I believe this post is long overdue. Since the reason for the post is embedded in my most recent scholarship, I’d like to share a bit of my recent work in steampunk towards the end. First, though, I want to address the conclusion of Amy Earhart’s Traces of the Old, Uses of the New where she discusses the group #transformdh. Earhart’s book is really the best history of the digital humanities I’ve seen to date, particularly from the vantage point of literary studies and new historicism. In some ways, it articulates a vision of the digital humanities that is very different from my own — but I celebrate it for its difference.
In the conclusion, Earhart usefully disentangles the critique of institutional structures in the digital humanities and the view that such critiques are too close to neoliberalism. She reminds us that “[t]he critique of the humanities is not, as Golumbia suggests, an alignment with cyberlibertarianism but rather an attack on what many digital humanists see as academia’s rigid hierarchy, the academy’s insistence on practices that are, at heart, antidemocratic, antimeritocratic, and exclusionary” (121). She also — quite rightly in my view — criticizes my 2012 article “Does DH Really Need to Be Transformed?” for lacking an “understanding of positionality” and not recognizing when I slip “into a position of power or at least comfort from which others might continue to be excluded” (123).
“Does DH Really Need to be Transformed?” has been criticized many times from many different sources. To be honest, my 2012 post is somewhat embarrassing for me to remember. I feel that my work in the digital humanities from 2011-2013 is very different from the work I do today. While I certainly wouldn’t unproblematically link the digital humanities to neoliberalism — it is the University, as Mark Sample tweeted yesterday, not necessarily DH that’s particularly exploitable by capitalism — I also know that DH is subject to many of the same financial pressures and (consciously or not) practices many of the same methods of exclusion as many other parts of the University system.
This is why the transformative aspect of #transformdh, located as it is outside the University, in public fannish practice — is so compelling to me. So, without further ado, I present part of the chapter “Queer Publics” from Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Time-Criticalities, Alternate Histories. The section is part of a larger chapter in which I discuss how queer steampunk performance can create opportunities for rethinking the publics of Victorian Digital Humanities. Enjoy!
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In order to theorize the queer publics potentially sidelined by these nineteenth-century digital projects, this section looks at the #transformdh movement and the GitHub-enabled anthology Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities as emergent social and technological models for incorporating various online publics into scholarly research. The unique perspective of #transformdh and the interface of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities act as provocations for sustainable forms of queer public Victorian studies. I use these in an analysis of the online version of The Journal of Victorian Culture — a site that offers a rich model of ninteetenth-century digital humanities in which the Victorian period is seen as a mode of connecting various publics into a heterogeneous mixture. My entry into understanding the relationship between social media and queer publics is Dorothy Kim’s analysis of Twitter as a “corporate-owned digital medium that has become a hacked digital media space.” For Kim, the “white flight” from Twitter chronicled by Bonnie Stewart and other Twitter scholars in 2013 and 2014 revealed Twitter’s relocation of public space “from the bucolic image of conversations with neighbors in the ‘American Dream’ single-family neighborhood to loud Broadway (clearly envisioning New York City).”[ii] Such bucolic visions illustrate to Kim how Twitter pundits are “blind to their own white privilege” and reinforce the kinds of racist segregations historically barring minority populations from the conversations imagined in these exchanges. Instead of envisioning the public as a partitioned space defined primarily through civility and white privilege, Kim’s use of Broadway as an image to define public discourse allows us to understand Twitter as “a huge multiracial, multi-bodied, multi-abled population.” In this sense, Kim’s work is similar to Michael Warner’s sketch of queer publics: there is no single public, Kim contends, and any attempt to homogenize the loud Broadway dissonance of contentious publics into civility is a form of violence to the multiplicity of populations existing on Twitter. She also cites the work of Sydette Harry, who argues that for its many minority and female users, Twitter works because “we don’t expect technology to conform to our consumption habits; we adapt to the platforms we’re given and make them our own.”
