AFRICAN MUSICAL ELEMENTS IN U.S. HIP-HOP: A NARRATIVE LITERATURE REVIEW OF RHYTHMIC FUSION, SAMPLING, AND CULTURAL NEGOTIATION

Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open

The Digital Anthropocene, Deep Mapping, and Environmental Humanities' Big Data Charles Travis (bio) Over the past two hundred years, the development of the steam engine, the mass burning of coal during the Industrial Revolution, the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945, and global carbon dioxide emissions over the last half century are all manifestations of human-technological agencies that have culminated into a cultural crisis ushering us out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene. As we advance into the twenty-first century, our use of social media, smartphones and smart-watches, X-Boxes, tablets, and laptops have transformed us into living, breathing remote sensors and unwitting environmental actors. We are now spawning digital wildfires; churning out oceans of big data; and in our quotidian existences, inaugurating what can be called the digital Anthropocene. This confluence of the digital revolution, the dilemma of climate change, and sociopolitical agency and violence has us reconsidering human-environmental relations by raising questions about the interplay between digital, social, psychological, built, and natural landscapes. As Finn Arne Jørgensen notes, the "idea of nature is becoming very hard to separate from the digital tools and media we use to observe, interpret, and manage it" (2014, 109). The intermeshing of analogue, digital, and natural environments captures this new human dispensation and was presciently anticipated by political theorist Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future: "The world we have come to live in, however, is much more determined by man acting into nature, creating [End Page 172] natural processes and directing them into the human artifice and the realm of human affairs" (1961, 59). Arendt's phenomenological thought resonates with the "wicked problems," "humanities innovations," and "interdependencies" articulated by the "Common Threads" page of the Andrew W. Mellon–funded Humanities for the Environment project. This essay will discuss a technophenomenological deep mapping of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) to explore how the novel and its traces of the Odyssey and the Inferno, when scripted digitally, enabled big-data social media performances at Bloomsday in contemporary Dublin. Spanning the classical, medieval, and modern eras, the arc of works composed by Homer, Dante, and Joyce, approximate the "three humanisms" of occidental history posited by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s (the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman, the repurposing of the humanistic perspective, and the discovery of everyday experience). Currently, digital humanism, coined by Milad Doueihi (2013), acts as a fourth convergence of the world's complex cultural heritage and technology and is changing relations between territory, knowledge, and habitat. This underscores the salience of Bethany Nowviskie's observation that the "rhetorical, technological, aesthetic, and deeply personal, sometimes even sentimental, struggles brought into focus by the Anthropocene […] prompt us to position the work of the digital humanities in time" (2014). The digital humanities' first wave (1980s–2010) witnessed the digitization of historical, cultural, literary, and artistic collections, facilitating online research methods and pedagogy, which dovetailed with a second wave (2002–2012) of humanities-computing quantification exercises, digital parsing, analysis, and visualization projects. Currently, a third wave (2012–2020) is cresting with the ontological tide turning, as humanities discourses and tropes are now beginning to shape emerging coding and software applications. The digital and environmental humanities are coming into league with smartphone applications, gaming platforms, tablets, and the visual and performing arts to force trans-disciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, environmental studies, genetics, bioinformatics, linguistics, gaming, architecture, philosophy, social media, literature, painting, and history (MacTavish and Rockwell 2006; Liu and Thomas 2012; Travis 2015). Influenced by narrative, storytelling, cinematic, gaming, and network analysis techniques, these digital and environmental humanities practices represent the fluidity of human-environmental symbiosis captured [End Page 173] by the concept of the Anthropocene, in contrast to the static snapshots of human-environmental binaries portrayed within the frame of the Holocene. Nowviskie states that there is a strong possibility for connecting such "technologies and patterns of work in the humanities to deep time: both to times long past and very far in prospect" (2014). Similar lessons in how to plumb the depths of the Anthropocene can be learned from the Native American writer William Least Heat-Moon, who first employed deep...

