CFP: Debates in the Digital Humanities 2021

Editors Matthew K. Gold (CUNY Graduate Center) and Lauren F. Klein (Georgia Tech) have released a CFP for the 2021 biannual volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities. From the call, possible topics include:

• DH in the present geopolitical moment. What is the role of the field in combating the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other injustices promoted by the current US administration and other nationalist political movements around the globe?
• What is the role of DH in a future in which neither basic human rights nor environmental sustainability can be assumed?
• Taking stock of the field to date, what has been its impact, either positive or negative? What opportunities and/or challenges remain unaddressed?
• What is the state of the field today? What are the topics, methods, and other approaches that define the digital humanities?
• DH and the world. What are the issues involved in the continued Anglocentrism of the field, as well as its focus on the Global North? What does DH look like in other locales?
• Infrastructures of DH. How do uneven distributions of resources–on national, institutional, organizational, and cultural levels–impact and shape the field?
• DH and indigeneity. How can indigenous perspectives inform the technological and social practices of DH? What additional ideas, approaches, and concerns are raised when considering DH, and data more generally, in indigenous contexts?
• DH and the academy. What is the relationship of the field to the academy, either politically or institutionally? How can DH intervene in the systematic dismantling of higher education currently taking place?
• DH, the disciplines, and allied fields. How should DH be framed in relation to other humanities disciplines and departments? How do (or might) allied fields such as STS, design, data science, media studies, computational social science, and the history of computing inform or be informed by the debates in the digital humanities?
• The development of DH as a field. How do various sub-fields of DH relate to each other? What role does specialization play within in the field of DH and to what extent are specialized publication and presentation venues needed? How might DHers communicate across sub-fields and move beyond them?
• How can concerns about the nature, provenance, meaning, and cultural significance of data that have been explored in DH work to date be applied to broader critiques of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning? How might this work engage with broader concerns about surveillance, privacy, and profit in governmental and corporate “big data” initiatives?
• Who does DH labor? How can the increasingly nuanced conversation surrounding digital labor inform our understanding of the labor involved in doing DH? How might it facilitate the reformation of older practices or the creation of new ones? How might this work inform discussions of data work, as suggested in the point above?
• DH Pedagogy. How should the digital humanities be taught? When should or shouldn’t DH be taught? What role does DH have to play in various curricula and disciplines? What does DH look like at different educational levels and in institutional types?
• DH and its publics. How is DH practiced (or how should it be) when focused on publics outside the academy? What does DH look like when focused on civic advocacy and action?

300 word abstracts due on October 8, 2019.