Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies

“Digital humanities (DH),” writes scholar-artist micha cárdenas, “has emerged as an academic field that promises a better understanding of the qualities composing the human through the addition of digital technologies to the field of humanities [End Page 324] scholarship” (26). Yet as cárdenas and the other contributors to this kaleidoscopic volume demonstrate, the promise of DH continues to be undermined by the field’s reification of a normative, universalizing conception of the human; its concomitant centering of white supremacist, colonizing, and heteropatriarchal logics; its emphasis on Enlightenment epistemologies and methodologies; and its privileging of exclusionary technologies and tools. Unsettling these dominant tendencies, Bodies of Information makes an insistent case, as editors Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont put it in their introduction, “that feminisms have been and must continue to be central to the identity and methodologies of the digital humanities as a field” (xi). Comprising twenty-five chapters and bringing together the work of forty-three authors, the volume vibrantly attests to the diversity of participants in and approaches to DH at present, exhibiting how intersectional feminism works across a spectrum of projects and interventions to critically reframe and push the boundaries of what is signified by the categories “the digital” and “the human” today.

Accordingly, editors Losh and Wernimont, both leading scholars of feminist DH, have organized the volume around six keywords that represent “boundary objects,” or emergent systems of meaning that facilitate the creation of communities and identities. The notion of boundary objects, as conceptualized especially by feminist scholar of science and technology Susan Leigh Star, suggests that objects broadly construed—discursive, material, or, indeed, digital—perform important communicative work in the process of meaning-making by facilitating multifaceted forms of engagement across difference. Boundary objects have played an important role in the development of feminist DH, at least since the concept was adopted by the digital feminist collective FemTechNet (a network in which many of the volume’s authors have been involved) as an operative paradigm for their project, begun in 2012, of creating a distributed open collaborative course (DOCC) as a feminist response to the massive open online courses (MOOCs) gaining in popularity then. As Alexandra Juhasz and Anne Balsamo wrote in an article about the project that appeared in the first issue of ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (2012), the DOCC was conceived as a collection of boundary objects, learning materials that could be modified digitally by students in a broad range of different pedagogical situations, enabling a collaborative, interactive, and distributed model of teaching and learning.

The boundary objects at stake in Bodies of Information—materiality, values, embodiment, affect, labour, and situatedness—play a similar networking role. The notion of boundary objects is worth dwelling on in approaching the volume, because it offers an important and helpful framing of what can at times feel like an unwieldy collection of awkwardly juxtaposed pieces that are, epistemologically and theoretically, often rather dissimilar. Reading with the editors’ framing via boundary objects, this dissimilarity can be understood as an affordance of the collection, which deliberately refuses cohesion and embraces the multiplicity implied by the term intersectionality. At the same time, this proliferation of approaches indexes a disciplinary moment—both for DH specifically and for [End Page 325] the humanities more broadly—that is characterized by precarity, with its dual connotations of insecurity and opportunity.

As many of the contributions directly address, the status of the humanities in the corporate university is starkly legible in DH, where its precariousness often appears in sharper relief than in more traditional disciplines. The field’s emergence parallels and intersects with the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s; its alignment with developments in STEM fields and its reliance on business interfaces (e.g. in the form of computer hardware and software platforms) and on external grant funding place it close to the realignment of the university away from a traditional liberal arts model. Moreover, DH’s connections to libraries, archives, computing centers, and instructional technology have made it particularly vulnerable to the restructuring of the university through the dismantling of tenure and the consequent precaritization of the professoriate.

Bodies of Information offers insights and strategies that will resonate with a broad readership beyond DH for addressing the insecurity of the neoliberal university, the ongoing underrepresentation of women and minoritized groups in secure academic positions, and the trivialization of feminism. Lisa Brundage, Karen Gregory, and Emily Sherwood take an autoethnographic approach to mapping the “invisible university” constituted by alternative academic (alt-ac) professionals who carry out administrative, managerial, center-oriented, and grant-related work, and they present a guide to thinking through gendered and racialized forms of labour in our current and future institutions. Susan Brown employs a feminist epistemological framework to explore how the gendering of service work has profoundly shaped disciplinary formations. Barbara Bordalejo draws on a survey she conducted to establish that DH is a majority white, binary, affluent, and anglophone field; the recommendations she offers for diversification—including changes to conference organization and assessment structures to support the most vulnerable among us—might well be adopted across the humanities. Two other chapters also draw on quantitative methodologies to demonstrate the representational imbalances in the field. Nickoal Eichmann-Kahwara, Jeana Jorgensen, and Scott B. Weingart analyze data from fifteen years of DH conferences to uncover implicit biases shaping peer review, selection of topics, and conference attendance; like Bordalejo, they offer a list of concrete suggestions to promote diversity in the field. Christina Boyles’s examination of projects funded by several major grant-awarding agencies since the 1980s provides clear evidence that “feminist researchers experience significant difficulties receiving financial support for their work” (104). Her analysis is compelling reading for anyone who has struggled with how to frame feminist projects in grant applications. Likewise, the chapter on “Accounting and Accountability” in feminist grant administration “maps out the challenges of trying to do anti-racist, coalitional work in the context of nonfeminist institutional structures […] governed by fiscal, rather than feminist, logics” (58), offering a highly instructive set of guidelines that should be mandatory reading for all those involved in administering funding. [End Page 326]

The chapters highlighted above are noteworthy not only for their critical, strategic approach to navigating the corporate university, but also because they appropriate diverse methodologies, a characteristic of DH that might inspire humanities scholars in other fields. As Eichmann-Kahwara et al. explain, part of their agenda in adopting a data-driven approach to intersectional feminist critique is “to show that simplistic, reductive quantitative methods can be applied critically, and need not feed techno-utopic fantasies or an unwavering acceptance of proxies as a direct line to Truth” (73). Many of the projects showcased here address and intervene into the predominance of data in contemporary epistemologies: Kim Brillante Knight employs craft to infuse data visualizations with materiality and tactility; Beth Coleman reads against conventional datasets, offering new methods for understanding the networked activism of Black subjects against racialized violence; and Bonnie Ruberg, Jason Boyd, and James Howe consider how queer theory can be brought to bear on methodologies of metadata collection. Other contributions offer important reflections on how positionality shapes participation in digital and academic spaces. Notable among these are Marcia Chatelain’s examination of her experiences as a Black scholar and curator of the social media campaign #FergusonSyllabus; Amy E. Earhart’s interrogation of the ethics of collaboration with historically exploited cultural communities; Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi’s analysis of the internal and external obstacles to the rise of DH in Africa; and Roopika Risam’s discussion of the biases inherent in algorithms that cannot account for the particulars of lived and embodied experience. Together, these chapters enact the call articulated by cárdenas “for solidarity between all those whom the word ‘humanity’ has failed to signify” (35), opening up new paths for considering how the digital might facilitate such solidarity even as it is implicated in that failure.