The digital humanities (DH) represent a transformative and interdisciplinary domain that integrates computational tools and methodologies with traditional humanistic inquiry. This paper examines the evolving landscape of DH, tracing its historical emergence, conceptual foundations, technological tools, and the challenges it poses to conventional academic paradigms. It interrogates the theoretical and practical implications of digitizing cultural knowledge, examining intersections with archival studies, data visualization, and ethical considerations in digital scholarship. Through a review of case studies, this study highlights how DH enables novel forms of inquiry into literature, history, media, and culture, while also revealing tensions surrounding collaboration, representation, and disciplinary fragmentation. Ultimately, the paper argues that digital humanities is not merely a methodological innovation but a conceptual rethinking of how knowledge is produced, curated, and disseminated in the digital age. Keywords: Digital Humanities, Cultural Studies, Computational Humanities, Digital Archives, Data Visualization, Interdisciplinary Research, Digital Ethics, Technocultural Literacy.

This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH? Modelling, with its historical roots, carries multifaceted meanings influenced by various disciplinary contexts. Modelling Between Digital and Humanities innovatively connects DH with the historical tradition of model-based thinking in the humanities, cultural studies, and the sciences. It endeavors to reshape interpretative frameworks by contextualizing DH's modelling practices within a broader conceptual landscape. Through an exploration of digital, visual and data models, the book asserts that DH holds the potential to be a cornerstone of a novel cultural literacy paradigm. By probing the interplay between technology and thought, the book ultimately positions DH as a catalyst for transformative cultural insights.

The relevance of the topic is that in the modern world, digital technologies are increasingly integrated into all spheres of human activity, including the humanities. This leads to the formation of a new research paradigm – digital humanism, which combines humanitarian values with technological capabilities. The purpose of the study is to explore the concept of digital humanism, its impact on the humanities, and to identify the main challenges and prospects of this phenomenon. It should be noted that thanks to the publication of the Digital Humanities Guide (2004), the term “digital humanities” quickly replaced “humanities computing”, became synonymous with interdisciplinary research, and began to spread rapidly around the world. The main objectives of the study are as follows: 1) Define the essence and key principles of digital humanis; 2) to analyze its impact on the development of humanities disciplines; 3) to explore the relationship between digital technologies and humanitarian values; 4) to identify potential risks and ethical dilemmas of digital humanism. Object of study: digital humanism as a philosophical and scientific concept. Subject of the study: its impact on the methodology and development of the modern humanities. The study aims to systematize knowledge about digital humanism as a new paradigm that determines the future development of the humanities in the digital age. Practical significance. Digital humanities is the product of a combination of art, technology, and science. The combination of the humanities and computing or information technology has broken down the extremely rigid barriers of the past between art and science, as well as between the humanities and technology, and has entered a new stage of mutual cooperation and overall development. The results of the research can be used to develop new educational programs, academic approaches and methodologies for researching the humanities in the digital environment. Research results can influence cultural and social changes in society, given the impact of digital technologies on human interaction and lifestyles. The study of digital humanism is of great practical importance, as it contributes to the development of technologies, improves the ethics of their use, promotes political and social change, as well as the creation of innovative solutions for modern society, harmony between the introduction of technology and the preservation of human potential.

