by Jamie Henthorn — Old Dominion University
February 15, 2013 – 09:54

The MediaCommons Front Page Collective is looking for responses to the survey question: How do you see the digital divide in your work and scholarship?

Digital Humanities scholarship tends to be overwhelmingly weighted toward young, predominantly – though not exclusively – white scholars working within Western contexts and institutions, producing on the one hand a bit of an echo effect, on the other hand an academic variation on the digital divide, wherein important perspectives have tremendous difficulty being heard, or else are noted only for their “otherness.” With this survey, we want to extend opportunities to non-western digital humanities scholars, as well as digital humanities scholars focused on non-dominant communities and practices to address the stakes in maintaining this “divide.”

Responses may include but are not limited to:

– Non-Western perspectives on the digital humanities
– Digital humanities as cultural imperialism?
– Can the subaltern digital human speak?
– ageism in the digital humanities
– the problem of color blindness/role of white privilege in digital humanities work
– Digital humanities and digital feminism
– Queering the digital humanities
– What role for the non-digital humanities?

Responses are 300-400 words and typically focus on introducing an idea. Proposals may be brief (a few sentences) and should state your topic and approach. Submit proposals tomediacommons.odu@gmail.comby March 1 to be considered for inclusion into this project. The project will run from March 18 through April 12.

In case you are unfamiliar with MediaCommons, we are an experimental project created in 2006 by Drs. Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo, seeking to envision how a born-digital scholarly press might re-conceptualize both the processes and end-products of scholarship. MediaCommons was initially developed in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and is currently supported by New York University’s Digital Library Technology Services through funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.