The digital humanities has its roots in fields of study dedicated to textual analysis and historical examination. The present moment is filled with DH practitioners creating visualizations of ‘big data,’ mapping connections between people and ancient cities, and building archives dedicated to long-dead authors. DH projects flourish in collaborations across disciplines and at the intersections of technology and humanistic inquiry. Yet despite the “h” in DH we often get caught up in technocentric discourses that prompt us to produce more, “scale” our projects, increase our “users.” In this talk, Kim Christen encourage us to pause, reflect, slow down and bring back an emphasis on building relationships as central to the practices of digital humanities.

Christen demonstrates how our technocentric approaches to DH practice often fail to address community concerns. Metadata schemas and access models in our common digital platforms don’t take into account the significance and use of those cultural materials within indigenous contexts. Even favorite tools of librarians and open access advocates, such as Creative Commons licenses, can work against the interests of local communities, effectively taking control of their own heritage out of their hands. To help address this, Christen has been helping develop Traditional Knowledge licenses that offer more nuanced approaches to managing cultural materials, and Murkutu, an open source platform built with indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage. She encouraged us to beware of one-size-fits-all approaches and to “pause, reflect, slow down and bring back an emphasis on building relationships” as a central value of our practice.

Presented at the IDRH Digital Humanities Forum 2015: Peripheries, Barriers & Hierarchies, University of Kansas, September 26, 2015.