Inspired in part by Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic paradigm, the past several years have witnessed a reinvigoration of Black Studies, with careful attention being paid to the approaches and methods of writing black history.2 The terms "African Diaspora" and "Black Diaspora" have become almost commonplace in scholarly discourse, emerging out of relative obscurity from their roots in the politically inspired Pan-Africanist and Civil Rights discourses of the 1950s and '60s.3 Critiques of the Black Atlantic model and its overly narrow concentration on the English-speaking world have fueled new and important discussions that have touched fields and subfields well beyond the traditional boundaries of Black Studies.4 While the internationalist perspective of Black Studies (particularly in the U.S. academy) [End Page 1] is not new,5 it is not too much to say that perhaps, for the moment, the recent academic enhancement of Black Studies has transformed blackness into a "hot" counter-narrative, offering new and keen perspectives on traditionally conceived histories, while at the same time helping to re-theorize the concept of blackness itself. The historiography of Latin America has not been left unaffected by the trends.6 Latin American historiography, however, has been traditionally preoccupied with questions seemingly distant from the core topics of African Diaspora study. A quick glance at Latin America's historiographical canon, especially as written by North American scholars, reveals inquires into issues such as the long-term ramifications of the Conquest, understanding the vicissitudes of the colonial economy, the impact of the Bourbon reforms, the causes of independence, the political and social shocks involved in the creation of nation-states, the impact of populism, the roots of economic dependency, etc. Rich and abundant regional histories have provided focus to these macro-historical questions. Important advances in social history, [End Page 2] gender studies, and, more recently, cultural studies have helped us personalize these histories to the point that we are now entering into the private lives and mentalities of families, while unmasking the deep historical processes behind the discursive structures of power in the public sphere. When race and/or ethnicity have entered these analyses, the indigenous population, which has arguably had a more prominent long-term demographic impact on the region, has frequently enjoyed priority, especially with respect to research on the Spanish-speaking mainland.7 Apart from places like Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, even the influence of blackness on one of the primary racial discourses in Latin America, mestizaje, has been minimal in comparison to the impact of whites, Indians, and mestizos.8 In short, when looking at the broad trajectory of historical writings on Latin America, outside of the Caribbean and Brazil, it has long been possible to do Latin American history without referencing blackness or the African Diaspora. This should come as no surprise, for although this condensed overview of the field leaves major gaps, we can all recognize that there are many seminal texts that mention blacks only in passing. This is not to say that these works lack merit; rather, the tradition of the field has simply prioritized other questions ahead of reconciling the region's African heritage.9 I raise these issues because it seems worth pondering here that with [End Page 3] all of the attention that African Diaspora studies are currently receiving, even to the point of characterizing some work on Latin America as being "diasporic" in nature, what exactly is the relationship between the African Diaspora paradigm and Latin American historiography?10 How do they impact one another and what should be their future course? Lastly, what does this special issue of The Americas offer in that respect? A good starting point for delving into these questions involves clarifying what is currently meant by the term "African Diaspora" in the existing literature. This is easier said than done, given the flurry of work spanning multiple disciplines on the topic. Moreover, at...

The article analyzes the main approaches to understanding the nature of identity construction and the mechanisms of social control in the digital age. Digitalization, globalization, and the transition of modern society to a networked or digital state have created new conditions for constructing identity, which is becoming more flexible and changeable. A close relationship between the nature of identity formation and practices of social control has been proven. The construction of identity in the digital society is a complex process involving individuals’ interaction with technology, social media and information systems. This process serves as a form of social control, establishing norms, influencing behavior, and shaping identities by social, economic, and political interests. Social networks are becoming important channels of identity formation, where individuals interact with different groups and virtual communities. The regulatory, economic, and political control mechanisms in the digital environment are described. It is proved that online platforms contribute to the construction of social ties, which ensures social control by influencing the content and nature of interactions. They also form prevailing unified patterns and models of action, influencing the identity and social behavior of individuals. Information and communication technologies offer new opportunities for self-expression and self-identification, but at the same time pose challenges to the preservation of the personal self. Therefore, it is necessary to take these issues into account in studies of digital culture and social media. Identity is not isolated or autonomous but is formed through constant interconnections with society and under the influence of various mechanisms of social control. The subject always has the opportunity to create new forms of identity and go beyond fixed roles and functions. However, it is also important to find a balance between the use of digital technologies and the preservation of real communications, while minimizing the negative consequences.

