Emerging field of digital humanities explained in MSU faculty member’s symposium talks
by Sam Kealhofer, Intern on the A&S Research Support Team
Research conducted in the digital humanities and its potential use in other disciplines is the topic of MSU Department of English Assistant Professor Dhanashree Thorat’s recent conversations about her research.
During one online event, Thorat and Julia Osman, director of the Institute for the Humanities, hosted a question and answer session, “What is the Digital Humanities Anyway?” To watch a replay, visit: facebook.com/msu.humanities.institute.
The question and answer format provided discussion on the use of computing technologies in the digital humanities, its themes of open access and activism, as well as examples of current research projects.
Thorat also participated in a digital humanities symposium panel last Thursday [Oct 22], hosted by the University of Oklahoma. Her presentation, “Racial Terror and Infrastructural Imperialism,” focused on Google’s latest undersea fiber-optic cable named “Equiano,” named for Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century Black man who was sold into the Transatlantic Slave Trade and later purchased his own freedom. Reading Google’s infrastructural initiative in light of Equiano’s autobiographical narrative, Thorat highlighted the histories, lived experiences and affective registers of enslavement, colonialism and Black liberation called into being by the invocation of Equiano’s name.
Thorat later spoke in a panel discussion where she touched on the interconnected effects of caste and colonialism on digitalization initiatives in India.
Her forthcoming monograph entitled “Liquid Data: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Internet Infrastructure” uses science and technology studies and digital humanities to study the colonial genealogies influencing the infrastructure of the internet in the global south as well as the projects by corporations like Facebook and Google intended to remedy the global digital divide.
Thorat pursues a data ethnographic approach, drawing on sources ranging from colonial maps to data policies in postcolonial nation-states to trace how internet infrastructures remain invested in notions of Western superiority.
Thorat said, “The rhetoric of ‘technomodernity’ draws on colonial-racial views of postcolonial natives as premodern subjects in need of Western aid supplied by white technologists. Given the importance of internet infrastructures in the world today, my work argues for decolonizing infrastructural development, and in particular, highlights new modes of regional co-building, ownership and management of internet infrastructures in the global south.” Thorat is also the editor for an Introduction to Digital Humanities textbook produced by the Center for Digital Humanities, in Pune, Italy. This is the first such initiative in the Indian context and it will include short introductory chapters to selected DH chapters, interviews with DH practitioners, sample assignments and bibliographies, said Thorat. The textbook will be open-access and published online by April 2021.
Through her work, Thorat explores the important interaction between emerging technologies and research in the humanities. She demonstrates that both can transform the other for the better. Technology equips the humanities with powerful new tools to better understand history and culture. Likewise, the digital humanities’ themes of open access and activism show promise to make emerging technologies like the internet more equitable and accessible, crucial during times of increased online learning.
In an effort to contribute solutions to the various challenges facing the nation, as well as insight into other points of interest, the College of Arts and Sciences will continue to highlight faculty research in our “Research in the Headlines” series each Monday and Wednesday. For more research in the headlines, visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/research/researchintheheadlines/; and for information about the College of Arts and Sciences or the Department of English, visit https://www.cas.msstate.edu/ or https://www.english.msstate.edu/.