are being criticized for reproducing the social divisions that exist in society. The effort to recover Black women's subjectivities from the digital minefield is not without its challenges, reflected in our study which searched approximately 800,000 books, newspapers, and articles in the HathiTrust and JSTOR Digital Libraries. The goal was to identify perceptions and lived experiences of Black women that emerged and the resulting knowledge that developed. The project team discovered multiple challenges related to the rescue and recovery of Black women's standpoints or group knowledge. This essay explores how even as computational analysis has embedded biases, it can be utilized to recover the experiences of Black women from within the digitized record. Thus, computational analysis and all that it encompasses not only makes visible Black women's experiences, but also expands the scope of the digital humanities.

Methodological Cyborg as Black Feminist Technology: Constructing the Social Self Using Computational Digital Autoethnography and Social Media

“…This project acknowledges my own insight and experiences as a legitimate source of knowledge and relies upon an informal data source to create knowledge in which I am heavily invested (See Brown et al, 2016 for an explanation of how corpora can be interpreted as sociopolitical entities and how the incorporation of informal sources of data into analysis can reduce some forms of disciplinary bias.) The use of social media, specifically Facebook, to create a corpus of study and analysis allows for the exploration of the social self specifically for the purposes of engaging in identity work and explicitly in service to Black feminism.…”

“…This is precisely what autoethnography brings to computational interpretation and analysis. (Brown, Mendenhall, Black, Van Moer, Lourentzou, Zeria, Flynn, 2016) in conjunction with the distant reading of the topic modeling output provided by the computation. With intermediate reading, topics emerging from computational modeling are traced back to Facebook posts that comprise the topics.…”

Resistance and restoration: Healing research methodologies for the global majority.

“…Gathering our Indigenous ancestral knowledge using data mining techniques, we strengthen our communities and embrace our epistemologies. Brown et al (2016) examined Black women's contribution to knowledge creation in digital humanities by using TDM to analyze 800,000 publicly available documents. Similarly, healing researchers could examine historical documents, social media, film/videos and newspaper articles globally using key words and topical analyses to determine and understand global epistemologies.…”

Digital Crime Histories and Developing a Public Pedagogy of Criminal Justice

“…For the most part, digital repositories replicate and even exacerbate disparities in record accessibility globally. Computational analyses of digital repositories in general suggest these continue to reflect the systemic biases of most record collections in offering limited records by or about minorities-or at least not making such records readily findable-impeding efforts to study the experiences of these groups (Brown et al 2016). The role of commercial genealogical providers compounds this issue because they cater for relatively well-off communities of family historians, ensuring that 'the new digital form of the sources…remain Western-centric' (Hitchcock 2017, p. 338).…”