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This chapter examines the current position of race and digital humanities work. It focuses on the digital work being produced by those associated with academia and those with strong connections to traditional humanities fields including history, literature, classics, art history, and archeology, among others. It argues that digital humanists need to examine the canon that they are constructing, a canon that skews toward traditional texts and excludes crucial work by women, people of color, and the GLBTQ community. They need to reinvigorate the spirit of previous scholars who believed that textual recovery was crucial to their work, who saw the digital as a way to enact changes in the canon.

This chapter, which provides a critical analysis of the technological terms of the postindustrial institutions led by knowledge work business, views such techno-logic through the lens of other participating institutions that, while increasingly colonized by postindustrial principles, offer an alternative perspective. The specific institutional perspective it brings to bear is that of the humanities and arts in the academy. Members of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Text Encoding Initiative, for example, have long had a hand in developing or adapting text encoding standards, and, in the last decade, major digital text and image archives at East Coast centers of humanities computing in the United States (such as Brown University and the University of Virginia) have proved the sophistication and robustness of text encoding for literature.

This chapter begins with a brief description of the author’s work as part of the Working Group for Digital Inquiry at Wisconsin. He describes the University of Wisconsin’s licensing agreement with the University of Michigan to begin working with files from the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), which contains over 27,000 items from early modern print. He then offers reflections about the nature of the text objects and populations of texts he is working with. He asks: What is the distinguishing feature of the digitized text—that ideal object of analysis considered in all its hypothetical relations with other ideal objects?

A South African by birth, white, of German ancestry, fluent in Afrikaans, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick spent six months in her native country in 1993 and a full year in 1994 studying the Soweto uprising. During that time, she assiduously examined the relevant archives but was unable to find any of the posters she knew the marching students carried: … From the transcripts and correspondence of the Cillié Commission I knew that the Commission had received, from the police, many posters and banners that had been confiscated during various student marches in 1976. None of them would have fit into a traditional archive document box and, though mentioned on the list of evidence associated with the Cillié Commission, they were initially not to be found. I continued to request that archivists search the repositories—without success. Until, one day, perhaps exasperated by my persistence or wanting to finally prove to me that there was nothing to be found in the space associated with K345, the archival designator of my Soweto materials, one of the archivists relented and asked me to accompany her into the vaults in order to help her search for these artifacts of the uprising! To be sure, there were no posters to be found in the shelf space that housed the roughly nine hundred boxes of evidence associated with the Cillié Commission. But then, as my disappointed eyes swept the simultaneously ominous and tantalizing interior of the vault, I saw a piece of board protruding over the topmost edge of the shelf. There, almost 9 feet into the air, in the shadowy space on top of the document shelves, lay a pile of posters and banners… . We can understand Pohlandt-McCormick’s mounting sense of excitement. It is not just the discovery itself; it is the sense of being in touch with the past—literally in touch. It is the knowledge that no photograph can do justice to any 3D object, whether it is a collection of posters, a cache of cold fusion memorabilia, or Enrico Fermi’s Nobel medal.