Week 2 Reflective Blog

There is a need to address the complexities of globalization, colonization, and the alienated labor of people of color in the production of technology that advances digital scholarship practices that they will not be able to access or directly benefit from.

Bailey , M. Z. (n.d.). All the digital humanists are white, all the nerds are men, but some of us are brave. Journal of Digital Humanities. https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/all-the-digital-humanists-are-white-all-the-nerds-are-men-but-some-of-us-are-brave-by-moya-z-bailey/

This particular quote in “All the Digital Humanists are White, All the Nerds are Men, but Some of Us are Brave” stood out because it was an uncomfortable sentiment expressed in my lab group last summer. We have had to address the elephant in the room of creating research about marginalized groups for an audience of people not primarily consisting of those same groups. Until my recent foray into academia, I didn’t think about these issues, but I think now is the best time to have these conversations.

I think that every field of academia needs to discuss how we get technological progress from marginalized groups but fail to use said progress to help those groups or even acknowledge their contributions actively. There has been a long history of this in everything from film to music, and academics have studied these phenomena and are still making the same mistakes. Ultimately, I think we as a community can do better for these marginalized groups, but that starts with these discussions.

In my own experience, I remember being at the lab just wondering who I was writing my paper for. I was studying misinformation on Twitter (or X) and was just thinking that no one who I wanted to help out with my paper besides academics would probably see it. Even if I somehow managed to publish my paper, the only way a mass audience would see my work and possibly be affected is if some new organization took my results and filtered them for whatever narrative they were trying to push. It was a frustrating feeling at the time, especially as someone who is from a marginalized group, and I still don’t know how to solve the problem or even address it.

In conclusion, we all are responsible for acknowledging marginalized community’s contributions to our work. Additionally, I think the issues brought up by the quote need to be addressed not just in academics but also in the broader digital humanities field.