Harry’s sense of adapting to already existing technology platforms and making them “our own” is a powerful queer utopian image to use when considering how various populations have been unintentionally marginalized in the digital humanities — since the call for wider genealogies of the field has sometimes collided with well-intentioned attempts to homogenize its “big tent.” I include myself in this criticism, since I wrote a widely-cited reaction against the group #transformdh titled “Does DH Really Need to Be Transformed?” back in 2012. There, I argued that the appeal to “guerilla movements” by #transformdh were not productive since the field already — or at least it seemed so to me at the time — “searches for commonality and initiates discussions about how to open the field to marginalized or otherwise ignored groups.” Since then, I’ve realized how much that justification mirrors the white privilege Kim theorizes while also seeing how powerfully #transformdh challenges the “digitize scholarship” model found in some approaches to public scholarship in the digital humanities. In other words, I theorized the digital humanities as an already-formed field that gradually expanded its boarders to make its discipline accessible to marginalized voices, rather than envisioning a grassroots process in which various communities construct heterogeneous forms of association that — broadly and contiguously speaking — create the disciplinary space for the digital humanities. Movements like #transformdh see participation in the digital humanities as irreducibly linked to political conflict in which tensions cannot be completely erased by calls for greater diversity. #transformdh began with the provocative mission statement seeking “to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects that push at the boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and inclusion.” Inclusion and transformation are both key to my analysis here — since implicit in the mission statement of #transformdh is the idea that the various publics populating online spaces have the ability to transform the character of those spaces. I don’t disagree that many figures in the digital humanities have worked towards recognizing the great diversity of practitioners in the field, yet I also recognize that my knee-jerk reaction against #transformdh was all-too-typical in its appeal to the digital humanities as a suburban public space of civil discourse.[iii] As Moya Bailey points out, the “ ‘add and stir’ model of diversity” needs to be challenged, since instead of “meeting people where they are, where people of color, women, people with disabilities are already engaged in digital projects, there’s a making of room at an already established table.”
#transformdh’s background in fandom studies illustrates how digital humanities scholarship can reject the “add and stir” model of diversity for one that recognizes the transformative potential of the various publics who encounter literary periods that are often dominated in University curricula by white, heteronormative, Western figures. The word “transformative” comes from the Organization for Transformative Works: a predominantly female non-profit organization that (among other things) values “the unhindered cross-pollination and exchange of fannish ideas and cultures while seeking to avoid the homogenization or centralization of fandom.” The word “transformative” in “transformative works” refers specifically to the idea that fannish ideas should be considered “transformative” for legal purposes — or protected as something with “a new purpose, sensibility, or mode of expression.” The argument about “transformative” use has been instrumental in the remix movement as well as in the long-standing series of court cases brought against HathiTrust and Google by the Author’s Guild. In the 2015 Second Circuit ruling of Author’s Guild v Google Inc, Judge Pierre Leval suggests that transformative use promotes a finding of fair use because “a transformative use is one that communicates something new and different from the original or expands its utility, thus serving copyright’s overall objective of contributing to public knowledge.” Key in this quote, for me, is the idea that contributing to public knowledge means expanding the utility of the original among different groups. The model, in other words, doesn’t address inclusivity on the level of an already established table — to use Bailey’s metaphor. Rather, it suggests a space of discourse that is produced through the utility of the transformative work. Further on, Leval quotes from Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., in which parodic use of a copyrighted source is based upon using “a prior author’s composition to […] comment[] on that author’s works” or the “substance or style of the original” (17). In both instances, the legal foundation of transformative use depends upon an intention to transform the original work in order to critique or otherwise challenge the message of the original text.
