Minimal Computing, Border Technologies and Other Marginal Practices in DH

In this talk we explore the epistemological edges of Digital Humanities to look at some recent trends that open it up to diasporic and global south practices. Minimal computing embodies a form of thinking that is planetary and emancipatory in scope, connecting it to other forms of technological disobedience found in the global south. Compare some of those edge cases—pirate libraries, immigrant tech use, repurposing, etc—to the production mechanisms of private and public enterprises in the North Atlantic world, we will hopefully develop a vision of our practice that reconciles cultural analytics and research architectures with struggles for justice.

B.A., Florida International University (2000), Ph.D., University of Virginia (2012). Alex Gil specializes in twentieth-century Caribbean literature and Digital Humanities, with an emphasis on textual studies. His recent research in Caribbean literature focuses on the works and legacy of Aimé Césaire, including work in Aimé Césaire: Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours published by Planète Libre in 2013. He has published in journals and collections of essays in Canada, France and the United States, while sustaining an open-access and robust online research presence. In 2010-2012 he was a fellow at the Scholars' Lab and NINES at the University of Virginia. He is founder and vice chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative and the co-founder and co-director of the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and the Studio@Butler at Columbia University. He serves as Co-editor for Small Axe: Archipelagos and Multilingual Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly. Alex Gil is actively engaged in several digital humanities projects at Columbia and around the world, including Ed, a digital platform for minimal editions of literary texts; the Open Syllabus Project; the Translation Toolkit; and, In The Same Boats, a visualization of trans-atlantic intersections of black intellectuals in the 20th century.