Midia, Xavier and Sarah: the Politics of Linking in Feminist and postcolonial Digital Humanities

Abstract

This chapter revolves around three heroes Midia, Sarah and Xavier. The chapter seeks to offer suggestions for how to engage in critical feminist and postcolonial digital humanities scholarship. In championing data-mining of unprecedented large-scale databases of Facebook and Twitter user-generated content and digitized archives, digital humanities scholars have initially uncritically jumped on the Big Data bandwagon. Inspired by Midia's hyperlinking practices, the chapter addresses the forging of links between people, texts and technologies as theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges that have particular implications for feminist and postcolonial digital humanities. This is consistent with the goal of feminist and postcolonial digital humanities, which seeks to research, critique and improve local, national, transnational and global forms of exploitation, exclusion, agency, ambiguity and hybridity in relation to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class.