Toward Slow Communities

The word “community” is everywhere in academia today; in our digital humanities programs, we seek to foster “communities of practice” who can work together as they build knowledge; we engage in community-oriented outreach to connect our projects to wider publics; we seek broader engagement with the “DH community” as we share our work with our peers.

But who are these communities, and how can we build with and towards them in ethical, responsible, respectful, and reciprocal ways? Building on recent work by scholars such as Kim Christen and Jane Anderson, who have explored the concept of “slow archives,” this talk proposes a model of DH community building that is grounded in decolonial practices and marked by ethical engagement on a variety of scales. Considering how DH relationships can be built at the level of the individual, the institution, and the field, this talk situates the potential for engagement in geopolitical organizations such as ADHO within a wider frame based on an ethic of care and a resistance to the forces of surveillance capitalism.

Associate Professor Matt Gold

The City University of New York

Matthew K. Gold is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he is the founding Director of the M.A. Program in Digital Humanities and the M.S. Program in Data Analysis and Visualization. At the Graduate Center, he serves as Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, Director of the CUNY Academic Commons, and Director of the GC Digital Scholarship Lab. He is currently leading work on the GC’s forthcoming Center for Digital Scholarship and Data Visualization.

As a scholar, he has published widely on the digital humanities and digital pedagogy. He recently co-edited Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (Modern Language Association, 2020) and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). With Lauren F. Klein, He co-edits the Debates in the Digital Humanities book series from the University of Minnesota Press and has published several volumes with the Press, including Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016. He has published work in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and edited collections.

His collaborative digital humanities projects, including Manifold Scholarship, Commons In A Box, and Looking for Whitman have been supported by grants from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation.

He recently served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and of the Constituent Organization Board of the Association for Digital Humanities Organizations.