Editorial Commentary

The advent of the Digital Humanities (DH) has precipitated a paradigm shift in the study of culture, moving beyond traditional qualitative analyses to incorporate computational, quantitative, and spatial methods. This transformation is most profound in its reconfiguration of our understanding of the processes of cultural production and reception. This article argues that DH methodologies do not merely offer new tools for answering old questions but fundamentally reshape the questions we can ask about how culture is made and consumed. By leveraging techniques such as distant reading, network analysis, and geospatial mapping, DH challenges monolithic conceptions of the solitary author, revealing culture as a complex, networked system of influence, collaboration, and recombination. Simultaneously, through the analysis of born-digital archives like social media, fan forums, and large-scale text corpora, DH provides unprecedented empirical insights into the dynamics of reception, capturing the agency of audiences in shaping meaning across temporal and spatial boundaries. The article synthesizes key DH scholarship and presents original data analyses, including a network graph of literary influences and a geospatial map of the reception of a canonical text. It concludes by critically reflecting on the methodological challenges and ethical considerations inherent in this digital turn, while positing that the enduring contribution of DH lies in its capacity to foster a more nuanced, evidence-based, and interconnected model of cultural phenomena. This expanded article further contends that this transformation is not merely methodological but also epistemological, forcing a re-interrogation of foundational categories like 'author', 'text', and 'reader'. By examining the interplay between computational models and critical theory, it highlights how DH fosters a reflexive, systems-oriented approach to culture. The discussion also delves deeper into the implications of algorithmic culture and the ethical imperatives of working with born-digital data, arguing that DH's ultimate value lies in its capacity to bridge the historic gap between theoretical claims about cultural systems and empirical, large-scale evidence.

109 Interface Konrad Ng What Race Does Online: “Gangnam Style” and Asian/American Identity in the Digital Age there are some unsettling parallels regarding digitization efforts for museums and the emerging field of the digital humanities: an exclusive focus on the use of technologies and social media to broaden public access, enhance engagement with students and the public, and improve collections and text management. These efforts, I argue, assume that the digital age is an apolitical domain and that the challenges of this moment are to overcome barriers to digital access (“the digital divide”) and to improve the management of voluminous points of data. This narrow interpretation of digitization obscures how participation in online life may be a political activity for everyone but perhaps most especially for racial minorities like Asian Americans. At the Smithsonian Institution , which seeks to digitize its vast collections, the experience of Asian Pacific American communities and their participation in forming the national patrimony are largely absent (Smithsonian Institution 1998). This was true for African American and Native Indian communities until the U.S. Congress approved the construction of a Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (expected to open in 2015) and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (opened in 2004). Currently the U.S. Congress is debating legislation for the construction of a Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. Given that the principal goal of the Smithsonian’s efforts toward digitization is to serve the American people by broadening access and improving the management of collections and research, what is being digitized—the digital humanities discourse among museums—is disconcerting . Of primary concern is that the realization of the digital 110 Interface age may affirm a racial ontology of data that has not valued the experiences of Asian Americans in the collections of America’s publicly funded museums. Rachel Lee and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong (2003) and Lisa Nakamura (2007) argue that digital culture is intrinsically political in that digital technologies are tied to gender, global modes of production, and the formation of racial identities. We can see this when we consider the recent study on the demography of social media by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Pew’s research suggests that the demographics of social media users are generally equal across sex and income, but differences emerge when it comes to age, where there is a generational divide, and race, where minority communities are heavier users of social media. As a recent story in the Washington Post notes, the disjuncture between the popularity of people of color on YouTube offers a striking contrast to predominantly white stars on network television and in Hollywood films (Tsukayama 2012). Kent Ono and Vincent Pham (2009) contend that the new media landscape has become the platform of culturally marginalized communities because of its capacity for open participation and freedom of expression. Indeed, Asian Americans are not only savvy users and participants in the online world, they form its core engineers. Richard Florida (2014) argues that nearly half of the Asian American population participates as cultural workers in America’s “creative class”—which includes those working in a range of artistic, scientific, technological, and educational professions, including the world of culture, design, and entertainment. In other words, a generation of drivers of digital culture is intersecting with the Asian American experience. As such, the critical question for discussions about museums and the digital humanities is this: how might we consider race in online space? I contend that the relationship between Asian American identity and digital life ought to be premised on the concept that Asian American identity may be constituted within an online space as opposed to Asian American identity only being constituted prior to it. What race can do online prompts a reconsideration of our assumption of what Asian American identitycandofromtheInternet.Todothis,IwanttoexploretheYouTube hit “Gangnam Style” by K-pop star and comedic performer Psy. I contend that “Gangnam Style” demonstrates the cultural force of Asian American digital life and a way of reading the relationship between Asian and Asian American identity in online and offline spaces in the United States. Released on YouTube on July 15, 2012, “Gangnam Style” became...

