Editorial Commentary

Abstract

Amid calls by environmental advocates to move academic engagement, including conferences, online, the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically sped up the shift to digital platforms in March 2020. Many of us are continuing to present and publish our research and creative work, as well as teach, online. The difficulties of this moment notwithstanding, particularly for essential workers and other vulnerable populations, the timing of this change presents some potential opportunities.This shift that has taken place over the last two years has prompted us to question how collective platforms, digital humanities initiatives, and technological developments are changing the ways scholars and artists communicate their ideas in the classroom and through their research and creative activity. What new tools and platforms are being developed to present scholarly research or creative works by visual culture professionals? What future developments lie ahead? Can, and should, these various tools be leveraged to reach a broader public audience? Other questions to ponder at this sociocultural juncture include the effects of platforms such as Zoom on our students or the way the move online affects scholarly publishing. How can scholars dismantle disciplinary and professional boundaries that have historically limited the potential for pedagogical impact both inside and outside of academia and across national and linguistic borders? This brief commentary highlights the recent development, manipulation, and reconfiguration of cutting-edge platforms, thus expanding the potential for visual culture scholarship to have an impact in the larger world.Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture is not alone in its mission to engage scholars across disciplines, methodological approaches, and theoretical frameworks. Journals like Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, published by Brill, often publish roundtable discussions, Q and A interviews, and other innovative forms of content, both in their physical pages and online. Some journals also make select articles available as open content, so as to promote the widest distribution and engagement with the ideas published by the journal. The highly successful online journal Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, has been entirely open access since the publication of its first content in winter 2015. The University of California Press has also generously made portions of LALVC’s content freely available during the pandemic in order to mitigate the restraints posed by library closures, limited travel, and economic limitations but also to draw attention to the journal, still in its early years of publication.Beyond access to library materials, though, what are the larger implications of the pandemic-era digital humanities explosion for the future of humanistic inquiry? Several years ago, a group of faculty and digital humanities experts at the University of California, Los Angeles, put together a Mellon-sponsored summer institute, “Digital Art History 101: A Basic Guide to Digital Art History.”1 Todd Presner, chair of digital humanities at UCLA and a key voice in this endeavor, spotlighted the potential of digital humanities as an “open-ended, nonhierarchical, and transmigratory” field that “expands both the notion of scholarship and the public sphere in order to create new sites and nodes of engagement, documentation, and collaboration.”2 For him, the concept of the “participatory” is a “foundational concept of many digital humanities projects insofar as they create conditions for engagement with communities and individuals not traditionally involved with humanities research and the documentation of the human cultural record.”3 Assuming we can overcome the digital divide so that all have internet access, the potential of the new digital public sphere seems utopian—a public sphere without exclusions, where publics and counterpublics coexist.Presner describes this space of coexistence as “the mangle,” a wonderfully evocative word to describe a place where ideas are wrung forth as a multitude of voices come together to participate in complicated, multifaceted discussions of the most pressing contemporary issues. For Presner, the mangle represents a space of “participation, community collaboration, and socially engaged praxis.”4 In his assessment, the future of the humanities hinges on collective actions that depend on digital tools making widespread participation possible, producing practical, tangible results in the public sphere. In the mangle, Presner adds, “scientific practices are marked by a ‘dance of agency’ played out through human, material, and social strategies of resistance and accommodation.” This metaphor provides scholars, students, and citizens with a framework for “engaging in transformative praxis.”5 Study of the humanities is no longer exemplified by a sleepy afternoon lecture in a stuffy auditorium but rather the collective action of engaged students, teachers, and stakeholders on college campuses and beyond.Presner’s observations raise questions, though, about power and participation. Who can access the tools and materials produced in the digital humanities? When, where, why, and how? Radical potentiality aside, Presner and others, such as Safiya Umoja Noble, awarded a MacArthur fellowship this year, in her book Algorithms of Oppression (2018), warn of how these seemingly objective tools encode bias in their very operation. Using an array of case studies from across disciplines, Presner observes that “as the emerging subfield of platform and critical code studies has already shown, the mangle of material, cultural, social, and