Critical and Cultural Digital Humanities
If the digital humanities build tools and datasets, critical and cultural digital humanities ask what those tools assume and whom they serve. This area brings the humanities' traditions of cultural critique to bear on data, infrastructure, platforms, and the field's own practices.
Definition
The branch of digital humanities that applies cultural, social, and political critique to digital methods, data, infrastructures, platforms, and the practices of the field, attending to power, bias, and justice.
Scope
Covers the reflexive and critical strand of the digital humanities: cultural criticism of digital methods and the field itself, data feminism and postcolonial digital humanities, minimal computing and critiques of infrastructure, and the study of platforms and algorithms as cultural forces. Includes attention to power, bias, labor, and inclusion in digital scholarship.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What cultural and political assumptions are built into digital tools and data?
- Whose knowledge and labor are centered or excluded by digital scholarship?
- How do platforms and algorithms shape culture and reproduce inequity?
- How can the digital humanities pursue justice, not just efficiency?
Key concepts
- Cultural critique
- Data feminism
- Postcolonial DH
- Bias and power
- Infrastructure
- Inclusion
Key theories
- Cultural criticism in the digital humanities
- Liu argued that the digital humanities had under-developed cultural criticism and called for the field to engage the meaning and politics of its tools, not only their construction.
- Data feminism
- D'Ignazio and Klein offered principles for analyzing and creating data that confront power, elevate marginalized perspectives, and make labor and context visible.
- Postcolonial digital humanities
- Risam argued for a digital humanities attentive to colonial legacies and global inequities, reshaping archives, methods, and pedagogy.
History
As the digital humanities grew, scholars questioned its relation to cultural criticism (Liu, 2012) and its inclusivity. Postcolonial and feminist interventions (Risam, 2018; D'Ignazio and Klein, 2020) and critiques of platforms and algorithms (Noble, 2018) consolidated a critical strand emphasizing power, justice, and reflexivity.
Debates
- Building tools versus critiquing them
- Whether the digital humanities should prioritize making tools and resources or sustain cultural and political critique of digital technologies and their own practices.
Key figures
- Alan Liu
- Catherine D'Ignazio
- Lauren Klein
- Roopika Risam
- Safiya Noble
Related topics
Seminal works
- liu2012
- dignazio2020
- risam2018
- noble2018
Frequently asked questions
- Is critical digital humanities against using computers?
- No. It is a reflexive strand that uses digital methods while questioning their assumptions, biases, and politics. The aim is more just and self-aware digital scholarship, not the rejection of computation.