L.I.S.A. - FAIR enough? Building DH Resources in an Unequal World

The world that Digital Humanities practitioners inhabit is a place
defined by uneven distribution of wealth and systemic oppressions.
As Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues in his recent book La cruel
pedagogía del virus (The Cruel Pedagogy of the Virus) (Sousa
Santos, 2020), the COVID-19 has exacerbated the inequalities in the
Global North and in the Global South; but the unmask of
inequalities is not a new topic in the field of Digital Humanities.
For the last decade many scholars have been defending a critical
approach to open access, computational tools, algorithms and
cultural datasets (Galina, 2014; Fiormonte, Numerico and Tomasi,
2015; Rio Grande, 2018; Earhardt, 2018; Risam, 2019; Noble, 2019).
In addition to the work of individuals, group initiatives like
Global Outlook::DH have also enabled debates on social justice,
diversity and inclusivity. In this presentation I aim to establish
a dialogue with previous interventions that critique the Digital
Humanities as a universalist, not situated and scientific field
whose epistemological frameworks, methods and tools can be applied
anywhere, anytime and under all conditions. To do so I will
examine, expand and question the FAIR Principles initiated by
FORCE11. These principles are four: Findability, Accessibility,
Interoperability and Reusability. They implicitly suggest a moral
idea of “fairness” or “justice” that should guide “data producers
and publishers” to maximize the “added-value gained by
contemporary, formal scholarly digital publishing” (Wilkinson et
al., 2016). Although the FAIR Principles were originated in the
context of e-science, they have already been adopted by library
associations like LIBER and some DH scholars have also evaluated
them (Dunning, Smaele and Böhmer, 2017) and used them as guiding
principles for developing digital archives (Calamai and Frontini,
2018). Drawing on examples derived from the Programming Historian
en español (PHes) and the Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD), I will
argue that, while the FAIR Principles can guide how we build DH
resources in the Global North, any attempt to apply them in the
Global South (especially in Latin American countries) may replicate
colonialist practices that ignore the digital divide and local
needs and practices in favor of hegemonic standards (Priani Saisó,
2019). This caveat is especially relevant for cooperation projects
that involve scholars, librarians, archivists and other
professionals with different backgrounds, that are based in
different countries, speak different languages and have different
needs and motivations. In brief, building FAIR resources is a
praiseworthy goal, but in order to produce an emancipatory
knowledge, that (perhaps) will repair some inequalities, we should
avoid cultural cloning and cognitive extractivism and instead
sustain an ecology of knowledge. Den Originalbeitrag und mehr
finden Sie bitte hier:
https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/fair_enough_building_dh_resources_in_an_unequal_world?nav_id=9351