conceptual forces denaturalizes the seeming objectivity and givenness of computational systems, platforms, code modules, inscription practices, and storage devices, revealing their structuring assumptions, protocols, and even ideologies of power.”6Similarly, Noble has investigated how what she terms “technology ecosystems” structure larger social narratives and determine the subjects those narratives ultimately address.7 She argues that “digital decisions reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling […while] masking and deepening social inequality.”8 Noble’s sociological research shows “how commercial search engines such as Google not only mediate but are mediated by a series of profit-driven imperatives that are supported by information and economic policies that underwrite the commodification of […] identities.”9 Furthermore, she states, “the race to digitize cultural heritage and knowledge is important, but it is often mediated by a search engine for the user who does not know precisely how to find it,”10 a point of particular interest for those of us working in visual culture studies. She warns, “Search results are more than simply what is popular. The dominant notion of search results as being both ‘objective’ and ‘popular’ makes it seem as if misogynist or racist search results are a simple mirror of the collective,” when in fact this is not the case.11 Noble concludes that “racism is a standard protocol for organizing behavior on the web” from within the technosphere out into the global hive of content users constantly swarming around content and entangled within it from dispersed locations around the world.12Noble’s and Presner’s critiques of the supposed objectivity of internet search results certainly resonate, we imagine, with this journal’s readers. The absence of a rigorous academic platform inspired us to work with a transdisciplinary array of scholars from around the world to launch this journal four years ago. Think back to an earlier editorial commentary in which we presented data on where scholars of Latin American and Latinx visual culture had been publishing their research.13 The major flagship journals of art history had not welcomed submissions in these fields, which outsiders might interpret as a lack of scholarly rigor in our research. In reality, this data demonstrated endemic bias in the editorial and review process in the publishing world. Consider another example: image databases and search engines. When we first abandoned slide projectors and moved to digital projection, it was very challenging to find databases of Latin American materials. Today, online image banks abound, but the authenticity of their contents and inaccessibility behind paywalls pose new challenges to scholars and students alike as we navigate around and sometimes through the digital sludge. As Presner and Noble point out, the prioritization of certain content by search engine algorithms in combination with user behavior powerfully shapes larger social agendas with ramifications that ripple beyond the purview of academia.This is thankfully beginning to change, as witness content on Google Arts & Culture, SmartHistory, and Khan Academy. Today we can usually find even the most obscure comparanda for class discussion using crowd-sourced platforms such as Flickr. Witness, too, the popularity of platforms such as TedTalks, YouTube, TikTok, and others. A recent search of Google Arts & Culture for images demonstrates the shift toward more inclusive visual culture content. Searches for various categories revealed the following results (figs. 1 and 2):“Latinx Art”: forty collections“Modern Latin American Art”: thirty-two collections“Italian Renaissance Art”: twenty collections“Pre-Columbian Art”: twelve collections“Colonial Mexican Art”: seven collections“Afro Latinx Art”: two collectionsThese findings are hopeful. They seem to demonstrate both users’ positive influence on content and the diversification possible on the web. And where else can you create a selfie with Frida Kahlo’s monkey or cartographically track deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon (fig. 3)?14 While peer-reviewed books and long-form journal articles remain important in tenure and promotion decisions, traditional forms of academic expression and dissemination have arguably become increasingly unengaging to students, the general public, and professionals working outside of academia. In “the mangle,” Presner reminds us, all boundaries are porous, subject to transgression, and malleable. Humanities scholars then must engage with digital resources for the potential they hold to not only maintain disciplinary relevance but engage humanistic inquiry to effect real social change in the lives of people grappling with the profound impacts of climate change, lingering legacies of colonialism, pervasive economic inequality, and persistent social injustice around the world today.A current digital arts project demonstrates the potentiality of Presner’s evocative “mangle.” Creando raíces/Creating Rhyzomes: Making a Digital Portal of Mexican American Art since 1848, a project at the University of Minnesota and the University of Texas, Rio Grande, is spearheaded by professors Karen Mary Davalos and Constance Cortez.15 A digital portal launched this fall that brings together images of Mexican American art held at eighty-seven museums, libraries, and archives across the United States, it promises to greatly expand images available for study, teaching, and research.16 Making these images freely available to all, this project has the potential to transform how we view so-called American art. Its creators are inventing decolonial digital protocols. “Imagined as an alternative to