The Keyword Museum
The Modern Language Association's project on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities:
Concepts, Models, and Experiments
is a space-bending and mind/behavior-altering enterprise. It will change the future of what is loosely
known as the Profession, the diverse
arenas of higher and lower education, and the traditional work of social
scientists and , most importantly, of people
in the hard sciences who think in combinations of mathematical symbols and
natural languages. The MLA enterprise, which
is open for comment until January 31, 2016, is a 21st century companion to a
still important 20th century print-centric tool, namely Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) by Raymond
Williams.
Forty years ago, Williams had traced how 155 words function
in the English language domain of
cultural transmission. He did not select
"race" for inclusion in his book.
That is odd. Given the blitzkrieg
of "race" in American and European discourses from 1900 to 1976, one
might have expected it would not have been ignored by a Cambridge University
professor. But the Western academic
world is a strange place where omissions can be rationalized and theorized into
non-existence, erased until they return home to roost. As a sidebar, one should
note, using "evidence" from Google's Ngram, that after ebb and flow from 1930 to now, the frequency of
using "race" has currently returned to its 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s
levels.
Adeline Koh (Stockton University) has brought that prodigal
child named "race" back to the animal farm. Under her curatorial guidance, we are
beginning to see more clearly just what kind of personification Race has been
historically. We are invited to
interrogate the stealthy delinquent as an agent of psychological destruction, a
victim of its own "affluenza."
Koh links race and technology.
She admits she has made a "deliberate political choice" in
deciding that "any responsible representation of race and technology
should offer challenges to and an expansion of how digital pedagogy and digital
humanities are defined." Whether
her choice is absurd or correct is open for debate.
One might also be skeptical of Koh's claim that much vital
digital work on race is unlikely to receive "the sorts of governmental,
federal, and institutional support other less politicized work has," primarily because the work is done outside the
academic factory. But it is probable that a network of surveillance
agencies do support digital work on race by using code words that seem remote
from the bogus concept of race. After
all, our nation is the greatest nation on Earth, and we the people are capable of doing anything.
Among the curated artifacts Koh offers for our review are
African Diaspora Ph.D, Ferguson Syllabus, Mapping Police Violence, SAADA (South
Asian American Digital Archive), #This Tweet Called My Back, Soweto 76, and
Invisible Australians: The Real Face of
White Australia. She provides her own
NITLE Race and the Digital Humanities Zetro Bibliography, other related
materials, and WORKS CITED for our inspection.
One must ask, of course, where are the curated artifacts pertaining to
Whiteness, Hispanic Diaspora, Pacific Island Cultures, and the Hamitic/Semitic
Middle East? If Digital Pedagogy is the
future, we need a better keyword mapping of why
so-called White Folk speak freely all races except the one to which they
belong. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January
14, 2016
MLA Source: http://digitalpedagogy/commons.mla.org/keywords
