- Where did this tool or method come from?
- Does the history of this tool impact how you use it (or whether you choose to use it at all)?
- Are there ways that you can complicate or subvert the original intentions for this tool or method? For example, many mapping projects rely on GIS, which grew out of government surveillance interests. The database, a staple of many DH projects, grew out of a long history of tracking and quantifying individuals to serve colonialist and other needs. To what extent can these tools be rescued from their histories and serve agendas that might be radically different from their original intentions?
- To what extent are these tools necessarily inscribed with these histories?
- If a choice is made to use these tools, what responsibilities do we have to acknowledge these histories? What would alternative tools look like, particularly as we “scale up” our data?
Mapping Marronage is an example of a project that resists the logic of the database as it visualizes networks of trans-Atlantic exchanges of enslaved peoples of African descent.
