Having to Ask

Two months into this fellowship, I have prayed in the following places:

• The Grad lounge
• Brandon’s office
• Shane’s office
• Amanda’s office

The first time, it felt strange. I had barely known everyone for a week. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I didn’t want to seem like I was putting on a show of religiosity. I didn’t want to be stereotyped and put into a box.

Each time I asked if I could pray in the Scholars’ Lab space, those around me were extremely accommodating, offering to leave the room to give me privacy. That made it feel like even more of an imposition. I felt too conspicuous, too seen. The kinder everyone was, the more uncomfortable I felt. I couldn’t make sense of it. Why did this kindness make me feel like an outsider?

Soon enough, the afternoon prayer started eliciting other uncomfortable thoughts. Once, as I unfurled my prayer mat, I wondered if the DH tools we discovered would ever support Punjabi or Urdu (my research languages). Shane and I had spent an entire morning trying Tesseract’s OCR software on images with Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi text, but the invariable result was gibberish. A few weeks later, when I wanted my name in both English and Urdu on our Charter website, Jeremy said he’d figure out if and how that was possible. I nearly told him to forget I mentioned it. I remember noticing how brown my skin was as I prayed that day.

The experience of double consciousness each time I pray in the Scholars’ Lab is a stark reminder that I don’t fully belong in the ‘Digital’ Humanities. I have to be accommodated for, adjusted to, and worked around. It doesn’t matter how sincerely the Scholars’ Lab staff welcome me into their physical space. As soon as we face a laptop screen, I am stripped down to an anglicized, areligious, apolitical version of myself. For the computer only recognizes these fragments. Here, too, it has become the job of the SLab folks to stretch themselves in unexpected ways to make me whole again: by trying to find digital platforms and tools with Right-To-Left (RTL) language support; by hunting down essays on Global DH and Minimal Computing; by dredging up their own insecurities and limitations in conversations to assure me of my place in DH.

The message is clear: It takes the kindness and effort of individual DH scholars to make space for me within systems that were not designed for people like me. Grateful as I am, it is not kindness I want, but the chance to be an equal collaborator. To create and share knowledge across the linguistic communities I belong to.

In a recent paper, Masoud Ghorbaninejad, Nathan P. Gibson and David Joseph Wrisley have discussed the Anglocentric nature of current DH infrastructures that largely ignore the “digital habitus”¹ of RTL language users. They state that “knowledge is not just cultural content embedded in language; it is also infrastructure that allows that content to be represented, circulated, and preserved for the concerned communities.” Of the many tools I have discovered these past few months – Omeka, Voyant tools, MALLET, Tesseract, to name a few – not a single one supports Urdu or Punjabi in any meaningful way. As a multilingual South Asian and a student of Muslim literatures, each interaction with these tools involves two things: (1) silencing the very voices within me that have already undergone violence at the hands of the English language, and (2) a fervent hope for alternatives.

(Thank you Brandon for the title!)