Invisible Hands, Visible Networks: An Digital Humanities Student Blog Roundup

Every semester I tell students that digital humanities is a public practice before it is a technical one; this fall my HT 930 students at United Lutheran Seminary (ULS) are proving the point faster than I can lecture it. Eight weeks in, they have launched a collaborative publication, built Humanities Commons portfolios from scratch (several of them writing HTML for the first time), and produced a body of blog posts that reads less like coursework and more like the opening of a research program. I want to argue in this roundup that two threads run through all of their work, 1) a sustained attention to the invisible labor behind digitization and 2) a turn toward network analysis as an ethical rather than merely descriptive method, and that these two threads, taken together, constitute a working definition of public theology in a digital key. Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash

Public Theology, the collaborative site #

The first thing to celebrate is Public Theology, a collaborative publication the class and I launched this fall under the tagline "public theology, public witness and shared resources." The site is open access (CC BY 4.0), runs an RSS feed, and already carries student essays alongside my own series on cosmopolitan public theology ("Whose Public? Which Theology?" and "Theologians Without Passports"). The students did not treat the site as a dropbox for assignments. They treated it as a venue.

Hau Sian Suan has published two pieces there. "Networking and Responsibility in Digital Humanities" argues that networks carry power and responsibility, not only connection, and that digital scholars owe consent and shared interpretive authority to the people they represent as nodes. His reading of Mapping the Republic of Letters is sharp: surviving correspondence gives a partial picture, and (in his words) the absence of oral knowledge and lost records "does not mean they were unimportant." His second essay, "A Public Theological Response to Poverty in Myanmar," brings José Míguez Bonino and Lisa Sowle Cahill to bear on structural poverty, noting that pastors in remote rural Myanmar have typically earned less than US$50 a month. Public theology, on his account, is communal responsibility and not personal morality.

J. Michael Mills's "Between the Parade and the Temple" takes on congregational decline directly. He cites geographer Michael Broadway's figures (national weekly attendance falling from 42% to 30% over two decades; median ELCA attendance dropping from 100 to 60 between 2000 and 2019) and then refuses Broadway's conclusion that closure is inevitable. Mills's alternative is to picture congregations as networks of trust, and his sketch shows the same congregation twice: once as a tight cluster talking to itself behind a barrier, once keeping its existing ties while building new ones with neighbors. Daryl Washington's "Digital Humanities as Public Ministry" and Mike Cantley's "Networking Across the Brokenness" round out the October issue, and I return to both below.

The portfolios #

The second thing to celebrate is the set of Humanities Commons portfolios. I asked students to build a scholarly home on a nonprofit platform rather than a commercial one (several of them cite Sarah Bond's "Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account at Academia.edu" as the reason), to write their first HTML, and to blog their way through the readings in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 and The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship. What came back exceeded the assignment.

Invisible labor #

Astrid J. Smith and Bridget Whearty's chapter "All the Work You Do Not See" became the hinge for the first round of posts, and the students did not simply summarize it; they located themselves inside it.

Donte Milligan's portfolio, Hazardous Hope ("finding gospel hope in the midst of empire"), opens with "Revolutionary Visibility," which moves from the Zora Neale Hurston quilt exhibit at Tuskegee to the installers, shippers, and documenters who made the exhibit possible, and then to his own two hours of fighting with HTML to change a single subtitle. His conclusion lands: unseen labor is the easiest to exploit, and "demanding visibility is a revolutionary act in the digital age."

Matthew Lingafelt's "When Digitization Seemingly Lacks Labor" is candid about building his portfolio with AI assistance and refuses to let that candor obscure the coders whose work made such tools possible. His accessibility commitment follows from the same logic: if AI can equalize who gets to build a site, he wants his site to equalize who gets to read it, so each major page opens with a plain-language summary for the chaplains, families, and care staff his work serves.

Lubna Younas's portfolio, Shalom, takes the labor argument and turns it into a design specification. Her planned website on social justice in Pakistan will carry a dedicated contributors section crediting editorial and technical labor alike, a documented workflow for handling sensitive material, full alt text, plain-language navigation, and possible bilingual support ("Blog One"). Ellis Billington's "Digitization: Its Beauty and Its Challenges" makes a parallel case from the archive side, using the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago to show how digitization serves rural and poor researchers who cannot travel, and why the work remains unfinished.

Accessibility as theology #

Daniel Collins's lutheran futurism ("public theology for the third millennium") and J. Michael Mills's Transitional Ministry, Public Theology, and the Upper Peninsula both seized on the Ghorbaninejad, Gibson, and Wrisley chapter on right-to-left text and its half a billion excluded users. Collins, fluent in three modern and two classical languages, admits that HTML is the hardest language he has attempted, and then reasons that if coding in his native orientation is this hard, the "democratizing pose" of DH looks thin from Cairo or Karachi. He routes the argument through Bonhoeffer's church "in and for the sake of the world" and commits to building a dark mode for readers with light-sensitive eyes like his own ("Accessibility in Digital Humanities: A Personal Reflection"). His latest post, "The Relational and Ethical Spiderweb of Research," carries the thread into the network readings.

Mills's "Everyone Is Welcome, in HTML" is the post I keep sending to colleagues. He wrote a nine-line web page and noticed what it did not say: no language, no character set, no reading direction. "That is how a default becomes invisible. It only looks like nothing is missing when you are the person the default was built for." Twenty-one years in military communications did not spare him the hives a Raspberry Pi gives him, which is his point about technical literacy not being one thing. Writing for a reader on a phone with a slow connection in a kitchen in Ishpeming, Michigan, he commits that every page will declare its language, encoding, and direction, and that anything he puts online will also exist on paper: "If a thing is only reachable by broadband, then in my county it is not public. It is just published." His homepage now renders Ecclesiastes 3:1 in Hebrew and Greek, the Hebrew marked dir="rtl", as a small proof of concept for the Transitions Wall project he is building.

Networks as ethics #

The second round of readings (Boyles, Boyles Petersen, and Jacob on surveillance; Brown, Whaanga, and Lewis on Indigenous protocols for relation-oriented AI) produced the most ambitious posts.

Daryl Washington's portfolio, The Unsilenced Ministry, is already a DMin vocational project in public view. "Why I Started This Project" begins in a curriculum review meeting with printed agendas and decent coffee, where he recognized that the formation materials being treated as universal were never built with his community in mind. His term for the pattern is Christian hegemony, and his method is DH: spatial mapping of where formation resources are concentrated, text analysis of what official documents refuse to say, network analysis of who gets cited. "Digital Humanities as Public Ministry: Mapping Power, Resisting Hegemony" puts the thesis in a sentence I would happily steal: "Metadata becomes a theological site." He grounds his open-access commitment in Black DH concepts of strategic legibility and reciprocity, and he means it; the project has a Knowledge Commons group and an advisory community.

Matthew Lingafelt's "Who's in the Network? Companion Bots, Care, and Scholarly Visibility" maps the data and consent relationships around twelve companion robots marketed to older adults, including PARO in dementia care, where the resident bonds with the robot but the facility signed the agreement. Donte Milligan's "Our Networks" reads the funders of Slave Voyages (NEH, Emory, Rice, Harvard's Hutchins Center) against Rice's expansion into Houston's Third Ward, and then turns the same analysis on his own West Philadelphia congregation's relationship with the University of Pennsylvania. Lubna Younas's "Blog Two" sketches her own ministerial network and concludes that ethical public theology sometimes means keeping some stories and relationships less visible. Brian Bennett, blogging as GeekChurch at A Pastor in the Parish, builds a two-node network of his podcast guests and speaking contacts in "Networking Made Visible," framed by Augustine's "visible word," and discovers that the map cannot show race or gender, which is exactly why he needs it; his companion post, "Humanities Coding in the Information Age," recants an earlier dismissal of web development as not "real" coding.

Mike Cantley, writing at both Healing Arts for All the Body and mikecantley.com, works the metaphor of the musician's anatomy in "We Are Members" and then, in "Networking Across the Brokenness," uses network diagrams to picture a divided global Body of Christ (one chart notes roughly 45,000 denominations), with Methodism's Oxford origins as a model for cross-denominational accountability and C.S. Lewis's "one single growing thing" rendered as an upside-down tree.

What I take from this #

Two observations in closing. First, the students arrived at network analysis as an ethical method before I assigned the ethics; the Smith and Whearty chapter on invisible labor primed them to ask of every graph, whose hands, whose consent, whose profit. Second, every one of them wrote about accessibility from a specific place: Ishpeming, West Philadelphia, rural Alabama, Pakistan, Myanmar, a dementia care unit, a kink archive in Rogers Park. Public theology that begins from the particular public one actually serves, rather than from "the public" writ large, is the kind I want to keep teaching toward, and this cohort is already writing it.

Go read them. Comment on their posts. Follow the Public Theology feed. The portfolios are under construction (Milligan's phrase), which is the correct state for a scholar's website to be in.

Portfolio roundup #

• Ellis Billington, Ellis Billington, Portfolio
• Brian Bennett, A Pastor in the Parish
• Mike Cantley, Healing Arts for All the Body and mikecantley.com
• Daniel Collins, lutheran futurism
• Matthew Lingafelt, Matthew Lingafelt
• Donte Milligan, Hazardous Hope
• J. Michael Mills, Transitional Ministry, Public Theology, and the Upper Peninsula
• Daryl Washington, The Unsilenced Ministry
• Lubna Younas, Shalom
• The class, Public Theology