Many years ago I asked researchers, librarians, and students of the humanities a simple question, “what do you really need”? Answering the question in a way that traverses from our individual interests and arguments to the aggregate of human cultural activity, which also includes what some naively call “nature,” can be a daunting task—especially when our answers lead to actual choices in building the next iteration of that record. In this talk I will introduce audiences to the conversations around “minimal computing” that have been taking place over the past few years. I will do so through the heuristic of the inherent tension between universals and particulars, the global and the local, choice and necessity. - Alex Gil

Event Description

Minimal computing is described by Go:DH as: “computing done under some set of significant constraints such as hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors.” (see Go:DH). In contrast to high-performance computing, minimal computing emphasizes lightweight, self-sufficient, and easy to maintain approaches to scholarly computing projects. Along these lines, the Wax Project, co-founded by Alex Gil, is a community-based, open-source guide for building scholarly digital exhibits using only html, css, and javascript. In his presentation, Alex will walk-through minimal computing as a critical practice, which invites us to reflect on the "inherent tension between universals and particulars, the global and the local, choice and necessity."

Speaker Bio

Alex is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly,  co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela).  His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke Press.