“SCRUTINIZE, RIP IT APART, REBUILD IT, REIMAGINE”: CENTERING CULTURAL CRITICISM AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN DH PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

Tarika Sankar

December 1, 2021

About me

• PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Miami
• Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow
• Dissertation title: Beyond the Culture Concept: Indo-Caribbean Identity as Diasporic Consciousness
• Graduate Research Assistant at the WhatEvery1Says project from 2017-2020; UM project manager from 2017-2018
• Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) Community Leader, 2021-22 cohort

Incorporating DEI into the project lifecycle

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1. PROJECT CHARTER

Define Project Goals

Community involvement

• What communities are implicated in this research?
• How can or should the communities implicated in this research be involved?

https://we1s.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/KF-8-2.pdf

Determine Roles and Responsibilities�Define project team & establish meetings

Labor Practices

• What labor practices are being used in the creation of the project? (e.g. undergraduate labor)
• How do we ensure that all labor is being fairly compensated and credited?
• Does our labor structure reproduce or rethink power hierarchies within higher education?

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https://humtech.ucla.edu/news/a-student-collaborators-bill-of-rights/

2.PLAN

Determine Data and/or Content Needs

Data ethics (raw data is an oxymoron)

• What is missing from the dataset or textual corpora? Are there any exclusions or absences, intentional or unintentional?
• Can we productively probe those absences?
• Who will get access to this data? Is there any potential that it could be used against this community in the future?
• What CAN the data show and represent? What can it NOT tell us?

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3. BUILD

Sketch, Design for Accessibility, Prototype

Tools and methods (all models are wrong, some models are useful)

• What are the histories and contexts of the tools (especially proprietary) and platforms I am using?
• Is there an open-source alternative?
• What assumptions are embedded in the methods or models I am using?

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4. REVIEW

Evaluate, Reflect, Revise

All maps are arguments, all archives are rhetorical

• What argument is this archive, collection or map making?

https://library.brown.edu/cds/slaveryandjustice/

5. SHARE

Disseminate to audience, assess, preserve

Transparency (process as product)

• How can we make the data curation decisions, choices, and methodology transparent to our audience?

Growing workshop and curricular offerings

• Finding and Managing Data on Marginalized Communities
• Data Ethics: Considerations for data on historically marginalized populations
• DH Fundamentals: Command Line, Markdown, and HTML (English and Spanish)

Thank you! Questions?