Introduction Some 25 years after the world wide web was born at the CERN (http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web) in Geneva in 1993, it should come as no wonder that most of the information we process today is produced and used in digital form. Capable of reproducing most of the pre-existing information carriers such as texts, pictures, sounds and films, the digital format is progressively replacing many of the former media. This process implies there will be profound changes in the daily practices of both scholars in the field of humanities and information professionals. Understanding changes induced by the influence of digital media within professional practices remains a critical task. As Michel de Certeau reminds us, there is more to learn about the evolution of scientific disciplines through the analysis of the conditions of their production than through their scientific outputs (1975, 65). This chapter proposes to shed light on the current changes of practices within the humanities and to outline several recommendations for a closer collaboration between humanities scholars and information professionals in order to achieve a thoughtful use of digital media. The first part of the chapter introduces the digital humanities, a field of practices situated at the crossroads between information sciences and the humanities, which has experienced a rapid growth in the past few years. It discusses the origins and scope of digital humanities, as well as the question of its definition. The close association between digital humanities and information sciences is also highlighted. The second part shifts the focus from digital practices to professional collaborations and analyses the evolving relationship between researchers and information professionals under the influence of digital information systems. Recent changes in the use of libraries and archives are discussed, drawing from recent surveys about information practices among humanities scholars. Finally, in the third part are recommendations on how to improve this relationship in a digital environment. It draws on previous points in order to propose some ways to introduce a closer collaboration between information professionals and humanities scholars within the context of the digital information landscape. In particular, it advocates the benefits of enhancing the visibility of documentary mediations in online environments.

Introduction Chapter 1. Pedagogical Cases Explained: What is a 'Pedagogical Case' and how can it be used as a professional learning tool? Chapter 2. 'Sophie' - Five year old female - motor delay and overweight - physical activity and health - motor development - physiology - pedagogy Chapter 3. 'Kate' - Six year old female - development coordination disorder - motor development - biomechanics - pedagogy Chapter 4. 'Patrick' - Seven year old male - autism - inclusive play - bio-psychomotor development - adapted physical education - pedagogy Chapter 5. 'Deshane' - Eight year old male - Black American - motor development - cultural studies - health promotion - pedagogy Chapter 6. 'Teresa' - Eleven year old female - immigrant - English language learner - multicultural competence - sport and exercise psychology - pedagogy Chapter 7. 'Rob' - Eleven year old male - elite sport - contextual perspective/psychology - biomechanics - exercise physiology - pedagogy Chapter 8. 'Yasmin' - Eleven year old female - early maturing/sexual behaviour - child development - sport ethics/policy - legislation/law - pedagogy Chapter 9. 'Greta' - Thirteen year old female - Maori - Maori culture - talented - motor learning - development - pedagogy Chapter 10. 'Onni' - Thirteen year old male - physically inactive - physical education and health education - home-school partnerships - physiotherapy - pedagogy Chapter 11. 'Jenny' Thirteen year old female - early maturing and talented - physiology - sociology - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 12. 'Tony'Fourteen year old male, poor body image, psychology, socio-cultural studies, motor control, pedagogy Chapter 13. 'Maria'Fourteen year old female - migration background and keen football player - critical ethnicity - gender studies - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 14. 'William'Fifteen year old male - Millennial and sport-crazy' - nutrition/physical activity/health, neuroscience - digital humanities - pedagogy Chapter 15. 'Laura' - Fifteen year old female - puberty and overweight - drop in blood pressure - physiology - fitness training - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 16. 'Joshua' - Fifteen year old male - amputee and low motivation - functional anatomy - positive youth psychology - exercise physiology/classification/disability studie- pedagogy Chapter 17. 'Ilona' - Fifteen year old female - migration background and English language learner - declining sport performance - sociology - psychology - physiology - pedagogy Chapter 18. 'John' - Fifteen year old male - academic achievement - psychology - physical activity/health - nutrition - pedagogy Chapter 19. 'Marianne' - Sixteen year old female - low physical activity/poor motivation - endurance training - exercise physiology - biomechanics - psychology - pedagogy Chapter 20. 'Karen' - Sixteen year old female - physically active - elite sport - Olympic dream - skill acquisition - coach-athlete relationships - socialization - pedagogy.

