Because no one doesn’t like Julie Andrews….

These are a few of my favorite things that are related not only to this class but also the intersection of race and technology more broadly.

Initiatives to diversify the production of new technology

We need more people like Omar Wasow and organizations like Black Girls Code because one of the things I think is most important about the future of technology is the explicit effort to diversify technology creators. We need more Black Planets, more JackandJillPolitics.coms, we need people from diverse backgrounds, who because of those backgrounds have diverse ways of thinking, can create diverse products. I, for example, suggested to Ethan Zuckerman last week during our workshop that he should maybe consider involving people of color who are used to having to follow more than one kind of news to help design the products that diversify users’ newsfeeds he is interested in. I also like these kinds of initiatives because I am a firm believer in  marginalized groups of people creating content and safe, counter-hegemonic spaces for themselves without the interference of privileged groups.

Apps that help address structural issues like the wealth the gap

“Around The Way App – Android Apps on Google Play.” Around The Way App – Android Apps on Google Play. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.

This is a project that we did not talk about in class but I personally would love to see more projects like this.

Around the Way is a mobile app that helps users locate black owned business around them. Though many people, myself included, have experienced problems with its functioning, I think the idea behind it was absolutely wonderful because support of black owned businesses can have many positive ramifications with the expansion of black wealth and promulgation of diverse representations of black people being just a few.

Ways of circumventing traditional access to power in production

Bread Pig can help people who may get missed by crowd funding sources like Kickstarter because of engrained user preferences for white aesthetics, more standard uses of the English language and intimate know how on structuring successful campaigns. I like this project, and would like to see more things like it, because it provides people who may be on the outside of more traditional informational networks to be able to self-publish. Like Around the Way, Bread Pig can aid in the visibility and success of black entrepreneurship.

People using preexisting, ordinary sites to makes extraordinary things happen

I love watching black Twitter lay the smack down on blatantly racist actions and creating tangible social change. I love that because of her web series on YouTube, Issa Rae is going to be working on a series produced for television by Shonda Rhimes. I find this kind of utilization of already existing technologies to create space for marginalized voices inspiring.

Applications of traditional humanities to push back against traditional cannons

I would like to see more institutions take advantage of social media and developing technology as they pursue social justice initiatives like justpublics@365. I also am enamored with scholars of the digital humanities who work on expanding traditional ideas of scholarship by moving away from institutions and sharing knowledge more freely. Since I have already gone on about how much I love sites like the Crunk Feminist Collective, I will refrain from doing so again and just direct you here.

What Blogs at the Margins…

“In the 1990s, the rallying cry of proponents of the Internet was the democratization of knowledge made possible by the developing technological infrastructure” (Earhart).

Maybe one day when I read about the high hopes rich, white men had for the internet in the early 90s- a place without race, gender and class, an uncolonizable space- I won’t roll my eyes. Unfortunately, today is not that day.

What makes the fantasy about the internet so deserving of a looping eye roll is the idea that a digital space that exists in a physical world ruled by patriarchy, homophobia, ableism and global white supremacy can be Utopian and equalizing.

 This eye rolling also extends to the idea that in changing the way information is presented or disseminated without first trying to address inequities in the way knowledge is formed and what information is deemed important, said knowledge will somehow become representative of diverse experiences and information. What a prefect segue into a discussion about digital humanities and three of this week’s readings: Digital_humanities, “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon” and “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?”

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The very formats of “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon?” and “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?” embody the value of digital humanities. The former is published on a website that encourages collaborative readings and understandings of the piece via a built in note taking/highlighting feature- users “can select and mark passages to express interest to the community, or help tag sentences for [their] index” (Earhart). The latter includes links and images (not unlike this blog) to provide additional tangential information and create more interactivity with its readers. Both articles focus more on directly addressing and solving the racialized, classed, and gendered discrepancies in representation within the field. Earhart seeks to accomplish this through collective work to reimagine traditional canons and Lothian and Philips curate a group of really interesting digital collaboratives that provide a space for the perspectives of marginalized groups that are often silenced. Thinking about the Earhart more specifically, and the encouragement of recovery efforts I was moved to recall Without Sanctuary, the digital companion of the book about American lynching with the same title.

The following quote succinctly brings into focus all that digital humanities have the potential to accomplish: “The spirit of #transformDH is not to arrest this momentum, but to channel it in truly transformative directions—to avoid trading whiteness for more whiteness, heteropatriarchy for more heteropatriarchy, one imperialist hierarchy for another” (Lathian and Philips). In short, #iamallaboutthesetwoarticles.

E for Effort

I found Digital_humanities remarkably counterproductive to the discussion of digital humanities. It provides an extensive history of humanities that I feel distracts from the possible future of the field. It also skates past the marginalization of certain groups that plague digital humanities (and society in general) and in a round about way goes on to blame those groups demand for inclusion for the decline in “sharing common references or approaches” and for “add[ing] ammunition to the forces that want to de-college the American populace” (23). I do however appreciate the work it does in trying to create a standardized understanding of the field.

