Refounding the Digital Humanities from the South

MARÍA GIMENA DEL RIO RIANDE

Conferencia; A keynote by Gimena del Rio; 2018

U of Miami

Digital Humanities are a growing scientific field in most of the North and Global South academies. However, when thinking about them in a global scale, we do not find a consensus in what they are or make. In fact, the different approaches to the term Global Digital Humanities ?to which a symposium is dedicated every year at Michigan State University and has also been the main topic at the 2015 ADHO?s international conference and the 2016 conference on Digital Humanities in Argentina? have only shown how difficult is to give account of the many Digital Humanities around the world. From the point of view of the academic canon (as disciplines or syllabi), it is impossible to define a discipline in a global and general way, since academic canons aim to legitimize and dialogue with the institutions they represent. In the case of the Digital Humanities, this canon or corpus do not only deal with humanistic contents, but also with technology, as it is the digital what defines their innovative approach to Humanities. Taking into account that access to technology is not equally distributed around the world, and that this fact impacts directly on use and/or development of digital tools and infrastructures inside and outside academia, can we think of Digital Humanities as a global conversation across disciplines, cultures, countries and languages? Furthermore, how do we relate epistemology and technology in the Digital Humanities?Far from the neoliberal, the monolingual anglo-centered accusations to DH, the ones centered in the vagueness of its definition or theorical framework, this presentation will focus on a ?Think global, act local? approach, using other categories for its analysis, such as Global-Local, North-South, Western-Eastern, Canon-Corpus, Center-Periphery. Its aim is to reflect upon where and how the Digital Humanities have been developing until now and how we can unveil the ?global effects? of its institutionalization through some case studies of ?epistemological diversity? from the Global South. It will make an emphasis on how some Humanidades Digitales projects and initiatives from Latin America and the Caribbean -a region that suffers from wealth inequality and the impact of labour-saving technological change and the lack of adaptation to technological advances- have re-shaped concepts such as the commons and have made a significant advance in re-thinking Open Access and Open Science, with high impact on the work of digital humanists/humanistas digitales.