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When Literacy Goes Digital: Rethinking the Ethics and Politics of Digitisation

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    • Go Digital, They Said. It Will Be Fun, They Said. Teaching DH Methods for Historical Research
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    • When Literacy Goes Digital: Rethinking the Ethics and Politics of Digitisation
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When Literacy Goes Digital: Rethinking the Ethics and Politics of Digitisation

Keynote
Author
Affiliation

Gerben Zaagsma

Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg

Published

September 12, 2024

Modified

November 15, 2024

Doi

10.5281/zenodo.13904623

Keywords

Digital history, Digital literacy, Digitisation, Ethics

A recording of the Zoom live stream of this keynote is available on Zenodo.

In recent years, the critical turn in digital humanities has sparked numerous discussions about digital literacy in the discipline of history. While critical work has focused on data, tools, and the skills that historians need in the current digital age, questions remain about the broader contours of digital literacy and the multiple meanings that could be attributed to it. Amidst the shift to a culture of digital abundance and a research environment that privileges what is available online, digitisation has brought old questions about heritage, power, and the production and construction of historical knowledge to the fore. This calls for an approach that expands our current methodological purview to include broader epistemological and normative considerations.

To this end, my talk will foreground the ethics and politics of digitisation as an essential component of digital historical literacy. I propose to do so in three intertwin ed steps. First comes historical context. Just as digital history urgently needs historicising, so too does digital literacy, not only as a product of precursors such as information and media literacy, but also in relation to notions of literacy and its ethical dimensions more generally. Second, thinking through digital literacy inevitably implies reckoning with the global dimensions of cultural heritage digitisation and its effects on historical knowledge production beyond the oft-posited Global North/South binary. Third, to exercise digital literacy is to acknowledge how ethics and politics suffuse digital epistemologies that fundamentally reframe historical research practices.

Ultimately, I argue that integrating these considerations in our discussions of digital literacy is crucial for a discipline still grappling to come to terms with the digital age.

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CC BY-SA 4.0

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@misc{zaagsma2024,
  author = {Zaagsma, Gerben},
  editor = {Baudry, Jérôme and Burkart, Lucas and Joyeux-Prunel,
    Béatrice and Kurmann, Eliane and Mähr, Moritz and Natale, Enrico and
    Sibille, Christiane and Twente, Moritz},
  title = {When {Literacy} {Goes} {Digital:} {Rethinking} the {Ethics}
    and {Politics} of {Digitisation}},
  date = {2024-09-12},
  url = {https://digihistch24.github.io/submissions/keynote/},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.13904623},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Zaagsma, Gerben. 2024. “When Literacy Goes Digital: Rethinking the Ethics and Politics of Digitisation.” Edited by Jérôme Baudry, Lucas Burkart, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Eliane Kurmann, Moritz Mähr, Enrico Natale, Christiane Sibille, and Moritz Twente. Digital History Switzerland 2024: Book of Abstracts. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13904623.
Unveiling Historical Depth: Semantic annotation of the Panorama of the Battle of Murten
Conference Program
Source Code
---
categories: 'Keynote'
title: "When Literacy Goes Digital: Rethinking the Ethics and Politics of Digitisation"
author:
  - name: Gerben Zaagsma
    orcid: 0000-0002-5978-9769
    email: gerben.zaagsma@uni.lu
    affiliations:
      - Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), University of Luxembourg
keywords:
  - Digital history
  - Digital literacy
  - Digitisation
  - Ethics
date: 09-12-2024
date-modified: 11-15-2024
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.13904623
other-links:
  - text: Homepage
    href: https://gerbenzaagsma.github.io/
  - text: Mastodon
    href: https://mastodon.green/@gerbenzaagsma
  - text: X
    href: https://x.com/gerbenzaagsma
  - text: C²DH
    href: https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/
  - text: Keynote Video Recording
    href: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14340336
---

::: {.callout-note appearance="simple" icon=false}

A recording of the Zoom live stream of this keynote is available [on Zenodo](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14340336).

:::

In recent years, the critical turn in digital humanities has sparked numerous discussions about digital literacy in the discipline of history. While critical work has focused on data, tools, and the skills that historians need in the current digital age, questions remain about the broader contours of digital literacy and the multiple meanings that could be attributed to it. Amidst the shift to a culture of digital abundance and a research environment that privileges what is available online, digitisation has brought old questions about heritage, power, and the production and construction of historical knowledge to the fore. This calls for an approach that expands our current methodological purview to include broader epistemological and normative considerations. 

To this end, my talk will foreground the ethics and politics of digitisation as an essential component of digital historical literacy. I propose to do so in three intertwin  ed steps. First comes historical context. Just as digital history urgently needs historicising, so too does digital literacy, not only as a product of precursors such as information and media literacy, but also in relation to notions of literacy and its ethical dimensions more generally. Second, thinking through digital literacy inevitably implies reckoning with the global dimensions of cultural heritage digitisation and its effects on historical knowledge production beyond the oft-posited Global North/South binary. Third, to exercise digital literacy is to acknowledge how ethics and politics suffuse digital epistemologies that fundamentally reframe historical research practices. 

Ultimately, I argue that integrating these considerations in our discussions of digital literacy is crucial for a discipline still grappling to come to terms with the digital age.
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