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Dear colleagues,
The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) kindly invites you to the next virtual DH-Kolloquium on August 7, 2020, at 5 pm. Our guest is Antonio Rojas Castro (BBAW, Proyecto Humboldt Digital, and Programming Historian) who will talk about "FAIR enough? Building DH Resources in an Unequal World".
The presentation (see the abstract below), will be pre-recorded and made available at the beginning of the Kolloquium, i.e. on August 7, 2020, at 5 pm. The link to the lecture will be posted on the Twitter account of the DH-Kolloquium (@DHBBAW). The discussion with the presenter (@RojasCastroA) will also take place on Twitter (#dhberlin).
# FAIR enough? Building DH Resources in an Unequal World Antonio Rojas Castro (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
The world that Digital Humanities practitioners inhabit is a place defined by uneven distribution of wealth and systemic oppressions. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues in his recent book La cruel pedagogía del virus (The Cruel Pedagogy of the Virus) (Sousa Santos, 2020), the COVID-19 has exacerbated the inequalities in the Global North and in the Global South; but the unmask of inequalities is not a new topic in the field of Digital Humanities. For the last decade many scholars have been defending a critical approach to open access, computational tools, algorithms and cultural datasets (Galina, 2014; Fiormonte, Numerico and Tomasi, 2015, Rio Grande, 2018, Earhardt, 2018, Risam, 2019, Noble, 2019). In addition to the work of individuals, group initiatives like Global Outlook::DH[1]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn1 have also enabled debates on social justice, diversity and inclusivity.
In this presentation I aim to establish a dialogue with previous interventions that critique the Digital Humanities as a universalist, not situated and scientific field whose epistemological frameworks, methods and tools can be applied anywhere, anytime and under all conditions. To do so I will examine, expand and question the FAIR Principles initiated by FORCE11.[2]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn2 These principles are four: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability. They implicitly suggest a moral idea of “fairness” or “justice” that should guide “data producers and publishers” to maximize the “added-value gained by contemporary, formal scholarly digital publishing” (Wilkinson et al., 2016). Although the FAIR Principles were originated in the context of e-science, they have already been adopted by library associations like LIBER[3]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn3 and some DH scholars have also evaluated them (Dunning, Smaele and Böhmer, 2017) and used them as guiding principles for developing digital archives (Calamai and Frontini, 2018).
Drawing on examples derived from the Programming Historian en español (PHes)[4]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn4 and the Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD), I will argue that, while the FAIR Principles can guide how we build DH resources in the Global North, any attempt to apply them in the Global South (especially in Latin American countries) may replicate colonialist practices that ignore the digital divide and local needs and practices in favor of hegemonic standards (Priani Saisó, 2019). This caveat is especially relevant for cooperation projects that involve scholars, librarians, archivists and other professionals with different backgrounds, that are based in different countries, speak different languages and have different needs and motivations. In brief, building FAIR resources is a praiseworthy goal, but in order to produce an emancipatory knowledge, that (perhaps) will repair some inequalities, we should avoid cultural cloning and cognitive extractivism and instead sustain an ecology of knowledge.
[1]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref1 http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/ [2]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref2 https://www.force11.org/ [3]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref3 https://libereurope.eu/ [4]https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref4 https://programminghistorian.org/es/
We are looking forward to the discussion,
Stefan Dumont Susanne Haaf Frederike Neuber Christian Thomas --
Frederike Neuber
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften TELOTA (http://www.bbaw.de/telota) Jean Paul-Briefedition (https://www.jeanpaul-edition.de)
Kontakt: Jägerstraße 22/23, 10117 Berlin, Raum 458 Telefon: +49 (0)30 20370 395 [derzeit nur per e-mail erreichbar!] Email: frederike.neuber@bbaw.demailto:frederike.neuber@bbaw.de
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Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik (https://www.i-d-e.de/) RIDE- A review journal for digital editions and resources (Managing Editor, https://ride.i-d-e.de/)