 Good morning, everyone. I'm Lorena Guadrall from the University of Cusum. It's a pleasure to be here at Carnegie Mellon and I'm sure other people who have come from different parts of the United States are also sitting that welcome to the Carnegie Mellon University. This is my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker or keynote today. I'm Henry Nieves. He will be presenting on developing a social justice framework for immersive technologies in digital humanities. On Henry Nieves is associate professor of history and digital humanities at San Diego State University in the area of excellence in digital humanities and global diversity. He was associate professor and co-director of the digital humanities initiative at Hamilton College. Nieves's 3D digital edition entitled A Part Health Heritage, A Spatial History of South Africa's Townships brings together modeling, immersive technologies and digital ethnography in the pursuit of documenting human right violations in a part health era South Africa. He recently completed a new book project entitled An Architecture of Education, African American Women Design in the New South with the University of Rochester Press for their series Gender and Race in American History. Nieves is also currently working on a new volume in debates in the digital humanities series and recently completed work on a special collaborative issue of American Quarterly on DH in the field of American Studies. He serves on the Modern Language Association's Committee on Information Technology. He sits on the board of New York State's Humanities Council and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. Nieves was presidential visiting associate professor at Yale University in the Women's Genders and Sexuality Studies Program and an affiliate in the Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory. So join me in welcoming Dr. Nieves. Good morning everyone. I know it's often hard for me at 9 a.m. so I'm glad to see you all here. I want to thank Alex, Lorena and Emma for inviting me to deliver one of the two keynote addresses. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's keynote address from a good friend and colleague. My talk on this first morning of the Immersive Pedagogy Symposium is going to be divided into two parts. The first frames my work in terms of its applied and theoretical foundation and the second specifically looks at my work in South Africa. So over the past 18 years as a feminist scholar trained in black and Africana studies and in African American women's history, I've had the unique privilege of working with arrays of faculty, staff and student colleagues who have permitted me to theorize and practice and make critical digital interventions in the humanities classroom. I would argue that given the recent turn in digital humanities scholarship that grows out of discussions about the intersectional contours of a critical DH, it becomes all the more relevant to consider what a critical digital ethnic studies might hold for our future work, especially for those of us working in immersive technologies. Scholars Tanya Clement, Wendy Hagenmeyer, Jenny Levine-Nies highlight some recent debates around the archive suggesting that quote, it's meaning hinges on the intersection of archival work, changing digital technologies and evolving scholarly practices and needs, end of quote. The past two slides are showing you some of the results working with students out of my DHSI course with Dorothy Kim at a Brandeis University, the second iteration of our race and social justice and DH course that we've been offering now, this was the second version and some of the results here I think suggest how we might think about a kind of framework around issues of social justice. The American Council of Learning Societies, ACLS recently awarded the University of Nebraska's Center for Digital Research, our grant to support a series of new workshops and trainings and what they are calling a digital ethnic studies. Lead co-PI Ken Price, co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln argues that quote, digital scholarly projects have come to suggest something that blends features of editing and archiving, end of quote. I would add that a great deal of that blending and even that blurriness has happened because of the emergence of new works by scholars of color. For example, here I'm thinking about Sophia Noble's Algorithms of Repression, Sadia Hartman's Wayward Lives, Jessica Johnson's 28th Social Text article, Marked Up Bodies, or Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel's recent edited volume, Disrupting Digital Humanities, who most frequently work at those very junctions between and among various forms of representation, acts of erasure from the historical record and in community-based practices that work to engage many publics. This raises the question, what might a critical digital ethnic studies look like if its centers on the work of women and people of color who are scholars have asked us all to interrogate the continued privilege of the white cis male authorial voice that still dominates digital humanities teaching and practice today. As a scholar of color, I've been involved in a series of critical making projects that work to build interdisciplinary degree programs, have raised public monies through government grant programs, and have worked with private foundation to support digital humanities scholarship involving undergraduates. I'm a strong advocate for engaging my students and colleagues irrespective of their situatedness in digital scholarship around the messiness of archive making and the importance of documenting our process of scholars. Making, and I use this word making very intentionally, and you'll hear me use it again, and making certain that we work to better reveal the processes of knowledge construction, tool and platform development in our inter-multi- and transdisciplinary research methods. Today, I'm working to develop new alternatives for scholarly publishing that build on already existing feminist-based digital platforms so that they now include immersive technologies. This body of work, and I'm only going to discuss a very small part of this this morning, but not of impossible at least in my mind unless my many project partners and collaborators had not embraced a certain amount of messiness and uncertainty. That messiness was only possible because we considered our efforts as a tool for coalitional work around overlapping and interconnected political realities. Those realities were premised on a collective belief that the humanities, the social sciences and what some might call the hard sciences are not in perpetual crisis as so many might have us believe about the American university. I believe we've arrived at a turn in digital humanities and in digital studies scholarship more broadly where we can now begin to radically change humanities-based research practices and offer new ways of documenting more specifically our intellectual work. You only have to look at the CVs of our science colleagues who have many, many more publications than those of us in the humanities the reason being that they publish without hesitation remarkably short three to four page essays about their work in progress and their initial findings. It is an ingrained part of their scholarly practice