The introduction to Global Debates in the Digital Humanities offers useful contours of some debates and issues at stake for studying digital humanities in the Global South. It’s useful that Fiormonte, Chaudhari, and Ricaurte offer a definition of the Global South: not just a geographical entity but “symbolically” as places that are located at the economic, cultural, and social margins of the industrialized world. Although it’s not the authors’ goal to define DH, rethinking DH within the Global South asks us to reflect more broadly on the term “digital humanities” itself — what do we mean by it and what does it include — as there are “no unique terms for defining digital humanities” in other languages like Chinese. One particular issue that the three readings from Global Debates in the Digital Humanities grapple with is language — as a means by which Western hegemony continues to maintain itself in producing, controlling, and regulating knowledge. This is an issue of “epistemic sovereignty” regarding the dominance of the English language in producing and disseminating knowledge. As the readings point out, the English-speaking North is the center for creating and diffusing academic knowledge, which is based on “the inequalities inherent in [its] infrastructures for the production and diffusion of knowledge.” For example, the US and the UK publish more journals than the rest of the world combined. Interestingly, Fiormonte, Chaudhari, and Ricaurte also share the challenges of finding contributors to the book to cover as many geographic areas as possible. They had a multilingual call for papers (for regions like Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean), but there weren’t a lot of proposals. 

So I was thus wondering:  1. Do you think an “epistemic solidarity” can be achieved if scholars and researchers encounter epistemic (but also infrastructural, political, and economic) differences and “injustices”?  

Sayan Bhattacharyya likewise takes up the issue of language and ill/legibility in “Epistemically Produced Invisibility” in conjunction with the issue of scale effects and network effects. Different forms of knowledge, especially from the Global South, which are more heterogeneous (produced on a different scale, in a different language, etc), are rendered illegible. He discusses that an attempt to address the issue of “epistemically produced invisibility” relies on the task of searching for a “common language” or “framework” that does not reduce or overlook epistemically-heterogeneous data, which becomes illegible under forces and tools of standardization. He proposes the “logics of hierarchal and nonhierarchical production and accumulation.” My questions regarding Bhattacharyya’s piece are more impressionistic:  

2. What do you make of the concept/term “cognitive capitalism”? In light of our discussion of knowledge monetization and gigantic corporations that dominate multiple information markets like RELX and Thomas Reuters last week, how is a “nonhierarchical production and accumulation” of knowledge possible?  

3. Bhattacharyya ends the chapter by talking about a tool he uses in his undergraduate classes in the humanities called “persistent annotation,” which asks students to annotate the invisibilities/illegibilities. Have you encountered any tool like this in your academic career? Could you think of other tools/approaches to address “epistemologically produced invisibility” in the classroom?  

4. Gimena del Rio Riande’s “Digital Humanities and Visible and Invisible Infrastructures” highlights the materiality and infrastructure of digital humanities, which is germane to our ongoing class discussions. Riande talks about her experience with having no support from the institution when doing DH research. She learns how “collaboration could be carried out horizontally at grassroots level.” This makes me wonder about the extent to which organizations like the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization help address the issue of infrastructure and resource scarcity in academic publications in the field of DH – what measures could/would they take?  

5. Riande ends the chapter by invoking Geoffrey Rockwell’s assertion that “Infrastructure IS people.” What do you make of this? Do you think the people aspect is already inscribed within the concept of infrastructure? Or it is necessary to emphasize the “people” aspect of infrastructure so that a certain aspect, such as its entanglement with labor, can be more accentuated?