This session is convened by Anne Baillot (Le Mans Université) and co-animated with Charlotte Feidicker (Bielefeld University).
The awareness for the environmental impact of research and teaching activities is rising in Higher Education and Research at large, with a variety of reactions in the disciplines when it comes to implementing an adaptation of professional habits. While some elements are common to all disciplines (buildings, travels), those that work more intensely with ICT-based technologies have developed specific approaches to tackle their energetic gluttony. Within SSH disciplines, Digital Humanities are one of the most energy-intensive fields and are directly impacted with this issue.
In the 2021 Manifesto Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis, the authors shed light on various aspects that serve as a basis for the discussion in the webinar:
"As digital humanists, every project we create, every software application we use, every piece of hardware we purchase impacts our environment."; "As humanities researchers, it is also our role to probe the values, the power structures, and the future imaginaries that underpin sustainable solutions. Given, especially, the immense and monopolistic power wielded by the global tech sector, and the critiques of this power that are part of DH, our use of their resources should be informed by the ways corporate economic, cultural, and scientific power perpetuates and exacerbates the crisis."; "Like all academic disciplines, DH research has a particular environmental impact. Not the kind of impact typical of energy-intensive, high performance computing research elsewhere on campus, but intensive nevertheless: we buy new machines, we build infrastructures that host large digital objects, we run queries over large datasets. "; "At the same time, our communities can address the environmental emergency, and do so in ways that are feminist, anti-colonial, and aligned with diverse flourishings of the human and more-than-human world. We can resist the perceived ethereality of the digital, when the reality is stuff, power, and pollution. We can highlight the power consumption of some forms of play (e.g. a GPU attached Colab notebook) and to advocate for mitigations (e.g. energy-efficient programming practices). We might even ask whether our power consumption - set against all power consumption - even matters at all, is even worth worrying about, irrespective of the optics of us declaring that it doesn’t matter (Whitmarsh et al., 2021)."
In this webinar, we present ongoing initiatives that strive to tackle this challenge, but we also discuss the impact of the gap that separates North Western countries from the global South. Questioning the “Digital” in Digital Humanities requires to reassess the definition of the discipline itself, and to redefine what brings together its community of practice.
Chair: Anne Baillot, Le Mans Université, France
Mastodon posts : Charlotte Feidicker, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
Speakers :
Emmanuel Ngue Um, Université de Yaoundé, Cameroun
Anne-Cécile Orgerie, CNRS Rennes, France
Torsten Roeder, Universität Würzburg, Germany
Elizabeth Williamson, University of Exeter, UK
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7 сен 2024
