On Infrastructure and Digital Humanities: A Reflection and CFP
by Maren Loveland, Mellon Graduate Fellow, English & CMAP
As a current DH Fellow, my research explores how infrastructured environments are mediated by digital technologies—namely through mapping, photography, and film. More specifically, I am curious about how these mediations affect the way infrastructures are imagined and aestheticized, and how they become objects of narrative and power. Infrastructures, like digital worlds, are embedded and enmeshed in the landscape, and as such, they hold great power over our lives and how we live them.
As my study of infrastructure has deepened over the past few years, I’ve widened my understanding of infrastructure to include the emotional and social infrastructures which organize interactions between human and nonhuman beings. Infrastructure has been analyzed through myriad paradigms, including animal studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and more. This capacious theorization of infrastructure has led me to ask: what are the infrastructures of digital humanities? And how does digital humanities itself act as an infrastructure? How can we better understand the infrastructures that surround us through the digital lens?
If your work has any interest in these questions, or meditates on the relationship between infrastructure studies and the digital humanities, a group of DH scholars is currently soliciting abstracts for a book titled Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities. As this edited volume denotes, scholarship at the intersection of these seemingly disparate fields is on the rise. The editors are asking for abstracts centered on the following topics:
1) analyzing infrastructure from the perspective of the digital humanities;
2) analyzing the digital humanities with critical infrastructure studies; and
3) digital interventions that (re)envision DH infrastructure.
To learn more about this CFP and the book itself, please visit https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-critical-infrastructure-studies-digital-humanities. Additionally, if you would like to discuss your ideas for this project or collaborate in some way, I’d love to chat! Feel free to email me at maren.e.loveland@vanderbilt.edu.