Hi all,

Sorry for not jumping in earlier. I've been ill and slower than usual. 

James, creating a category for Other that only has Non-English entries is NOT-A-Good-Idea. Take a moment to think about this equation, Other=Non-English, then think about the subjectivities following on the heels of Edward Said's Orientalism. I know this is difficult, but you are moving in the right direction! I salute your effort to create a space for 'positive discrimination,' or affirmative action as the USeans call it.

Since the awards would lose what makes them unique unless voting was 100% volunteer, may I suggest simply continuing the work of advocacy and encouragement behind the scenes. Just do not make any distinction in the categories. Use the other category as Dan suggests, to make sure the community surprises us. We will help you here at GO:DH to reach larger audiences whose main vehicle of digital expression is not English. 

Let me be clear. If you make sure to advocate for a kaleidoscopic and babylonian ecosystem of digital humanities, and show awareness that English models on offer are NOT universal or representative of the rest of us, I'll be on your side if you receive any ill will. 

Your great admirer,
Alex.


On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 6:17 AM, James Cummings <James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi GO::DH,

Me again! Sorry. After summarising the suggestions received here I received a suggestion through other means that I'd like to run by you since it does feed into the desire to encourage non-anglo DH resources to nominate themselves for DH Awards.

As you'll remember some didn't like the annual nature of the awards without a catch-all category of 'other' and some didn't like the non-English category because of a perceived ghettoisation of non-English resources. I resisted the 'other' category for two reasons (1: a *large* category for admin and voters; 2: difficulty of comparison for voters).

The suggestion was made to me that there be an 'Other' category for anything that didn't fit into the other categories, but that nominations in this category be restricted to non-English resources (that didn't fit into any of the other categories and the nominations committee try to move things nominated here to other categories if suitable). The idea behind this suggestion, I believe, is that English resources don't get the benefit of the 'other' category and miss out as previously described, but non-English resources do not. This would be a form of so-called 'positive discrimination' based on the assumption that anglo resources have more than enough innate privileges.

For my part, I found the idea clever but I worry about any form of discrimination (positive or not), and also couldn't think of a way to name it which didn't seem to repeat the perceived ghettoisation that people have seen in this year's category. While I don't think anglo-created resources would suffer unduly because of this, it still seems a bit unfair.

-James

--
Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings@it.ox.ac.uk
Academic IT Services, University of Oxford

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