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? 

I’m still in search of a “perfect” academic note-taking system, but I’ve gone from taking notes by hand to typing on Pages and annotating PDFs using GoodNotes and Preview on Mac. I used to rely heavily on papers and pens, but I shortly abandoned it after realizing that writing by hand is too slow for taking notes in a seminar. I still carry a notebook; sometimes, writing in a notebook is very useful. But it’s always the attempt to find stuff later—flipping through hundreds of pages of illegible handwriting—that is dreadful and frustrating. So, I’ve turned to digital note-taking, which allows me to search my notes, whether I’m writing, typing, or marking up a PDF.

I use Pages, which automatically saves as I work, for taking in-the-moment notes in a seminar and noting my questions/responses/thoughts on class readings — all in one place. In my individual reading, I switch between using Preview and GoodNotes on an iPad or as they allow me to annotate PDFs easily. Since CUNY provides Microsoft Office 365 for us, I also tried using OneNotes. However, having multiple CUNY email addresses due to various campus affiliations had caused me to misplace my notes. Trying to sign in to each account and dealing with the two-step verification to look for my notes was time-consuming and didn’t always work. My files won’t sync across devices sometimes, which is something, as of yet, I haven’t experienced with using iCloud. In this sense, I can control where to store and how to arrange my notes and sources — yet within the limits of the platforms and assumptions that these technological tools will continue to function properly, which is an aspect I don’t necessarily have control of. Regarding technical bugs, I used Zotero to organize and manage sources and citations in the past. However, I didn’t have much success with it. It kept crashing, and some of my latest annotations would go missing after my device was updated to the latest IOS version. I ended up creating different folders (either on my desktop or on Google Drive) and storing all my PDFs there. I copy and paste citations on a Word Doc to keep track of citations. I’m aware that this might not be the most effective approach to maintaining a personal notes database in the long run as I discover and accumulate more sources, so I’m also willing to give Zotero another try.

In terms of finding scholarly articles and sources for research, I often look at the bibliography from any class readings that I find particularly useful to see who the author is citing. If I find an interesting text, I’ll also look at the bibliography of that piece, continuing this process in hopes of mapping out the scholarly conversations the authors are engaged in. I mainly use the databases of our library, which select and filter sources indexed by specialists and indicate how I can access a particular text. I will also use Google Scholar, which is quite effective in finding precise quotes and phrases. However, I’m always curious (perhaps also a little skeptical) about Google Scholar’s ranking algorithms and scope. It doesn’t offer a collection of carefully selected sources as our library systems do, so I’m always curious about the list of databases it covers. I’m interested in continuing to explore, think, and complicate questions surrounding my personal knowledge infrastructure, particularly the conditions that enable its becoming — as a way to foster infrastructural awareness and “intelligibility,” as Lisa Parks puts it, to become more aware of how I participate in and am complicit with knowledge production processes.