Dear all,
I am sending this message both to Humanist and GO::DH mailing lists. So apologies for deliberate cross-posting.
First I’d like to congratulate all those colleagues that have made possible the GO::DH initiative, to which I was very happy to offer immediately my collaboration.
As you perhaps already know I've been critical of the present DH scenario (see http://www.academia.edu/1932310/Towards_a_Cultural_Critique_of_Digital_Human...) I’ve quickly drafted a list of reflections and questions that I think will be of interest to both communties. I am aware that my list is by no means exhaustive, and above all does not offer well-structured arguments or imply easy solutions to the problems. So I’d be very grateful if you could expand/criticize/improve it.
1) The first issue I’d like to raise is very well-known, and we’ve been discussing it on Humanist for a long time (a probe of the Humanist archive will prove useful on this), and that is the problem of cultural and linguistic dominance. Despite all the efforts of our academic community, a regrettable tendency persists to consider any event at which English is spoken as "international" and anything else as only "national". Far too many conferences, initiatives, books, research projects, etc. which happen outside the “core” countries (USA, Canada, UK, sometimes Australia) go unnoticed even when presented or written in English. Information only flows one way, and too often it appears as if the hidden agenda is to incorporate and absorb rather than collaborate.
My question is: how much are our Anglo-American colleagues aware that the lingua franca and its connected scientific discourses are proprietary, just like most of the technology (i.e. software, search engines, etc.) built upon it? And how can we free ourselves from this mutual prejudice and at the same time giving up in our efforts to foster a truly “equal” communication?
To be amicably provocative: shall I claim my universal right, as non-native speaker, to speak badly a foreign language without being openly or implicitly discriminated? Is it an anarchist’s dream to imagine a world free from (the guardians of) Grammar? At the dawn of Humanae Litterae, Latin was the non-proprietary lingua franca, and cultural authority was built on classical texts (whose authors were no longer able to “correct” you…) rather than on the triad Finance-Technology-Weapons.
2) One of the first problems that stems from linguistic-cultural dominance is that of institutional governance. I will never reach your level of linguistic skills (this email cost me days of work and then I asked a native speaker to revise it). So how can I compete with my native speaker colleagues when it is time to - for example - participate in a public debate or election? Are democracy and participation language-proof instruments or rather the essence of linguistic practice?
3) I think that the Low-Mid-High income pattern adopted by the GO::DH group puts on an economic basis something that is not strictly dependent on money. In general, culture and knowledge are not directly bound to income. Sometimes they generate income, but we do not treat knowledge the same as any other commodity, firstly because it is a dynamic concept, and secondly because you cannot trade it *universally* (your knowledge on how to fix a Harley Davidson is not exchangeable with my knowledge of Swahili, etc.). So I think that to say you want to establish collaborations with "low income" countries is a risky way of categorizing and stressing differences rather than imagining peer-to-peer relationships (as if we were speaking of knowledge and not of commodities). I know the GODH (forgive us!) group didn't mean that, but I'm questioning the way they are presenting the initiative. To an external but old DHer like me, it sounds like another attempt to find 'international' legitimacy without really tackling the geopolitical issues involved.
4) Epistemic (in)justice. This is arguably an expansion of point 1). People in different cultures have different ways of expressing ideas. It is widely known that international journals and conferences reject papers because they do not meet certain rhetorical and stylistic standards. But where are these standards designed? Too often problems are not merely stylistic, but involve cultural, social and political aspects. In the last fifteen years, I've edited four collections of international essays (3 out of 4 were DH texts) and I became very sensitive to this problem. As an Italian epistemologist working in France has recently argued "among the many epistemic injustices that we commit in academia, one of the strongest is linguistic injustice ... . Some of [our] arguments may appear less convincing than those coming from an Oxford educated philosopher because the style of writing and structuring of thoughts we have learned is radically different." [http://social-epistemology.com/2012/09/07/gloria-origgi-reply-to-paul-faulkn...]
5) I will spare you the issue of the mechanisms of political representation, but as I argued in my Koln paper I think we have much to learn from (and experiment with) the treatment of knowledge as a commons. Much of the criticism about the cultural biases of DH (i.e. how it can benefit or harm the collective good) may be understood from this perspective. I suggest you to read Teresa Numerico’s paper on the CCEH website: http://www.cceh.uni-koeln.de/files/Numerico.pdf In conclusion, I really hope that GO::DH will finally become an opportunity to address at least some of these problems in a spirit of collaboration, intellectual generosity and cultural sensibility.
All the best
Domenico