This editorial project was a real pleasure to pull together, and we at @umd_AADHum hope that others enjoy these projects and reviews as much as we do! There is such a beautiful story here about the deep diversity of #digitalhumanities work committed to the study of Black life +
As we discuss in our #ReviewsinDH editorial note, this issue is committed to highlighting the work of contemporary "thinker-makers" doing the work of Black art, Black study, Black recovery, and Black speculation— a natural extension of @umd_AADHum's operational perspective +
Black intellectual work has *always* been distributed across the arts and humanities. #BlackDH roots itself in the deeply multimodal & multivariate approaches that characterize Black thought. Digital arts, digital humanities, digital studies, digital-x can all equal Black Study +
There's more to come from @umd_AADHum x #ReviewsinDH next month, but in this issue you can see how we are featuring projects that thematically and structurally amplify some of the dominant concerns to thinking Black + digital, while moving across discursive frames to do so. +
We carefully tried to corral (not snatch!) the edges of #BlackDH— not edges like marginal, but edges like coastline, the electricity in finding new links & nodes: "data driven" installation art fr @thistimeitsmimi, a community book arts project fr Sonya Clark's @SolidarityBook +
In addition to @gdmusgrove's Black Power in D.C. mappings, our #ReviewsinDH issue also includes video essay/digital installation art fr @LegacyRussell and digital storytelling fr @NontsiMutiti. Each embeds its critique in the form of the object, embracing a complex generativity +
Of course there is much to say about what is not here (glances over at the 2k words cut fr the intro), because there is no way a single edition could get at the increasingly large network of people committed to #BlackDH. Something we'll have more to say on at another time 😉 +
Time for my ever-constant exhortation: Spend time with #BlackDH projects. Teach your students to read and use digital projs in their research.
Over here at @umd_AADHum, we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’ve learned over the past year or so, running both a large fellowship and developing more than a few dozen #BlackDH events and projects during the panny +
In our conversations re what’s next for @umd_AADHum, we find ourselves compulsively avoiding framing our ideas as “we’ve gained insight into x” while adjusting to these times™.
But at the same time, things have indeed changed and it is our job to know that, as well as we can +
As well as we can: In balance against our hesitation to lemonade the pandemic, this year we’re doubling down on developing programs and activities that respond to / learn from the complexities of scheduling, hybrid-work, and distant collaboration that characterized last year. +
Recently I was asked to write a thing for @PublicBooks, on teaching, learning, and ‘doing’ #digitalhumanities in the pandemic.
I ended up with a #BlackDH essay about ontologies of digital mediation in the anthropocene—which is a fancy way of saying that + publicbooks.org/like-sands-thr…
For @PublicBooks I wrote about new and old forms of loss, of how remembering and forgetting are so tightly tied to experiences of space, to our experiences of natural and built environments. Black Americans have always had a fundamentally multidimensional relationship to space +
In "Black Haunts in the Anthropocene" I contemplate Black multidimensionality as an experience of hybrid temporality, so deep historical embeddness that requires us to constantly remix the present. Everything has a groove, but nothing quite fits together. blackhaunts.mp285.com
Starting my day at a talk with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (@rwgilmoregirls) & Paul Gilroy (@bungatuffie), two of my favorite minds and favorite humans.
I'm especially struck by Gilmore's response to the question, via Stuart Hall's thinking, of whether the study of culture is a luxury +
Is the study of culture a luxury? Gilmore describes how struggles through, about, and as effects of culture highlight a constant sense of human trying to improve social, political, and economic conditions. "All of that trying," she notes, "is part of the process." +
For Gilmore, the study of culture is also "the study of consciousness, the study of ideology," the study of how we live— or as I would gloss, of how we *manage* to live in our inherited worlds. @rwgilmoregirls: such study enables us to "see things we wouldn't otherwise see" +
Excited for the opportunity to witness this deeply grounded and pathseeking #digitalhumanities collab between MITH, @umd_amst, and some of the keepers of Lakeland’s legacy.
This is the kind of project that illuminates possibilities for #BlackDH and community generated research.
As if this weren’t enough, you can follow this convo with a dive into some of the larger structural matters underlying Lakeland’s historical and contemporary claims. Which is to say, you should catch this convo on reparations and anti-Black racism...
The program is opening with Ms. Violetta Sharp, who is fifth generation Lakeland. She describes Lakeland as a vacation community founded in the nineteenth century, sited in what eventually became the larger College Park area. Black families were attracted to the area + work opps
Struck just now by this "Deep Nostalgia" tech, which algorithmically animates photos. My colleague @Afromanticist has used it with this photo of #FrederickDouglass. It is amazing. And also terrifying. My first book was about haunting as praxis in Black lifeworlds, so thoughts +
My book is about memory & loss in AfAm life, and it ends with a consideration of Beloved coupled w/ James Van Der Zee's Harlem Book of the Dead (work that structured my pivot into #BlackDH). I'm also thinking now about @toniasutherland's writing on postmortem holograms of Tupac +
In this case Deep Nostalgia works by mapping an image onto a set of templated movements. The image is algorithmically re-mastered (*shuddersincontext*) around those movements, like any computer-generated animation. Of course much of the terror is generated by the fact that +
Enjoying @UMDMAVRIC. Especially grateful to @marcruppel for his rundown of the kinds of work possible at the intersection of design, storytelling & spatial humanities. Now I’m motivated to note some of the #XR work @umd_AADHum is exploring alongside @UMD_MITH's work w/ Lakeland +
... So a #BlackDH XR project based in some of our previous @irLhumanities work like @christinwa9's Black Brooklyn/ Dare to Remember (2017) project + @awwsmith_ ’s “What's in you air" (2020) AR project, developed as a @SnapLensStudio resident.