Hi Domenico,

As you know, I'm really glad you joined GO::DH (and have now provided us with a great way of pronouncing it), in part because your work is one of the things that really got me thinking about this.

I've got some comments (but not answers) picking up some of your threads below.

On 13-01-20 10:29 AM, Domenico Fiormonte wrote:

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.

As a native English speaker, I'm not necessarily in the best position to comment on what the best approach to dealing with this problem is. I do know that it is something that is coming up more and more frequently, in part again due to your influence as well as that of others, however.

At ADHO, for example, an issue that has not yet been answered but is front and centre at the moment involves cultural normalisation of academic discourse: it is not just that English becomes a norm linguistically, it is that Anglo-American norms as to how things like abstracts are to be composed becomes a de facto norm (see your point 5).

Alex, Marcus, Titi, and I discussed this a number of times during our debates about putting together GO::DH. The approach we came up with as a start for this list was to encourage people to use the language they feel works for the context they are in. We also hope to encourage people who share that language to translate or paraphrase contributions as a community service when they feel it is appropriate or useful. This can be done simply as part of a given thread.

This approach is based on the idea that many of us have some reading knowledge of more than one language and can sometimes follow the basic sense of what we are reading. If something is particularly difficult, we might find a paraphrase helpful, but may not need a full translation. And of course sometimes only a full translation will work.

We took this approach to publicising the initiative and are taking to translating the website; it's even been used once or twice already on the list. Mostly the direction has been English --> other languages; but there have been a couple of times already on the list where the original language was not English and members of the list have decided whether or not things needed translated.

One advantage of this approach, it seems to me--especially when we are dealing with material that was not originally written in English--is that it at least begins to let native English speakers in on the point you discuss above: what it feels like to not be a native speaker of the dominant language in a conversation; and it normalises the idea that we need to pay attention in our professional language use (whether English or something else) to the needs of others who are not native speakers.

I doubt it is a perfect approach and one of the things I've learned already at GO::DH is that the mix of experiences /always/ produces improvements. But that was our starting point.

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?

This is a really serious issue and one that I'm not quite sure what to do about.

When we put together the call for volunteers we tried to emphasise how important linguistic and cultural diversity of experience is for a group like this. But that doesn't eliminate the "competition" problem you mention and I'm sure it impacts the willingness and confidence of volunteers who are not (near) native English speakers.

We discussed this in the very initial stages of putting the original proposal together. We thought then that one way of acknowledging the issue might be by making cross-linguistic/regional/cultural collaboration a fundamental part of our organisation. So now that we have an executive, for example, we had been thinking that one proposal might be that all offices at GO::DH be led by a pair of people drawn from different regions, linguistic communities, and/or types of economies. So instead of a single webmaster, we might have two webmasters, drawn from more than one region, language, cultural population.

We thought this might get really interesting if, as seems likely, we also end up organising things in part by region. Let's say we had a Europe working group. Under this principle, it would be chaired by somebody from Europe AND somebody from somewhere else--from Africa, perhaps, or China. Same would be true of a Caribbean workgroup or one focussing on North or South America.

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.

This is an absolutely central question, I think. Again, I can only tell you what our thinking was. How things play out in the future, we can't know.

The first point is that we are not using income level to describe cultures or knowledge. We are using it to map a communications and collaborative disconnect. For whatever reason (and I'm not competent to say why), the DH world is currently divided along a line that corresponds to high income economies vs. all other types of economies (this is something I got from your work, in fact); all national scholarly societies who are members of ADHO are based in high income economies; most individual members of ADHO-supported or acknowledged DH mailing lists come from those same economies; funding from the agencies ADHO members most often turn to is also generally staying within this divide (with an increasing number of exceptions).

A founding premise of GO::DH is that this division by income level should not be intrinsic to our discipline or our research practice. In other words, the impulse behind what we are doing was in fact to address the very fact you note: there is no intrinsic reason why the income level of your economy should dictate your ability to work with, learn from, and teach others doing similar work (beyond any specific infrastructure or political restrictions, of course).

Our second founding principle is that GO::DH is not an aid programme. That is to say it is not an asymmetrical attempt by people in high income economies to help people in mid and low income economies. Instead it is a community of interest for people who want to break down the barriers that seem to be preventing us from collaborating as symmetrically as possible with each other on a global basis.

Absolutely key to this approach is the recognition that we are peers. People have different skills, abilities, resources, and, perhaps most importantly, experiences: our idea is that participation in a forum that allows us to share these skills, abilities, resources, and experiences improves everybody's ability to use technology in the research, teaching, art, and advocacy.

In fact I think this is probably the best thing about this list already: the exchange is improving everybody's understanding already. The actual GO::DH proposal was massively improved and sharpened by the exchange of experiences we had at the Cuba meeting Ray arranged; the minimal computing group that is starting to form comes directly out of a similar sharing of resources, ideas, and especially experience.

So I think you are exactly right about the dangers of both seeing this as an aid programme and using income difference as an explanation of cultural difference or scientific ability rather than simply a way identifying the locus of a communications gap that does not need to exist.

I would disagree, for this reason, with your analogy. We are not trying to create a place where knowing how to fix a Harley Davidson can be exchanged for a knowledge of Swahili. Rather we are trying to set up a place where motorcycle mechanics can help improve each others practice by sharing their different experiences and knowledge of different models: Harley vs. Hero Honda, for example. Or a place where linguists might improve their typological knowledge by sharing knowledge with experts in a wide variety of different languages and language families. This is why it is crucial that we understand ourselves as peers: we are collectively helping each other by sharing our specific knowledge, experience, and (different types of) resources.

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...]

I think something like GO::DH should make us aware of this and keep it front and centre: certainly it seems to me to be part of sharing experience. As I mentioned above, this is an increasingly commented upon issue. I can't see us hindering discussion of it, at the very least.

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.

I think this is what we are hoping to do. At least it is what I'm interested in.

As I say, the above are comments rather than answers: your essay in the Koln dialogues was actually one of the starting points for my thinking about the specific construction of GO::DH and it has informed my contributions to the work that has gone on since then--which is probably why there's something for all 5!

But I think it is easy to fall into the traps you point out, and some of the most significant may not be open to "solution" rather than simply awareness. All you can do is your best!

All the best

Domenico

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