Thread by @adelinekoh

Origin Story: How and why I started this book with @dorothyk98 that just won the @AmerStudiesAssn #2022ASA #digitalhumanities Book Prize - a long thread 🧵 +

When I started this collection about 8 years ago, digital humanities had just started getting a lot of attention after years of not being taken seriously as “humanities computing.” Suddenly a ton of money was being poured into this field.

The leaders of the field were adamant in acting like this was just such a nice unproblematic field, one person even published an essay where he said digital humanities were the golden retrievers of the English department.

Coming to this field as a postcolonialist, it was clear to me that digital humanities was anything but nice and unproblematic. Because the tools and work we all design and work with come with implicit racial, gendered, abled and more biases. We replicate biases in our technology

The (white) leaders of the digital humanities were very unhappy with the critique that I sought to bring to the field.

They started a witch hunt against me and my work.

Turned collaborators against me. Said I was “toxic” and “a problem”. Told people that they would never publish again if they continued to work with me.

As you can imagine, this caused me a lot of psychic stress and trauma. It was one of the reasons why I #quitacademia

But while they were leading this witch hunt, I knew I was doing good work because I was helping other BIPOC in the digital humanities space feel seen and valued, by the work I was publishing and the events I was organizing.

The harassment got too much for me though and for my mental health I had to leave.

And this is where I am eternally grateful that my BFF @dorothyk98 stepped in to take over this volume and turned it into this amazing RIOT of a volume to shine a light on non yt DH

8 years after I started this volume, it is incredible to me that it is honored by the book award by @AmerStudiesAssn - the legitimization and recognition that digital humanities is anything but “nice”, but deeply messy and replicative of our social issues is so vindicating.

I did not think I would get here in this lifetime, but here we are. Again, immensely grateful to @dorothyk98 whose brilliance illuminates this book, and the amazing contributors who stuck with it while I left, and @punctum_books for publishing it.

This volume speaks louder than just another academic text.

It speaks to the continued relevance and importance of talking about discrimination.

It speaks to crossing over from leaving the academy and the important work of a post academic.

Thank you 🙏🏽
#2022asa

Finally: a big thank you to my former advisor and friend @FriedaEkotto for teaching me the importance of examining historiography as a way of resetting technologies of knowledge.

It is because of her I applied this to the #digitalhumanities to question its singular origin story