Seeing Race and Inequality

"We must consider how the Internet developed as a part of a longstanding history and process of racial formation - the complex, racialized historical contexts, circumstances, interests, and problems that predate, but may either be exacerbated or corrected by the web's technological environment..."
- Charlton McIlwain

Tweets

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ARchitecture of the web

internet Racism can look like...

• Racially segregated site navigation
• Racist Comments and Tweets
• Reinscribing or upholding racist or racially bias myths and meta-narratives

internet Racism can look like...

• Virtual Redlining
• Unfiltered or under-scrutinized algorithms
• Racialized assumptions about certain people groups and technology.

A Critique of Internet Metageographies

• Background - Published in 1999, this work is an earlier Digital Humanities texts in which the Internet was being both utilized and interrogated within humanities scholarship.

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• Thesis - Harpold proposes that the cartographic representations of network activity produced at this time are embedded in unconscious metageographies, that at first sight appear straightforward but actually rely upon “historically and politically-inflected misrepresentations of underlying material conditions” (6).

A revised Geographic Epistemology

• There are epistemological frameworks or ways of knowing that have shaped our cartographic perceptions of Africa. Africa is only going to appear as a blank space or as a sign of lack because the questions being asked were not addressing African nations.

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• Need alternative epistemologies or ways of measuring IT progress. How might the map look different if it were measuring cell phone use, or other technologies that are more common in African nations?
• During the late 1990s the historical exclusion of information technology in the unwired parts of the world was not the focus of mapping and Internet practices.
• Africa is only going to appear as a blank space or as a sign of lack because the questions being asked were not addressing African nations. Need alternative epistemologies or ways of measuring IT progress. How might the map look different if it were measuring cell phone use, or other technologies that are more common in African nations?

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• Africa is only going to appear as a blank space or as a sign of lack because the questions being asked were not addressing African nations. Need alternative epistemologies or ways of measuring IT progress. How might the map look different if it were measuring cell phone use, or other technologies that are more common in African nations?

What can Digital Historians Do?

• Highlight, critique or problematize the cultural significance of race and ethnicity in technology and digital cultures.
• Engage critical race theory and practices on the web.
• Confront the internet's "real time" output through digital projects, scholarship and teaching.

What DH can do (continued)

• Focus on authors and cultural producers of non- European descent.
• Employ Critical Digital Pedagogy which is inherently political.

Keyword - Critical Digital Pedagogy

• centers its practice on community and collaboration;
• must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;

(Continued)...

• will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices;
• must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.

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