Imagining Computing After American Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The history of computing is embedded in the histories of colonialism, racism, militarism, and violence. While this has been acknowledged within American Studies for at least a decade (e.g. Nakamura and Chow-White 2011, Chun 2011, Johnson 2018), the past several years have seen an efflorescence of scholarship that directly connects specific episodes in the history of computing to these larger historical frames. Meredith Whittaker (2023), for example, has explored the close relationship between the structured logic underpinning Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, often considered the “first” computer, and the plantation management system that provided his family with its source of wealth. Paola Ricaurte (2019) has traced the many parallels between material processes of colonial extraction and contemporary practices of data extraction happening globally. Meanwhile, Ololade Faniyi (2024) has exposed the significance of Google naming its west African fiber optic cable after eighteen-century abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, alerting us to how the capture and sale of information that the cable enables in fact replicates the capture and sale of people that took place for centuries along that same oceanic route. This abundance of historical examples, considered in the context of contemporary right-wing pivots by major tech companies–not to mention the US government–begs the question: what role does computing have in imagining the future? Does it have a role to play at all?

In this panel, we follow calls to “imagine” (Benjamin 2023) and “practice” (Ritchie 2023) more livable worlds, alternately supported by or envisioned against computing. In doing so, we reject the dominant impulse of corporate technology development to settle for what Lily Irani (2019) has termed “minimum viable futures.” Drawing from our complementary frameworks of Indigenous studies (Ompang), abolitionist praxis (Stevens), decolonial theory (Posada), archival theory (Klein), and Black Digital Humanities (Johnson and Webb), we will offer historically grounded yet future oriented visions of computing that allow us to “locate resources for meaning, imagine new forms of sociality, and articulate new modes of knowledge production,” as well as question “what possible futures” our computational tools, methods, and platforms “enable or foreclose at the present conjuncture.”

The topics of the panelists’ presentations are as follows:

How traditional Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) protocols are applied to analyze and interpret large-scale observational data (Omapang)
The emergence of the platform economy and labor outsourcing from the United States to fuel its artificial intelligence industry (Posada)
The role of computing in the beginning of mass incarceration in the US in the 1960s and its implications for abolition today (Stevens)
How a map created in the 18020s by Shanawdithit, a Beothuk woman, continues to demonstrate the inescapability of the colonial frame for data-driven knowledge today (Klein)
LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, an eco-system of researchers who mobilize decolonial and antiracist methodologies to erect alternate communities of praxis beyond the university (Johnson and Webb)

Taken together, these projects illustrate the close connections between the history of computing and American empire, and underscore the importance of bringing a broad range of frameworks associated with American Studies to bear on our understanding of computing’s past, and our envisioning of liberatory futures.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Nikko Stevens, Smith College

Panelists

• Lauren Klein, Emory University

• Jessica Marie Johnson, Johns Hopkins University

• Nadejda Jahi Webb, Johns Hopkins University

• Julian Posada, Yale University

• Aspen Omapang, Cornell University

Biographical Information

Aspen Omapang is a Filipino-descendent of kamaʻāina of Hawaiʻi Island. She is a PhD Candidate in Information Science at Cornell University. Her research is concerned with the role of technology in mediating political participation, Indigenous peoples’ legibility to the U.S. government, and Indigenous identity. Aspen serves on the ADVANCE Resource Coordination (ARC) Network External Advisory Committee and most recently was a sociotechnical systems intern for Intel Labs. Aspen’s research is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship and Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

Nikko Stevens is a critical technology researcher, software engineer, and community organizer. Stevens studies the ways that data infrastructures--data models, databases, data structures--can reinforce existing social inequality, and, crucially, how we can use data infrastructures to guide us towards the worlds we wish to build. As a software engineer, they led the architecture of web properties for billion-dollar corporations like Coca-Cola, Sony, and Instagram, and their work won numerous awards, including at SXSW. As a community organizer, Stevens's work in the Drupal community earned them the Aaron Winborn Award and recognitions by Red Hat and The Linux Foundation. They are currently a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, and an incoming assistant professor of Statistical and Data Sciences at Smith College. Their current book projects connect data infrastructure, software engineering, and movements for social transformation.

Julián Posada is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His research integrates theories and methods from information science, sociology, and human-computer interaction to examine the sociocultural dimensions of information technology development and use. His current project investigates the dynamics between human labor and data production in the artificial intelligence industry. Incorporating Latin American critical thought, the study emphasizes the experiences of workers in the region who are employed by digital platforms to produce machine learning data and validate algorithmic outputs.

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Klein’s research brings together computational and critical methods in order to explore questions of gender, race, and justice, both as they emerge in the early United States and as they endure in the present. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1789-1900 (MIT Press, forthcoming 2026), and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a former fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of the multiple award-winning book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist. Johnson is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is PI of Black Beyond Data, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab, with co-PIs Kim Gallon, Alexandre White, Alex Gil and Nadejda Webb. Alongside Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa, Johnson also co-directs the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship. Johnson is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mimno of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She was guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017). Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections.

Nadejda Isha Webb is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the Assistant Director of LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure. Her research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st-century African-American and Post-Colonial literature and digital humanities, imaginaries, and representation. One of her current projects, “Beyond a Haunting,” queries the relationship between histories of indenture and belonging to understand how descendants of indenture are grappling with this positionality. Webb’s research has been supported by ACLS and the Social Science Research Council.