Digital Objects & Obsolescence

What are the historic legacies and politics of representing culture as data?

A Note on Today’s Reading

This material is intense and important.

Guidelines for discussion:

• Listen with care and attention to the humanity in these histories
• Centering the perspectives and experiences of the enslaved and their descendants
• Ask questions when something is unclear, not to challenge but to understand
• Recognize that some in this room may have personal or familial connections to this history

A Note on Today’s Reading

Our goal: Not to achieve comfort, but to develop critical understanding of how data and technology reproduce historical injustice—and how they can resist it.

Who Was Neptune?

Why does Dr. Johnson start her article with his story?

“For abolitionists, Neptune’s death, though narrated by Stedman, who was far from an abolitionist, offered readers necessary explanatory data. It offered neutral, stable, even quantifiable information about the depravity of bondage. […] In other words, for abolitionists, Neptune’s death-as-data evidenced the carnal violence of overseers, drama of slavery, injustice meted out to free and enslaved alike, and vulgarity of black death. But Curious Adventures, like much abolitionist media that claimed to advocate for the enslaved, also recreated and legitimized a ledger of torture.” p. 58

What is the relationship between data and slavery? What is Dr. Johnson’s critique of objectivity and thingification?

Data, defined here as an objective and independent unit of knowledge, has been central to the architecture of both slavery studies and digital humanistic study

What is the relationship between data and slavery? What is Dr. Johnson’s critique of objectivity and thingification?

“However, in this article I question the stability of what has been or can be categorized as data, the uses the idea of data has been put to, and the stakes underlying data’s implicit claim to stability or objectivity. This article uses the term data transhistorically to gesture to the rise of the independent and objective statistical fact as an explanatory ideal party to the devastating thingification of black women, children, and men.” p. 58

Core Questions

• How does the history of slavery help us see some of the issues with trying to digitize or create digital archives?
• How do we handle the issue of missingness in data?

What is an Archive? Who Makes It?

Archives are not just the records bequeathed to us by the past; archives also consist of the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to read its signs, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities. —Vincent Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt”

What are some of the problems with representing slavery as data both in the past and today?

Databases reinscribe enslaved Africans’ biometrics as users transfer the racial nomenclature of the time period (négre, moreno, quadroon) into the present and encode skin color, hair texture, height, weight, age, and gender in new digital forms, replicating the surveilling actions of slave owners and slave traders. p. 59

There is nothing neutral, even in a digital environment, about doing histories of slavery. p. 60

The Problem of Cliometrics

Statistics on their own, enticing in their seeming neutrality, failed to address or unpack black life hidden behind the archetypes, caricatures, and nameless numbered registers of human property. p. 61

The impulse to revisit the plantation South from the perspective of black laborers and their experi- ences contributed to changing conceptions of data as historians struggled with which sources would be of value, what meaning could be gleaned from narratives and numbers, and what archival material appeared to be stable, objective, and quanti “able → In the 1970s, a subset of cliometricians, a cohort of researchers using statistics to write economic studies of history, grew especially interested in the slavery debates. Cliometricians paid special interest to quantifying the lives of the enslaved but were motivated by very qualitative consider- ations — the tense and emotional tenor of the topic. In later years, Robert Fogel, coauthor with Stanley Engerman of Time on the Cross: The Eco- nomics of Negro Slavery, described the cliometric struggle with slavery as emerging from a “desire to develop a precise, emotionally detached, ideo- logically neutral analysis. When Fogel and Engerman applied statistical methods to their data, they concluded that the material lives of enslaved black women, children, and men were better, on average, than those of twentieth-century African Americans. In fact, in their estimation, slavery was an efficient and modern economic institution, quite compatible with “shifting labor requirements of capitalist society.→ An indignant Herbert Gutman published expressive critiques of their strategy. In Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of “Time on the Cross,” Gutman identified the methodological problem as a “model [that] mixes two processes together: how slaves learned and what slaves learned.”15 Statistics on their own, enticing in their seeming neutrality, failed to address or unpack black life hidden behind the archetypes, caricatures, and nameless numbered registers of human property slave owners had left behind. And cliometricians failed to remove emotion from the discussion. Data without an accompanying humanistic analysis — an exploration of the world of the enslaved from their own perspective — served to further obscure the social and political realities of black diasporic life under slavery.

How does DH study the history of slavery?

• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database https://www.slavevoyages.org/.
• Freedom on the Move https://freedomonthemove.org/.
• Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade https://enslaved.org/

What is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database?

Launched in 1998 by David Eltis and David Richardson:

• Nearly 30,000 Atlantic slave trade voyages
• Moved from CD-ROM to open-access website in 2008
• Provided unprecedented computational power

What are Dr. Johnson’s critiques of this project?

“The brutality of black codes, the rise of Atlantic slaving, and everyday violence in the lives of the enslaved created a devastating archive. Left unattended, these devasta- tions reproduce themselves in digital architecture, even when and where digital humanists believe they advocate for social justice. A just attention to the dead, I argue, requires digital humanists to learn from black freedom struggles and radical coalition building that offer new models for “social justice, accessibility, and inclusion.” p. 58

What are Dr. Johnson’s critiques of this project?

At a 2008 conference, researchers presented a CD-ROM:

Understanding the dimensions of slave ships provided context for the experience of the Middle Passage but could not seem to capture the moral rupture and sense of injustice expressed by people of African descent. pg. 62

What are Dr. Johnson’s critiques of this project?

“As this brief history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database sug gests, bias is built into the architecture of digital technology.” p. 65

Should we collect this data? What are the tradeoffs?

“In reality, evidence from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database suggested that more enslaved women and children crossed the Atlantic than previously assumed, and insights gained from the advanced computation offered by the database further clarified the significance of African women and youth in different time periods, to different impe- rial interests, and in different parts of the Americas. The database pow- ered and empowered users to find women and youth, making information from ship manifests around the world public, accessible, and searchable.” pg. 64

Should we collect this data? What are the tradeoffs?

“The data set, corrupted by its creation as part of a project of manufacturing slaves and masters, needed to be defragmented before it could be used. And yet it is the only archive from which the descendants of slaves can demand “a fully loaded cost accounting.” pg. 65

An Alternative: Black Digital Practice

Black digital practice is the revelation that black subjects have themselves taken up science, data, and coding, in other words, have commodified themselves and digitized and mediated their own black freedom dreams, in order to hack their way into systems. p. 59

Examples:

• W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Lorenzo Johnston Greene
• eBlack Studies & Afrofuturism listserv (2000)
• #transformDH collective (2011)
• Community genealogy projects online

Black Digital Practice & Future

The study of black life and culture must also accompany an ethical and moral concern with sustaining black life and shaping black futures

A corrective that:

• Centers descendants and their needs
• Embraces the uncomfortable and unquantifiable
• Refuses disposability
• Infuses data work with humanity

How does this relate to our dataset? Can someone describe the data and how it was collected?

How do the authors detail some of the uncertainty or missingness in the data?

• What is a visitation?
• How do the authors explore the politics of National Parks and counting visitors?

Why do we care about what gets counted or how?

• Onuoha, Mimi. “The Library of Missing Datasets - MIMI ONUOHA.” MIMI ONUOHA. Accessed January 11, 2024. https://mimionuoha.com.
• Onuoha, Mimi. “MimiOnuoha/Missing-Datasets,” January 9, 2024. https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets.