Introducing the DHARPA Project: An Interdisciplinary Lab to Enable Critical DH Practice

in DH Benelux Journal (2022), 4(1), 29-41

In this article, we introduce software under development by the Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator (DHARPA), an interdisciplinary team of researchers and developers working to enable ... [more ▼]

In this article, we introduce software under development by the Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator (DHARPA), an interdisciplinary team of researchers and developers working to enable best practices in the humanities through technology. We argue that the strength and appeal of historical inquiry lies largely in the relationship between scholars and their sources, a connection in which the former engage with the latter through critical assessment, contextualisation and documentation. However, we also contend that these symbiotic processes themselves need to be evaluated and recorded. While digital tools and techniques have been accused of alienating historians from their materials, critically informed digital methodologies can also fortify and extend this relationship. To that end, we are building software that will enable users to not only apply best practices to their sources but also to allow them to write the history of those interactions, thus providing material for self-reflection and critique. In this article, having laid out our goal, we describe how the modular and datacentric design of our software’s backend and the interactive documentary capabilities of its frontend operationalize a critical epistemology centered on the scholar-source relationship. We continue with a discussion of our team’s internal dynamics in creating this software, and conclude with an invitation to readers to contribute to the process through commentary and testing. [less ▲]