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Infrastructural Sovereignty in the Black Atlantic
  • Dhanashree Thorat
  • globalDH
  • infrastructure
  • literary studies
  • race
  • Black digital humanities
  • postcolonial digital humanities
  • digital divide

In June 2019, Google announced a new undersea fiber-optic cable line connecting Portugal and South Africa and named it Equiano after Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century Black man who was kidnapped from his Igbo village and sold into slavery. This article reads Google's infrastructural initiative against the grain of Equiano's autobiographical narrative to locate how the violent afterlives of slavery and colonialism manifest in and undergird Internet infrastructure projects today.

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Gestured Labor: A Review of Proxies (2021)
  • Sarah Potvin
  • infrastructure
  • standards
  • proxy
  • labor

Dylan Mulvin's Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In (2021) argues that because proxies maintain a fiction of representativeness, we must be attentive both to their function as stand-ins and to the human labor and bodies that sustain their status.

EN
Unpacking tool criticism as practice, in practice
  • Karin van Es
  • cultural criticism
  • tools
  • digital
  • infrastructure
  • cultural criticism
  • Tool criticism
  • Digital methods
  • Methodology
  • Digital infrastructures

This paper explores tool criticism – a critical attitude required of digital humanities scholars when working with computational tools and digital infrastructures.

EN
New Questions, Next Work
  • Bethany Nowviskie
  • race
  • cultural heritage
  • dh
  • infrastructure
  • cultural criticism
  • social justice
  • Digital humanities
  • Organizing
  • Reform
  • Mutual aid
  • Infrastructure
  • Reflection

We have pathways forward and tantalizing hints, but can scarcely imagine what it will mean to shift from extractive modes of digital research and curation — quantifying, fragmenting, pinning, hoarding — to ones that are generative, healing, open-ended, and which make us whole.

EN
Archives, Information Infrastructure, and Maintenance Work
  • Ciaran B. Trace
  • archives
  • infrastructure
  • Infrastructure
  • maintenance
  • maintenance work
  • humanities scholarship
  • archival work

This article examines the notion of the archive as revealed through a process of infrastructural inversion, with an emphasis on understanding the working information practices of archivists as a prerequisite to any discussion of humanities infrastructure initiatives. Situating the archive as a form of infrastructure and archival labor as a form of maintenance work generates descriptions of archival systems and practices that shine a spotlight on key negotiations and tensions that adhere in a profession that exists in service of others.

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