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Digital Humanities

Abstract

Current conversations around the manifestations of artificial intelligence have led to binary viewpoints that either predict apocalyptic visions of imminent human obsolescence or forthcoming machinic sentience and technological singularity. Amid these polarized perspectives, the materiality of massive digital infrastructures that regularly exploit vulnerable labour forces and the environmental costs driving such emerging forms of digitality are being systematically erased. As a field bridging humanistic enquiry and computational methods, digital humanities finds itself at the epicentre of such debates around the potentials and pitfalls of what artificial intelligence and its futures imply for scholarly and humanistic practices. Therefore, this chapter identifies and reviews interventions from 2023 and early 2024, across both discursive and physical locations, to show how current disciplinary conversations in digital humanities must emerge from both traditional and unconventional sites, which navigate the intersections between artificial and human domains, while emphasizing the provocations and issues that will shape the future of the field.

Introduction

The following review of the year’s work in digital humanities (DH) comes at a pivotal moment when traditional paradigms of knowledge production, access, and circulation are facing significant challenges, through the proliferation of Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots and virtual assistants. The disruptions brought about by GenAI, or, more specifically, large language models that use machine (deep) learning enabled by vast datasets to produce human-like and supposedly creative responses to user prompts, are seen to be particularly acute in the humanities and social sciences. As a field bridging humanistic enquiry and computational methods, DH finds itself at the epicentre of debates around AI, grappling with both the potentials and pitfalls of what its current manifestations imply for scholarly and humanistic practices. Within the binary of AI doomerism and utopianism, extreme viewpoints have emerged that either predict apocalyptic visions of imminent human obsolescence or celebrate the purported achievements of narrow AI (GenAI) as unmistakable evidence for forthcoming machinic sentience and AI singularity (Narrow AI systems, also often known as Weak AI, are designed to address specific and focused tasks with great efficiency but within a limited and predefined domain. They are distinguished from artificial general intelligence [Strong AI], a still hypothetical technology, which will be able to perform wide-ranging tasks with human-level intelligence and expertise.) Amid these polarized perspectives, the materiality of massive digital infrastructures that regularly exploit vulnerable labour forces and the environmental costs driving such emerging forms of digitality are being systematically erased. Therefore, this chapter reviews representative contributions from across 2023 and early 2024 that have been curated with a keen eye towards scholarship that explores the discipline’s role in navigating the intersections between artificial and human domains.

In extending the critical approach taken by the authors while framing their assessment of DH scholarship in last year’s issue of YWCCT, this year we centralize two broad themes: locations/practices and materialities/infrastructures. These themes serve as key lenses shaping the ‘array of convergent practices’ (Schnapp et al. [2015], p. 2) understood to arguably constitute the discipline of DH and build upon the previous year's focus on foregrounding ‘current formation(s) of a global digital humanities […] beyond its normative centers in the Global North’ (Roy and Deshbandhu, pp. 2–3). At the outset we would like to acknowledge some excellent DH-focused and polyvocal contributions from 2023, notable amongst them, the volumes What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom, edited by Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki; Modelling Between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice, edited by Arianna Ciula, Øyvind Eide, Cristina Marras, and Patrick Sahle; and Digital Humanities and Laboratories: Perspectives on Knowledge, Infrastructure and Culture, edited by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger and Christopher Thomson, which could not be covered within the remit of our current analysis. While these works offer valuable insights into various aspects of DH, our curation this year takes a more targeted approach. This is predominantly since our approach focuses not just on temporality and disciplinarity but also the ontological foundations of DH that must be actively addressed during a period when creativity and humanistic enquiry are supposedly being replaced by machinic processes and expertise. Therefore, in the following sections, we highlight a wide range of academic contributions as well as civic technology initiatives, and collectives that align with the enquiries, methods, and practices of Critical DH, regardless of whether these works explicitly identify themselves as DH contributions. We see this approach as essential for ensuring that Global DH remains critical of technopositivist imaginaries and is not confined within specific disciplinary formations or institutional considerations. By incorporating diverse scholarly perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and beyond, the contributions reviewed in this essay facilitate a granular examination of digital cultures, methodologies, and formations as well as the contingent humanistic methods of engagement which can challenge current instrumentalist imaginaries around digital affordances and/in the humanities.

