Babel or Havana: Digital Humanities and Its Libraries
Alex Gil: (Gil Fuentes, Alexander), Yale U
“Babel or Havana: Digital Humanities and Its Libraries”
http://www.elotroalex.com/profiles/
In the past several decades, as researchers have steadily embraced more and more computational research methods and publishing technologies, they have re-engaged institutional libraries in new ways. As a result librarians have become collaborators, designers, systems administrators, teachers, and researchers in their own right. At the same time, the result of the explosion of digital humanities activity has resulted in alternative and independent libraries, collections, archives; many with their own exhibits, and providing their own “services.” These shadow and independent libraries have come to inform, and are informed by their institutional avatars. Such organic re-organization of the cultural record begs many questions: what is then a library? What are institutional libraries to do?
Inspired by the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, in this talk I will offer two operational models—one aspirational, the other deterministic—that can help elucidate the current moment, and help us imagine where we might want to go. I will ask us to think on the one hand, of the digital library of Babel, with all cultural artifacts of the world under one interface where we can find them—this is the dream of Google, the one box to search it all, the dream of international standards and interoperability. At the other end, lies the disjointed and creaky city of Havana, built out of what Ernesto Oroza calls “architectures of necessity”—this is the moss that gathers around the corporate dreams of institutions, the making-do and DIY operations that never cohere, the pirate libraries that flaunt international law.
In my remarks, I will provide brief overviews of what is happening in these two worlds, including the attempt of libraries to build bridges through and with digital humanities to the world beyond its collecting. In the end, I hope to exhort our audiences to embrace the belief that we are in a transition moment, where the divisions of labor that formed around the production of books as commodities over the past couple of hundred years proves to be inadequate for the possibilities of our new hybrid cultural record—always analog, and already digital.
Bio
Alex is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela). His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke Press.