and for some time now I floated the idea of a journal of critical digital studies in digital humanities. This is not something we currently have available to us that publishes short form articles about process. I will admit that I am also to blame for the widespread obsession over project completeness as I have internalized the publisher parish model of the academy particularly in the humanities both as a former department chair and a DH center co-director. Meanwhile the chronicle of higher ed characteristically proclaimed not so long ago in what appears to be a 28 point font I'm guessing that computational methods repeatedly come up short and that once again a digital humanities debacle has been revealed. Nanzi Da writes quote computational literary studies not only has this branch of the digital humanities generated bad literary studies but it tends to lack quantitative rigor. Its findings are either banal or if interesting not statistically robust under quote it seems this piece and a subsequent series of essays that are in dialogue about this latest dust up in the chronicle and elsewhere resemble more and more general misunderstanding as to what interdisciplinary work in digital humanities looks like that it's not formulaic but it is iterative and often deliberately incomplete and often narratively rich in ways that we do not see elsewhere in the humanities today. I'm going to attempt to model into discussion a bit of what over the past year and a half or so I've come to call messy thinking and writing and making as I proceed to lay out a process with respect to queer traces that we're witnessing in the archive. I'll also be asking us to think about the ways that online scholarly publications and their platforms particularly immersive technologies could be designed to address and confront the need for social justice in our work as digital humanists. Some of this talk will be a bit more informal as I discuss some of my current works in progress perhaps not so much inspirational as a symposium keynote but more aspirational. I want to share with you this morning is a digital archive that as a construct, as an architecture of knowledge remains highly problematic because South African records and archives still serve even some 25 years plus after the dismantling of the apartheid state as tools for both oppression and liberation. I will for the sake of this talk make clear that I'm committed to community-engaged archive making and storytelling through the use of immersive technologies in the hopes that they can begin to bring about social justice. I welcome discussion, debate, and some knowledge-sharing about ways we might move forward in developing a social justice framework for immersive technologies in digital humanities. As a scholar of color in the areas and fields of digital humanities and digital studies I see archive making as an integral part of a broader black feminist project to combat absence, erasure, and the perpetual oversimplification of black lives. I would be remiss if I did not make clear that I'm deeply influenced and profoundly shaped by other feminist scholars including Tara McPherson, Laura Wexler, Jessica Marie Johnson, Lisa Nakamura, and Kong Huan, Dorothy Kim, who I had mentioned earlier, Amy Earhart, Jackie Wernemont, Kim Gallon, Liz Losh, and Rupa Garism. All scholars who have written critically about the social and cultural effects of technology in and across the humanities while making certain that they never trivialize the lived realities of women, people of color, or careers of color, and their unique relationship to the digital. For these scholars and myself, a kind of reflexivity, a kind of positionality, and an acknowledgement of the evidence, power, and politics of historical storytelling shape both our theory and our praxis. Many of these scholars and community-engaged activists would likely see their work more squarely in a kind of critical digital ethnic studies framework, although with the continued defunding of area and ethnic studies programs across the country for reasons that are far too complex to discuss here today. Okay, one acronym, STEM. It would require a complete restructuring of what we know as the humanities, acknowledging that obsessions over science, technology, engineering, and mathematics without a critical framework will do little to answer the kinds of questions we're seeking around issues of social justice. Jackie Wernemont's recent clarion call at DHSI a couple of weeks ago was an institute lecturer where she asked us to think, what are you doing, quote, to make sure your kin, human, and non are free, end of quote. For me, it's abundantly clear that we still need the work of black feminist scholars who will interrogate and hold accountable other digital study scholars, especially those in archival studies to move past their fixation with the narrative of first and second-way feminisms, while at the same time ignoring the contributions of women of color to these social movements and equally important interventions in the digital sphere. I would add this to Jackie's question, quote, what are you doing to make your, sure your kin, human, and non are free and able to empower themselves? Freedom does not always include or mean forms of self-empowerment. Freedom has its limitations. We have only to see the U.S. post-2016 election and the agency to self-empower is critical. DHSI, Hilt, and Iliads, to name a few, are the kinds of knowledge communities that will help to make possible new modes of scholarly interrogation, production, and to help determine how the work is valued differently and encouraged the dissemination of that work. I see DHSI, Hilt, Iliads, and symposiums like this one as potential sites for this kind of inter-multi- and transdisciplinary critical digital ethnic study scholarship. If we brought the sorts of methodological and practice-based questions about power, privilege, and access from ethnic studies to our work in immersive technologies, we might begin to see new ways of harnessing these tools that originated as part of the military industrial complex to serve our social justice needs. I should have said that Part 1 is now over. Now Part 2 begins. I've positioned myself and now I'll talk about the stuff you probably are more interested in. I believe it's important to also situate my own positionality in digital humanities as a first-generation queer man of color because it bears a particular imprint on my research, teaching, and scholarship, all of which I see as part of the theorizing and writing about the process of critical making. I already mentioned how evidence, power, and politics are integral to feminist practices of historical storytelling. To that list, I might also add issues of access and privilege as areas of particular concern when working in the global south and in a place shaped by a system of legalized racial hatred and violence such as that found in South Africa under apartheid. For me, social justice is only possible when we seek to ensure that all people participate in and benefit equally from a system that is inclusive of diversity while also cognizant that power and privilege are addressed and examined at both a micro and macro level under circumstances regarded as messy. By work documenting the student uprisings in Soweto began 15 years ago with a prototype I