1. Locations/Practices

Through a non-traditional juxtaposition of academic scholarship on DH with the practical work of social sector organizations who address digital access, literacy, and mediation in Global South/majority world spaces (Alam), we hope to highlight the crucial need in DH for constant dialogue between theory and practice. We see the contrasting yet complementary perspectives offered by discursive and physical locations as particularly vital for addressing the exacerbation of existing inequalities by digital affordances. GenAI provides an apt example of such inequalities, wherein human labour from the Global South/majority is exploited to provide the training and testing data for Global North-based AI conglomerates but with no means for the workers to access the resulting benefits (Gray and Suri, Ghost Work [2019]). The authors also hope that such an approach is in line with the call raised in last year’s contribution for polyvocality, the amplification of marginalized voices, and a renewed vigour towards engaging with alternative trajectories and historiographies of DH that often remain overlooked in the academy. Consequently, this section surveys two discursive locations—Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations and Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality: A Practical Guide, a co-authored monograph by Catherine Knight Steele, Jessica H. Lu, and Kevin C. Winstead—alongside the embodied practices from two on-the-ground initiatives situated in the Global South/majority worlds: the Baraza Media Lab from Nairobi, Kenya, and the civic technology organization, Tattle, from India.

On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations is a collection of sixteen essays, with a substantial number emerging from conference talks and colloquia delivered by Ramsay over a fifteen-year period. The common thread connecting these essays is that while they can all be read as standalone reflections on the discipline of DH, they are, in Ramsay's own words, a fervent appeal to current and future DH scholars ‘that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities’ (p. xi). Not surprisingly, this means that these essays deliberately avoid focusing on individual DH projects, institutions, or definitional debates, which often constrain the potential of DH within limited technopositivist imaginaries. Instead, Ramsay foregrounds how digital humanists, as a collective, have a critical responsibility to scrutinize and challenge the underlying power dynamics inherent in the technological tools and systems that are being employed within disciplinary formations of DH and beyond. In the opening essay of his collection, ‘Textual Behaviour in the Human Male’, Ramsay uses the ‘infamous Kinsey report on Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)’ as the springboard for critiquing instrumentalist notions that frequently permeate the field of DH. Ramsay notes that even as an English professor who has ‘spent [his] whole career […] studying computers […] [and has] learned the arcana of statistical mathematics [and] can hold [his] own in a conversation with any computer scientist’ (pp. 7–8), his investment and belief in ‘what makes the humanities “special”’ is due to its ‘alternative ways of knowing and talking’ (p. 8), since the key differentiator for the humanities is its self-reflexive methodologies of discussion and enquiry. Ramsay stresses that the ‘DH bug’ (p. 13) is perfectly epitomized when DH scholars leverage distant reading/algorithmic criticism—dominant methodologies for generating quantitative insights about cultural topics/texts—not just for generating merely numerical signifiers or seeking definitive truths. Instead, Ramsay highlights that for digital humanists to continue positioning themselves and the discipline as a progressive force within academia, aiming to broaden knowledge and accessibility to cultural productions, they must also self-reflexively interrogate their own subjective biases, which are most often linked to socio-economic and institutional privileges. This facet also becomes a key theme in the essay ‘How To Do Things (To Texts) with Computers’, where Ramsay highlights that DH methodologies, in their attempt to do ‘something with the text’ (p. 31; author’s emphasis), often remain limited to doing ‘something about the text’ (p. 32; author’s emphasis). Such approaches, that foreground elusive ‘Strong-AI’-backed programs to ‘do [better] literary criticism, philosophy, or historical analysis’ (p. 35), may undoubtedly lead to more critical (quantitative) insights but provide minimal (qualitative) humanistic engagement. Ramsay asserts the need to (re)locate the role of DH in the current era where humanistic enquiry must address the ethical, social, and political issues of our increasingly technologized worlds and provide insights into the intersections between algorithmic technologies and human experiences.

