4.1.1: The Opaque Online Publishing Platform

In this chapter, I outline the development of the Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP) and discuss why this project became a born digital dissertation. Through this analysis, I will touch on postcolonial (4.1.3; 4.2.3), anti-custodial, and digital humanist (4.1.2) approaches to knowledge production. I discuss how this is informed by a careful approach to both opacity (4.2.5) and transparency (4.2.2). I will also outline how these theoretical concerns were built directly into the code and workflow of the project (4.3.1; 4.3.4). This chapter will reflect on how this practice-based intervention can be used for future scholarship (4.1.2; 4.3.5). While there will be code discussed in this chapter, I am choosing to omit a large percentage of the code developed by Kalani Craig in favor of a more theoretically grounded critique. The more technical aspects of this project can be found in the appendix (X.2.1; X.2.2; X.2.3).

This dissertation did not start as a digital project. I am relatively new to digital humanities (DH) frameworks, tools, and perspectives, having only really embraced the methods in earnest at the peak of the pandemic in fall 2020. Imagining this project as a born-digital dissertation—a document that was designed to be read online, and whose print version would be considered secondary—came about in spring 2023, and, as compared to other elements like the dataset and tuberculosis corpus which I began working on in Fall 2021 (0.2.1; X.1.1; X.1.3), the digital dissertation platform came together quite quickly.

What drew me to a digital dissertation was the ability to respond the epistemic problems which guide my research—the ways humans are turned into research objects (0.1.4; 0.1.5; 2.1.3; 2.1.4), the ways those objects become valuable for researchers and institutions (0.1.4; 2.1.3), and the ways I too use those objects and systems for my own benefit (2.4.3)—in ways apart from my written argument. I value non-traditional modes of presentation and engagement, as best evidenced through my creative work (3.2.1; 3.2.4; 3.3.1), and the digital dissertation became another medium and platform to respond to the same problems that arose when working on Tuberculous Imaginaries (3.2.4) and “Dermographic Opacities” (3.3.1; 3.3.3). The speculative affordances of a web-based argument help me extend my critique outside the more aesthetic arena of installation art (4.2.1). Digital methods let me, in no unclear terms, intervene in the discourses around the history of medicine while also providing frameworks for my colleagues who also struggle with the problem of knowledge production in a colonialist knowledge system (0.1.5; 4.1.3).

As outlined in the introduction to this dissertation (0.2.3), I borrow my understanding of the postcolonial and anticolonial¹ from Afro-Carribean and Indigenous scholars. These knowledge workers have addressed and critiqued western knowledge practices that have been instrumental in the harm done to their communities.² Especially in the case of Indigenous scholars, they respond to disciplines that stole information from their communities in addition to material objects, including the remains of their friends, families, and ancestors.³ When I use the term ‘colonialist knowledge system’ I am stressing the ways in which land, culture, and human bodies are seen as resources for knowledge claims (0.1.4; 2.1.3).⁴

These digital approaches also let me engage in a broader community of like-minded DHers, who see the field as a space to practice liberatory anticolonial work (4.1.2). The OOPP is indebted to open publishing and collaborative initiatives within DH. This project built on top of a community archiving platform first developed by Indiana University’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH)⁵ as part of its Memory-making and Anti-custodial Reclamation for Collaborative Histories (MARCH) initiative.⁶ The community archiving project extended IDAH’s longstanding interest in minimal computing (4.1.2),⁷ the use of digital tools to give communities agency over their artifacts and histories,⁸ and an interest in supporting underrepresented groups in ways that meant they did not have to relinquish their cultural artifacts to a university, archive, or library. That project started with a partnership with Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz—a media scholar whose video archival practices foreground the consent of the subjects who produce materials⁹—and as of this writing, the team at IDAH has worked to archive materials at two community centers at Indiana University—La Casa, and the Asian Cultural Center.¹⁰

The community archiving platform was developed specifically for use in these kinds of archival projects, but it has also been used in other contexts—for exhibitions and classrooms.¹¹ Hicks-Alcaraz’s work is especially indebted to the anti-custodial turn in the archival discipline, which pushes beyond the critique of the ideologies inscribed into university collections to demand the divestment of materials, modelling approaches to stewardship that circumvent top-down models of ownership.¹² The MARCH program’s materials were so compelling for this project because they shared a similar skepticism toward western archival practices, and they worked to create modes of representation which foregrounded the agency and consent of communities who were seen by western researchers as research material.¹³