I have read 90% of the readings for this week before, and that is because I am–for better or worse–in the Digital Humanities program. The DH program at the GC does a good job of trying to be intersectional, and its failings only lie where the failings of DH lie in this regard.

Despite my disdain for the ever-growing liberal idea that political change should be perfect immediately and that progress is a myth, Miriam Posner’s introduction to What’s Next really resonates with me, in regard to the current state of “intersectionality” in Digital Humanities (which, I add in quotations as 1. It is not truly intersectional, and 2. Including Black scholars and Black issues, for example, should not have to be considered “intersectional,” but should rather be the default). She writes: “Digital humanists have heard numerous recent calls for the field to interrogate race, gender, and other structures of power. I would like to argue here that these calls, while necessary and justified, do not go far enough.”

Eight years later, nothing has changed. I find at the beginnings of DH journals empty land statements and recycled declarations of dedication to supporting Black lives. As much as I would like it if dismantling the system entirely would fix our problems, that has proven historically to cause only more problems yet. Posner presents an argument that, by being so radical, ends up being as useless as a black square on Instagram. I know, that sounds mean, but I am truly sick and tired of seeing one of two things: 1. Bland statements that accomplish nothing, and 2. ‘Radical’ calls to action that plan to accomplish so much they achieve absolutely nothing. What happened to “baby steps”?

Though, of course, Posner is right: “Likewise, most of the data and data models we have inherited deal with structures of power, like gender and race, with a crudeness that would never pass muster in a peer-reviewed humanities publication.” However, I can gladly say that at least on my end, we have made strides in how we categorize people for data (which, as I must say sounds kind of gross, like treating people as cattle, but I like to think that at least my work tries to look at the holistic individual as much as possible. Perhaps I’ve created the grass-fed, free-range version of data collection). In my keynote Representing Diverse Identities in Data at University of Colorado Boulder, I discussed how I created the inclusive demographic survey for my project, MapLemon. MapLemon’s survey includes options that prevent data binarism (basically, it does the opposite of male/female, black/white). One of the things that Posner discusses that I specifically aimed to do in creating this survey was the exact opposite of what the United States census is doing. I am one of the literal millions of people that census categories fail to provide for (reminder: the census helps municipalities receive funding and determine where to send that funding). And though it took six years from the publication of Posner’s piece, we got there! Small progress is possible!

Posner continues, “I would like us to start understanding markers like gender and race not as givens but as constructions that are actively created from time to time and place to place. In other words, I want us to stop acting as though the data models for identity are containers to be filled in order to produce meaning and recognize instead that these structures themselves constitute data.” And in this she is echoing the exact problem I see not just in Digital Humanities, but also in Linguistics and a wide variety of fields of which I am not a part. Models before data. Checkboxes before people. We are attempting to place people into categories before we even know what categories are necessary; this is one of the problems I talk about in my keynote (I promise to link the video when it’s available). When we do this, we are creating an image of the world that does not actually exist, and that only seeks to prove ourselves correct.

Posner then says, “It is not only about shifting the focus of projects so that they feature marginalized communities more prominently; it is about ripping apart and rebuilding the machinery of the archive and database so that it does not reproduce the logic that got us here in the first place,” I think she misses as many liberals miss- we can’t just burn it all down. When Project MapLemon was hardly an infant even born, I presented my ideas at NAACL’s Queer in AI workshop in the early months of 2022. Without going into why I refuse to work with the NAACL now after such an experience, one of the other distasteful experiences I had while presenting there was being ripped apart by one of the workshop organizers for having a project idea which “reinforces the idea that non-binary people can be boxed into a category” (or something along those lines)–which my project has since been praised for… not doing that. The organizer continued their tirade (yes, they were very angry, I am not exaggerating), saying something about how I needed to make a data collection model that didn’t rely on surveys or demographics entirely. Which… how are you at Computational Linguistics conference if you’re not working with– okay. My criticisms of their criticisms aside, I repeat: we can’t just burn it all down. We have to start somewhere. Making my survey leagues better than previous surveys is a start. MapLemon’s survey asks people to self-describe rather than tick a box in most places, and has an ‘other’ option with space for elaboration where it does ask you to tick a box; I even interviewed people to ask them what the boxes should be! I don’t think we need to burn it all down, I think we just need to do better.

Posner ends her piece in what I feel like almost backs out of her radical calls to action, by politely requesting that DH pushes for “inclusion.” Despite my criticisms of the radical, I also think this one is bullshit and rings of the same emptiness I complained about in the beginning of this post. Can we not have a call to action which says simply: “Please question what you create before you create it, think about who is being left out of the narrative, and then ensure you find ways to add those people back in before you do anything else”? Actually, there it is: that is my call for not only Digital Humanities, but for all practices. Don’t burn it all down, don’t say “we strive for inclusion.” Do something tangible instead.

“So maybe this is the thrill we can work toward—the thrill in capturing people’s lived experience in radical ways—ways that are productive and generative and probably angry, too.” -Miriam Posner