Power, Privilege, and the Ethics of DH

Being new to the digital humanities world, I stumbled around quite a bit in search of an appropriate maiden project. To put it lightly, I hit a few roadblocks. It was frustrating, but it got me thinking. I mean, REALLY thinking. Thinking hard about philosophical things. Things that make my brain hurt… but in a good way. I love an ethical dilemma.

Some background information is probably in order here, and I think a little information about my personal circumstance will help to illustrate my concerns.  I’m coming at this from an anthropological perspective. A particular area within anthropology in which there are lingering hard feelings among interested parties is bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology, particularly in places with a history of European colonization. Bioarchaeology (the study of human skeletal remains from archaeological sites, which is what I do) is very interesting and important to some people…and pretty offensive to others. I am currently working on a dissertation that is, in a way, mine to do what I want with. But it is not really mine, because it is not about me as much as it is about the community of people whose remains I measured and qualified and analyzed and theorized about. Chances are, my dissertation will do nothing but gather dust on the MSU library shelf for all of eternity. The only way it will have an impact will be if I literally throw it at something. But what if I decided to try to do more with it? How would any public (especially digitally public) representation of my work and its subject affect living communities/interested parties? Do I have a right to make any kind of statement at all about a community that I am not a part of? If I do, where does this right come from? If I don’t, why don’t I, as a human and a scholar (and a humanistic scholar) have such rights? How will increased digitization and increasingly open access affect how we view our scholarly rights and responsibilities to the public? What am I even talking about?

I think many scholars from many disciplines deal with similar, although not identical, issues.  We are, after all, digital HUMANISTS. We deal with people. Living, breathing people with interests, feelings, needs, and wants. In this modern age, tech savvy is power. As people with knowledge of and access to digital tools to create and disseminate packages of information, we have power over our audiences in a very real sense. I think that intentions are typically good, but even good intentions can lead to dangerous circumstances if perception/reception of our projects differs from our expectations. I can easily envision circumstances in which communities feel that they have been misrepresented and (even worse) powerless to respond, unless digital access and knowledge come to be viewed as a right rather than a privilege.

I hope this is not perceived as some kind of paranoid warning of an impending, colonialist DH empire. I actually don’t think that is going to happen because, in theory, there will be checks and balances. Perhaps what I have very ungracefully tried to introduce here is an idea for a general conversation about DH conduct and ethics. Not as it applies to copyrights and licenses (which are important in their own right), but as it applies to the individuals and communities of people whom we create “knowledge” about. I guess what I am getting at is the ethics of access/dissemination/representation. Who gets to control it? I believe that knowledge is good and it should be shared whenever it can be. But how do we do it? Or, more specifically, how do we do it properly? I am inclined to think that the only way to do this right is to make sure that as many scholars (“scholars” interpreted broadly) as possible have equal access to digital training and tools. But I suspect that is only one piece of the puzzle. Wrapped up in all of this “access to tools and knowledge” stuff is the issue of diversity in DH, which has been introduced in a previous blog post, and I think that my concerns might be seen as an extension of that issue.  I am anxious to see if others see these issues as a cause for concern and, if so, start to come up with some suitable approaches to dealing with them.