- Feb 2019
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www.erudit.org www.erudit.org
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It was ecological (and, by luck, even millennial). The aim was to restore a reasonably high approximation of wholeness to the disaggregated fragments into which editors had systematically fractured Blake’s original works during more than a century of strenuous editorial efforts to render them, and him, more readable by making them more compatible with the habits and dominant institutions of modern culture
In this case "ecological" involves the restitution of fragments. Put another way, negotiating a difficult landscape -- a diaspora of text and images through coincidence and for the sake of making images more easily viewed and texts more easily read by divorcing them -- and bringing back some coherency.
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ecological effort
Interested to see how vital the use of "ecological" is to the author and their argument. From this initial use I think they mean to say that their efforts gather together textual and pictorial fragments from all over/ a complex habitat/ landscape. There are good reasons to distrust natural metaphors, however, since they often lend themselves to teleological analyses that depend on evocations of the natural cycles of birth, maturation, and decline and "evolution" over time.
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sfonline.barnard.edu sfonline.barnard.edu
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The web is functioning as a site of online hyper-surveillance and trolling of Black activists engaged in the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the US and beyond
Look at this statement in relation to the #transformDH site, projects like Documenting the Now, and the Syrian Archive.
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a historical trajectory of global capital’s thirst for expansion at the expense of Black life
This resonates with passages from TJ in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" (via the essay by Michael Hardt on "Thomas Jefferson on Democracy in AQ). How the imperial power (which emphasizes manufacturing) puts the colony at a distance (the place that emphasizes the production of raw materials/ agriculture). The labor of black people, in particular, is put at a distance and obscured/ erased by the system of global capitalism.
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rather than follow the traditions in new media and information studies that primarily focus on racial representation without direct ties to the material conditions of oppressed people
Something to think about related to the proposed project re: archiving past, current, and ongoing work of the Shockoe Bottom advocates. The need to go beyond representing the movement to linking the drive for a Shockoe Bottom Memorial Park to "the material conditions of oppressed people" in Richmond and the declaredly New New South.
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By making these connections more visible, my hope is to shift discourses away from simple arguments about the liberatory possibilities of the internet toward more critical engagements with how the internet is a site of power and control over Black life
The Internet is built like most societal structures: for the benefit of white people and for the sake of white supremacy. It is ABSOLUTELY not free of structural inequities. And yet black people were early adopters/ enthusiastic users of the "communications affordances" the Internet allowed (thinking of Black Planet and, more recently, Twitter).
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suggest that the web is a panacea of social liberation and empowerment
There is a utopian strain that runs within DH and the adoption of digital tools. One example: "We need to archive protest movements so that they aren't as ephemeral and so that the story of those involved can endure beyond the parameters of the invention in public space." It fails to see how that same digital archive could be used to surveil/ doxx/ generally discrimate or endanger the people who were involved.
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