The Peripheries and Epistemic Margins of Digital Humanities

Abstract

For the last 20 years many scholars have pointed out the importance of diversity as a need for a more even playing Digital Humanities (DH) field. However, this concept was mainly understood as interpersonal diversity or, in other words, as a need of representation of non-Global North scholars in projects or conferences, in order to minimize Anglophone perspectives. In this chapter we want to revise the state of DH, moving from the interpersonal diversity approaches to the concept of epistemic diversity. We regard epistemic diversity as the possibility of developing diverse and rich epistemic apparatuses that could help building knowledge as a distributed and embodied phenomenon. We also analyze the concept of epistemic diversity from a geopolitics of knowledge perspective through the analysis of the international DH journals’ landscape to show how epistemic diversity lies on the margins or peripheries of DH. We close our chapter with a reflection on the South as a metaphor of a more diverse DH.