6 - Ready Player Two: Inclusion and Positivity as a Means of Furthering Equality in Digital Humanities and Computer Science

Summary

Introduction

Digital humanities has recently had an awakening among its ranks that it is perhaps not as egalitarian as it seems. Certain members of the community have been active in expressing the inconsistency in the discipline and the reality that digital humanities is similar to other academic fields in many ways with respect to diversity. These include, but are not limited to, scholars such as Deb Verhoeven and her celebrated “Has Anyone Seen a Woman” speech at the Digital Humanities 2015 conference in Sydney, Australia, as well as Nickoal Eichmann, Jeana Jorgensen, and Scott Weingart, who engaged in data analysis of Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) conference submissions from 2000 to 2015 in an attempt to better understand the realities of regional diversity at these conferences. Moreover, fields and disciplines closely tied to the broader digital humanities movement such as computer programming, hacker culture, and new media studies have had to fight their own battles for equality in a way that affects the broader digital humanities movement. Such battles within these movements include the blatant sexism toward feminist new media studies during Gamergate, the altercation between geekfeminism.org founder Alex “Skud” Bayley and “MikeeUSA,” and the rise of “brogrammer” culture. This paper focuses on these events and case studies as indicators of the state of gender and race in digital humanities and, just as importantly, how the responses to systemic or individual instances of sexism have helped or hindered digital humanities and its related field as a whole. By analyzing the effect of these movements and the reactions to them, we can see how to best present ideas of equality to the discipline and effect change in the most efficient manner possible.

Definitions and Privilege

The first step in any discussion of digital humanities is to develop a working definition of the term. Likewise, an important aspect of engaging with issues of diversity is acknowledging one's own perspective and the inherent privileges attached to it. Still, even if the analysis provided misses the mark in some ways, the case studies and arguments provided are themselves worth making note of in a single space.