Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation

In midOctober 2008, the American Studies Association (ASA) hosted its annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. According to its website, the ASA “is the nation’s oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history.” Over the past two decades, the ASA conference has emerged as a leading venue for vibrant discussions about race, ethnicity, transnationalism, gender, and sexuality. While the ASA represents scholars with a diverse array of methodological approaches from a variety of disciplines, the society is a welcome home to academics whose work is interpretative and theoretical. During the meeting, I attended a variety of panels engaging such issues and approaches and came away feeling energized and refreshed, my intellectual imagination stoked by the many ways in which race and ethnicity were wielded as central terms of analysis throughout the long weekend. The following week, I was off to Baltimore where I attended “Tools for DataDriven Scholarship,” a workshop funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This invitationonly event was cohosted by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), two pioneering centers of what we have recently begun to call the “digital humanities.” This workshop built upon several years’ conversation (particularly following the 2003 NSF Atkins Report on cyberinfrastructure) about the need for a digital infrastructure for humanities computing. The goal of the workshop was defined in the email invite as a report “that discusses the needs of tools developers and users; sets forth objectives for addressing those needs; proposes infrastructure for accomplishing these objectives; and makes suggestions for a possible RFP.” This meeting was also lively, full of thoughtful discussions about the possibilities for (and obstacles in the way of) a robust infrastructure for scholars engaged in computation and the humanities. The conversation certainly part iii ][ Chapter 9