CDHI Lightning Lunch: Language as Equity in Critical DH

Please join us virtually via Zoom on Wednesday, March 20, 2023 from 12:00 pm-1:00pm for the University of Toronto Critical Digital Humanities Initiative’s fifth Lightning Lunch of the 2023–2024 year. Lightning Lunches are short meetings over lunch featuring the work of three scholars on a theme in current critical digital humanities scholarship.

This final Lightning Lunch of the semester will address the topic of linguistic equity in the digital humanities. There are major disparities among the world’s languages in terms of the quantity and quality of digital content available in them. This disparity mirrors historical power dynamics between dominant and marginalized states and groups. According to the 2022 State of the Internet’s Languages Report, 75% of internet users access knowledge on the internet in only ten of the more than 7000 living languages. Non-text-based systems of representing language are also largely absent. In this Lightning Lunch, we discuss the implications for digital humanities work and spotlight projects at different stages that attend carefully to language as a core element of equitable knowledge production. In this Lightning Lunch, we ask: What are the obstacles to digital linguistic equity as they bear on your work? How can we facilitate linguistically underrepresented communities’ access to more and/or better knowledge online—and wider access to the perspectives this access provides?

Stay tuned for more details about our panelists!

This event will be held virtually. Please register on Zoom.