People love to sort things into binaries. Digital is traditionally the opposite of the humanities, failure the opposite of success, and student the opposite of professor. At the Bucknell University Digital Scholarship conference, whose theme was “Negotiating Borders Through Digital Collaboration”, I witnessed the dissolution and blending of all of these binaries.
Throughout the summer, we discussed the ways that digital tools can be used to present traditional humanities materials in new ways, and that this started to dissolve the binary between the two. This conference continued to bring the two closer to one another in my mind because I was able to see how digital tools can also be used to inform the humanities. A number of projects presented at the conference used some form of crowdsourcing to gather information, form narratives, and complement or enhance humanities materials that already existed. Dr. Safiya Noble’s keynote was especially important in recognizing the way that search engines influence our perceptions of humanity and reinforce hegemonic narratives. Much as people may like to think of them as being two separate spheres, it is clear that digital tools, including those that are common knowledge, are continually influencing the material that influences the humanities.
Similar to the way that the conference showed digital and humanities as being complements to one another, failure and success were also posited as being congruent. A number of panels discussed the struggles they encountered with regard to their work, but each used it as an opportunity to reevaluate their projects and methods or shift their focus. The conference emphasized that failure allows for greater discovery; it is not an endpoint, but rather a beginning.
Most striking to me though was the erasure of a student/faculty binary at the conference. In the beginning of the digital scholarship summer fellowship in May, the conference seemed like a very abstract concept. To me, conferences always seemed like lofty places, reserved for a select group of scholars that I could hope to accompany,and only become after years of education and having published a substantial amount of published material. Bucknell smashed this expectation to pieces. Not only was my and my cohort’s undergraduate research regarded as being significant, but the conference affirmed and included the work of scholars at all levels, and proved that the people doing work on the digital humanities aren’t on a binary, but really function as a community of practice, where students, professors, librarians, educators, and technologists all rely on and influence one another. The implicit task after this conference seems to be to expand the community of practice even further. As dictated in Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s keynote, it is incredibly important to introduce and establish the digital humanities at those institutions, such as community colleges, tribal colleges, and historically black colleges, that have often and unjustly been left at the margins of academic communities. The community of practice cannot function if it only features the voices of an elite some, while denying access to the voices of an inclusive many.
I like this imagery of dissolving binaries. I’m starting to think that it could be a theme for something …