Aronova, von Oertzen, and Sepkoski’s “Introduction” provides a comprehensive foundation from which to discuss Big Data, computers, and science. In their writing, they reflect critically on the legal, ethical, and political implications of today’s information technologies and the high value it places on data. They ask, then, “what is the source of the new value?”[1] By illustrating how the collection of large data was not invented by computers but in fact has a long epistemological history, the authors argue for a more encompassing historiographies of data, science, and computers that include the natural, social, and human sciences.

In their volume, Aronova et al. also question the emergence of a “new elite.” Safiya Noble’s article, “The Future of Knowledge in the Public,” takes issue with these new elites and argues for studying the social context of those who organize information online. As example, Noble discusses how systems of organization inherit their creators’ assumptions, like the classification of people as “illegal aliens” in a library system. D’Ignazio & Klein also wrestle with the difficulties of classifications in their work, “What Gets Counted Counts.” In it, they examine the online classification of gender, using Facebook as a particularly strong example.

In her “Conclusion” to Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks too investigates gender inequalities in the technology field. Using gender as a historical analysis, Hicks shows the absence of women who defied technological change and who shaped key technologies. The piece concludes by stating that “the process of rendering invisible certain categories of workers” aligned with the nation building project.[2] Such unequal relationships of power are also evident in Bailey & Gossett’s chapter “Analog Girls in Digital Worlds.” While similarly concerned with gender, their chapter renders visible the intersectionalities of race, class, and sexuality within the digital humanities. Bailey’s section, especially, explores the relationship between academia and non-academic digital spaces, including the value and usefulness of both spaces.

The power imbalance in the digital sphere is also evident in the pieces by Kimberly Christen, Joanna Radin, and Roopika Risam, who all examine the legacies of colonialism and indigeneity in the digital world. Risam questions how the digital humanities have contributed to the epistemic violence of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and suggests some methods of decolonizing, for example, by focusing on the local context. When researchers take data out of context, as we see in Radin’s piece, it can lead to profound negative consequences. Additionally, Christen shows how the utopian ideal of the digital “openness” disregards the cultural, social, and historical conditions of oppression that native peoples have endured.

Lara Putnam’s “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable” provides further insight into historical and digital research praxis. Rather than focusing on data mining, Putnam highlights how historians use digital methods for “finding and finding out,”[3] and the consequences of some of the physical and geographic spaces of archives. This change has affected the “peripheral vision” and social interactions scholars experience in the physical archive. Although digitization has weakened some traditional barriers, Putnam concludes, the benefits may be canceled out by superficiality and new blind spots.

In all, the readings for the past two weeks illustrate the subjectivity of socio-technical systems, which are often flaunted as egalitarian, neutral, and liberating. Though the authors provide a wide range of considerations, the literature revolves around the North American and European experiences. What new insights might we encounter concerning data, the digital, gender, and race with voices trained in and hailing from South America, Africa, or South or East Asia?

[1] Aronova, et al., 4.

[2] Hicks, 238.

[3] Putnam, 378.