One can see this appeal to transformative critique in the work accomplished by #transformdh. Participants in the 2015 conference, for instance, created video essays that encapsulated their hopes for transforming the digital humanities by acknowledging the various publics contributing to digital work. M. Asli Dukan’s “The Invisible Universe in Speculative Fiction” argued that the white supremacist imagination of speculative fiction reflected the segregationist practices of sundown towns in early 20th-century America —where any black person caught in such towns after dark was “subject to harassment, violence or even death.” Dukan ends her video essay by looking at the rise of black speculative fiction in film since the 1990s, but the overall impression of the piece combines some of the best transformative practices found in both digital humanities and cultural studies. The use of a video essay experiments with new forms of scholarly multimedia that are becoming more widely practiced in the online communities where digital humanities scholars operate. Included with the embedded video on the site is a film script that shows just how much planning went into its production, while surveying the multimodal affordances of the video essay as a scholarly genre. Narration, shots, and cuts are included with descriptions of the images and sound produced by the video. At the same time, Dukan uses her video essay to uncover transformative possibilities in the discourse of film history. By highlighting figures from the history of black speculative film like Sun Ra, Henry Bellafonte, and Bill Gunn, Dukan is able to show how decades of speculative alternate histories simmered beneath the white supremacist assumptions of film history. She claims with an optimistic tone that resounds in many of the projects highlighted by the #transformdh collective, “Black creators of SF […] ‘have adopted and adapted the genre’ to suit their needs.” This sense of adoption and adaptation is crucial to black science fiction, Transformative Works, and #transformdh.
Dukan’s video essay asks a question that is also important when considering the various transformative possibilities of the digital humanities and Victorian Studies: to what degree can different publics adopt and adapt Victorian history to suit their needs? Apart from providing open access to sites that otherwise lock their non-academic audiences out of participation, it is incredibly difficult to find opportunities for public adaptation of online research in Victorian scholarship. The SIMILE timeline used in Felluga’s BRANCH project, for instance, makes it easy to experience the content provided on the timeline, but there are no options for audiences to contribute content. Originally developed as a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments project has since been discontinued, though open-source versions of its projects continue to be developed occasionally by a loosely-grouped community of programmers. SIMILE timelines are made with a JavaScript program that embeds data culled from a Google Spreadsheet. The data for Timeline is formatted through JSON and PHP or MySQL.[iv] While the lines of PHP code enable dynamic modification of the SIMILE timeline when users update the content of the Google Spreadsheet, in practice this process is more complicated due to how the code incorporates multiple data formats.[v] Further, while SIMILE allows multiple people to contribute to timelines, there is no functionality that enables people to see different contributors or their impact on the timeline shown on the front-end. At best, SIMILE crowdsources representations of linear and homogeneous time — giving users the ability to contribute to what is ultimately a single temporal narrative about the nineteenth century.
[ii] Stewart’s analysis is focused on “montization and algorithmic thinking and status quo interests” as amounting to a “takeover” of the enthusiasm many scholars and public academics felt for Twitter in 2008.
[iii] See, for instance, Amy Earhart’s blog chronicling The Diverse History of the Digital Humanities. In the first post, she argues that many digital humanities scholars are “ahistorical” and typified by “broad statements that suggest that only one vein of work is digital humanities, an inaccurate understanding of where we have been and where we are going.” The blog compliments her forthcoming book Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies and showcases what Earhart calls “lost” digital humanities projects like Sharon Harris’s Early American Women Writers, in which websites covering traditionally marginalized groups seem to be forgotten in more of the recent discussions about the digital humanities and diversity.
[iv] JSON (“JavaScript object notation”) is a programming language syntax based upon JavaScript, which provides real-time server-to-server communication of data without the need for downloading applications like Flash or Java. SIMILE timelines leverage JSON in order to transmit data from Google Spreadsheets to the site featuring the timeline. PHP (“hypertext preprocessor”) is a server-side programming language for HTML (“hypertext markup language”) that can be mixed with various tags in order to give executable functionality to websites. Similarly MySQL is a relational database management system that is an open-source version of the database programming language SQL. Initially called SEQUEL (“Structured English QUEry Language”), SQL was developed in the 1970s and eventually changed its name to SQL for copyright reasons. SQL was one of the first database management systems to allow multiple tags for search queries.
[v] Since multiple data formats can be used by the JavaScript operating SIMILE, the program can create multiple problems negotiating with the standards of various departments that might be hosting the software.