‘The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around’ stands out as a particularly provocative essay in this collection, where Ramsay admonishes digital humanists who have a singular focus only on the quantitative analysis of an ever-expanding corpus of humanistic texts, all in the hope of making more ‘representative’ humanistic claims (p. 46). Instead, Ramsay argues, the act of surveying small or large corpora of texts through DH (algorithmic) methods must involve ‘screwing around’: an approach that is less invested in developing a normative ‘path through culture’, represented by statistically significant claims, and much more in facilitating the hermeneutics of search and questioning, which are central to humanistic enquiry. This argument is expanded in the chapter on ‘The Art of DH’, where Ramsay reflects on his own work of visualizing key traits in Shakespeare plays through graphical representations. Ramsay locates such graphical representations, often derided in traditional close-reading-based humanistic methods, within the register of artistic expression, since they are both ‘a cut-up, deformed, partial, deliberately constrained view of something that, ironically, allows us to see’ (p. 69). Ramsay’s argument here is a powerful critique of the charges levelled against DH as being a ‘scientizing of the humanities’, and shows how critical tendencies in dominant humanistic enquiry that created divisions between the art(s) and the humanities can be bridged through digital humanistic scholarship and enquiry, which does not foreground ‘results’ but rather creates the provocations mentioned in the subtitle of the book.

Unlike much of the current scholarship and many of the publications in the discipline that concentrate on individual projects or serve only as technical manuals for implementing digital tools and techniques, Ramsay’s volume is distinguished by its focus on the ontologies and foundations of DH. This does not mean that questions around (lack of) diversity in DH scholarship and the importance of intersectional approaches that must foreground race, sexuality, and gender in DH are not underscored. For example, in the essay ‘Digital Humanities and Its Disconnects’ Ramsay addresses a set of wide-ranging and well-founded critiques of DH, emerging from scholars such as Alan Liu and Tara McPherson. Ramsay defends DH and related fields (such as critical code studies) from critics like Liu, who claim that these fields lack the capacity for cultural criticism. Ramsay argues that both DH and traditional cultural studies engage in forms of critical annotation that challenge dominant power structures. Further, he points out that this recognition, mostly missing from contemporary conversations around DH, can allow for new forms of critical (and ‘technical’) annotation to take place through a dialogue between theoretical formulations and the building/making of tools, thereby ensuring that DH justifies its progressive potential. This thread of argument is also supported with empirical evidence from his own experiences in programming as a humanities scholar and his issues with ‘programming described as a “useful skill,” because I know it also as a stirring intellectual exercise’ (p. 121). Further, through essays on a wide range of DH-related topics such as ‘Mining Data’ Ramsay reorients the data-oriented imaginaries of DH—that arguably alienate traditional humanists—firmly within foundational concerns in the humanities as well as more pedagogical concerns within current DH scholarship. Overall, On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations justifies its title and offers vital questions around the grounds that provoke DH as a discipline as well as the issues that must be acknowledged to keep alive its radical potential.

