Andy: Carpio on the Statement of Values for Digital Ethnic Studies

Carpio, “Toward a Digital Ethnic Studies: Race, Technology, and the Classroom”

Question from Prof. Whaley: “How did White Violence, Black Resistance investigate power relations embedded in the digital realm? (613-614) What constituted the work of the Statement of Values for Digital Ethnic Studies? (615)”

According to Carpio, the White Violence, Black Resistance project encouraged and empowered students to “curate histories of racial violence” (613) themselves, situating their objects of study not in some unreachable past but in the present. Digital tools were framed for the students, then, as tools not only of passive documentation, but active intervention.

The Statement of Values for Digital Ethnic Studies is, as Carpio puts it, “a student-authored Statement of Values for Digital Ethnic Studies” that was a collaborative result of the Race and the Digital project (615). Grounded in the work of digital humanist Lisa Spiro, it responds to the relative absence of digital humanist statements/manifestos pertaining to American ethnic studies specifically. It provides a list of scholarly “priorities” that include such values as intersectionality, connectedness, and “bottom-up data gathering”--the latter being a key feature of the Race and the Digital project (615). The Statement of Values serves as an articulation and reaffirmation of the principles of scholarly, creative, and community engagement on which Carpio’s project was based.

Question for discussion:

• To what extent might the form of the manifesto, statement, list of principles, etc. serve as a generative and important outlet for scholarly collaboration itself? Are digital humanists collaborating to create such documents simply because the field of DH is taken to be in its infancy/early stages, or is there perhaps something intrinsically collaborative about the kind of scholarly work done in DH that encourages the expression of shared commitments?