Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 34, No. 196.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2020-07-29 13:26:31+00:00
        From: Frederike Neuber 
        Subject: Virtual presentation at Berlin's DH-Kolloquim, 7.8.2020: Antonio Rojas Castro „FAIR enough? Building DH Resources in an Unequal World“

Dear colleagues,

The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) kindly invites you to the
next virtual DH-Kolloquium on August 7, 2020, at 5 pm. Our guest is Antonio
Rojas Castro (BBAW, Proyecto Humboldt Digital, and Programming Historian)
who will talk about "FAIR enough? Building DH Resources in an Unequal
World".

The presentation (see the abstract below), will be pre-recorded and made
available at the beginning of the Kolloquium, i.e. on August 7, 2020, at 5
pm. The link to the lecture will be posted on the Twitter account of the
DH-Kolloquium (@DHBBAW). The discussion with the presenter (@RojasCastroA)
will also take place on Twitter (#dhberlin).

--
*# FAIR enough? Building DH Resources in an Unequal World*
Antonio Rojas Castro (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)

The world that Digital Humanities practitioners inhabit is a place defined
by uneven distribution of wealth and systemic oppressions. As Boaventura de
Sousa Santos argues in his recent book La cruel pedagogía del virus (The
Cruel Pedagogy of the Virus) (Sousa Santos, 2020), the COVID-19 has
exacerbated the inequalities in the Global North and in the Global South;
but the unmask of inequalities is not a new topic in the field of Digital
Humanities. For the last decade many scholars have been defending a
critical approach to open access, computational tools, algorithms and
cultural datasets (Galina, 2014; Fiormonte, Numerico and Tomasi, 2015, Rio
Grande, 2018, Earhardt, 2018, Risam, 2019, Noble, 2019). In addition to the
work of individuals, group initiatives like Global Outlook::DH[1]
(https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn1) have also enabled debates on social
justice, diversity and inclusivity.

In this presentation I aim to establish a dialogue with previous
interventions that critique the Digital Humanities as a universalist, not
situated and scientific field whose epistemological frameworks, methods and
tools can be applied anywhere, anytime and under all conditions. To do so I
will examine, expand and question the FAIR Principles initiated by FORCE11.
[2] (https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn2) These principles are four:
Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability. They
implicitly suggest a moral idea of 'fairness' or 'justice' that should
guide 'data producers and publishers' to maximize the 'added-value gained
by contemporary, formal scholarly digital publishing' (Wilkinson et al.,
2016). Although the FAIR Principles were originated in the context of
e-science, they have already been adopted by library associations like LIBER
[3] (https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn3) and some DH scholars have also
evaluated them (Dunning, Smaele and Böhmer, 2017) and used them as guiding
principles for developing digital archives (Calamai and Frontini, 2018).

Drawing on examples derived from the Programming Historian en español (PHes)
[4] (https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftn4) and the Proyecto Humboldt Digital
(ProHD), I will argue that, while the FAIR Principles can guide how we
build DH resources in the Global North, any attempt to apply them in the
Global South (especially in Latin American countries) may replicate
colonialist practices that ignore the digital divide and local needs and
practices in favor of hegemonic standards (Priani Saisó, 2019). This caveat
is especially relevant for cooperation projects that involve scholars,
librarians, archivists and other professionals with different backgrounds,
that are based in different countries, speak different languages and have
different needs and motivations. In brief, building FAIR resources is a
praiseworthy goal, but in order to produce an emancipatory knowledge, that
(perhaps) will repair some inequalities, we should avoid cultural cloning
and cognitive extractivism and instead sustain an ecology of knowledge.


[1] (https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref1) http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/
[2] (https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref2) https://www.force11.org/
[3] (https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref3) https://libereurope.eu/
[4] (https://dhd-blog.org/?p=14165#_ftnref4)
https://programminghistorian.org/es/

We are looking forward to the discussion,



Stefan Dumont
Susanne Haaf
Frederike Neuber
Christian Thomas
--

Frederike Neuber
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
TELOTA (http://www.bbaw.de/telota

Jean Paul-Briefedition (https://www.jeanpaul-edition.de)

Kontakt:
Jügerstraße 22/23, 10117 Berlin, Raum 458
Telefon: +49 (0)30 20370 395 [derzeit nur per e-mail erreichbar!]
Email: frederike.neuber@bbaw.de

- - - -

Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik (https://www.i-d-e.de/)
RIDE- A review journal for digital editions and resources (Managing Editor,
https://ride.i-d-e.de/)


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