This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. It is true that the DH community is considerably more open, approachable, welcoming, and willing to embrace new approaches than many traditional areas of humanities academia. Big Tent DH, then, is an ecumenical approach, whilst giving the freedom for individual scholars to explore their own interests, wherever in the research and teaching spectrum they lie.
Despite all this, there will be a lot of folk left peering into the Big Tent, without ever gaining full access of any paid employment in DH. Institutional support means access to computational infrastructure, journals, money for equipment, conference travel, paid sabbaticals to write up research, payment which enables you to subscribe to journals and scholarly societies, etc.
Once uncovered, the funhouse mirrors beneath the big tent of digital humanities distort the reality of digital humanists with different views. Perhaps more significantly, the inclusive space inside the tent is always already marked by an outsideβan outside that has so overwhelmingly been conceived as Western territory.
In this formulation, DH practitioners often unwittingly or intentionally institutionalize Western spaces as those in which DH discourse takes root. This and other important research compel us to critically evaluate the socially biased foundations upon which technological innovations are based.
For example, in the context of colonialism and the hegemony of language, Braj B. As one might suspect, DH to date seems to imitate life by linguistically privileging English above all other languages. Indeed, as Matthew Kirschenbaum notes, digital humanities feel inextricable from English departments around the world. But how exactly does it manifest itself, and to what end? These two conditions set the stage for the comparison that I want to make while comparatively reading two queer, postcolonial communities in urban areas along the rim of the Indian Ocean.
