At a moment when governance, borders, and memory are increasingly
mediated by data and artificial intelligence, the humanities have an
essential role to play in understanding and intervening in their
effects. Digital humanities offers important points of intervention in
how data is used, even as the field continues to work through how best
to realize that promise. In this talk, Roopika Risam draws on her work
in critical data studies and anticolonial scholarship to argue that data
now shapes the conditions under which historical knowledge is produced,
determining how histories are assembled, separated, and made legible,
particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts shaped by archival
violence and imperial classification. In many cases, digital projects
reproduce inherited logics of empire — hierarchy, enclosure, and
archival fragmentation — through their underlying data. Using the
Pan-African Data Project as a case study, Risam examines how choices
about data shape relations of power and historical visibility, and
reflects on how digital humanities might more fully take up its
responsibility to shape knowledge otherwise.
Roopika Risam is an
Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies and Comparative
Literature at Dartmouth College, where she co-directs the Creative and
Critical Data Studio within the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement
Cluster. Her work brings together digital humanities, postcolonial
studies, and critical data studies, with a focus on race, empire, and
the politics of knowledge production.
She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2019) and founding co-editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities. She has edited multiple volumes, including The Digital Black Atlantic (Debates in Digital Humanities Series, University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices (Stylus, 2023). Risam also directs the Pan-African Data Project. Her forthcoming book, Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate (HarperCollins, 2026), offers an 11,000-year global history of data as a technology of governance. For more, please visit https://roopikarisam.com.
