[ONLINE] The enframing of narratives and the post-Fordist Global South Digital Humanities ecosystem

The enframing of narratives and the post-Fordist Global South Digital Humanities ecosystem: Rethinking the social informatics of digital cultural heritage in an era of techno-optimism

The computational turn, in the humanities scholarship, particularly, with the advent of the Collections as data movement, has resulted in the increasing discursive marginalization of Digital Humanities (DH) scholarly practices and narratives from the Global South, in the Heideggerian (1971) paradigm of enframing.  

Hence, this demands a discursive-textual mode of critical analysis, entailing the materialization of Bowker’s (1994) idea of “infrastructural inversion” to dismantle the reductionist post-Fordist scholarly communications edifice, placing the onus, equally, on the GLAM professionals and the techno-humanists.  

In this presentation, I will expound a conceptual framework, informed by Paul Ricœur’s (1992) hermeneutical construction of “narrative identity” and Henry Giroux’s (1993) notion of Border Pedagogy, for rethinking the DH workflow, transnationally, for deconstructing Western DH grand narratives and creating counter-texts.  

By blending Ricœur’s hermeneutical technique, collaboratively, with digital multimedia storytelling tools and Giroux’s idea of Border Pedagogy, it is posited, will enable the re-contextualization of computational narratives, facilitated by GLAM professionals re-envisioning themselves as "border crossers" to reinforce the extant DH epistemic milieux, sociotechnically.  

In conclusion, this conceptual edifice is an exercise in participatory praxis, as a counterpoint to the techno-deterministic DH research ecosystem, for enabling intercultural dialogue and envisioning a new sociology of knowledge. 

Register for the Zoom event and view the full seminar series programme: https://critical-creative.eventbrite.co.uk

The Sloane Lab Seminar Series is convened by Marco Humbel (Sloane Lab & UCLDH), Nadezhda Povroznik (TU Darmstadt), Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL) and Andrew Flinn (UCL). Administrative support is provided by Lucy Stagg (UCLDH & UCL IAS).

This joint virtual seminar is co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.