In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[ 309 Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon amy e. earhart I n the 1990s, the rallying cry of proponents of the Internet was the democratization of knowledge made possible by the developing technological infrastructure .Lost or excluded texts began to be published on the net,some developed by scholars, others by fans, and still others by libraries and museums. I remember the possibilities that these materials offered for the literary scholar.I could create a website for students that linked the recovered e-text of HarrietWilson’s Our Nig,period images of slaves, and the variety of African American cultural and historical documents found on the then-fledgling Schomburg Research Center website.The seemingly expansive materials for use on the web were far more complete than materials found in print anthologies or other such course materials.For scholars interested in reinsertingwritersof colorintocriticaldiscussions,therecoveryeffortswereaboon. We imagined that the free access to materials on the web would allow those previously cut off from intellectual capital to gain materials and knowledge that might be leveraged to change the social position of people of color. The new space of the Internet would allow those who had been silenced to have a voice. Hypertext theorist Jay David Bolter promoted the freeing power of the web-based environment as a space that encouraged “the abandonment of the ideal of high culture (literature, music, the fine arts) as a unifying force. If there is no single culture, but only a network of interest groups, then there is no single favored literature or music” (233). As the 1990s drew to a close, and the number of digitally recovered texts seemed to grow each day, Bolter’s prediction seemed correct. However, a review of digitized materials production and the current treatment of race in the digital canon suggests that Bolter’s hopes have not been realized. I want to focus my discussion by examining a subset of the digital humanities, digital texts.1 I’m interested in the digital work being produced by those associated with academia and those with strong connections to traditional humanities fields including history, literature, classics, art history, and archeology, among others. My part iv ][ Chapter 18 amy e. earhart 310 ] focus includes pay-walled scholarly production, such as the excellent Clotel project published by Virginia’s Rotunda Press, and open-access materials but excludes large-scale digital projects produced by for-profit publishers,such as Gale-Cengage, or nonscholarly produced projects,such as Google Books.I am also most interested in projects that make something.Here I would like to echo Stephen Ramsay’s recent argument that “Digital Humanities is about building things.” While Ramsay has come under fire for his insistence on the applied nature of digital humanities, the history of digital humanities reveals the centrality of building to the field. In fact, scholars invested in early work on race in digital humanities insisted on building editions and digital texts as an activist intervention in the closed canon. While we should continue to explore tool building, visualization, and data mining as crucial areas within digital humanities, the narrow digital canon should remind us why we cannot stop digital edition work. While those invested in digital text production should continue to flesh out the digital canon, other areas of digital humanities, such as tool building and visualization , should also be invested in the investigation of canon on their work. For example, the Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK) project has harnessed materials from Documenting the American South, Early American Fiction, Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Shakespeare, and Wright American Fiction 1850–75. While the purpose of MONK is not text recovery but visual analysis,a broad understanding of the literature of this period is only as good as the data from which the analysis draws. In the case of MONK, a quick search reveals that texts by Sojourner Truth, Sui Sin Far, and Maria Christina Mena—authors of color included in most standard anthologies of American literature—are absent.2 Add to this MONK’s claim that “for users of public domain materials, MONK provides quite good coverage of 19th century American fiction,” and we are reminded that a more direct analysis of the position of race in digital humanities work is necessary (Unsworth and Muller, 2). We shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of certain texts used in the MONK project, as the digitized humanities corpora is scant and...

Share