How does Algeria fit into the world of digital humanities? First, we have to determine what we mean, when we write about digital humanities. The University of Sheffield’s Digital Humanities Institute refers to academic work “which uses digital methods and computational techniques as part of its research methodology, dissemination plan, and/or public engagement,” and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities supports “new methodologies for humanities research, teaching and learning, public engagement, and scholarly communications.” To this increasingly-crowded field, Oxford Languages offers a definition of “the digital humanities,” which is “an academic field concerned with the application of computational tools and methods to traditional humanities disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy.” Having described the term digital humanities with its emphasis on the humanities engaging with digital techniques, we can turn our attention to Algeria’s place in these fields: first in the humanities and then to its digital impact.
“Algeria” occupies a significant role in “the global humanities”
Arguably, “Algeria” occupies a significant role in “the global humanities”; for Nicole Beth Wallenbrock, film director and screenwriter Merzak Allouache depicted refugees’ “conflicted thought process and trial with the elements” (“Migration, State Power, and Popular Media,” in Global Humanities: Studies in Histories, Cultures, and Societies; Migration and State Power, Frank Jacob, editor, 2016, p. 123). During the 1980s, Algeria (like Mozambique and Vietnam) was “home” for those “contract workers” who fell under verbal, physical violence, and arson attacks from active right wing movements in the German Democratic Republic (Sven Brajer and Johannes Schültz, “Old Concepts in Changing Societies: Continuities and Transformation of Nationalism in East Germany, 1871-2019,” in Nationalism in a Transnational Age: Irrational Fears and the Strategic Abuse of Nationalist Pride, Frank Jacob and Carsten Schapkow, editors, 2021, p. 61).
The question remains as to whether Algeria occupies a comparable position in “the digital humanities”
The question remains as to whether Algeria occupies a comparable position in “the digital humanities.” A variety of definitions of “digital divide” set us up to answer questions regarding the role of “Algeria” in the digital humanities. As one example, Josh Brown, “Digital Approaches to Multilingual Text Analysis: The Dictionnaire de la langue franque and its Morphology as Hybrid Data in the Past” (in Multilingual Digital Humanities, Lorella Viola and Paul Spence, editors, 2023) cites Danele Baglioni’s “The Vocabulary of the Algerian Algerian Lingua Franca,” Lexicographica 33 (2017). Reference is to the early-modern plurilingualism, “which existed throughout the Mediterranean for centuries, driven by commerce, conflict, and migration” (Joanna Nolan, Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur: From Sea Jargon to Military Order? (2023), p. 8), raising further questions about the “divide” in the “digital divide.”
“Algeria” appears twice in the field-defining Matthew K. Gold, Lauren F. Klein, Debates in the Digital Humanities (2023). Once, the jurisdiction is referenced in a contributor’s biography: “is a comparativist working across six European languages, Latin and Arabic. He grew up in North America and has extended work and research stays in Algeria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Tunisia; since 2002, he has been residing in Arab countries, as a faculty member first in Beirut and now in Abu Dhabi, working to build digital humanities communities of practices and infrastructure…” A second time, the jurisdiction is referenced in the context of colonial-era migrations, reflected in literary texts: “Black French women’s voices complicate those ultra-localized—and this is at the heart of Maboula’s book—those very linear, hexagonalized understandings of how time and space intersect. I am thinking here about Audrey Celestine’s Une famille française… an autobiographical account of how her own family’s circulation between Martinique, Algeria and northern France subverts the simplistic view of how Frenchness is constructed and functions.” Such a context encourages further interrogation regarding how “the digital” is constructed and functions in the present.
Again, for Meagan Call-Cummings, Melissa Hauber-Özer, and Giovanni P. Dazzo, in their co-edited Routledge International Handbook of Critical Participatory Inquiry in Transnational Research Contexts (2023), the jurisdiction is referenced in a contributor’s biography, with Venezuela, and Mexico: “my students were single mothers working endless hours, matriarchs and caretakers of their families, first generation immigrants or refugees, or even push outs from the USA schooling.” The unique conditions of this community’s digital divide remains to be identified.
As part of the playbook associated with the “People-Centered Smart Cities” initiative, UN Habitat introduces a distinction which falls within the realm of the Digital Orientalist: “Until recently, digital divide policy was focused primarily on physical access to infrastructure; while the cost and affordability of ICT remains a big issue in many countries, a larger problem is the lack of knowledge and understanding of information technology itself.” To the first issue of physical infrastructure, and the second issue of information technology, the current query introduces a third issue which is that of representation. Drawing on the methodology of the UN Habitat’s previous playbook, “Assessing the Digital Divide,” which instructed readers to collect, analyze, and report grassroots data about the digital divide in the form of a digital divide assessment, one task was to identify the unique conditions of their communities’ digital divide. The current intervention collects, analyses and reports secondary data, to prepare an “academic digital divide assessment.”
Helpful for followers of the Digital Orientalist, while mapping out a “digital divide,” Michael Mack distinguishes between “mainstream idealist and Cartesian rationalism” in which “the mind is supposed to control the movements of the body;” for Mack, “Spinoza does away with the hierarchical command center of the mind,” in that “the identity of the corporeal and the cerebral renders inoperative the hierarchy that is constitutive for a thinking grounded in representation: we no longer require the lowly sphere of matter to be representative of the higher sphere of the spirit.” Why? For Mack, “the two are identical, are contaminated with each other,” as well as, “in other words, […] simultaneously one entity, through conceptually distinct” (Disappointment: Its Modern Roots from Spinoza to Contemporary Literature, 2020, p. 47).
Algeria’s seemingly miniscule role in contemporary digital humanities may reflect some kind of a north-south digital divide, might indicate the distance between global-Anglophonie and global Francophonie, could even index the insularity of American exceptionalism. Drawing on the methodology of the UN Habitat’s multiple playbooks that instruct readers to collect, analyze, and report grassroots data about the digital divide in order to develop a digital divide assessment, the Algerian Scientific Journals Platform (ASJP) should be acknowledged, as well as the Archives Numériques du Cinéma Algérien, a series of blended workshops sponsored by the Integrating Content & Language in Algerian Higher Education working group, in addition to the international conference ‘Media, Language, and Society: Perspectives and Reflections on the Mediatization of Culture’. In contrast with the seemingly miniscule role allocated to Algeria’s role in the digital humanities in the world of print, a body of evidence indicates that contributions to the digital humanities from Algeria remain robust.
Works cited:
Meagan Call-Cummings, Melissa Hauber-Özer, and Giovanni P. Dazzo, editors, Routledge International Handbook of Critical Participatory Inquiry in Transnational Research Contexts (2023)
Matthew K. Gold, Lauren F. Klein, editors, Debates in the Digital Humanities (2023)
Frank Jacob and Carsten Schapkow, editors, Nationalism in a Transnational Age: Irrational Fears and the Strategic Abuse of Nationalist Pride (2021)
Frank Jacob, editor, Global Humanities: Studies in Histories, Cultures, and Societies; Migration and State Power (2016)
Michael Mack, Disappointment: Its Modern Roots from Spinoza to Contemporary Literature (2020)
Joanna Nolan, Lingua Franca and Français Tirailleur: From Sea Jargon to Military Order? (2023)
Lorella Viola and Paul Spence, editors, Multilingual Digital Humanities (2023)
The Digital Orientalist 