Category: Uncategorized

Hello friends!

A lot has happened since I last wrote. I have graduated, moved, and moved on to new things! I am so excited to be teaching again and in beautiful Happy Valley!

Ill be sending out more missives soon!

Besos!

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Check out our tweets from our Southeastern Women’s Studies Association Conference Panel Theories of the Flesh: Uses of Women of Color as the Bodies of Knowledge Production in the biomedical industrial complex.

In my last post I told you about the exciting project Im working on with folks around the country, and now world, who are interested in editing wikipedia so that it better reflects the diversity of our living.

How can we join for editing other languages? #Feminists engage #Wikipedia to combat perceived biasesaje.me/XZ8ln7 #tooFew”

— damla bayraktar (@damla_bayraktar) March 9, 2013

I was on Al Jazeeras The Stream talking about problematic representations of Black women in the media when the folks there learned about the #tooFEW initiative.

We did another interview about #tooFEW and we talked about some of the backlash wed received. As more folks learned about the project, more folks are interested and more folks were hateful.

I fielded some tweets that were a little dismissive but what was most surprising was looking at the page announcing our event.

Someone edited our wiki event page, changing the location to DICKS. They or another person also trying to discredit our event signed up empowered tool of the patriarchy to attend as well as deleted all of our pages to be edited, replacing them with Adolf Hitler.

   

 

What was initially an opportunity to empower marginalized voices through proactive action, now further illustrates the necessity of itself and other projects like it. By editing the Feminists Engage Wikipedia page in these ways, patriarchy is proved real. Clearly some editors of wikipedia have the very biases we are attempting to counteract with our edits. If you look at our retrieved list of edits (thank you Wikipedia for your extensive history features, and we can see your IP address when you do stuff like this) most of what wed like to do is add people and ideas that arent present on the site currently. We are editing entries that are relevant to our communities. I say this to say we are working on pages that are already marginalized within Wikipedia and we are being attacked.

Someone asked via Twitter, why make such a big deal about #tooFEW. Why not just edit consistently.  I explained that for some this may be their first opportunity to edit.

 

We are understood  as using activist-speak for simply trying to bring together marginalized folks who are consistently edited out of history. This attack on the event page even before we start to edit is disheartening. Why would marginalized groups want to edit if this is how they are treated when they try to engage Wikipedia initially?

This also has me thinking about the utility of publicity. Its wonderful to get the word out about #tooFEW but incredibly saddening that it incites attacks. We wont be thwarted though. This is exactly why #tooFEW is so necessary.

Feminist POC Wikipedia Takeover! 3/15 11-3 EST

Hello Friends!

I am really excited to tell you about a project I am working on called Feminists Engage Wikipedia, where folks around the country sign into Wikipedia, edit certain entries and add new ones to counteract the very white straight cis dude nature of the site. We will be working in person and virtually Friday, March 15 from 11 am to 3pm EST. I would love for you to be involved and there are a number of ways you and people you know can participate.

1. Give Ideas for Entries-

• Add New People, Events and Things Perhaps an awesome Black feminist writer who just wrote her first book? Or an important woman of color disability justice activist? Is their an important moment of Trans* activism that’s not on Wikipedia? An important documentary or two  that need to be reflected in wikipedia?
• Edit existing Entries –  Who needs an important source or event added to their existing entry?
• You can add them to our list of entries to work on here by clicking edit in the brackets to the right.
• If you already have something ready to go, add it your self!

Participate- 

• Sign up for a wikipedia account (don’t use your gov’t name like I did)
• Watch this video to learn just how to edit wikipedia (click “Flash” at the bottom of the playback video if it starts to mess up)
• Join us virtually follow hashtag #tooFEW and learn what we are up to
• Join us in person
• In the South @ Emory University Library Jones Room, 3rd Floor Friday March 15  11am -3pm EST (You don’t have to stay the whole time and we will have free delicious food!)
• In the (North) East @ Barnard College 11am -3pm EST
• In the West @ Scripps College 8am-12pm PST

Tell Somebody-

• Students Do they need extra credit? Can this be a class project? Are you learning about some really cool people in POC/Trans*/Queer/Women’s History that don’t have wiki pages or have pages with bad information? You can fix it!
• Friends Do you know other folks who should know about this? Please spread this information to activists you know, faculty, etc. Everyone is welcome!
• Organizations These edit-a-thons work best with lots of folks working on specific things. Do you know orgs like INCITE or SONG that know specific types of folks who should be added to wikipedia or projects folks should know about?
• Email me your ideas too busy to edit yourself? Let me know and I’ll add your list of stuff to the one we are generating!

