Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2021
Publication Title
People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center
Abstract
This chapter examines "the stacks" as a "zombie category" that retains the power to shape understanding despite being outmoded. We analyze three ways of thinking about "the stacks" that sustain digital humanities: first, the physical library stacks that are part of the information architecture that arranges scholarship; second, the technology stack of globalized computing that distributes scholarship; and finally, the social stack of human relationships that make everything possible. Each stack reveals something different about the digital humanities and the patterns of labor embedded within it. Drawing on the sociological lessons of the zombie category, we aim to disaggregate the stacks as discursive assemblages, thereby exposing the mechanisms through which infrastructure effaces its own social labor while also rendering social labor a visible component of infrastructure.
Original Citation
Laura R. Braunstein and Michelle R. Warren, “Zombies in the Library Stacks,” 70-82 in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center. Ed. Anne B. McGrail et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021
Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation
Braunstein, Laura and Warren, Michelle R., "Zombies in the Library Stacks" (2021). Dartmouth Library Staff Publications. 41.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/dlstaffpubs/41