Hello everyone,
This is a debate I myself am very interested in. I have tried to do things about it, for example by doing bilingual interviews ( http://4humanities.org/?s=redhd&x=0&y=0), or by participating remotely and IRL in events back in Mexico (http://disidenciacognitiva.wordpress.com/).
The effort it takes to individually do something bilingually, for example, is, literally, a double effort. Sometimes to little reward. At least immediate reward. I keep hopeful it will be useful somehow for someone in the future at least.
I'd like to say as well that a concentration of power or notoriety does not only happen between English-speaking academic cultures and the rest. It happens here in London (UK) too, for example. If you are outside the 'big two' London unis, it's like you don't exist. Plenty of people doing interesting stuff around/about/ digital technologies in the humanities and social sciences, but because our workplaces are not officially labeled as DH then it's harder to intervene, coexist or even get recognised by 'the centres'. This does not happen at the individual, social, human level though, it's more of a cultural phenomenon that often transcends individual wills or agencies.
I agree with Isabel there is a need to develop channels for communication. I'd also say we need to develop a culture of communication and collaboration. And more importantly, a *global* culture of communication and collaboration: that is, one that has an awareness of difference and that is willing to do things and think outside the box. This means doing stuff beyond the job description, and often in other languages than our own.
As a member of ACH and ADHO committees I can say that from English-speaking countries/institutions there is A LOT of interest in integrating/recognising/encouraging/acknowledging/getting to know/collaborating with non-English speaking scholars and their institutions. There is no anti non-English DH agenda at all, but a lot of good will and eagerness to widen access and participation.
As Alex has suggested, I also believe that those of us who also do or want to do DH-related research/practice in other languages than English need to reach out. Reach out to each other regardless of country or mother tongue. In my humble opinion there is both the need to develop 'literatures' in our mother tongues --as Alex also suggested-- but we also need to stop seeing the English language as the de facto enemy, "the language of conquest, the influx/of the language of hard nouns,/the language of metal," (Atwood).
In the same way that it is expensive, complicated and mostly impractical to host fully multilingual international conferences (maybe only the European Parliament and the United Nations have the infrastructure to make this viable) I honestly don't see a time in which it is not necessary to engage in scholarly communications in English at some point or another. Expecting DH to become completely multilingual (for example in a conference in Nebraska) seems very unlikely. If they don't come to us, we might need to go to them. If they ignore us, we need to make ourselves unavoidable, unmissable, ubiquituous.
Just my two cents...
All the best
Ernesto
On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 8:09 AM, Frédéric Clavert frederic@clavert.netwrote:
Thanks, Isabel.
Something happened at THATCamp Paris 2010 for the French (more than the French speaking) DH, is that we all realised that we were doing something that could be labelled as "DH" but most of us did no know it. Everything was ready to start building a French DH community, it just lacked a kind of "founding" event - and THATCamp Paris and the writing of our manifesto became this event.
Best, Frédéric
2013/4/29 igalina igalina@unam.mx:
The experience we are having with the RedHD (Red de Humanidades
Digitales)
is that there ARE people who are working on DH projects, usually not
calling
themselves digital humanists at all. However, the problem is not that
they
don't call themselves digital humanists. The problem is the enormous difficulties we have encountered to actually find the few people that we have managed to find. It seems to be based on chance, luck and fortuitous conversations. Why is is that projects in English are more visible than other ones?
Because
the DH network is primarily for and by English speaking colleagues? I
don't
know. What I do think is that although we have managed to find DH
projects
in Spanish these people are not connected between themselves. It seems
to be
that the communication channels are not properly established, or if they exist we haven't been able to tap into them. I for one think that they do not exist and this is what we have to focus on (one of the great things about this list, for example). These communication channels can allow us
to
find and connect and then yes, hopefully collaborate in the language most favourable. Best, Isabel
Dra. Isabel Galina Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) igalina@unam.mx
De: globaloutlookdh-l-bounces@uleth.ca [
globaloutlookdh-l-bounces@uleth.ca]
en nombre de Alex Gil [colibri.alex@gmail.com] Enviado: lunes, 29 de abril de 2013 03:37 p.m. Para: A list for participants in the ADHO DH Global Outlook Community Asunto: Re: [globaloutlookDH-l] A revolution yet to happen
Bonjour Frédéric,
Judging from individual conversations I've had while helping build our
small
global network, I can hazard that your feeling is shared by most of us
here
at GO::DH. One of the explicit goals of GO::DH is precisely to make the work done in other languages and areas of the world visible to the
English
dominant, but I would remind us that the vice versa is as equally
important.