Can we talk about the question and answer section:

Whose questions are these? The format of this publication, its stock questions and answers, seems antithetical to the interactivity that the digital humanities are rooted in. The text is resistant to questions from actual readers. The question answer section offers very stagnant answers that impose very strict definitions of the digital humanities; that they necessitate institutions and assessments, and attempts to strictly define who can be involved in projects and how. This discussion of digital humanities is unimaginative and does not acknowledge ways that current projects are advancing the field and leaves no room for individuals or people who are not part of the academy (122-130).

Things to ponder:

> Can inclusion of diverse aspects of the humanities ever be achieved when the academy is necessarily based on exclusion?
>I’m very much interested in the idea of the core curriculum that gets raised in the Burdick et al piece. How can we build a core curriculum that encapsulates enough breadth to prepare students “to steer their democracy through the challenges and opportunities that this highly networked, globalized, mobile, and ecologically fragile century offers” (Burdick 24)?
     ~ Personally, I think that having a framework that uses honest, accurate, integrative information about the ways systematic oppression operates established by a diverse group of humans to contextualize various works that fit under the “humanities” umbrella is the way to go, but I am also very interested in what everyone else thinks. (Full disclosure: I believe adequate representation if diverse experiences is the solution to most problems.)
> How can the digital humanities keep moving away from institutions and towards individuals?

Works Cited

Burdick, Anne, and Johanna Drucker. Digital_humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, pp 1-26 & 122-130.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262018470_Open_Access_Edition.pdf

Earhart, Amy E. “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.  http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/16

Lothian, Alexis, and Amanda Phillips. “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?” Journal of e-Media Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (2013)

The Proposal (Minus Ryan Reynolds)

I am going to be honest with you. I am not really sure what exactly this post is supposed to incorporate or look like. I do, however, know the guiding questions that I want to pursue in this multimedia essay and so I guess I’ll start from there.

Stolenness? That’s not a word.

My multimedia essay will likely be a chapter, or part of a chapter in my thesis. (Just for some background, I am a senior in African American studies and my academic interests are rooted in popular culture, media studies and blackness.)  The question guiding my thesis is this: How do contemporary non-immigrant black Americans grieve and understand their stolenness from Africa? Stolenness is a word I made up use to express feelings loss and disconnect that are the result of being descended from people who were stolen from their homeland and then subsequently had their cultures stolen from them.

My entrance point to understanding how non-immigrant black Americans deal with the traumatic violence that is their descent from the savage and vile system that was the Atlantic slave trade will be black performance – both traditional conceptions of performance and another way of defining performance that I made up. This alternative way of thinking about performance, which I have dubbed “anti-performance” seeks to describe the kind of performance that happens as one blogs. Blogging is performative in that even if a post is meant to be deeply introspective and diary-like it is also on a public and fairly accessible platform and therefore is completed with a possible audience in mind.

What does this have to do with AAAS 108x, though?

I plan to investigate my questions about stolenness by analyzing the content and form of posts made by non-immigrant black American Tumblr users that relate to the Middle Passage, American chattel slavery, alienation and loss.

For example, let’s look at one subset of posts that I am going to use for this project: the posts under the #Middle Passage hashtag.

“Viccisitudes.” Underwater Sculpture by Jason DeCaires Taylor. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

This image of an underwater sculpture entitled “Viccisitudes” created by John deCaires Taylor off the coast of Grenada appears quite frequently within the hashtag. Within the posts it is clear that users see this sculpture as a kind of memorial, although that was not the original purpose intended by the artist. A need for a place of remembrance and grieving for the millions of lives lost during journeys through the Middle Passage seems to be a common want among black bloggers.

 

 

Why Tumblr? (And really Imani, why are you always talking about Tumblr?)

–          It’s a digital space that does not promote the creation of strong identities – identities that are connected across social platforms and easy to target by advertisers.

• I was introduced to the concept of strong and weak identities by Lisa Nakamura during a discussion of her book Race After the Internet in her September 26, 2013 AAAS 108x guest lecture.

–          Users are free to remain as anonymous as they want to be and often connect through common interests and not non digital familiarity

–          Although it has post limits (250 per day) Tumblr has no character limit like Twitter and has a lot more flexible tagging system that make it suitable for creative tagging.

#BlurredLines

I think this week’s readings largely fall under the themes of erasure and resistance. Identity in Mashpee highlights how the American legal system forced themselves on the indigenous Mashpee community via definitions of culture and “tribe” hundreds of years after Europeans who would become Americans forced themselves onto them with guns and the plague. The selections from Media Effects, though not particularly surprising  to me because I have a long-standing academic and personal investment in issues of whitewashing and limited representation of POC on television, is an example of systematic erasure at the hands of widely disseminated stereotypes  and political agenda setting (which are veiled, often with very little effort, under the guise of news and entertainment.) Cultural Appropriations of Technical Capital speaks to the resistance to popular negative narratives that occurs when black women can create safe spaces for their voices and stories.

#Blurred Lines

No not this. Although its ties to both race and technology are quite interesting:

• Hashtags promoting the song flash frequently across the screen
• The internet created a forum for people to speak out against the blatant support of rape culture in the song’s lyrics
• Robin Thicke is a ultra-white singer (Yes, I said ultra-white: he’s Canadian and his father is this guy) who appropriates black music and is currently suing the family of music icon Marvin Gaye.

