Radical_Digital_Humanities

Radical digital humanities is about interrogating power. It sheds a light on the importance of integrating minorities who have been neglected through past years in literature and films. DHS can help tackle the biased content of social sciences by making a balance when each group of people has a chance to be represented. Some initiatives were done in the past such as postcolonial literature which made a positive impact.

Radical DHS is a term that associated with Aaron Swartz; an American co-founder of the social news and entertainment website, Reddit. He is a computer activist and social and political advocate. His aim sums in one sentence” I want to make the world a better place”. At the age of 12 years old, Aaron created his first online website, info.website.org before the launch of Wikipedia. His digital record is full of achievements such as RSS, Creative Common (CC), watchdog.net and the open library.

He was passionate about copyrights and his aspiration was to spread knowledge among people who do not have permission to access as he wrote, “I don’t like excluding people”. His main concern was about the control over the ways you find people and how traffic flow on the internet is centralized. Thus, his aspirations were politically oriented which brought him too much trouble.

Two significant initiatives marked him as a radical digital humanist whose goal is to provide people with open access internet. Firstly, he was interested in bringing the public access to the public domain, PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), so he joined an initiative called PACER recycling that provided free access. Then, he was prosecuted by FBI. Secondly, he decided to look at institutions that publish academic journal articles. He used the MIT cable to download millions of data from J-Store and spread them with the world for free. Unfortunately, he was caught by the American government which considered him as a felon. He lost his freedom, his Internet and we lost him as he committed to suicide.

He cared about spreading knowledge and justice, but he was punished for doing so. Is being a radical digital humanist a crime? I think the term “radical” itself is a challenge and this what Posner (2016) claimed in her article that it is our responsibility to restructure the content of DH so it can reflect the reality. Also, Shah said, in India, the Internet used as a privilege and it would be great if schools can benefit from open access. This verifies Aaron’s vision of making knowledge a human right around the globe.