The necessity of recognizing the radical possibilities in DH as well as discussing the current contestations around the discipline becomes the key concern of Knight Steele, Wu, and Winstead’s collaborative monograph, Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality, which draws on their own experiences as leaders of one of the pioneering Black DH programs in the United States, the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum) at the University of Maryland. The lucidly written introduction emphasizes that the authors see ‘Black DH’, situated within Black studies and Black activism, as an exemplar of how students, faculty, administrators, and funders must leverage Black digital studies and DH to bring about more equitable and considerate practices in academia. The authors operationalize the concept of ‘radical intentionality’, at the core of which is ‘care [as] a radical practice in the academy rooted in Black feminist praxis […] [that interweaves] narrative, auto-ethnographic reflection, feminist critique, and critical analysis of artifacts […] for establishing and sustaining research, communities, and programming that is, both and always, intentionally digital and intentionally Black’ (p. 3). The authors highlight that Black DH studies always prioritizes four key objectives—the agency and benefit of Black individuals who are involved, the need to move beyond technopositivist imaginaries, a critical approach towards using digital tools and methods, and the intentional fostering of community-building practices, which challenge the siloed and falsely meritocratic nature of academia. The authors’ key goal is to show how intentionality in DH scholarship and practice can and must become a crucial path for achieving the goals of minority communities. The book’s structure demonstrates in practice the collaborative model it promotes: the introduction, first chapter, and concluding chapter are co-authored, while each author contributed one additional individual chapter. The central argument of the opening co-authored chapter to this monograph, ‘I Don't Love DH; I Love Black Folks’, analyses the current drawbacks of much of contemporary DH scholarship and projects, which primarily prioritize tools, products, and deliverables at the expense of the processes constituting the lives and everyday practices of individuals and communities, especially from historically underprivileged locations. Through using the core programs of AADHum—such as reading groups, conversation series, digital humanities incubators, digitization efforts, and the national conference, ‘Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black’—as case studies, the authors explore how intentional care must involve tactical disruptions and location-specific engagements that inspire and uplift both individuals and communities. The authors particularly focus on making transparent the extensive emotional labour put forward by minoritized individuals, in this case Black women, without whom many vibrant DH initiatives and productive programming would not have existed.

Beyond the particular context of Black digital activism and the contexts of AADHum, Steele, Lu, and Winstead’s arguments extend the assertions of contemporary scholars (Crompton, Lane, and Siemens, Doing Digital Humanities [2016]; Risam, New Digital Worlds [2018]; Roy and Menon, ‘No “Making,” Not Now’ [2022]), who discuss how DH in postcolonial and majority world contexts should not only focus on innovative methodologies and new sites of cultural enquiry but also support the communities from/within whom such scholarship emerges. In a similar vein, in Chapter 2, ‘Where Are All the Black Scholars in Black DH?’, Winstead argues for the need to expand the definition of Black DH to include scholars whose work goes beyond creating conventional DH tools or products. In redefining contemporary debates and definitions in DH, Winstead emphasizes the importance of focusing on initiatives and individuals—such as those studying Black gamers, the activities and impact of Black writers, and Black content creators on social media and digital platforms—which can encourage dialogue and reduce the disconnect around DH between academics and those outside the academy. In an overall excellent book composed of engaging chapters that carry forward the key argument, special mention must be made of Chapter 3, ‘What Are We Going to Eat?’, where Steele operationalizes the basic human necessity of food and its invisibilized role in academic spaces for sustaining the physical, social, and emotional needs of individuals and communities who contribute towards and build DH scholarship. Steele’s argument illuminates a crucial aspect of DH that is often overlooked: the profound connection between the environment in which DH scholarship and teaching occur and its impact on the quality of work produced. Steele suggests that truly innovative scholarship and engaging pedagogies in DH do not emerge in isolation. Instead, they are the product of nurturing ecosystems that span both digital and physical spaces. Chapter 4, ‘If You Teach It, They Will Come’, by Lu, situates the importance of ethical DH pedagogies and practices within the overall project of Black DH. Using examples from her own research in Black DH as well as the undergraduate curriculum emerging from the collaborative work of AADHum, Lu shows how the centring of Black feminist thought can allow for the development of robust, theory-grounded DH programs even in institutions with low infrastructural support for Black and minoritized communities. Lu's practical suggestions provide much food for thought around the institutional formations of DH, which often mimic the frantic rhythm of neoliberal academia. By choosing to reiterate the continued importance of aligning DH research, programming, and pedagogy with a ‘radical intentionality’, Lu provides a roadmap for subverting the transactional nature of disciplinary knowledge, especially in DH, that often permeates institutional structures. The concluding chapter of this book is a set of personal reflections from the co-authors on their experiences with the AADHum initiative, from joining to departure. The authors analyse their experiences through the lens of Blues epistemology, connecting the project’s legacy to the complex histories of Black creativity, justice, and criticism, and provide a vital lesson for DH projects: that while funding can be maintained without intentionality, a community cannot. As a path forward, they suggest the importance of conceptualizing and executing integrity-driven, grant-funded projects as assemblages that should strategically respond to shifting opportunities and power dynamics.