Please spread the word far and wide!  I hope to see you there (and/or virtually)!!!

I am honored with another interview with the Library of Congress. Here, Im talking about teaching Viewshare to the Emory Community.

 

 

Read more here!

Im unfortunately unable to attend MLA this year but I wanted to give a bit of what I would have presented on the panel, Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities. Its at 10:15 am, Friday!

Alchemy is the “science” of turning regular metals into gold. When I talk about digital alchemy I am thinking of the ways that women of color in particular transform everyday digital media into valuable social justice media magic. We turn scraps into something precious. Like chitterlings, the discarded pig intestines of the internet can be reworked into a delicacy. As Dr. Tricia Rose notes however, there can be unintended and long term health effects from making a way out of no way. People can assume that leftovers are enough and abandon efforts to make sure everyone gets their fair share. It is the delicate balance of making do and pushing for more that informs my thinking on women of color’s transformative digital media magic.

By refashioning existing social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr, gender marginalized folks of color are creating the changes that they want to see in the world. Innovative web series, projects and initiatives proliferate on the web as those of us whose genders and sexualities are labeled deviant within white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, find more autonomous room online. But even within the “democratized space” of “teh interwebs” the same systems of oppression operate, pushing new digital media makers to grow new strategies that fit a rapidly shifting digital ecosystem.

In the world of digital humanities, digital alchemy takes many forms. In 2012, a conversation sparked in part by tweets from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Conference, brought many DA issues to the fore.

On September 29, Josh Guild, a self described “historian. tacher. student. observer. urbanist. writer. freedom dreamer,” tweeted “still waiting on that ethics of live tweeting in the academy convo.” This tweet sparked an intense twitter, multi blog multi day conversation, dubbed “twittergate” by fellow Emory graduate candidate Roopsi Risam. The conversation reached the pages of Inside Higher Ed. What’s most interesting about the conversation to me is the way that the work and theorizing of women of color dropped out of the conversation about the ethics of live tweeting presentations.

Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson was one of the first tweeters to respond to Guild’s tweet. She, an afro-Latina digital humanist expressed her stake in publicly tweeting talks as an issue of access, particularly for folks of color she feels accountable to who are often structurally disempowered from participating in these conversations. Adeline Koh, contributed not only to the conversation but to its documentation as well by collecting the relevant tweets and blog entries that traced the conversation.

Tressie Cottom also an Emory Graduate candidate was a central figure, summarized the debate as follows.

I don’t want my ideas stolen before I have a chance to publish them. It happened to my friend/cousin/colleague.

Building your brand as a “hip” digital scholar by tweeting the work of

others is selfish.

People behave badly in conference backchannels. Rules should be established to govern good online academic etiquette.

This is, I think, a fair summation of different points of view expressed during the twitter conversation about the ethics of live tweeting at conferences. Interestingly enough the conversation was sparked by an academic who tweets regularly but who prefers more traditional engagement when they speak at conferences. I point that out to say that this is not a conversation being had by Twitter “haters” but also by those who engage and use Twitter but who are not comfortable with the medium being used differently in different spaces.

I highlight this portion of Cottom’s blog post to illustrate the complexity of conversation that is taking place. While talking about the substantive claims people are making, she is also pointing to the fact that Guild is a twitter user, attempting to counter efforts that would pit the positions expressed against each other. This complexity is obscured once the conversation is repackaged for larger audiences. The points being made by some of the main participants are no longer included in favor of more senior theorists thoughts.

Those most vocal and central to this conversation were junior scholars of color and specifically women of color and that’s where things took a turn. The Inside Higher Ed piece strips the conversation of the very real and central questions of control and access by only quoting white participants in the conversation and misattributing the concern around control and access to Mark Sample, a leading scholar in the field of digital humanities, who was quoting the aforementioned Risam. Sample informed Inside Higher Ed of their mistake and they fixed the attribution of the quote however the very real concerns about the labor and theorizing of women of color in the context of a public sphere were illustrated in that moment. It wasn’t tweeting itself that resulted in the incorrect attribution of Risam’s tweet as scholars concerned with tweeted talks worry will happen. It was preconceived notions about who theorizes and what voices matter in a conversation that shaped ideas about what voices had something relevant to say in the conversation.

