In this talk Isabel Galina Russell will outline the main challenges involved in creating a truly global Digital Humanities community with active participation from a broad range of countries and languages. Drawing on her experience in establishing the Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD), Dr Galina Russell will discuss the importance of geopolitics in Digital Humanities and the way in which the Digital Humanities are particularly equipped to address issues such multilingualism, multiculturalism, publishing models and dissemination, validation and knowledge construction, community building and collaborative projects.

1. +
Geopolitical diversity in
Digital Humanities
How do we make it happen?

2. +
RedHD
 Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD)
 June 2011
 “Our aims are to promote and strengthen work on the
humanities and computing, with special emphasis on
teaching and research in Latin America.The RedHD supports
better communication between digital humanists in the
region, the formation of human resources, preparation and
documentation of good practices, the promotion of DH
projects, dissemination of DH related events as well as
promoting the recognition of the field. Additionally we seek
to promote regional projects and initiatives on an
international level”

3. +
Scholarly publishing and
communication
 Highly complex international structure in place today
 An integral part of power and prestige (assignment of grant
money, hiring, tenure, etc.)
 Also a communicative and collaborative practice
 Essential for knowledge construction

4. +
Publishing from the periphery
 Little participation in “international journals”
 Dominance of researchers from developed nations
 Indexing services (Arts&Humanties Index,Web of Science,
Scopus)
 What journals are in?
 Citation and production analysis using these ‘core’ journals
 Fiormonte (2015) looked at DH literature. Strong
predominance of citations to publications in English (related
to English speaking institutions and projects).

5. +
Science on the periphery
 (…) science on the periphery is characterized by
 poor funding,
 the absence of a viable scientific community,
 negligible presence in international invisible colleges,
 an insularity resulting from inadequate access to relevant information and
 inadequate communication within the local scientific community and with
international invisible colleges,
 an unduly long time lag before participants can take part in hot/emerging
research fronts,
 lack of originality,
 weak institutional infrastructures,
 an excessive dependence on science carried out in the centre, and
 negligible contribution to the world’s pool of knowledge.
(Arunachalam, 2004)
 Rarely periphery countries get to set the research agenda

6. +
Lost Science in the Third World
 “structural obstacles and subtle prejudices that prevent
researchers in poor nations from sharing their discoveries
with the industrial world and with each other”.
Gibbs (1995)

7. +
A Geopolitics of Academic Writing
 “how texts construct and constitute knowledge; how the
values of the Western intellect traditions are reflected in the
conventions and practices of academic communities and
their communications; how mainstream journals and their
publishing practices are congenial to the interests of center
knowledge while proving recalcitrant to periphery
discourses; and how academic writing/publishing functions
are an important means of legitimating and reproducing
center knowledge” (Canagarajah, 2002).

8. +
Research in periphery countries
 Research in periphery countries is particularly invisible
 Marginalization of peripheries in the production of
knowledge
 And the impact of their research

9. +
Why and how is this relevant to
DH?
 Research is collaborative
 Humanities: rich cultural traditions, multilingual,
multicultural, heterogeneous
 A collaborative and open community
 Openness, collaboration, collegiality, connectedness, diversity,
experimentation
Spiro (2012)
 DH as transformative / reposition Humanities
 Not just about using technology

10. +
Defining Digital Humanities
 “The tension between the digital humanities and the academic
establishment is multifaceted and involves institutional hurdles to
doing interdisciplinary and collaborative work, need for space
and technological infrastructure, tenure systems not adapted to
digital production and publications, and the need for non-faculty
experts and corresponding career paths. Based on these and
other factors, there is a strong sense that the university and the
humanities need to change to accommodate this type of work,
and all this feeds into a vision of transformed humanities.”
(Svensson, 2012).

11. +
DH on the periphery
 Fighting power structures
 Validation
 Recognized and valid forms
of production Humanities
Academia at large
DH

12. +
The periphery in DH
 Lack of diversity
 Linguistic
 Geographical
 Power structures
 ADHO DH
Periphery
DH

13. +
Humanities
Academia at large
Periphery
Periphery
DH

14. +
New forms of publishing
 Academic structures in the Humanities value individual work
 Traditional outputs – journals and books
 Open Access movement
 New forms of peer review

15. +
DH publishing
 New DH production
 Datasets, web pages, digital scholarly editions, textual markup,
visualization
 Figuring out how to certify them as valid outputs and
communication on knowledge
 A BIG DH issue
 New ways of publishing
 Novel forms of peer review
 New career paths