Eurocentric, colonial, or siloed collections, Rhizomes depends upon decolonial methods for collaboration that emphasize equity, transparency, trust, and reciprocity.”17 In an enlightening blog post entitled “Why Culturally Informed Search Strategies?” they analyze the difficulties of classifying a common Mexican American object, the piñata.18 Following the conventions of most mainstream museums, a piñata would be classified as a vessel. Such a classification has the unintended effect of making the object invisible during online searches. The creators are thus thinking deeply about how one might search for Mexican American art, adding terms such as rasquache, domesticana, “lowrider,” and ofrenda, terms they have developed to create “culturally-informed search strategies.”19 This type of digital humanities scholarship facilitates productive interfacing between investigators and objects that activates the practical potential of the mangle.Of course, circulating just beneath the surface of initiatives like Rhyzomes are pedagogical and activist impulses. The gathering, organization, and publication of images is essential to the teaching and learning of Latin American and Latinx visual culture and art history, which then enter into public circulation where they stimulate individual and collective action. Digital platforms, from innovative databases to peer networks and alternative publication formats, open up pedagogical potentialities for both educators and students. When multimedia sources are well curated, the tools with the most meaningful contents that do not merely imitate popular culture prove productive in the hands of educators and students. When we “use technology to facilitate new forms of dialogue that undermine the conventional sage-on-the-stage model of patriarchal mastery,” digital humanities tools and platforms can make pedagogical experiences more accessible to interested students.20 Following these rich experiences in the academy, graduates can take their foundation of knowledge and box of humanities tools out into the world, where they can become activated working for the greater good.Digital humanities platforms, like the Dialogues section of LALVC, can also facilitate more inclusive theoretical discourse on digital humanities research and pedagogy. As the Getty Foundation Digital Art History initiative has demonstrated, the digital humanities have the potential to transform the discipline of art history because “the latest tools and techniques allow researchers to handle large volumes of digitized images and texts, trace patterns and connections formerly hidden from view, recover the past in virtual environments, and bring the complex intricacies of works of art to light as never before.”21 Educators across higher education are bringing digital humanities tools into their classroom, creating their own digital tools, and crafting nuanced, productive student assignments. Lisa Trever, for example, has described how she successfully assigned readings from the Dialogues section of LALVC in her undergraduate seminar at Columbia University, AHIS UN3708 “Beyond El Dorado: Materials, Values, and Aesthetics in Pre-Columbian Art History,” to stimulate student discussion of legacy and loss across the discipline of Latin American art history. At conferences and as part of informal conversations and professional interviews, scholars from across the field have expressed how helpful the Dialogues section of LALVC has been in their engagement of students due to its short format, more accessible style, and immediately relevant nature of the material presented.At the College Art Association conference in 2021, we participated in discussions about the investigation and expansion of art history digital humanities projects. Panels from a range of subfields considered the digital pedagogy of art, the potential of public scholarly collaborative scholarship, and facing scholarly suspicion in the digital age. At the same time, Panorama released an announcement calling for applications to a newly established Digital Reviews Section Editor to focus on digital art history and scholarship. As of publication date, a selection had yet to be announced, but the field is surely watching closely to see how this innovative new position will use “digital practices and data driven methods” to scope, develop, and lead this new digital humanities publication initiative.22 As Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank, dean of content and strategy at SmartHistory and former associate professor of art history at Pepperdine University, has already demonstrated in her scholarship, pedagogy, and career trajectory, art history needs more emphasis on pedagogy by way of a digital focus. By pushing the boundaries of what publishing is or the types of questions visual culture studies can and should ask, the digital humanities offer a space to build, edit, and collaborate in real time via online platforms and software applications.We are all looking forward to a day when we can teach, present, and engage in person. Still, the pandemic has presented us with certain opportunities. The world we returned to is not the same as the one we all left behind, nor should it be. The possibilities of digital teaching, scholarship, and creative work have forever changed us. The borders between our classrooms and the digital realm have broken down. We now exist in “the mangle,” in the borderlands between the real and the virtual. And as we know from Chicana/o studies, the border, as an in-between space, a space of nepantla, is a site of transformation, of change, one that harnesses the power of being neither here nor there but instead, through the collaborative power of technology, everywhere.