Too often “diversity” in the context of higher education is limited to conversations about race/ethnicity and gender and inclusion. You’ll regularly find organizations that proclaim their “diversity” because they have people of all shapes and sizes… who share pretty much the same politics and worldview. But is that true “diversity”?

This is something that has been part of an ongoing conversation on my campus (Baruch College), which has regularly been proclaimed “the most diverse college in the United States.” But what does that really, truly mean, and how does the discomfort it can provoke add value to the academy? Could it suggest an investigation that needs to go beyond efforts towards inclusion and really force us all to regularize the critical examination of our own wide-ranging prejudices?

Just a half-baked thought…

On the subject of diversity, I’m particularly interested in thinking about how we can attract a plurality of undergraduates and graduate students to thinking that DH is something that they can do. How do make the practices of digitally-assisted scholarship more grok-able for a wide audience of people? (I’m aware of the irony of using “grok” in this context…)

It’s also worth mentioning the excellent Collaborators’ Bill of Righs from the Off the Tracks workshop at MITH. As Mark, Alex, and others noted at STS, we might find that DH is already more diverse than we might think if we start acknowledging all of those with whom we must collaborate for DH.

Finally, I’ll point to the “Messy DH” session that happened at THATCamp Southeast as another node in this conversation. Session notes are available on Google Docs, as well as a proposed series of posts for ProfHacker.

Also, would we include representation of different institutional positions in our discussion of diversity, i.e. 2-year college people, administrators, community members?

Re: What is diversity? I think that’s a great place to start discussion, especially if we reformulate it as, what are the underrepresented groups in DH? Then I would really hope we can have time for Why? and What can we do about it?

Can I ask a stupid question, one that I hope isn’t offensive? When we say “diversity,” are we talking only about race, or also about sexuality, gender, and disability? Not to mention class.

Obviously, since I’m a woman, gender issues are more often on my mind. Frankly I sometimes wonder whether part of the reason I’m attracted to digital humanities is that it seems to offer a respite from identity politics: on the face of it, it’s a meritocracy. However, I’m regretfully certain that that’s only a seeming, and that the seeming might even be more pernicious than outright bias.

Private organizations range considerably in terms of the website materials — my favorite right now is the site for Hannibal Square Heritage Center in central Florida. One of the better sites (the Harvey Gantt Center) has links to the private webmaster used for the site, and I suspect that’s true for others. Most local heritage sites (including those focusing on minority communities) will not have the curatorial/academic staff of a Montpelier or Monticello, so contracting out for a webmaster makes sense. Interesting things to talk about at the session…

I like the idea in general, and the questions Patrick raises, especially these: “can getting people involved digitally help to open up new fields of inquiry that make more sense for a broader population? Or can DH provide a broader inroad to humanities that we’ve seen so far?”

As a European-American who works on issues of race (mostly from the 19th-century American debate about slavery and its aftermath), I’m interested in diversity both of scholars participating in the conversation, and of texts and other objects being digitized and interpreted. I tend to assume that getting texts, objects, and other information out there, even if later, more diverse generations of scholars will interpret them differently than I do, is a step in the right direction. At the same time, I’m aware that the form and context in which material first appears can exert a possibly-undue influence on later interpretations.

I’m not sure whether that’s exactly where you were headed, James; it’s just my two cents.

One, is that I wish we had more data to help us see the extent of the problem. I have a gut instinct that, from the perspective that “Digital Humanities” is a subset of “Humanities”, we’ll see different demographic slices across different disciplines within the humanities. That is, are different branches of the humanities (e.g., history, literature, archaeology, etc.) more or less prone to this issue in general? That might help us understand the anecdotal evidence that I think we’re working from.

Another, is from the other angle, and this is what I’m actually more interested in. Can Digital Humanities do things to help alleviate some problems of representation in the humanities in general? In what ways could we work within DH as a way to encourage people into fields in the humanities that are lacking in diversity?

For example, can getting people involved digitally help to open up new fields of inquiry that make more sense for a broader population? Or can DH provide a broader inroad to humanities that we’ve seen so far? It seems like the museum and archive folks might have insights and doors to help the academic folks in this area?

Last, deeper note: do we need to examine whether some tools and technologies embraced by DH might be analogous to the short hoe, or otherwise causing harm that we’re not seeing?

We were at a roundtable devoted to the future of the Society for Textual Scholarship (not to be confused with the future of textual scholarship), and one audience member (an older, white male) stood up, looked around, and declared that everyone in the room was white and that we needed more diversity in the organization. The backchannel immediately noted that while we should indeed strive to be more representative, not everyone in the room was white. See, for example, Paige Morgan’s response and thoughtful followup, in which she observes that “by assuming everyone is white, we don’t help diversity situation any more than if we intentionally exclude.” This expresses a similar sentiment to my own tweet that you quote.

It’s worth mentioning that the very people the speaker ignored when he glanced around the room had a sense of humor about it. Barbara Bordalejo joked that she should be invited to deliver a plenary talk “to compensate for not noticing me” and Alex Gil constructively pointed out that if the organization is “worried that it is racially homogeneous” then the “first thing it should do is approach the few minorities that already participate.”

But please don’t make it too difficult. I am Australian and we aren’t too bright.

And, like Tim, I’d love to get a conversation going about accessibility, so please see my just-published “Making the Digital Humanities Accessible: A Session Idea + A Survey.”

But there is SO. MUCH. POTENTIAL. HERE to do some really powerful, enabling, democratic, world-changing stuff.