Bonjour Fr¨¦d¨¦ric,
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
¡Ù 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!