In this Essay, I Propose Taking Media-Cultural Hybridity as a Framework for Theorizing the Many Praxes of the Digital Humanities. Media-cultural hybridity, characterized by systemic media changes that have fostered cross-cultural exchanges, can usefully frame the varieties of DH and their concomitant global-cultural implications. Most DH practitioners will agree that media changes have already altered aspects of our reflections about, and everyday work in, the humanities; the field has examined the effects of these changes frequently and in depth in the last decade. But if, as I suggest in the following paragraphs, systemic media changes are accompanied by parallel systemic cultural changes, then DH could surpass the rhetoric of collaboration and make way not just for trans- or interdisciplinarity but also, crucially, for cross-cultural practices. In these pages I can only begin to sketch this framework, which itself is just one part of a larger investigation, but the questions I raise here will, I hope, be intriguing enough to spark further discussion. Now that DH has carved some niches, big and small, in academies around the world, highlighted the importance of local academic and cultural specificities, and established a praxis that negotiates the print and digital cultural records, is it possible to work toward topological understandings of the various emergences of the field? That is, can we develop understandings not just of the many local and disciplinary DH praxes but also of the encounters between them as indicators of the continuities and ruptures in the field? And, ultimately, can those understandings force us to rethink our epistemology so that it incorporates the cross-cultural exchanges at play?
Being Māori and Pākehā: Methodology and Method in Exploring Cultural Hybridity
