feminism

All too often, defining a discipline becomes more an exercise of exclusion than inclusion. Disrupting the Digital Humanities seeks to rethink how we map disciplinary terrain by directly confronting the gatekeeping impulse of many other so-called field-defining collections. What is most beautiful about the work of the Digital Humanities is exactly the fact that it can’t be tidily anthologized. In fact, the desire to neatly define the Digital Humanities (to filter the DH-y from the DH) is a way of excluding the radically diverse work that actually constitutes the field. This collection, then, works to push and prod at the edges of the Digital Humanities — to open the Digital Humanities rather than close it down. Ultimately, it’s exactly the fringes, the outliers, that make the Digital Humanities both heterogeneous and rigorous.

This collection does not constitute yet another reservoir for the new Digital Humanities canon. Rather, its aim is less about assembling content as it is about creating new conversations. Building a truly communal space for the digital humanities requires that we all approach that space with a commitment to: 1) creating open and non-hierarchical dialogues; 2) championing non-traditional work that might not otherwise be recognized through conventional scholarly channels; 3) amplifying marginalized voices; 4) advocating for students and learners; and 5) sharing generously and openly to support the work of our peers.

(source: back cover of the book)

In our contemporary, increasingly transnational world, national literatures may seem increasingly arbitrary—even more so in the context of electronic literature, whose barriers of circulation tend to be marked by transnational, rather than national, groupings based on, for example, language or access to certain technologies. In contrast to the frequently (hyper-)nationalized literatures of mainstream literary study, electronic literature is often framed as an international or transnational literature. There are very good reasons for this: for example, the medium of electronic literature naturally lends itself to transnational dissemination and readership through the global reach of the internet. However, this transnational approach, which frequently exhibits an unacknowledged bias towards works produced in the US, also frequently ignores the ways in which an understanding of national contexts may enrich the understanding of a work. Through this paper, I hope to facilitate discussion regarding the relative merits and demerits of a transnational or national framing of electronic literature by using my own larger project, which focuses on works responding to Canadian contexts, and its sub-study of the decidedly transnational setting of J.R. Carpenter’s Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl as a case study. This paper begins by briefly describing my larger project, which examines works of electronic literature that consider how gendered, queer, racialized, and economicallydisenfranchised identities navigate physical, regionalized Canadian spaces of the past, present, and future. In this project, I examine e-lit that uses temporally- and spatially-dynamic techniques to explore how marginalized identities operate on the peripheries and navigate Canadian spaces and historical contexts, and how these works trouble the dominant narratives that these marginalized groups encounter and resist. As a part of this study, I look at J.R. Carpenter’s works of electronic literature, which transform the aesthetics of predominantly male-authored printbased forms into non-linear, female-narrated digital explorations of girlhood and the formation of gender identity. In this paper, I briefly consider the thematic trajectory of Carpenter’s works (from a focus on Nova Scotia and North American maritime settings, to Montreal and urban settings, to a transatlantic aesthetic) before diving into a short case study of her work Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, set in a transatlantic space. The location of the work’s narrative in transatlantic waters means that this work is less obviously situated within a Canadian space, thus troubling my framing of her work within a Canadian context and making this work a perfect candidate for a study with a transnational approach. However, this work is also very much informed by the diasporas of the British Isles towards the now Atlantic Canadian shores, and the pre-digital communication networks that grew out of the transatlantic relationship between these two landforms. Thus, I argue that an understanding of both Canada’s history of colonization and exploration and its transnational underpinnings enriches our understanding of this work in which a girl’s appropriation and transformation of narratives of past colonialist endeavours is a subversive repurposing of those words in service of a feminist journey of personal discovery.

In recent years, the digital humanities has been shaken by important debates about inclusivity and scope—but what change will these conversations ultimately bring about? Can the digital humanities complicate the basic assumptions of tech culture, or will this body of scholarship and practices simply reinforce preexisting biases? Bodies of Information addresses this crucial question by assembling a varied group of leading voices, showcasing feminist contributions to a panoply of topics, including ubiquitous computing, game studies, new materialisms, and cultural phenomena like hashtag activism, hacktivism, and campaigns against online misogyny.

Taking intersectional feminism as the starting point for doing digital humanities, Bodies of Information is diverse in discipline, identity, location, and method. Helpfully organized around keywords of materiality, values, embodiment, affect, labor, and situatedness, this comprehensive volume is ideal for classrooms. And with its multiplicity of viewpoints and arguments, it’s also an important addition to the evolving conversations around one of the fastest growing fields in the academy.

Contributors: Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi, U of Lethbridge; Moya Bailey, Northeastern U; Bridget Blodgett, U of Baltimore; Barbara Bordalejo, KU Leuven; Jason Boyd, Ryerson U; Christina Boyles, Trinity College; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Lisa Brundage, CUNY; micha cárdenas, U of Washington Bothell; Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown U; Danielle Cole; Beth Coleman, U of Waterloo; T. L. Cowan, U of Toronto; Constance Crompton, U of Ottawa; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M; Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, U of Colorado Boulder; Julia Flanders, Northeastern U Library; Sandra Gabriele, Concordia U; Brian Getnick; Karen Gregory, U of Edinburgh; Alison Hedley, Ryerson U; Kathryn Holland, MacEwan U; James Howe, Rutgers U; Jeana Jorgensen, Indiana U; Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Dorothy Kim, Vassar College; Kimberly Knight, U of Texas, Dallas; Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson U; Sharon M. Leon, Michigan State; Izetta Autumn Mobley, U of Maryland; Padmini Ray Murray, Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology; Veronica Paredes, U of Illinois; Roopika Risam, Salem State; Bonnie Ruberg, U of California, Irvine; Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), U of California, Santa Barbara; Anastasia Salter, U of Central Florida; Michelle Schwartz, Ryerson U; Emily Sherwood, U of Rochester; Deb Verhoeven, U of Technology, Sydney; Scott B. Weingart, Carnegie Mellon U.

(Source: University of Minnesota Press)