About

The idea for this project grew out of conversations in the Introduction to Digital Humanities course I took in Fall 2018, about how digital humanities had shifted from seeing itself in its early days as a big tent¹ to becoming an expanded field² and then allying itself with advocates, activists, organizers, and others in an effort to help bring about much-needed change. Excited by the impact of the work many digital humanists were doing and its potential to “contribute significantly to a larger technically and historically informed resistance”³, I wanted to help by sharing the tools I was learning with groups these were not handed to.

At the time, I was tutoring in a federal prison in New York City, where I was struck by the complete absence of digital technologies used to pursue educational goals. I saw that on one hand digital literacy would be super important to students when they left prison and set out to seek jobs. In addition to this, I found that going into the back end of a computer and telling it what to do - instead of being scared that I would break the damn thing - so mesmerizing, fun and empowering that I wanted to share what I was learning with my students and employ these practices in prison as pedagogical tools. When we have fun, we learn. There was no doubt in my mind that the freedom and freshness of digital humanities theory and practice would appeal to incarcerated students. The question was never why, only how.

Minimal computing work done by digital humanists provided the answer to this question. Minimal computing is an emerging conversation in digital humanities about the need for computing solutions in parts of the world with little or no internet connectivity and limited access to digital technologies. Its search for solutions revolves around the central question of what is needed and explores how to meet these needs at minimal cost. It aims to be sustainable, reasonably easy to program and able to preserve digital work at low cost and independently. To my excitement, I found that these goals exactly met this project’s needs.

This site is built with Ed, a Jekyll theme designed for textual editors based on minimal computing principles, and focused on legibility, durability, ease and flexibility. It was a real pleasure to learn to use its underlying technology and it has excellent documentation.

If you are interested in talking about, contributing to or otherwise getting involved in DH in Prison, see its sibling site Intro to DH and write to me at springle@ccny.cuny.edu or https://github.com/binipringle .

- Sabina Pringle, May 2020