Cottom wrote another piece highlighting both the scramble by some scholars on twitter to say something about the debate but obscure the implications of race in the conversation and the simultaneous dismissal of the conversation as old and unnecessary. She writes:

I am not sure if the debate is so silly because it is happening outside the purview of the digital humanities elite or because it was being had by a group of women (most of them minorities), early career scholars. But, I suspect it is a combination of both.
I find it hard to imagine that a conversation about who gets to define the rights of an audience, or who gets to control the dissemination of publicly funded knowledge, or how ideas are weaponized against the very populations we use to justify and further our research would be taken so lightly had Nathan Jurgenson or Mark Sample or Cathy Davidson taken it up. That it was a group of minority women (without tenure, no less!) seemed to render the conversation less valuable.

It is this context that makes me ambivalent about bringing people into the digital humanities or encouraging folks to identify as digital humanists. There are many benefits to engaging the community and what I like most is the genuine interest by people connected to DH to learn more and grow their knowledge about the issues that others are raising. I wonder if it might be useful to again survey some of the projects that already exist on the periphery of the big DH tent. I see clusters and nodes of activity that are linked by threads of digital media magic but are themselves examples of DH work beyond the canon.

I recently learned about Akirachix, a Kenyan women’s digital collaborative that is solving local problems with the members’ DH skills. They’ve created cell phone apps that are useful for farmers in their community, allowing them to check crop prices without a corrupt middleman, transforming the world of app users. Marginalized groups don’t just add to the diversity of the people working on DH projects; they have different priorities, which can lead to different types of projects. I hope that the spirit of inquiry that drives DH entices folks out of the tent to see all the great work people are producing in other places and encourages more transformative collaborations.

I’m recently returned from #ASA2012 (or #2012ASA) and I really did enjoy myself. I had the opportunity to meet folks “fleshy avatars,” some of whom I’ve been in e-community with for a long time. I also met new folks with whom I’m excited to build intellectual community (and I stole away to the beach for a little bit!).

I was wearing my DH hat at the conference and went to the Digital Humanities Caucus Panel, What can digital humanities bring to American Studies? And vice versa? For a very insightful and detailed transcript of the session see Alexis Lothian’s blog post here. This panel was scheduled against the minority mentoring breakfast a fact Marta S. Rivera and I lamented on twitter and was particularly heart wrenching as the two sessions were separated by a thin wall (so much joy next door!). I digress.

Then it was on to the Digital Shorts! I was up first, where I gave folks a quick overview of the Emory #OWS Archive and the visualizations the other grad fellows and I created based simply on the 31,000+ geolocated tweets in the archive. Other shorts included a discussion of Scalar, USC’s online archival platform, and a pitch for submissions for DHQ.

Fast forward through more conference, simultaneous dog show in the convention center, freezing conference rooms, planning for ASA actions in support of Palestinian people, no wi-fi and it was time for my workshop/roundtable with fellow #transformDH enthusiasts. We had quite a turnout including #transformdh patron saints Lisa Nakamura, Natalia Cecire, Lauren Klein, and Susan Garfinkel, among others. For a recap of our session check out our hand out, storified tweets, and Alexis Lothian’s awesome recount of the session. I hope folks feel the pull to connect themselves to the #transformdh movement and hashtag.

Part of what inspires me about DH is a commitment to doing and generally doing better. I appreciate being a part of a community that is interested in working through critiques and the collaborative spirit that engenders. Someone asked me what is transformative about DH and I didn’t have a good answer at the time. Upon reflecting, I think DH is not in and of itself transformative, but it attracts people with an interest in problem solving and the creation of solutions, which is a different epistemic position than many other fields. This makes many transformations possible and I’m glad to be connected to the movement.

Overall ASA left me more committed to publishing work and sharing information about creating sustainable conferences. There’s so much great content at ASA but with a schedule from 8am to 10pm with no lunch or dinner breaks (with few meal options nearby) it becomes hard to sustain yourself as an attendee. American Studies can learn from its own interdisciplinary sub-fields, namely disability studies, and think about how to promote more wellness while conferencing.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by the fine folks at the Library of Congess regarding the view that Professor Evans and I created for her project, SWAG Diplomacy using their platform, Viewshare! You can read the entire interview here but I wanted to provide a piece. Enjoy!

Stephanie reached out to me, a graduate fellow at Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons, to help make a map for her amazing project charting the world travels of famous African Americans as described in their autobiographies. Initially, she’d found some mapping software that wasn’t the right fit. I suggested Google Maps, which was closer to what she needed, but users could not map multiple points at the same location. For example, Paris, France, was a popular destination for many African Americans but you could only see one point on the map at a time and couldn’t tell there were 29 other people under a data point of Billie Holiday in Paris. When I saw the Viewshare workshop advertised, I thought it would be a right fit and it was! I was able to take my Excel file and create a view during the workshop that allowed you to see and search by “Traveler” and “Country.” It was exactly what we were looking for!

More here