Recovering Spectral Presences in the “Universal” Digital Library
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2021-05-21

Eleanor Dickson-Koehl (HathiTrust Research Center, University of Michigan), J. Stephen Downie, Ryan Dubnicek, Glen Worthey (HathiTrust Research Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), John Walsh (HathiTrust Research Center, Indiana University) and Maryemma Graham, Jade Harrison (University of Kansas)

As digital libraries grow more massive and more heavily relied upon in scholarly research, we are  obliged to reflect on the increasingly hidden absences they contain.  While we have some idea of what we have in our digital libraries, do we know what we don’t have?

Whether the writings of Black, indigenous, or other marginalized communities of color; works of linguistic or ideological minorities; or examples of neglected or excluded genres — any spectral or token presence they have can sometimes be seen as faint glimmers in the catalog. But their absences are invisible.

This presentation describes a multi-institutional effort to collaborate with scholars to identify and recover texts both hidden in and absent from one of the largest-ever academically focused digital libraries.  Together, we are developing and curating reusable worksets and research models using these texts from our 17-million-volume digital library, as well as new methods for their analysis, with an emphasis on historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities. These texts, once recovered, curated, and analyzed, will help document, preserve, and promote their communities, and will help make our library more just, inclusive, and representative.

We believe that only working together as librarians and scholars of marginalized communities can we be sensitized to the blind spots that are magnified in the massive-scale digital libraries we’re building and sustaining.  Without such interventions, negligible presences become even more invisible as the general collections grow inevitably ever larger.  Our project fights against the normalization of historical exclusion, seeking to bring these spectral presences in the library to light. 

At the same time, we’re carving a new path through one of the minefields of digital research — that of imagined universality and comprehensiveness, but of actual historical exclusion, ghosting, and gaps — and are helping one of the world’s largest digital libraries confront its own exclusions and commit to a corrective.


For more information about the 2021 Global DH Symposium visit 2021.msuglobaldh.org.