The blurred lines I am referring to are those that delineate, contain and categorize (or at least try to) cultural identity.  I intend to spend the rest of this post focusing on the Mashpee piece, which highlights erasure through the act of violence that is being forced to define yourself using parameters of a power structure that has dedicated itself to your annihilation for hundreds of years, and the Brock piece which looks at how everyday black women work to blur the lines trying to circumscribe them.

A Tribe Called What?

I was initially unsure why this rather dense historical look at land ownership of indigenous Americans in Massachusetts was relevant to our course, but I understand now it’s importance. For one thing, this piece helps us to look at race and identity outside of the black-white binary and secondly it provides a lot of insight into how the enforcement of white supremacy can be deployed to force POC to conform their cultural identity to mainstream, often racist narratives. The case that Clifford discusses is incredibly important because it points to the precariousness of being a person of color in the United States. This is a country that used to count slaves as 3/5 of a person and reserves a national holiday for racist who got lost and then was responsible for a genocide and this was a trial that at its very core was pondering the very existence of a group of people.

Black Girls Blog

Clearly a passion of mine, black women using the internet to connect to each other and discuss black womanhood on their own terms is incredibly valuable and I think that this study could have done a better job at being inclusive to a variety of black experiences. Firstly, these posts were all written as a response to the Andrews article- I’d be more interested in the analysis of posts that were more organic in their creation and development. I also feel that evaluating definitions of black womanhood based on posts about marriage is inherently classist, as women of lower socioeconomic status or those who don’t “have it all” are eliminated from the conversation. There is also of course the fact that when this was written when women who wanted to marry women could not participate in this conversation in the same way because their unions were widely unrecognized/ illegal.

The following questions about this article still remain:

• Is it sexist or limiting to try to evaluate definitions of womanhood through the lens of marriage? Especially given the fact that, as it was pointed out in the article, relationships within the black community have not been hyper-focused on resulting in marriage.
• This article for me raises the question of how often  black women talk freely on other posts on mainstream outlets like Jezebel with at times shaky relationships with race?
• Must all “counter-hegemonic ways of knowing and coping skills” be deemed “Afrocentric”? And also what does that word really mean?

My Journey Through Digital Spaces

I think you can a lot about a person from looking at their Chrome start page which reveals their most visited sites. The above screenshot was taken this morning and is of my Chrome start page.

I remember getting off the school bus at a stop a few blocks away from my dad’s house. I was in seventh or eighth grade and I run upstairs to my bedroom where a Windows PC – virtually prehistoric by today’s standards- awaited me. I would sit on that computer for hours, talking on AIM and then eventually Myspace with my friends until it was time to start dinner. I haven’t thought about this, my first computer in a long time, in at least five years but in writing this post and reminiscing about the excitement I got from waiting for my broadband connection to America Online to load fills me with a rush a gratitude and an overwhelming thankfulness for the advances in technology that have been made since 2005.

I consider myself a digital native. I was one of the first of my friends to get a cell phone: I was only in 4^th grade but the year was 2002 and I live in New York City. I have a smartphone that pretty regularly saves me from my ineptitude with directions and my poor spatial awareness. I have a Facebook page that I check almost impulsively despite the fact that I care very little for the vast majority of my “friends” on the site. I always have headphones in my ears connected to the Pandora App on my phone or my iPod and my entire life would come crumbling down around me if I didn’t have access to Gmail and GoogleDrive for 24 hours.

My connectedness to the digital is what I would consider for a 21 year old female college student in 2013 to be typical but there are a few digital frontiers that I have actively resisted and avoided. I don’t have Instagram and only have a Twitter because it was mandated of me for this class. I don’t have a Vine and only have SnapChat after months of prodding from my friends. I like my digital experience to be, like my non-digital experience, community based and free from unnecessary attention.

Moving from the general to the quotidian, my Google Chrome start page accurately shows the websites that I spend most of my day on. While I have already touched on my dependence on Gmail and my reluctant participation in Facebook the number one website that I can and have spent hours upon hours on is blogging website Tumblr. Anyone who knows me knows that Tumblr is a pretty big part of my digital existence.

I got on tumblr about a year and half ago after I decided to transition back to having natural hair. The blogs I followed quickly evolved from just hair blogs to blogs that focus on black history and news, a few blogs that keep me connected with the Scandal and Marvel Cinematic Universe fandoms and blogs run by black women who make me laugh, who understand the struggle of inhabiting a body that is both black and female and who actively participate in the dismantling systems of white power and patriarchy. Last semester, my junior spring, I changed concentrations (and in changing concentrations changed the entire professional and academic trajectory of my life) after I realized how much I loved spending time learning and appreciating black culture and thinking critically about issues that effect the black community.

For me there is something really beautiful and freeing about being able to remain as anonymous as you’d like while also being able to make real personal connections with people around the world. I could ramble on about how wonderful of a space Tumblr is but in the interest of both my time and yours I’m just going to post links to the blogs whose posts I reblog and like the most.

QueenNubian jdelafro knowledgeequalsblackpower trap-beast