Have digital tools and methods accelerated the rate of scholarly production over the last 20 years? If so, has this acceleration been beneficial for scholarship? This article considers examples of accelerated historical scholarship as well as calls for a “slow history.” Through an analysis of the author's own experiences with the digital humanities, it examines the advantages and disadvantages of digital technologies in the field of history. It concludes that online resources and digital technologies have expanded the archive for the historian and created new ways to reach other specialists and the general public. Nevertheless, historical scholarship must still rely on carefully crafted, well-argued prose whose production cannot be accelerated by new digital technologies, although recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence may ultimately challenge this situation. In recent decades, the field (or, at times, discipline) of digital humanities (DH) has revolutionized the scholarly profession and beyond—and with good reason. Seen at times as a democratizing force, DH has led to the creation of an increasing number of open- access databases and scholarly publications, the launching of massive archival digitization initiatives, and the development of numerous digital tools that help streamline the work of the academic researcher, student, and educator. In many ways, then, its benefits are manifest. Yet, recent years have also begun to reveal numerous problems that could influence various aspects of our trade as well as what—and how—information will be available in the future. This article discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of DH and invites the reader to reflect on what we can do to help mitigate these problems. Exciting new modes of digital scholarship have emerged in recent years, providing us with expanded windows onto the past. This process has been accelerated by somewhat democratized ways of digitizing and analyzing source material. A main issue of contemporary knowledge production using digitized sources is how power can so easily be reinscribed into access to archives. The choice to digitize collections, even the existence of collections themselves, creates a great opportunity for research but also runs the risk of reinforcing the privilege and worldviews that have shaped and continue to shape the very processes of digitization and digitalization. Drawing on examples of Western and non-Western digital scholarship, this article argues that, although the digital facilitates greater public knowledge of collections, when it comes to decolonizing our research subjects, it also introduces significant layers of complexity. This article advances an analysis of the development and state of critical digital humanities. It posits two modalities for this approach to digital humanities (DH). The first is a modality of inward-looking, functional self-critique that comprises a rethinking of computational genesis stories, logics and methods, institutions and infrastructures, and digital capitalism, and the second is an outward-looking critique best understood as a form of situated sociopolitical engagement that embraces epistemic and social justice projects that are decolonial, anti-racist, inclusive, collaborative, and multilingual. Through these analyses, the article offers a vision of critical digital humanities in its mission to critique the ideologies, social inequities, and epistemological hierarchies that are built into technological products and computational logics and that are concomitantly fostered by knowledge- creation industries of universities, corporations, governments, and the GLAM[R] sector. In this way, the article shows how critical digital humanities helps us to envision the role that DH can play in processes of recovery, reparations, emancipation, and community-building. Drawing upon over 20 years as Editor-in-Chief of H-France, I argue that the scholarly profession, established in Cold War era, pre-digital institutions, has only begun to adapt to the transformations introduced by the global digital humanities. A generational shift is currently underway as younger scholars more natively adept with digital technologies use their skills and forms of new media to press for changes in hiring and tenure practices, to demand greater progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues, and to insist that the academy confront the collapse of academic positions in the humanities and provide training for and recognition of alternative career paths. I call upon professional organizations to undertake difficult conversations and take leadership in reshaping professional organizations for a post–Cold War, digital age, especially in terms of funding priorities. Scholarly organizations will best gain influence through collaboration.

The African diaspora, also referred to as the African Black diaspora, is the voluntary and involuntary movement of Africans and their descendants to various parts of the world. Even though voluntary widespread African diasporas occurred during precolonizing periods, the Arabic slave trade (7th to 18th centuries) and the transatlantic slave trade (16th to 19th centuries) are largely recognized as phases of involuntary movement with an estimated combined 30 million Africans dispersed across the African continent and globally. Today, the largest populations of people descended from Africans forcibly removed from Africa reside in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, with millions more in other countries. Such vast movement of a people across time and space has meant that those who are part of the African diaspora have suffered similar problems and disadvantages. The legacy of slavery, especially in relation to racism and colonialism, has garnered attention across the scholarly disciplines of history, ethnic, cultural, and religious studies. Likewise, African and Black diasporan responses to colonial oppression have manifested in multiple curricula in literature, music, philosophy, politics, civilization, customs, and so forth, designed for and by African diasporans in their efforts to unite all people of African descent, building on their cultural identity and resisting racist ideology and colonial rule.

