On the Humanity and Inhumanity of Data

On The Humanity and Inhumanity of Data
Professor Alex Gil, Yale University & the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective

Slave registers provide one of the most prominent historical sources for modern-day data practices. Not only are these artifacts precursors of the modern-day spreadsheet, they prefigure in their cruelty and reductiveness, the doubly dehumanizing conversion of human beings into quantities linked to profit and production. As our 21st scholarship embarks on a recuperation of the Black lives that suffered and eked out joy under Atlantic Slavery, we must also contend with new material forms of scholarship linked to data: databases, visualizations, algorithms and most recently, generative AI. This confluence of pressures has brought several questions to the fore: Can data extracted from historical records created by the perpetrators of violence be re-humanized? How do we re-center, to borrow from the vernacular, the lives of folks who were enslaved while avoiding the risk of further dehumanization? If so, what can we specifically rescue or give back to the ancestors of the African diaspora? Agency? Dignity? A narrative beyond scenes of subjection? In this talk I offer some tentative answers to these questions using as test case our team effort, “(Un)Silencing Slavery: Remembering the Enslaved at Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica.”

Professor Alex Gil is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly, co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax.