Caroline Bassett 教授任教於劍橋大學，並擔任劍橋數位人文中心主任。Caroline Bassett 教授之前服務於蘇塞克斯大學 (Sussex University)，並於 2019 年在該校創立了蘇塞克斯人文實驗室。她的研究關注於資訊技術與文化形式和實踐的交流。 Caroline Bassett 教授著作等身，近期於2020年與Sarah Kember 及 Kate O'Riordan 合著出版Furious一書，探討性別議題和資訊技術的關係。在其他方向的新著作包含三個方向：數位媒體藝術(digital media arts)和新唯物主義(new materialism)、自動化技術所帶來的焦慮 (automation anxiety)、電腦寫作與其限制 (synthetic writing and constraint)；數位人文與女性主義(Full Stack Feminism)；以及人工智慧相關專業與人工智慧應用系統的法律責任(accountability)問題。



DH says it hopes to be expansive, hospitable, and open. The big tent metaphor was meant to peg that down; it indicated a common space, or even a commons, where all kinds of work could go on in conditions of recognition and respect. However, what is formally adopted as an aspiration is not necessarily realized in practice, reflecting this the tent metaphor has often been attacked in recent years. Many have pointed out that the atmosphere inside isn’t as inclusive as all that, that the valorization of particular forms of work produces the valorization of particular kinds of knowledge production and the denigration, or devaluation, of others. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, if DH is tent then it is pitched on uneven ground; it tilts towards the anglophone, it is distant from the global south, it prioritizes canonical work, and its sides are tightly battened down - not enough new air gets in.

Demands for change have sometimes been articulated by re-shaping the tent metaphor – there have been calls for a bigger tent, for seeing DH as a tent city, or perhaps as a cluster of various communities and forms of work operating in the interests of adjacency rather than common purpose. Some would like to ditch the metaphor entirely; calls to abandon the tent for the stack as the locus of DH work have to do with this and are producing suggestive work.

But I want to start somewhere else. Not with what goes on inside the DH community (in the tent), nor even with the question of DH community and how it might be forged (which is germane to conferences like this even if we ask this question obsessively). I want to start outside. That is, as the storms rage on – environmental, medical, social - I want to ask what should we do? Or to put this another way how should Digital Humanities be in the contemporary world? This starting point leads back in to DH of course and to issues that are nearly concerned with DH practices and orientations – but encourages thinking about DH as an open terrain rather than a closed community. The point is to abandon an obsession with definition in favour of a demand for the co-development of a series of propositions around engagement and its stakes. That is the work of this paper.