Associate Professor Bonnie Mak will present, “Confessions of a 21st-Century Memsahib: The Off-Shore Sweatshops of the Digital Humanities,” at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Austin in January 2016. Her paper will be offered as part of the MLA panel, “Critical Informatics and the Digital Humanities,” an initiative that seeks to document emergent methods for the digital humanities.
Mak’s paper explores how initiatives in the digital humanities are participant in a cultural imperialism that is expanding the reach of the West simultaneously backwards and forwards in time. English texts dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries are now being transcribed and encoded by workers in various Asian countries, and, more lately, India in particular. In light of the British subjugation of the Indian subcontinent until 1947, Mak examines how these circumstances of production shape present-day investigations of that which is called English history. Her presentation furthermore considers the implications for workers in Southeast Asia and India as they encounter texts that transmit pre-colonial English mores and morality.
At Illinois, Mak is jointly appointed in GSLIS and the Program in Medieval Studies. She teaches courses in the history and future of the book and offers doctoral seminars on authenticity, reading practices, and knowledge infrastructures. Her first book, How the Page Matters (2011), examines how the page has always been a complex interface between author, designer, and reader—from the manuscripts of the Middle Ages to the digital screens of today. A recent article, “Archaeology of a Digitization” (2014), again combines the traditional approaches of codicology and historical bibliography to investigate questions of digitality. Her current book project, Confessions of a 21st-Century Memsahib, is an exploration of the social history of digitizations. Currently, she is senior fellow at the Center for Humanities and Information at The Pennsylvania State University.