In extending the ambit of collaboration, representation, heteroglossia, and polyvocality in DH beyond discursive locations to embodied practices, we now move on to two on-the-ground initiatives, situated in the Global South/majority worlds: the Baraza Media Lab from Nairobi, Kenya and the civic technology organization, Tattle, from India. A closer look at the Baraza Media Lab details its desire to network, experiment, and share knowledge and in the process create a strong and collective voice for effecting change through digitality. This approach is expected to help it realize its long-term vision of societal impact by forging a community of African storytellers and a (digital) media ecosystem that is keen to work for the public interest. By offering its communities safe spaces for learning, experimentation, and collaboration, the Baraza Media Lab aspires to provide a conducive environment for the emergence of digital/new media initiatives. It also offers a platform for prototyping, informal networks, linkages, capacity-building initiatives, and a vibrant community to engage with. The lab epitomizes a community-focused praxis of DH by engaging with key issues, such as challenges of gender representation in mediascapes, through their programme SheLeads Media, and counters mis/disinformation through its programme Fumbua (launched during the 2022 Kenyan general elections), which collaborates, debunks, trains, amplifies, and provides room for advocacy. In terms of research, Baraza Media Lab engages with digital media practices like podcasting and has tried to situate the nation’s creative industries in social settings by examining how the Covid-19 pandemic affected the sector.

Similarly, Tattle, the civic technology initiative from India, envisages itself as a ‘community of technologists, researchers, and artists working towards a healthier online information ecosystem’ (2024). Tattle, like Baraza, engages with dimensions of gender and mis/disinformation but through different kinds of initiatives. For example, its initiative/online tool Uli hopes to mitigate the effects of online gender-based violence, and provides tools for collective response. Operational on popular browsers like Chrome, Brave, and Firefox, Uli allows the redaction and archival of slurs and abusive content. Tattle also offers the Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU)—a resource for raising public awareness regarding algorithm-based fabrication. By relying on collaborations and the DAU (academics, researchers, startups, tech platforms, fact-checkers, and journalists), it aspires to combat generative AI-based misinformation and manifestations like deepfakes. It has also engaged with game-based learning approaches, and through its adaptive digital game ViralSpiral offers players ludic scenarios that emerge when mis/disinformation is shared, alongside an appraisal of the consequences of their actions. An experiential artefact that allows algorithmic and digital literacy to be experienced in terms of play, Tattle’s and Baraza’s projects epitomize the productive intersections of hack and yack in global majority DH by solidifying the human locations and practices constituting digitality, often considered too abstract to be visualized or engaged with on a societal and cultural level.

2. Materialities/Infrastructures

As a natural progression from reviewing contemporary DH discourses across physical locations and embodied practices in the last section, this section focuses on the materialities and infrastructures that are central to current and future trajectories of DH. Our review here looks at two books—Matteo Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence and Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller’s Linked Data for Digital Humanities—alongside the journal Big Data & Society’s special issue on critical data studies in Latin America. By juxtaposing Pasquinelli's materialist critique of AI with Nurmikko-Fuller's examination of linked data in DH, and the diverse perspectives from Latin American critical data studies, we aim to highlight contemporary DH scholarship that dismantles the pervasive myth of technological neutrality: a foundational attribute of critical DH studies. These resources contend that the notion of digital affordances as value-free tools is a carefully constructed illusion that serves the interests of dominant power structures. Pasquinelli’s work underscores how AI, often heralded as a neutral force of progress, is deeply embedded in capitalist relations of production and exploitation. Similarly, Nurmikko-Fuller exposes how linked data, presented as a universal tool for knowledge-sharing, is shaped by specific political and economic agendas. The Latin American perspectives offer a counterpoint to these dominant narratives, highlighting how digital technologies often exacerbate existing inequalities and marginalization.

Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master has the potential of being a pivotal text in the field of critical DH and in further solidifying the intersections of DH with the emerging field of critical AI studies. By meticulously tracing the historical and material conditions that have shaped AI, the book challenges the prevailing notion of AI as a cohesive construct, and subscribes to the core principles of critical DH that reveal the power dynamics inherent in digital systems. Central to this critique is the revelation of AI as a mechanism for optimizing labour exploitation rather than a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Pasquinelli's deconstruction of algorithmic thinking exposes the underlying power structures embedded within technological systems. This perspective is antithetical to the often celebrated utopian visions of technology, and instead offers a grounded analysis of its real-world implications. In essence, The Eye of the Master provides a foundational framework for understanding how digital technologies are inextricably linked to broader social, economic, and political forces. By dismantling the myth of technological neutrality, the book empowers us to critically examine the ways in which AI and other digital systems perpetuate inequality and marginalization. As such, it is an indispensable resource for scholars and practitioners seeking to develop a more just and equitable digital future(s).

In exemplifying a similar critical foundation for linked data in DH, Nurmikko-Fuller offers a contemporary lens through which to examine the broader sociopolitical context of technology. Nurmikko-Fuller provides the context for linked data by observing that the development, implementation, and adoption of technology is shaped by factors that are sociopolitical, institutional, and economic. By identifying how information is ‘captured, published, represented, accessed, and interpreted using computational systems’ (p. xi), the book questions how our understanding of the digital and its many offerings is shaped by technology. The start of the book traces the interdisciplinary nature of DH as a field to build an interpretative lens to examine linked data. It introduces its readers to data models like the Resource Description Framework (RDF) (pp. 13–16) and the ‘Five Star Standard of Linked Data’ (pp. 12–13). Owing to the pervasive and interstitial nature of linked data, the book then identifies the challenges linked data poses to privacy and how linked data, when used to combine large datasets, can erase anonymity in online spaces (pp. 23–24). Such erasure of anonymity can be potentially dangerous when the combined datasets are used to aggregate and profile data. The book subsequently uses this understanding to complicate the notion of the ‘quantified self’ to ask: ‘Is there any difference if we are surveilled by people or by algorithms?’ (p. 36). The author then offers specific case studies to examine how policies of institutions and their economic ways of functioning determine how linked (open) data is used. By engaging with the Open Data Model and practices like open-source software and open-access publication the author shows how linked data can be used to combine freely available open datasets with those that aren’t. The next case study in the book illustrates how data from three different kinds of storage (tabular, relational, and RDF) can be merged as a single database when published as an RDF. The process of remapping the different kinds of data is achieved through the development of a ‘data-driven ontological model’ (p. 95). Nurmiko-Fuller highlights the remapping through three cases: the first where data is manually aligned; the second by using the open-source tool D2RQ; and the third combining them with the data already in RDF form. The process allowed for all three databases to be simultaneously queried when the merged RDF emerged. The book complicates the understanding of ‘truth’ in the digital humanities from the lens of linked data to identify how social and cultural biases affect the way reality is perceived. Nurmikko-Fuller observes how all information structures are inherently biased by the views and opinions of their creators, and thus it is important to accept ‘the impossibility of a completely objective understanding of the universe (and everything in it)’ (p. 67). The book calls for the DH community and those working with data not merely to question paradigms of information publication but also to engage with them ethically and critically. By asking the same questions of data, its tools, and its interpreters as scholars of science and technology studies and the sociology of scientific knowledge have of the scientific community, this book sets the right frame for asking the same questions of the large language models (LLMs) that hope to merge datasets in their own ways for user’s prompts and queries. Questions that are paramount include: How do such systems account for the embedded biases in their code, which consequently enable the data aggregation that fuels them? Collectively, these analyses reveal the intricate ways in which technology is deployed to maintain and reproduce power imbalances. By interrogating the underlying assumptions about digital affordances, these texts seek to contribute to a more critical and socially just understanding of DH and its related disciplines in shaping a more equitable society.

While engaging with the promise of generative AI, Tarleton Gillespie, in his 2024 article ‘Generative AI and the Politics of Visibility’, quotes Kishona Gray on intersectional technologies to ask if generative AI and its large language models (LLMs) can offer the same kind of representation and diversity in their creations as what has been achieved through years of struggle by marginalized and non-normative communities. In his analysis of three widely generative AI tools, Gillespie found that in their current state of training and design the models were reifying existing inequalities by perpetuating normative identities and narratives. When the models were prompted for variety and diversity the results obtained were concerning, as diversity was offered from the perspective of the hegemonic and the normative rather than as a means to offer alternative perspectives.

Echoing the challenges of visibility raised by Gillespie, we chose to look at Big Data & Society’s 2024 special issue on critical data studies in Latin America—an attempt by guest editor Rafael Grohmann to balance ‘the importance of going beyond universalisms’ against a desire to ‘essentialize the Global South’ by calling for a ‘more nuanced and complex approach to this issue’. The special issue, through its eight constituent articles, aims to offer theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches to critical data studies that are unique to Latin America. It challenges the hegemonic view that the region is a site for the application of theories from the Global North, and aspires to build bridges between scholarship from Latin America and other global perspectives.

The first article in the issue, Sebastián Lehuedé’s take on an alternative planetary future, examines frameworks of digital sovereignty (cyber, technology, and data) and questions their transformative character. Lehuedé examines three digital sovereignty frameworks: the European Union, the Chinese state, and a decolonial option espoused by Latin American civil society to find that the Chinese and European frameworks can amplify coloniality in certain aspects of digital sovereignty. The decolonial non-Western interpretation, despite requiring further development, offers possibilities for digital sovereignty to be achieved from a bottom-up process which allows for coexistence with the environment.

Jonas Valente and Rafael Grohmann’s article argues for the need to look beyond the frame of data colonialism and find ways to engage with the region’s rich traditions of social thought to arrive at more nuanced takes on datafication. By drawing on the work of Leila Gonzalez, the authors propose the need for situating datafication in Latin America in relation to other countries (as opposed to studying it in isolation) and use this newfound arrangement as a means to build alternative critical theories of data.

Helena Suárez Val et al., in their article, suggest the use of the term ‘data artivisim’, by drawing on Latin America’s rich tradition of combining art and political practice, especially since the 1950s (in the efforts of the Zapatistas and other examples). They locate their argument in the context of ‘feminicide’, and suggest the use of data artivism to counter its invisibility and that of other forms of gender-based violence. Their article codifies data artivism as ‘works that mobilize art and craft as tools of social contestation and (de)construction and as methods to engage with and visualize data’ (p. 2). In the hope of inspiring scholars from the fields of critical data and data-visualization studies, the authors call for a deeper engagement with art and the need to find common ground with artists, activists, and advocacy groups. They believe that this approach will yield possible alternatives to data mobilization, as well as lead to wider adoption of ‘vizibilizar’ strategies such as the production of ‘counterdata’ through meticulous research, recording, and memorializing.

Paola Ricaurte et al., in their article on algorithmic governmentality, position Latin America in a frame of ‘generalized crisis’ and observe how governments in the region have begun to rely on discourses of technological advancement and innovation to both justify their actions as well as call for the integration of automated systems into infrastructures of governance and public service. Ricaurte et al. draw on theories of governmentality and critical data studies to observe that Latin American governments’ push for an algorithmic and automated approach leads to the emergence of political rationality which is then manifested in the sociotechnical imaginaries that they perpetrate. They also view this reliance (on algorithmic governmentality) as a form of soft power wielded by the US government over the region, and as a means for local governments to automate control of society.

Oscar d’Alva and Edemilson Paraná’s contribution serves as a foil to Ricaurte et al., as they observe how the state sector of official numbers and statistics has been pressed to find ways to engage with big data. They observe, however, that the sources for this data are controlled by large tech corporations and, in order to address the conflicts that emerge from such interactions (between government departments of statistics and tech corporations), offer three case studies from a Latin American perspective. Their article offers an understanding of the political economy of big data in Latin America and explores the reshaping of state–business relations through digitalization, as well as examining how the commodification of data challenges the existing norms of ‘data as public goods’ in the context of official numbers and statistics.

Andrea Medrado and Pieter Verdegem’s article in the special issue uses participatory action research (PAR) and the ideas of Paulo Freire and Fals Borda to interrogate AI from a ‘South–North’ approach. They argue that the Global North’s centrality has been taken as a given when it comes to the epistemologies, experiences, and understandings of AI, and suggest the use of PAR as a means to both establish dialogical relations and a North–South flow of ideas and learning (by drawing on PAR’s inherent fostering of dialogue). They argue that PAR can also empower marginalized communities in the Global South by offering new avenues of voice to the voiceless. By focusing on autonomy, empathy, and dialogue in the frame of ‘AI and (in)justice’, they critique the idea of a ‘superior AI’ and remind both participants in their study and readers of their article of the possibilities of human intelligence when combined with acts of thinking, making, and feeling.

Julian Posada’s article considers Venezuela ‘s macroeconomic context of hyperinflation, where most of the workforce is self-employed. In such a critical situation, the country’s population views data-production platforms that enable machine learning as a way of earning money in US dollars. Posada examines how these data workers are interconnected in a mangled web of intermediaries and digital currencies, and are affected by this ‘deep embeddedness’ that characterizes their livelihoods. In studying how the phantomization of wages shapes working conditions, Posada finds that this form of data work (that relies on intermediaries for payment) erodes worker autonomy (as is the case with gig work in Global South contexts) and comes at a significant cost to a workforce already in extreme precarity.

The final article in the special issue, by Kenzo Soares Seto, proposes the concept of ‘platform sub-imperialism’, an idea derived by examining the intersections of Latin American platforms, overexploitation, and the accumulation of data. The author argues that this is a reality where certain countries (in the case of this article, Brazil) from the Global South play the role of regional centres (nodes) that facilitate the gathering and storing of data and capital from their neighbouring countries. This arrangement, the article observes, transmutes these nations (like Brazil) into intermediaries between ‘hegemonic nations’ (nations that demand this data) and ‘digital colonies’ that provide the data, thereby reifying existing inequalities in the global workforce through the frames of platform labour and technological dependence.

Conclusion

In the 2024 essay ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Nicholas Mirzoeff notes the contingencies of living in the Anthropocene era, when the ‘modern research university has grafted the capitalist division of labour onto the medieval vision of the individual scholar in his cell’, and demands ‘[C]rowd-sourced collective and horizontal practice’ as not just desirable but necessary (p. 215). Like current trajectories in Anthropocene studies that prompt us to reconsider humanity's relationship with the environment beyond mere geospatial concerns, this essay identifies interventions, from both discursive and physical locations, to show how current disciplinary conversations in DH must emerge from both traditional and unconventional sites, and emphasize the provocations and issues which will shape the futures of DH. In conclusion we see our deliberate curation of DH contributions this year as shaping one of the several possible pathways that critical DH could adopt going forward, especially with regard to the increasingly cross-disciplinary and context-cutting conversation around artificial intelligence and the resultant digital affordances. It is also important for us to acknowledge the need for fostering critical and tempered approaches that not only examine the outputs offered by AI but also interrogate the constitutive processes, especially human labour, that are integral to its functioning. Therefore, is imperative that both DH and critical AI initiatives champion the need for holistic approaches of examination that foster both critical understanding and uncomfortable meaning-making, lest we lose all semblance of nuance and end up taking counterproductive and reductive binary positions.

Books Reviewed

Organizations Discussed

Journal Articles Reviewed

References