Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center- Kelly Baker Josephs relying heavily on examples from Caribbean digital work, examined how to define digital humanities activism and shape it's past taking into consideration a variety of projects and intended audiences. This reading, I was introduced to new components of the digital humanities field which I believe will be of vital knowledge going into my first digital project surrounding Caribbean Historical Literature.
Josephs mentioned that DH work can be extremely "timely, political, and radical." To prove this, digital projects like Torn Apart Separados and the PRMapathon Initiative were both produced in a drastically time-sensitive period post humanitarian or natural crises. Since these projects are produced so rapidly, we can see exactly what digital humanities can do at the moment. Digital Humanities at the moment proved that the faster a digital project gets produced, the more it yields a higher social impact. Now we are able to not only see what digital humanities do but also its impacts on the lives of people. Josephs went on to say that it is time that digital humanists accept that they are also public humanists and that if they can label their digital work as public work then they will be able to answer the question of what digital humanists do as well as where and for whom they do work. A project on HIV/AIDS in Jamaica portrayed how digital humanities can also be beneficial to the public. The results from the research allowed for the HIV/AIDS community in Jamaica to use the information when necessary. In that way, the public was able to interact with the information as well as share stories of their own which would be accessible to not only Jamaica but the Caribbean and the rest of the world. Live love hope, the digital project depicted DH activism and how a digital platform can be used to acknowledge the needs of the marginalized populations of the Caribbean specifically in this case- Jamaica. The creators of this project were able to make digital work "relevant and responsive" to the Caribbean community.
Additionally, we were able to see how Digital Humanities constantly change since the definition of who digital humanists are and what they do comes up very often. Josephs described the definitions of "we" in Digital Humanities as "steadily hacking and yacking" with the digital humanities community and its interests at the heart of digital activities. With digital humanities being timely, radical, diverse, and political we constantly see how the 'marginalized' community have used digital tools to create voices for themselves which in turn shaped and molded their existence. When digital work is based on Black studies and Caribbean studies it is crucial that the work is relevant to the communities the work is about. It is important that humanists and Caribbeanists alike make all the information and tools that they use available to other scholars in the Digital Humanities field can thrive off that information and relay to upcoming students and by extension the public.
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