“Those already marginalized in society and the academy can also find themselves in the liminal spaces of this field. By centering the lives of women, people of color, and disabled folks, the types of possible conversations in digital humanities shift.”
Moya Z. Bailey, All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave
This passage was interesting to me because it highlighted the important issue of lack of diversity in Digital Humanities. Bailey, who is the author of the passage argues that the field is dominated by specific groups of people and urges to make the field accessible to other people including but not limited to women, people of color, and disabled people. Diversifying the field allows for new ideas and unique perspectives that will enrich the field and create equal opportunities for everyone to contribute towards the advancement of digital humanities. This passage was first published in 2011 about 11 years ago. As we discussed in the previous class, students shared the words “diversity” and “accessible” among many other words to describe the field of digital humanities. This indicates that a lot has changed during these years. The lesson that I learned from this passage is the importance of addressing issues and projecting your voice. If Bailey and other people who were criticizing the field of digital humanities were silent and didn’t publish blogs to raise awareness, the field would probably not reach its current stage which is much improved since 2011.
In addition, I learned about the importance of blogging especially back when social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter were not that popular and people used blogs to reach out to their audience. However, this type of communication was a monologue as the audience could not respond back or share their views as easily as in the current social media platforms. I think that blogging was and still is an important tool to project your voice in addressing various issues that are relevant to our society. I loved this question asked by Bailey, “In doing the work of creating and utilizing digital tools for better digital humanities projects, shouldn’t we also be engaging the humanities themselves?” where she is criticizing the lack of engagement between digital humanists who are constantly working to create better projects but are missing on engaging different people.I will end the blog with the conclusion that Bailey has reached, which is that “As more diverse groups of people have entered the academy and the field of digital humanities, the contours have been redefined.” I’m glad the identity of digital humanity has evolved over time to being inclusive of different groups of people and diversifying the growing field of digital humanities.
