Dear all,

sorry to be slow answering. First of all, I would like to call your attention on a key aspect of the Global Debates CFP: we will publish all original papers online! The printed volume will be in English, but the online version will be multilingual. As far as I know this is one of the first experiments of this kind not only in the DH field (Marin Dacos rightly remembered http://net-lang.net/, a remarkable *bilingual* project). I think we should be grateful to both the series editors and Minnesota UP for accepting this challenge. As already pointed out by members of this list, this would be one of the first time that a group of scholars not based in (or linked to) Anglophone institutions will co-edit a collection published in the US. In DDH2016 out of around 50 published texts only two or three were authored by people not based in Anglophone organizations (i.e. US, UK, Australia). Paola, Sukanta, and I are very grateful to Matt and Lauren because they wanted to challenge and may be reverse this trend. Judging for the encouraging public and private messages we got so far it seems that the non-English DH community is celebrating this event, and we are all excited about moving the project forward.

But of course as all projects, also the Global Debates volume project has some limitations, both in terms of resources and scope. Paola, Sukanta and I have discussed at length the translation problem, and we will be happy to find alternative and creative solutions for translating accepted papers. If a prospect author will not have the resources to translate his/her final text, we’ll try to find a solution with the help of the publisher, the series editors, and of course everyone in the DH international community.

However, the first step of the process would be to select abstracts, which can submitted in other languages than English (see the CFP). In conclusion, we believe the risk of exclusion of accepted papers would be very low, and the alarm should be watered down. It will be in our responsibility as editors to ensure that the whole process will be conducted in a fair, equal and transparent way.

Personally, I agree with Ernesto Priani: solutions to the linguistic and/or cultural exclusion should be designed preferably *from* the South and *for* the South. Two years ago we created a South-South dialogue group, and we started to discuss these issues. Here are some of the ideas we’ve been discussing, first in Malaga and this year in Rome (https://epriego.wordpress.com/2017/04/06/digital-humanitieshumanidades-digitalesinformatica-umanistica/):

http://cshdsur.es/descargas/SOCIAL_SCIENCES_AND_DIGITAL_SOUTH%20HUMANITIES.pdf

One final remark. This thread started from a legitimate concern on language policies, but honestly I don’t think that monolingualism is the biggest problem of DH (and in general of science: http://m.scidev.net/sub-saharan-africa/publishing/news/southern-scholars-missing-development-journals.html): we all know that the real problem is the supremacy of the Anglophone epistemological models, structures, organizations that have a direct effect on the educational models and on the ways of constructing and disseminating knowledge and research. As you can see from the wide range of CFP topics, our scope (and hope) is that the contributions to the volume will address these structural problems.

Saluti a tutt*

Domenico