developed called Soweto-76, a living digital archive during my tenure as a faculty fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities at the University of Maryland College Park. Soweto-76 was at the time our initial prototype for an online multimedia archive of the holdings of Johannesburg's Hector Peterson Memorial and Museum, combining existing oral histories, testimonies, photographs, video footage, material objects, and sound recordings in the collections of the Hector Peterson Memorial and Museum that were sought to redress the existing portrayal of the lives of township residents in the mainstream or official historical record. The prototype was completed in 2008. At that time, the archive and the 3D models made the project ultimately limited in its extensibility and required a great deal of hands-on working custom coding to add new content. At the same time, I had already been working with the Soweto-76 Student Foundation to address what they had long felt were extant silences in the historical record about the role of women and girls in the June 16, 1976 uprising, something they were very much looking to address over the short term as they sought to preserve endangered archival holdings and supplement over the long term with a series of new digital interventions. Historiography of the period takes a very limited and somewhat argue narrow view of the events leading up to June 16, about the day and the weeks that followed. And because of apartheid's indelible imprint on the academy, much of that scholarship has also been shaped by a few majority white voices that have not allowed others, especially black South Africans, an opportunity to make even messier that history. Few book-length studies have considered the historical significance of these township spaces as extant philosophical artifacts of a difficult or contested past and how the remains of the material cultural heritage using 3D technologies inform or can inform our understanding of the resistance that actually occurred there, from house to house and street to street, and how the many competing narratives of liberation might begin to be layered with one another to reveal contradictions, overlaps and accounts of human rights violations. This gap in scholarship continuing even today is particularly unfortunate as townships now face complex heritage preservation issues. For example, the tearing down of historical fabric to make way for better, more modern RDP or reconstruction and development program housing types and the competing pressures of the international tourist market with little regard for uniquely homegrown reparative justice model. Apartheid heritage is a spatial history of South Africa's townships, brings together 3D modeling, immersive technologies and digital ethnography, ethnographic methods to document the long history of human rights violations within the unique urban landscape of Soweto, South Africa. In particular, the project looks at four interconnected historical events or moments in the township's development. The prehistory of two Iron Age sites there, the founding Soweto in 1904, the student uprisings of 1976 and the death of a gay 14 year old anti-apartheid activist there in 1988, 1989. This work documents the long deray or a long-term history of a place. Here I'm looking at a place that we would later call Soweto. Influenced by Ferdinand Bardell's writing and the Mediterranean, and by my alma mater Binghamton University, that master's degree in anthropology was good for something, I'm deploying the digital as a tool for constructing even reconstructing historical inquiry through place or placemaking focusing on the physicality of nature and space. Writing a series of interconnected spatial histories, the four historical narratives include the supporting secondary and primary source documents of past events in Soweto's history, which requires narrating change over time, while also including the spatial dimensions of political change, social change, class relations, gender relations, and cultural change. In addition, efforts to document Soweto's spatial relations using an intersectional and feminist analytical framework have not been attempted before in a book-length monograph. And here I want to make clear that the nomenclature of the analog book, which I think we're still very much tied to, hog-tied to in ways that I'm constantly resisting, is something that I'm actually kind of struggling to name. I'm grappling in particular with recent work on the history of the chapter. If anyone has some insights in naming the sort of multimodal narratives, I'm describing those that aren't neatly labeled as chapters. I'm happy to hear your insights and thoughts. Historian Phil Ethington, in his work on Los Angeles since 13,000 B.P., divides the region's history into nine regional empires, regimes, for example, much like Ethington's work for Ghost Metropolis, the incorporation of multiple scales of spatial and historical analysis through micro- and macro-historical reconstructions in my project, helps to virtually recreate the detailed histories of the local, domestic, or residential in Soweto's unique race-based spatial history. As a first step towards realizing apartheid heritages over the past 16-plus months, I've been co-principal investigator on a $100,000 grant to develop a new publishing cooperative, an enterprise funded jointly by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, or the NHPRC, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that was awarded to me and my co-PI, Elaine Sullivan, at UC Santa Cruz. These efforts are the results of our work with 16 other scholars and practitioners where we have begun to theorize and make a series of claims that further their arguments around 3D modeling and virtual reconstructions of scholarly digital editions, something that can be witnessed in the framework of a now-long and well-established area in digital humanities and in literary studies. Our research question for the grant was as follows. Can we apply the same sort of analyses, deep annotation, and versioning techniques from scholarly digital editions to our efforts in 3D historical reconstruction modeling? Practices and standards such as the use of TEI, XML, have revolutionized the ways in which scholars may access the written word from modernist texts to Shakespearean folios to inscriptions from antiquity. Increasingly, web-based technologies have made it possible to publish non-legistic texts such as images or musical scores, but the publication of 3D worlds or environments, as many of you know, entail challenges well above those required even for image-based editions. I should note that for our team, deep annotations refer to annotations with more information than is traditionally practiced to include primary and secondary source materials accessible through a robust digital archive and through lengthy supporting historical text or another kind of narrative layer. A successful 3D scholarly edition would provide users reliable academic source materials within the context of a three-dimensional virtual environment such as a reconstruction of a cultural heritage site or of a historical event. In addition to the processes and apparatus of traditional academic publishing, 3D scholarly editions must also accommodate the range of technologies used by digital studies scholars who work in spatial history to answer specific research questions and provide mechanisms to embed academic argumentation in deep annotations within a virtual online space. A 3D scholarly edition is uniquely digital because it allows for the publication of interactive, richly annotated, and multimodal experiences that cannot be reproduced in traditional print form. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the ways that an intersectional and feminist methodological framework might inform the making of a scholarly digital edition environment or platform. Here I'm showing you our cooperative, our multi-institution cooperative. We just submitted a few weeks ago a million dollar grant to the Mellon Foundation and HPRC to develop this publishing cooperative with the hopes that this will sort of kickstart a new round of publications for 3D and as many of you know, Fulcrum is the only platform at the moment. It's a bit wonky, so we actually now are embarking on and have been able to get scalar. The publishing platform first developed by the University of Southern California and combined with the Unity real-time engine provides an opportunity to explore the many possibilities for bringing to light complex in these messy histories. Our project team has already piloted and now will test its significant changes to the scalar platform that will now help contextualize geographical locations and objects through this deep annotation system. We've also now developed the ability to publish 3D worlds and models in scalar, something that had not previously been possible. This is a major breakthrough for a whole host of reasons and I'm happy to discuss it further during the Q&A. We're also working to embed a comparative testimony tool that works across scalar with our annotation in 3D virtual environments. So my work in recording the experiences of everyday women, not just the great women such as Winnie Mandela or Albertina Sissulu, although they cannot be overlooked, shows that the domestic sphere for black women in the townships was not just a house despite attempts by apartheid engineers who sought the active destruction of the family structure through the creation of these dormitory enclaves that were explicitly designed to export the black African residents energies. Despite what the state proposed, township residents reclaimed their homes in the spaces of the street in ways that suggest this is a fundamentally geographical project that seeks to document a very spatialized and purposeful social movement that helped to end apartheid. Each of the four historical events are time periods and apartheid herages very much consider social movement theory and how we begin mapping, begin a mapping of those movements. And here I'm thinking of Belinda Robb Netsworth on African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement. I also consider the micro scale by looking at the house or home as the primary spatial unit of analysis for the project. Found throughout Soweto, the single family house and its inherent racial, gendered and sexualized complexities, if one seeks to pursue a messier and multi-layered narrative about the ways in which spatial liberation was brought about, readily lends itself to an exploration of its intimate geography through historical reconstruction. In particular, a recasting of micro history popularized in the 1970s into a kind of spatial micro history could allow for a bridge between historical studies using 3D GIS and historical GIS by really creating a data archive with qualitative data from recently gathered oral history testimony. Here is where two methods come together, Bardell's work on the Long Duray and the work of Italian micro history. A kind of spatial micro history works from the premise that both the social and cultural history of everyday individuals can be documented to the use of various interdisciplinary research methods, including feminist geography, critical race theory and feminist GIS, or through what I designate as a kind of intersectional cartography. For example, this intersectional approach allows us to begin understanding the network of individuals from across the various townships who participated in the student uprisings of 1976 while also mapping those relationships, especially the networks of women and young girls who mobilized their efforts and how those activist networks were embedded into the physical geography and vernacular architecture of individual houses, streets and neighborhoods. In particular, in cooperation with community leaders, former student activists and family members as part of apartheid heritage's fourth narrative, I'm attempting to recover the history of a young 14-year-old boy named Stompe Sapay, along with two other boys killed by the Mandela United Football Club in the late 1980s for suspicion of being government informants working against the African National Congress. Those deaths believed to have been orchestrated by Winnie Madigazela Mandela at the time Nelson Mandela's wife during the time of Mandela's incarceration had remained contested and erased in the histories of the tumultuous 1980s and the fight against the apartheid regime. My work attempts to shed new light on this difficult confluence and discussions of race, racial hatred and violence, but it also reveals the ways in which sexuality and sexual identity were used as tools of the state to mark these black bodies as less than or unworthy of the appellation of legitimate, of being legitimate heroes and herons of the liberation struggle. At that time in the 1980s, even today, had many historic sites across South Africa. In Stompe Sapay's case, suspicion over his sexuality and intimations of alleged abuse by a white methoded pastor marked his body as illegitimate incapable of being a true struggle leader. Despite his age and his unique ability and charisma whereby he organized school-aged children by the hundreds, some would even say the thousands in protest in the mid to late 1980s. This denial of a more complex layering of history and the messiness involved in the telling of the lived reality of this queer youth killed in Mandela's own house, something that few are willing to discuss or even remember in any detail, provide one of the most glaring examples where the historical legacy of queer and activist communities is suppressed or erased from contemporary liberation histories. Interestingly, and as a bit of an aside, I was told about a year ago as a historian of South Africa that I was, quote, touching the third rail in liberation histories. I was treading in very deep waters and was likely to make a long overdue intervention in our understanding of the anti-apartheid movement if it could capture the history of queer activists. Some have even argued and some of you know me personally, the accident that occurred to me personally last year may have been politically motivated, actually. Can that methods and technologies currently available and those proposed by the larger project to build a 3D scholarly edition platform cast new light on human rights violations that many would prefer remain erased, hidden or lost and be represented effectively and I would say more importantly, effectively. What are the tangible political, social and economic costs, something that an intersectional framework might help us recover of