I understand Craig's comments about DH ≠ the world, to mean that DH may
very
well be practiced by another name and another flavor in many parts of the world today. These conversations remind me of the early years of the Comintern, when they set out to take the gospel of Marxism to "the third world," and came back to Moscow with the realization that Marxism was already out there, the world just didn't call it that! In short, nothing
can
happen until we have a large network founded on mutual recognition.
We have much work to do in the francophone world, and we hope that means
not
just France or projects IN France about the francophone world. I myself
have
been focusing on the hispanophone world, and I can tell you we have many challenges building networks there. Yes, we are using the problematic
brand
of DH as the banner to unite, perhaps because networks need common brands (as far as I can see), but also because we can envision a truly global annual conference and a community of practitioners and theorists of the digital arts. While we develop robust traditions in these languages, we can't expect the English "center" to always pay attention, but that
doesn't
trouble me much as long as we get enough attention to tap into the desire for collaboration that Craig signals.
I myself couldn't care much for what Bethany Nowviskie calls the "typical markers of academic prestige." I do know that many of you are worried
about
those, and I sympathize, but I encourage you to seize the much more
present
task of building "literatures" in our languages and discuss our different relationships to technology writ-large. In the end we are challenged (sometimes blessed) by the status of English as lingua franca (once
French,
Latin, Arabic, Chinese, etc) and its role as the code-base from which our digital systems borrow their cultural assumptions, but this should be no insurmountable obstacle to building language-specific traditions and communities.
As David suggests, GO::DH could also be that place where we carefully
grate
our regional and cultural assumptions about technology against the grain
of
different environments in order to refine those assumptions. In my view, these slightly unharmonious encounters will be precisely what we need in order to shed more clarity on the relationship between scholarship and technology in a global context (if such a thing is possible).
Count on me for the beers too!
On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 7:29 AM, Frédéric Clavert frederic@clavert.net wrote:
Dear all,
I'm new to the list - I knew I should have been member of it for a while - and my first message will be an answer to an answer to a post of mine.
Yes, my quantitative examples are flimsy. But my post is not based on them. It's just an illustration to a feeling which is: there are many non-english speaking DH projects that are somewhere on a hidden continent, because they're not in English. And it would be great to bring them a bit of light.
As for as action is concerned, I already participated to several THATCamp Organisation committees (Paris (twice), Florence, Luxembourg-Trier) and organised two conferences on history and the digital era in Luxembourg (and the third is on its way). I also have to deal with a team of enginers, documentalists and one historian (myself) that work on the present and future of a multilingual digital library (http://www.cvce.eu).
Beyond that, I never refuse a beer.
best, Frédéric
2013/4/28 Alex Gil colibri.alex@gmail.com:
Let us begin it. Que comience!
On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 10:53 PM, Craig Bellamy <txt@craigbellamy.net
wrote:
Dear GO
I find the post curious Domenico, but the DH is just a small part of the world, it isn't the world. The post is reductive and build on some monumental and flimsy quantitative generalisations. What's wrong
with
down-loading a text, marking it up, playing around with it and
posting
it for others to have a look at?. There is no action in the post and
the
ideas in it could be broken down into a few blocks of quality time where
some
excellent work could be produced. The DH is about technology and if there are barriers to applying technology in all sorts of social or
cultural
contents then there are some really nice people who could be asked
for
assistance.
If Frederic is ever in Melbourne I'll take him out for a beer.
Kind regards,
Craig
On 27/04/2013 11:04 PM, Domenico Fiormonte wrote:
I guess people on this list would be interested in reading this post by Frédéric Clavert:
http://www.clavert.net/the-digital-humanities-multicultural-revolution-did-n...
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-- Dr Craig Bellamy Research Fellow ___________________________ Computing and Information Systems The University of Melbourne Parkville, Melbourne, Australia ___________________________ w: craigbellamy.net
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