I have, on multiple occasions, discussed my hesitation to label myself as a digital humanist.

Honestly, it’s hard to say you’re not a digital humanist when you spend approximately six hours on a plane traveling across North America to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute– more fondly known as DHSI.

DHSI is part professional development, part summer class, and part summer camp. You pick a class and spend five super intense days in said class, taking a deep dive into your chosen digital humanities topic.

Some people might have been poring over the course schedule as soon as it was available, but I waited until I knew for sure that I could even afford to go. Tuition by itself was something like $950– but as luck would have it, I got a tuition waiver from W&M Libraries. There was still the matter of flying cross country and housing, but I figured I would be able to scrape together some money from my program to help cover the cost.

Once the matter of money was settled, then I looked at course offerings– for a solid ten seconds. I knew as soon as I saw the Race, Social Justice and DH: Applied Theories and Methods course offered by two of my DH heroes, Angel David Nieves and Dorothy Kim. I had been exposed to their work at Race, Memory and the Digital Humanities and My Mother Was a Computer symposia, respectively, and getting a chance to work closely with them was an opportunity I was not about to pass up.

So I hopped on a plane headed for Victoria, British Columbia, traveling to Canada and the Pacific Northwest for the first time. The cross country flight to Seattle was relatively uneventful, as I waited for my connecting flight to Victoria in the airport, I began to make friends. In typical Ravynn fashion, I sent out a tweet using the hashtag, #DHSI19, to see if anyone was traveling to DHSI on my flight. The tweet attracted a small group of people, which seemed to bode well for my digital hijinks over the course of the week.

After a quiet first night in the dorms, I was ready and eager for class to start. Compared to the rest of the institute, my class was filled with a lot of different types of people, most of them women. I was excited to be surrounded by them, and my excitement was met with lively discourse from a range of viewpoints on the various topics Drs. Nieves and Kim had devised for us: archives, mapping, social media, digital ethics, multimodality, data, labor, games and data visualization. Our nearly 1,000 page course packet included thought provoking articles and chapters from authors such as Roopika Risam, Robin DiAngelo, Nick Sousanis, Wendy Chun, Lauren Klein, Lisa Nakamura, Adrienne Shaw and Tara McPherson.

While all of the conversations that happened in that room on UVic’s campus were valuable, I find myself returning to project that we collectively created for the end “showcase” at the end of the week. It was a four-part project digital (and analog) project that questioned the infrastructure of DHSI by doing a break down of who is represented among the instructors at the Institute; that offered guidelines for creating an ethical digital project; questions to ask yourself before and as you get started on your project; and a reading guide for pieces to get you started on your journey with race and social justice in the digital humanities. We created a google slides presentation that was displayed on a laptop, but we also wrote each of the sections on huge sheets of paper and occupied an entire corner of MacLaurin Hall, plastering our signs on the walls– a display that was all but impossible to ignore. As Nalubega Ross aptly stated as the class admired our handy work, “We came, we saw, we took up space.”

One of my long standing concerns with the digital humanities is how often we create projects because they’re “cool” or because “we can,” without thinking about how these technologies can be harmful to communities or even weaponized. The questions we developed (and circulated via Twitter to the DHSI community) encouraged people to stop and reflect on the projects they were creating in their own classes. Technology inherits the biases of the people that create them; they are not neutral and it is imperative we stop treating it as if it is. (If you want an excellent study on this phenomena, check out Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression.)

It took me until DHSI to realize just how deeply invested I am in the digital humanities. I care about justice in the work itself, the spaces we inhabit to do the work (both digital and physical), and for the marginalized people in the field, creating “digital alchemy” as Moya Z. Bailey would say. I realized that in order to do justice oriented work, we have to work on the infrastructure of our institutions to make sure that we are safe and supported. It is astounding to me how much magic comes out of a system deliberately crafted to keep us out, but it is my goal to ensure that, at some point, doing this work will not be so soul wrenching of a task.

Digital humanists, as Jacque Wernimont said in her Institute lecture on June 3, 2019, are the “makers, breakers and killjoys.” We are wired to break things apart and reassemble them so they work better, faster, smarter. I am wired to make and break. When I care about something, I want it to be the best possible version it can be. It will drive me to work and will drive me to tears, but once I start, I am unstoppable.

It took me until DHSI this year to truly claim what I have known is true for months now: I am a digital humanist, and I belong.

If you’re interested in more about Race, Social Justice and DH, tweets about our class can be found using the #RaceDH tag on Twitter!