capturing the memories of someone in the history of the liberation struggle today? As I work to reconstruct Stumpy's activism through the United Democratic Front, his work with the ANC and the UDF and the many conflicting reasons for his death documented in the transcripts of court testimony, I am left to wonder how the queer traces of his life, if he even was queer, the question that might not be so easily or readily answerable will be valued and remembered. So, I'm going to play a short clip and we had a little bit of an audio issue but I think you're going to hear it just fine. It was the first resident there today and he was working at the offices, at the superintendent's offices. Then he was given the choice to go and choose a house. So this video clip that I just showed is just one example of the ways that the house becomes emblematic of not just family or personal histories but also helps to narrate the anti-apartheid struggle. Here's also where it becomes impossible not to include a historical figure such as Winnie Medekezele Mandela. The Mandela house, as she might suggest, is not a typical township house in an ordinary township. Medekezele Mandela was perhaps hinting that any other house in Soweto could have been substituted for hers but hers was indeed the headquarters for most of the planning behind the student uprisings of June 1976. In another portion of the interview she finally makes clear that the house was headquarters for every activity that took place in the country and some of the stuff I can't even tell you, of course. Otherwise, I'll revive terrible memories to those we were fighting with. Yeah, no, it was the headquarters. All decisions were taken even part of the 1976 uprising. The consultations took place there. So it was a hive of activity. Meetings took place right there because they never thought we would meet there. Indeed, would it be possible to tell a queer history of that typical township house at 8-1-1-5 Villacazi where the boys were suspected of being beaten and tortured or even the house of 585 Eagle Street where Stompy was actually killed, bringing to light those queer traces by modeling a very different approach to our understanding of house and home in apartheid South Africa. If the house at 8-1-5 Villacazi was reinterpreted, not only to include the officializing narrative of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the post-apartheid South African state, which it currently depicts, but if a multi-layered spatial micro-history were to be told, displayed or rendered visible through virtual technologies, we could imagine how a radical queer politics and even a feminist analysis of the contributions of South Africa's LGBTQIA community helped to reshape liberation history. Therefore, digitized micro-history with maybe AR and VR enactment or VR forensics reconstruction, much like the work of forensic architecture team at Goldsmiths, or the circumstances of Stompy's killing would be compelling indeed, but recovery of these past traumatic events or even one iconographic image or event from 42-plus years ago will likely be very well contested still, and here I'm taking the slaying of Hector Peternser, for example, it is even contested today. So the necessary forensics of historical recoveries problematized up front, not to mention the enormous commitment of labor demanded by the law and social justice as we bring both court testimony and 3D models together to help us reconstruct elements of this history. I cannot in a spatial history cast aside, I'm almost done, or ignore the part that Winnie Madica's Mandela played in both maintaining but I would even argue sustaining the ANC's critical role in bringing an end to apartheid, as I mentioned briefly earlier. She was the victim of incarceration, herself, physical violence, banning and systematic harassment at the hands of the South African authorities while her husband Nelson Mandela remained jailed for 27 years. She was detained and tortured by security forces in part for her involvement in support of the Soweto uprisings. Through the mid-1980s she also became a vocal proponent of the ANC's use of strategic violence, a position she defended in the 1985 speech where she says, quote, I will tell you why we are violent. It is because those who oppress us are violent. The Arthur Conner knows only one language, the language of violence. All that is left to us is the painful process of violence, end of quote. In 1986 she was influential in bringing resolution to an internal conflict within the Orlando West branch of the Soweto Youth Congress which resulted in the formation of the Mandela United Football Club. A number of those youths involved in this conflict moved into the outbuildings on the grounds of the Mandela House and were later implicated in a series of retaliatory killings at a time when he was living at 585 Eagle Street in Soweto where the beatings and torture of these youth activists from the United Democratic Front were believed to have taken place. I'm hoping to find a way into that still extant location which has not been altered in any way from what I've been told to photograph the spaces where crimes were committed to provide a new way forward for addressing the allegations of human rights violations and abuses by both victim and perpetrator under apartheid. While I'm not trying to reify the heroine figure through my discussion of Mandela Mandela, I understand that hers is an incredibly complicated narrative that as I see it helps to stitch together a number of entry points for telling these difficult histories that move us beyond the typical historiography of the period and possibly more inclusive of LGBTQIA histories. Here I'm reminded of Simon and Coley an anti-partite gay activist and AIDS activist from Soweto. His quote is saying if you are black and gay in South Africa then you really is all the same closet inside is darkness and oppression outside is freedom and a coat. So this denial of a more complex layering of history is perhaps one of the most glaring examples where the queer and anti-apartheid activist community there was suppressed or erased from many if not all public available liberation histories. Excerpts from the TRC hearings that highlighted some of what occurred around Stompies death and the death of other young activists resulting from violence committed by the Mandela football club are not currently included in the latest reinterpretation of the Mandela home by the city of Johannesburg nor is it explained why the house at 8.1.5 the Locazi was later fire bombed by local men in response to the killings by members of the football club. In other words, the archival silences here are deeply profound. A critical digital ethnic studies may actually help sort through and help reconstruct and recover a history that is still very early in the telling despite what we think we know about the South African liberation struggle from several decades ago. Perhaps it would also explain why a person such as Stompies of Pei or at least provide us with was killed or at least provide us with a messier more complex narrative history that allows us to know better some of the rationale for suppressing the role of queer activists against apartheid. Would an intersectional framework allow us to better understand why concerns over the treatment of LGBTQIA activists by police and security forces were seen as less important than the struggle over apartheid? Was it seen as somehow taking away from the political priorities of the ANC? Were some in a growing LGBTQIA community of activists jeopardized by their prominence in the struggle and as the standard bearers of the struggle? Or was it simply a matter of discrimination based on homophobia and the lack of empathy for what was a common struggle to end institutional oppression in human rights violations? The technology is now at our disposal can allow us to layer the story using multiple tools for mapping, text mining, 3D visualizations so that Winnie Mandel's narrative serves to bring to light this difficult queer history. This is what I maintain. Our work to build an extensible open-source platform with deep annotation and design-driven primary and secondary source embedded materials could be seen as providing a discursive space for that messiness to live online and become accessible. If deployed by a museum on internet accessible screens or used by handheld devices such as an iPad, tablet, or other smart phones and made available to tourists visiting the site, we could add another layer to that messy diversity narrative particularly the silenced and overlooked histories of queer youth who lived in Soweto and were actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement. In closing, so perhaps as a way to help frame all of the above, I'm going to refer to Kathleen Fitzpatrick's most recent book, Generous Thinking A Radical Approach to Saving the University. It provides us with what might be possible in the Academy today if we were to slightly modify Yitris Bisback's Strategic Essentialism quote, a recognition that our definitions of community are always reductive but also potentially useful as organizing tools. For Fitzpatrick quote, the pragmatic coalition building function of community is crucial to the future of the university both in its understanding of the public with which the institution might work and in its understanding of its own internal structure under quote, the sorts of massive political shifts we're witnessing today whereby pragmatic coalition building has been disavowed or relegated to the margins has meant that for those of us as queer feminists of color we must find ways to reestablish that coalition potential building potential. I see spatial reconstruction and archive making through the use of immersive technologies as just one possible way of getting us back to that coalition building potential and now to return to the messiness that I had sort of begun with and had been grappling with throughout the talk. At the start I wanted to advocate for the messiness of archive making and the importance of documenting our process of scholars working in making with community as we attempt to discern queer traces in the archive. We are very consciously making new histories and new narratives through this work. As we engage in a practice of queer witnessing we're culling documentation and information for previously silenced members of the community and this information remains contested even among communities principles. We have fallen short as we disclose and argue our under the hood intellectual processes as humanists let alone as digital humanists. In the case of black lives across the diaspora and those of others in the global south these new practices become an important element of any digital project. Rebuilding trust today and as a part of a messy thinking and writing methodology or process this might mean a significant recalibration of our academic workflow including changes to promotion and tenure guidelines such that process and making are understood as equally important intellectual endeavors. I would say that we've arrived at a moment in the field of DH where we can now begin to more radically change humanities based research practices and offer new ways of documenting more specifically the intellectual work of digital scholarship and digital humanities. The promise of a digital social justice framework offers the prospect of research methods involving generosity and patience knowing when to listen and learning when to speak and I would add knowing the value of black lives queer lives are really any marginalized group in our common human experience and I thought it would just end with because we're all about virtual just look at a very new versioning of our model of Soweto from just February. Not how this is incredible. I want to open it up to questions. I'm sure there's any questions. We'll look again. Please. Are you... Is this in the audience? Can we move away from the screen and... Yeah, it's one of the things we're going to be... We've already started working on that. So we're trying to find a way to do both. Some of the concerns obviously is the accessibility to those in the community and what that kind of means and again I think we're always sort of writing a fine line between what the community wants from telling these stories and also how we can make the most impact when it comes to tourists and people who visit the area and maybe even those who can't visit and what that kind of means. So we're constantly negotiating some of those challenges and AR and VR is still not as stable as I think we'd like so we're also sort of waiting to see where all of that sort of lands given all the kinds of changes we're seeing but it's definitely something we've been working on and I should say back at Hamilton back in 2010, probably 2011 we were experimenting with VR, AR, we were one of the first shops to really do a lot of that work and much to Hamilton's credit it continues to do that kind of work there I've taken some of that obviously to SDSU so finding ways to make AR and VR accessible in the global south is just the question we're always sort of grappling with but that's a good question I'm going to drink while you're asking so it's been a long and lengthy relationship over the past 15 years working with the Soweto-76 Youth Foundation there are a core group of activists from 1976 who have wanted to transform the narrative told in the Hector Peterson Museum which has been the primary vehicle for telling this narrative but unfortunately South Africa in the post 1994 period decided that tourism was going to be their solution to economic advancement and opened up a series of township museums across the country about eight or nine different projects but they never actually put in a long term sustainability plan for these museums they never really put collections in the museums and also never thought about ever changing the exhibits now we're coming on many years later and the exhibits are broken or not as effective as they probably could be and so part of the work has been to try to rethink about how we can make interventions when there are limited sort of resources for the museum itself which has always been very much a community driven focused museum site so in a lot of ways for those of you who do museum work the eco-museum movement out of Canada has been very influential and also shaping and thinking and sites of conscience have also been places that we've been thinking and with and doing with so the community has been long involved it's a process of an iterative process where I go back twice a year and we talk about where things are and where things should be as you all know the technology changes so just as we're about to make one big leap forward we take a couple of steps back because the technology sort of bites us to the butt but now we're thinking things are going to be much more stable with scalar we're sort of revamping it as the platform to do a lot of this work so at least we'll have something that's stable and out there so right now with the publishing cooperative we're in the midst of releasing five different digital editions that have 3D modeling, 3D virtual worlds and also have some AR and VR so getting the message out is really what's important to the community members and how we sort of do that again the challenges of doing 3D and VR is how do we in a case of South Africa where bandwidth is a question how do we sort of deliver 3D models that might be less rendered but still provide the same kinds of information that the community would like to have out there and I should say one other thing and it may be that I'm jet lagged and I'm just talking but one of the challenges with this process has also been that I have been told many many stories about the truths behind some of what happened under apartheid that were never told to the TRC so there are some real challenges there as my role as a historian my role ethically my role as storyteller where's that fine line between protecting those people that we work with but wanting to disseminate the stories but then putting those informants in jeopardy when you sort of reveal things that might actually go counter to what the TRC revealed so it's a negotiation process that we're sort of constantly going through how much do we tell how much do we put behind certain kinds of protections to the site so we've also been thinking of ways of maybe mimicking some of the things that the platform Lukatu does so that maybe community members depending on their particular place have certain kinds of access that maybe is different maybe those who are student activists can access a certain part of the website that others publicly can't again it's all sort of in play as we try to figure out what are the many features we want to sort of add to scalar to be able to do some of this work I know I threw a lot at you trying to actually be sort of integrating some of this stuff because I've been using the beauty of WebGL as a tool in that room it's just not a job script I also use scalar when I teach what I do I'm curious about sort of how this is going to work together I'm not as technical as I probably should be but I can tell you that we've actually been able to get WebGL to work within scalar so one of the challenges that we have been thinking about in this versioning of scalar or re-versioning of scalar is to even think about ways of maybe folks just downloading the entire package it's a little bit problematic it's less so for first world contexts but in third world contexts even the ability to download a file to be able to display on a computer are challenges so we're really committed to making this available online and not having to download something also because updates become very difficult when it's just a download package so we've been really pushing WebGL as the solution in scaler functionality well if they're going to be you may not know the answer to that in the world it's basically just through an iframe in many regards but what we're sort of mitigating is between how much of the virtual world you're going to have to where you will be able to access the information in world as opposed to sort of layering the information on top of the world so those are the two things that we're right now trying to figure out more details of and from what we've been able to figure out it's going to be possible to toggle between both of those kinds of realities so all of the features that we know of scale are all of what it does in media the tagging, the metadata that's all going to be a part of it plus this sort of deep annotation system this testimony tool it's going to be sort of recast in a lot of ways it may also say this please don't tweet this out but it may also get a different look because of the 3D so we're trying to figure out what that's going to look like so it may not be sort of that very fixed kind of page look that it has it may be something very different because we want to be able to have the model and the buildings and those kinds of layers be the text as opposed to being more fixated on monographic kind of text we're trying to navigate between those two sort of spaces and some of that's going to happen with the deep annotation kind of tools that we're developing and you saw some images of that right now we're still trying to figure out but I can assure the world that Scala is going to be able to deliver 3D models in a way that it's never been able to do before so that I think changes the landscape for 3D publishing suddenly I mean we have Fulcrum and Fulcrum can be a little wonky I love my folks at University of Michigan Press they're a project partner with us on this new grant and they were on the previous grant and they've just been great they've been real realistic about some of the challenges they've had to face and I think the Gabby project is the one project that sort of shows all the different features that are possible for Fulcrum but all the limitations also that exist with the Fulcrum platform so I think we're informing a little bit of what might happen and changes by the curve in Fulcrum so it's an interesting kind of dynamic where the presses are coming together to try to figure out these solutions because they know there's a whole world of 3D that they are not accessing and it's not just an archeology it's in all sorts of areas and so I think they're seeing this as a potential boon for publishing and not in any way financial but just to be able to open up to a whole series of new academic and interdisciplinary areas was mentioned kind of briefly but I'm kind of curious there's been a lot of focus here on the space as a place to explore how much have you been able to work with the artifact history like you said the museums don't have huge collections necessarily have you been able to access the artifacts that would be in these spaces and sort of reproduce those as well fortunately the museums have been about opening access up to much of what they do have in their collections and part of the project has also been to accumulate archival holdings or sort of personal holdings so there's lots of stuff that we've been able to gather just through working in the community so there's great rich material that no one's really looked at before that's going to be a part of what we've been doing one of the other things that we've been able to do in the last few weeks out there I don't know if most people know this but eBay is an incredible repository of images you may not know this but many newspapers have dumped their archives into eBay and there is a huge boon of images if you search for most I'd say late 19th we've also been able to use to build some of the sort of historical fabric that we've needed so for the history sort of nerds in the room if you ever troll eBay all of these newspapers are dumping their archives and selling their photographs that's a challenge that I'll let my library colleagues struggle I have an expansive view as my colleagues in Hamilton