New Dialogues in Spanish and Portuguese Studies:Pedagogical and Theoretical Perspectives from the Digital Humanities Susanna Allés-Torrent, Megan Jeanette Myers, and Élika Ortega The Digital Humanities (DH) has been for many years, even decades, in constant development and self-definition and has been able to gather a diverse and international community that goes beyond the traditional framework of academia. Different initiatives underscored the need to advocate for linguistic and cultural diversity and adopted inclusivity as one of its core values (Galina Russell 2014; Gil and Ortega 2016; Mahony 2018; Spence 2014).1 In this process of self-(re)presentation, one of the most particular lines of debate has probably been the relationship of DH with other disciplines. Consequently, practices, theories, and fields of studies come together to seek to redefine themselves in light of digital methods of critical analysis reshaping their academic practices and scopes, creating what Ortega (2019) has termed a "Digital Humanities ecology of knowledges." Critical Digital Humanities advocates for the need of stronger theoretical frames and deeper engagement with cultural criticism (Fiormonte 2016; Liu 2012). Black Digital Humanities explores the relationship between DH and Africana, African American, and Black Studies, and how technology can bring forward an understudied field by exposing "humanity as a racialized social construction" and by reconsidering the canon (Earhart 2012; Gallon 2016). Postcolonial Digital Humanities brings to light how legacies of colonialism of knowledge production still pervade the digital cultural record (Risam 2018). Data Feminism exposes how data science can be informed by the ideas of feminisms and justice (Klein 2020). Digital Black Atlantic investigates the ways in which digital tools can better be interconnected with African diaspora studies (Risam and Baker Josephs 2021), and so forth. In this sense, Modern Languages (ML) also finds itself in the process of establishing the terms in which it intersects with the Digital Humanities. This intersection of DH and ML does not consist of the adoption of a digital literacy as a mere instrument, but as an indispensable critical and culturally sensitive component for understanding digital culture and digital methods. We should emphasize, furthermore, that this crossroads of disciplines goes in both directions, meaning that the DH can provide ML with new digital approaches to study and analyze language, literature, and culture. And simultaneously, ML can enrich the linguistic and cultural meaning of DH. A decade ago Kirschenbaum (2010), in a key article for the field, analyzed the role of English departments and the reasons for being at the vanguard of DH: the centrality of texts, which are the most suitable data to process; the long tradition of composition unavoidably [End Page 535] associated with computers; the boom of theories around digital archives and editions since the 1980s, and practices of electronic literature; the openness of English departments to cultural studies, including digital material culture; and the interest for the digitization of books and reading supports (6). Obviously, the analysis was made from the US-perspective, but it paved the way to better contextualize the then burgeoning DH field within that precise setting. In the case of ML departments, no self-assessment has yet been done. We can find "histories" of digital methods in certain countries (e.g., Spain, in Toscano et al. 2020), geolinguistic communities (Ortega and Gutiérrez 2014), or disciplines (e.g., Medieval Studies), but not in a ML context. It seems therefore that the relationship with DH is still undefined, and this is especially true from a pedagogical perspective (Taylor and Thornton 2017). Modern language departments have traditionally focused on fostering the study of language and culture. So, as ML shares some of the developments highlighted by Kirschenbaum, units devoted to ML are institutionally kept busy with communicating and teaching the foreign component with digital tools. The urgency and popularity of language teaching has, in many cases, rendered an "instrumental" use of such tools (e.g., case of language courses), rather than fostering the critical and reflective integration of DH approaches.2 It is within this context where the challenge remains of determining how the digital is adopted and taught. Scholars are already examining the multiple ways to adopt and implement methods, skills, tools, and projects both in their teaching...