16. +
Internet as a publishing platform
 Digitization of materials and making available online
 Humanities 1.0 (Davidson, 2012)
 Non-canonical texts (Earhart, 2012)
 Difficult access (Priani, 2015)
 Geographically dispersed
 Journals
 Scielo and RedALyC (“Science that cannot be seen does not exist”)
 Collections – rich cultural heritage
 International Dunhuang Project
 Europeana
 Hathi Trust
 BibliotecaVirtual Cervantes

17. +
Internet as a transformative
platform
 Access is not enough
 “substantive rethinking (…) of the ways those faculty do their
work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is
read both inside and outside the academy”
(Fitzpatrick, 2011)
“Humanities 2.0 is distinguished from monumental, first generation
data-based projects not just by interactivity but also by an openness
about participation grounded in a different set of theoretical
premises, which decenter authority and knowledge”
(Davidson, 2012)

18. +
DH as transformative
 DH are defined through the spirit of the times we live in
 We should be fully aware of the radical cultural, social and
epistemological transformation that are occurring
 Position of tension
 “new interpretative models, new disruptive paradigms in our
understanding of culture and the world”

19. +
Building and critical thinking
 Digital Humanities
 Building, creating things
 Importance of cultural criticism, critical thinking (Liu, etc)
 New scholarly publishing and communication
 DH can contribute by building
 DH can contribute by thinking critically

20. +
Publishing
 Power structures
 Recognition and validation
 Communication and inclusion
 Build systems that address this historical imbalance

21. +
Thank you!
Isabel Galina Russell
Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
igalina@unam.mx
@igalina

22. +
References
 Arunachalam, S. Science on the Periphery - Bridging the Information Divide. In: Moed, H. F.;Glänzd, W., et al (Ed.).
Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research: The Use of Publication and Patent Statistics on S&T
Systems. USA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. cap. 7, p.163-184.
 Canagarajah, S. A. (2002) A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. USA: University of Pittsburgh Press,
 Clavert, F. The DH Multicultural Revolution Did Not Happen Yet. L'histoire contemporaine à l'ère numérique 2013.
 Dacos, M. La estrategia de la sauna finlandesa. Blog de la RedHD. Mexico: RedHD 2013.
 Davidson, C. Humanities 2.0 - Promise, Perils, Predictions. In: Gold, M. (Ed.). Debates in the Digital Humanities.
Minneapolis: University of Minesotta Press, 2012.
 Earhart, A. E. Can Information Be Unfettered? In: Gold, M. K. (Ed.). Debates in the Digital Humanities. London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012. cap. 18, p.309-318.
 Fitzpatrick, K. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. USA: New York
University Press 2011.
 Fiormonte, D. (2015), Towards monocultural (digital) Humanities? InforLet. 2015 2015.
 Fiormonte, D. Towards a Cultural Critique of the Digitak Humanities. Historical Social Research, v. 37, p. 59-76, 2012a.
Disponível em: < http://www.academia.edu/1932310/Towards_a_Cultural_Critique_of_Digital_Humanities >.

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References
 Galina, I. (2013) Is There Anybody Out There?, Blog de la RedHD, <insert URL>
 Galina, I., Priani, E. (2011) Is There Anybody Out There? Discovering New DH Practitioners in other Countries, Digital
Humanities 2011, Conference abstracts, Stanford, EUA.
 Liu, A. Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities? In: Gold, M. K. (Ed.). Debates in the Digital Humanities:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012. p.495-498.
 Gibbs, W. Lost Science in the Third World. Scientific American, p. 92-99, 1995.
 Priani, E. (2015) La Biblioteca Digital del Pensamiento Novohispano. DHCommons, (forthcoming).
 Risam, R. Acroos Two (Imperial) Cultures. Roopika Risam. 2015 2015.
 Rodríguez Ortega, N. Prólogo:Humanidades Digitales y pensamiento crítico. In: Romero Frías, E. e Sánchez González, M.
(Ed.). Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Digitales: CAC (Cuadernos Artesanos de Comunicación), 2012. p.13-17.
 Schreibman, S.; Mandell, L.; Olsen, S. Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Introduction. Profession, p. 123-135, 2011.
 Spiro, L. "This is Why We Fight": Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities. In: Gold, M. K. (Ed.). Debates in the
Digital Humanities. USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. p.16-35.
 Svensson, P. Envisioning the Digital Humanities. DHQ, v. 6, n. 1, 2012.