CFP: Digital Humanities Quarterly Special Issue on Minimal Computing

Alex Gil (Columbia University) and Roopika Risam (Salem State University), guest editors of Digital Humanities Quarterly, have released a call for proposals for a special edition on minimal computing. From the call:

Minimal computing can be defined as any form of digital or computational praxis done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, agency or other factors. Within the context of digital humanities scholarship, minimal computing refers to such computing practices used for teaching, research, and the construction and maintenance of a hybrid — digital and analog — scholarly and cultural record.

Broadly construed, our scope is not limited to digital scholarship within the confines of universities and thus includes work undertaken in galleries, archives (institution and community-based), and libraries, as well as in collaboration with communities. In this issue, we strive for equity in gender and particularly encourage submission by women and gender minorities. We further actively seek to include at least one contribution from each of the following geographical areas: Latin America, Africa, and Asia. We are able to accept submissions in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Suggested topics include:

• Minimal hardware: aged machines, USBs, arduinos, simple circuits, etc.
• Minimal computation: simple scripts, bash, tranductions, etc.
• Static site generation
• Teaching fundamentals of computing tied to subjects in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences
• Forms of making-do in relation to computation: jugaad, hacktivism, DIY
• Technological disobedience, i.e. using technologies in a way they were not intended
• Marginal forms of knowledge and memory production involving computation
• A critique of minimal or minimalist approaches undertaken by choice, rather than by necessity
• Genealogies of minimalist forms of computation
• Case studies on projects that address a multiplicity of costs (environment, bandwidth, access, maintenance, etc) and needs (publishing, remembrance, resistance, etc) with an overall reduction in complexity
• Implications of minimal computing practices for universities, libraries and archives.

Abstracts are due January 30, 2020.