yes, this! I'm really interested in this

Actor Network Theory is a powerful framework under which we can understand complex socio-technical assemblages. To justify using it through an extreme reductionist interpretation that "critical theory = absolutism" doesn't seem to do it justice.

I do not think a single person I know who has read any amount of critical theory or even agreed with it would really think that people would ascribe universal values onto words and not understand that value systems are historically and socially inflected. They might, as do Adorno and Horkheimer, consider the holocaust to be an absolute moral evil, but if that's something that Lyotard is here supposed to free us from, I don't quite know what we gain.

I think the definition that you give of critical theory here, from the Stanford encyclopedia, is just wrong. Adorno's /Negative Dialectics/ begins, for example, with an epigraph that rejects the totalities that you here ascribe to Critical Theory: "The whole is the false", thereby countering Hegel's Absolute.

This is a great example of the type of critical thinking involved in scholarly digital building—often such projects include hard thinking about the exact nature of scholarly objects. Patrick Murray-John has a fantastic article that further discusses “where the theory is” when scholars design and build (Theory, Digital Humanities, and Noticing). The penultimate paragraph in particular lists some of the critical questions that arise out of designing for an “item” in a digital archives platform.