Panel "Responsibilities of the Digital Humanities"

In the framework of the Summer University a public panel discussion will take place in the lecture hall of the Bibliotheca Albertina. It is scheduled for Wednesday 31st of July 2019 from 16:15 to 17:45. This year the panel discussion is devoted to the following topic:

The Digital Humanities have the means to question established knowledge, to position knowledge in a new way, and to create new knowledge. What are the responsibilities of the Digital Humanities when it comes to history, politics or political parties, canons, disciplines, social groups, communities, ethics, society? How can we arrive at a more inclusive, sensitive, in the end more human, conceptualisation of the world and the beings who inhabit it, than has been the case in the past?

Some examples come to mind:

History, traditionally, is conceptualised most of the time as national history or from a national standpoint or even a nationalistic ideology. It is mostly the history of "important" people or groups. As such it remains not only partial, but also biased. The Digital Humanities have the means to cater for complexities, to dig up discarded knowledge, to reposition knowledge and to question its current interpretation.
In probably all our cultures there exist established canons in literature, the arts, music and the like. These canons are obviously biased with respect to the genders, social classes etc. As has been observed by several digital humanists, DH projects tend to intensify such biases. As it is easier to get funding for research when the focus is on members of such established canons, than when the focus is on people who have not been admitted to them, research which tries to question such canons and to bring to the forefront those who have been hidden from history is not undertaken. Research is also missing which unveils the situation in the Digital Humanities by looking at papers and posters presented at our conferences and asking questions about gender, language, place of origin of the people in the focus of DH projects (see for example Marc Hall "DH is the Study of dead Dudes").
Over the past fifteen years quite a lot of funding was devoted to the documentation of African languages. It would seem, however, that this has not substantially impacted the scientific agenda of the discipline of linguistics in Africa so far. Instead, current practices, which tend to be either theoretical or applied, do not seem to need the Digital Archives where the collected data have been stored. (see Emmanuel Ngué Um "The Asynchronous relationship between Digital Archives and the discipline of Linguistics in Africa"). What is the responsibility of the Digital Humanities which include linguistics when it comes to these data and the researched communities?
The funding for most language documentation projects came / comes from (North-)Western funders. Most projects are initially carried out by (North-)Western researchers. What is their perspective? Why and for whom do they collect the data? Which theory is the basis of such research? What do they want to prove? What are the consequences for the researched communities? What do they lose? What do they / how can they gain? (See for example DOBES, ELDP). What role should Digital Humanities play?
We tend to think sometimes that we need to bring Digital Humanities to far away and / or small linguistic and cultural communities in order to empower them to do something about their own cultural heritage, their self-esteem, their identity and the like. Are, or to what extend are, we right? What ethical questions are involved? What is our perspective? What should our perspective be?
What are our responsibilities with respect to archives like the Stasi Records
Archive? Should we not contribute the knowledge, proficiencies and competencies which we have with respect to digitalisation, transcription, markup, mapping, accessibility, and many, many more, to a critical, contextualised, complexities sensible analysis?

Members of the panel (alphabetical order)

I tried to invite the German State Minister for Digitalisation, Dorothee Bär, but she was unable to take up my invitation. I have invited our two lecturers and members of the group, whom I had heard reflecting critically about data collection or who are involved in projects where one or all of the responsibilities named above need to / should be considered. I am very happy that the following people have agreed to be panelists: