Reflecting on My Development of Digital Humanities Literacies

In a lot of ways, I feel as if the trajectory of my engagement with the digital humanities has been marked by my attempts to understand the relationship between theory and practice within the discipline. In my first presentation of the semester, I was still struggling in many ways with how to translate digital humanities theory into digital humanities practice, recognizing more instances in which this process "failed" subjects, artifacts, and end-users than those that adequately and meaningfully engaged content. Which is not to say that I necessarily saw (or see) theory and practice as compartmentalized discursive spaces, but I just needed to really believe in the digital humanities and discover digital humanities practices that spoke more directly to my own sensibilities and those sensibilities articulated by Tara McPherson and Matthew Kirschbaum and Alan Liu, Olin Bjork and Melanie Kill, N. Katherine Hayles and Jason Farman, and so forth. In short, I really needed to engage in digital humanities practice myself before I could really see and understand all of the ways in which theory and practice are entangled and overlapping within the digital humanities.

In my most recent presentation regarding my final project proposal, though, I feel as if I finally got it. In predicating much of my presentation on the social, cultural, and historical context in which Cuba generally developed into an insular and surveiled geographical space, and relating these circumstances to the emergence and relative inaccessibility of digital technologies in Cuba, I finally found what I was looking for in the digital humanities: a unique and profound performance of digital humanities theory. Indeed, I argued in my presentation that the manner in which Cubans navigated obstacles in and around material access, in order to actually use digital technologies, escape surveillance, shirk hardware and infrastructure limitations, and exchange information, constituted a form of (h)ac(k)tivism that embodied digital humanities theory. Cubans in Cuba, I found, were performing the digital humanities by virtue of their very acquisition of unique and personalized digital literacies.

It was not until after my presentation, though, when Doctor Christen Withey indicated that my social, cultural, and historical context was, in fact, my project, that I truly understood that I, too, was performing the digital humanities, and that I had unearthed and revealed that point of contact between theory and practice that I longed for at the beginning of the semester. My own digital humanities literacy is still in development, but I am excited to really take ownership of my contextualized approach to my project on the topic of Cuban digital literacies, not as a "brief and reductive timeline," but as the very fabric of an important and timely project in the digital humanities.