Neither so global, nor so local. Digital Humanities and Humanidades Digitales

MARÍA GIMENA DEL RIO RIANDE

Congreso; European Summer School on Digital Humanities; 2018

Universidad de Leipzig

The idea of a Global Digital Humanities has been a central debate in the field in the last years. Just to mention some examples, in 2015 ADHO named its annual conference Global Digital Humanities; Local Constructions in Global Contexts was the Argentine Digital Humanities Association conference in 2016; and in 2017 the Call for Papers for the Debates in the Digital Humanities was announced as Global Debates. However, beyond the benefits that we could expect from a global curriculum in Digital Humanities, the concept global is complex and even contradictory (let?s think of concepts coined from the North to define the South, such as the "Global South").In Gutenberg's Galaxy and Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan opened a critical research field on the impact that technologies had on Western civilization. Later, the idea of technogenesis, or how the human species is defined by its co-evolution with various tools and technologies, and the increasing rejection to technological monism, started gaining importance in cultural debates on media, and should also nowadays be part of the global debates about the Digital Humanities, if we still believe that the Digital Humanities is an intersection between Humanities and digital technologies.Technology is never neutral, and depends on social and cultural, political and economic variables. In addition, it is an element not equally divided in any society. So, can or should Digital Humanities be defined globally? Will the different access to technology condition the development of the Digital Humanities in the world? This talk aims to address these issues though some examples from the emerging Humanidades Digitales field in Latin America, a region that not only suffers from wealth inequality, but also from the lack of adaptation to technological advances. It will especially focus in some Argentinian DH projects, in order to find some local answers to these global questions.