remember of fair use so I think it's all part of that knowledge dissemination process yeah I'm not sure on the answer on that one but I can say at least there's some interesting stuff out there to help you sort of build your sort of archive up or at least the kind of material that will help inform what you're building that is really out there it's been an interesting sort of thing I troll eBay too much I have a question on that and this has been started you know that you're looking at a real image of a newspaper no no no I mean I guess because I've been looking at them for so many years I can kind of tell what's real and what isn't most things are I would say anything that's manipulated I've probably never come across because no one cares about this history unfortunately yeah so that's kind of the good thing yeah yeah and I think part of it is also that many of the photographs that are being dumped are actually from the Netherlands and from sort of Europe that are being dumped into these archives it's not just US papers but it's mostly European papers that are then sort of being sent through AP so I gotta trust that AP is trying to do something right with the images and now one more tab for you and as you're thinking about our what are you considering in relationship to the ability for your people who are accessing it to edit the materials and how are you thinking about especially with this provenance and issues of reposting and their use one of the things we've thought a lot about is trying to get community to be involved through crowdsourcing we've thought of different ways of trying to have elements of the project crowdsourced so that we can catch some of those moments where things are very slippery and don't quite align it's been a lot easier to get folks to talk through video recording and so much of our information is coming through that right now so the thorniest issue here is trying to figure out because of community interest how do we sort of mitigate the challenges of them having told certain truths and not told certain truths to the TRC that is probably the more thorny part of all of this that we're not quite sure when it comes to permissions we obviously are getting permissions from those who give us interviews but the challenges still remain that memory changes and what they may tell you in one interview changes significantly to another and that's kind of some of the messy stuff we haven't quite figured out how to address it online when you're sharing all this stuff forward that has added 3D experience are you would you be open for instance to sharing the whole unity project part of the requirement of having Mellon money and NHPRC money is it all has to be available so all of it will be put up in GitHub and so it'll all be accessible then it can be someone else's challenge but part of it also is that and I think this is why I alluded to the fact that DH projects don't tend to end as we all sort of know and the relationship with the community doesn't really isn't going to go away anytime soon so my engagement continues and sort of whatever updates we're going to have and that's part of what we want to have happen with the digital edition you know why we're sort of adopting that particular framework so that there can be many versions of the particular narratives that come about because sometimes interestingly enough when you're thinking about 3D worlds in South Africa one of the challenges is that what was built sometimes very different from what actually appears in the architectural drawings and the apartheid state had very interesting ways of imagining and actually there's propaganda photos of what the townships were supposed to look like so they've got children walking around in bonnets with dolls and beautifully you know manicured lawns one of that was built and so part of what we've also been thinking about is how do we put the idealized version of what the townships were supposed to be versus what the realities of what actually got built and what that kind of meant and so that's some of the crowdsourcing stuff that we probably want to try to figure out because there are elements of the idealized versus the real that did appear and how do we sort of talk about those moments as well so what are the potential of involving the students in building this which of course goes through some of the work you've done that's the idea of who's doing the work and who doesn't benefit so what are the potential of involving the students sort of learning more I guess building as starting and we're talking about the question of the community involvement how do you involve students in bridging without diving into poverty tourism which is sort of a starting project masquerading as a question so over the years I've had students learn how to build buildings and make models sorry how do we stop this so we've involved undergraduates from the very beginning and I think this was what we always thought was going to be sort of the hallmark at Hamilton because it's only an undergraduate institution so we involved them in both the research process and the making process so we had students do a lot of modeling we had some graduate students that we also regionally brought into the project right now because I do have graduate students at SDSU they're involved in working with me on the annotations and sort of providing a lot of the contextual sort of writing so they're being co-authored into the publication as they sort of produce these annotations and I work with them they get credit for that so they will have a publication as a result of this one of the other things we've also talked a lot about is trying to push this notion of a citizen archivist and trying to actually develop the skills of archiving in the township around sort of the collections that folks have and to also provide the kind of training that might give employment opportunities for folks there the poverty tourism is a real concern and I'm always reluctant to take students and I've only taken a couple of students over the years with me because that do-gooder impulse is something that we also have to be very careful about and I think if you're engaged in a pretty honest conversation with and about community then you can get the students to see if this isn't about exploitation because of the way in which the community is so involved in the process and they're sort of, they're really mitigating what stories are getting told and not told in a lot of ways so that I think helps with some of that but it's a big concern fortunately I think South Africa has gotten over it's kind of moved beyond the poverty tourism and now they've really moved into eco-tourism which is a whole other area I don't know if it's any better but at least there's been a lot more cognizant, okay this sort of poverty tourism thing has perpetuated the kind of segregationist policies because many of the tour operators happen to be white but now we're finally beginning to see black tour operators going in and doing that work so there's a little bit of a switch up there and there are more community based tourism models sort of happening as well that are happening in so that's been good but again messy, layered and needs to be talked about, right needs to be sort of engaged with, great question that's a good messy point to end on thank you thank you