Makers of the World, Unite!

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.

Moya Z. Bailey, All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave .

This particular snippet from Moya Z. Bailey’s article has played midwife to some of my thoughts about what it means to “produce” – or to make, in other words – in our culture today.

I want to avoid using the term ‘capitalism’ here, because I know it is a cue for many people to roll their eyes, but I think it’s a relatively uncontroversial observation to note that we often demand some justification for making things. We feel that a ‘thing’ should have some financial value, an immediate pragmatic use, or to reflect some level of skill or development which the average person cannot match. For example, some people may criticize art if it looks as though a child might have made it, or they might suggest that a person sell crafts online, as if that is more legitimate than crafting for its own sake. And even intangible things are evaluated in this way: if it can make money, it is branded as a service. If it is ‘unskilled labor,’ which anyone might do, then it is un- or under-valued. (Now I suppose this is my cue to start singing the Internationale.)

I agree with Slavoj Zizek that academia does not have to be [immediately] useful to justify its existence. I think ‘making’ is similar. If the process of making is nourishing or fulfilling in some way, that is enough. The ‘product’ does not have to be financially valuable or exceptional in any way. We have impulses to create as human beings, and I would argue that these impulses are a large part of what makes us human.

At risk of sounding ‘out there,’ I think digital tools are a good avenue to explore and depict things which are haunting us. (I like the term ‘haunting’ because it brings to mind ghosts or spirits – in other words, things which affect us in some way without truly being “real” or “present.”) I’m particularly interested in ways of depicting the past – buildings, land, events – and trying to pluck out their threads in the present. But in a more general sense, what I find exciting about the ‘digital’ of digital humanities is that it can manifest people, places, and events which are gone or which have never existed, and so give us an avenue to engage with them.