# Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis
Part of *Channels of Digital Scholarship* Seminar
at *Maison Française d'Oxford*

23 February 2023, 14h

Homepage:
https://mfo.web.ox.ac.uk/event/channels-digital-scholarship-seminar-0

## From First Contact to the German Working Group "Greening DH"

by Torsten Roeder
https://fedihum.org/@toroe

My name is Torsten Roeder and I am working as a researcher and project manager in the area of Digital Humanities [[link](https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/zpd/zentrum/team/roeder-torsten/)]. I am specialized in the fields of digital editions and digital heritage. I am member of faculty and of a new department "Center for Philology and Digitality" at the University of Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany [[link](https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/zpd/startseite/)].

In 1994, nearly thirty years before, when I still went to school and Digital Humanities did not exist as a term, I was allowed to skip a day in school to go to an international computer expo in Hanover, the CeBit, which in that time was the annual high-profile event for information technology in Germany (just see [[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CeBIT)] for more details). All the software producers and hardware manufacturers had their representative fair booths and organized great shows (see e.g. [[this page](https://ia-petabox.archive.org/details/pc-magazin-1994-04/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater)] from a contemporary computer magazine). I remember that one of the tiniest halls on the fairground, relatively hidden (no. 15), was dedicated to computers and ecology [[link](https://www.hydrogenambassadors.com/other/cebit94.php)]. Around 40 initiatives presented their projects to discuss hardware recycling and energy consumption. But their presentations were close to invisible within the large expo and pretty marginalized in the small hall (cfr. this report from a contemporary alternative newspaper [[link](https://taz.de/!1571340/)]). That was 1994. Having seen the presentations, I think I was pretty convinced then that digitization would actually save more resources than it would consume and that the problems concerning recycling of devices and green energy would be solved soon. It seems that I was pretty mistaken.

Now, fast forward, about 27 years. In the meantime I had worked a lot in Digital Humanities projects and I had supported environmental movements here and there, but I never connected DH and ecological sustainability to each other. In Digital Humanities, a lot of discussion is going on about data sustainability and long-term availability, but the ecological cost is not yet a part of that. So the vision of FAIR data [[link](https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/)] and CARE data [[link](https://www.gida-global.org/care)] does not yet include *Green* data. While the IT sector and also libraries are already working on their part of the problem, the DH had not started then.

In 2021 I was asked to join an initiative to promote "green" ideas in Digital Humanities. I saw this as a chance to catch up. The idea was to found a working group within the Digital Humanities Association in the German speaking area [[link](https://dig-hum.de/)], which are mainly Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and small parts of other neighboring countries. The intention of the working group "Greening DH" [[link](https://dhd-greening.github.io/)] is to build up awareness and expertise in environmental sustainability related to typical Digital Humanities tasks – and to take action.

There are, on the one hand, some aspects which are typical for all scientific fields, as carbon footprint of conferences and travels. On the other hand, there are some issues which are relevant to specific methods and practices of Digital Humanities. We intend to work continously on guidelines that address all areas of the DH workflow, starting with research and digitization, further analysis methods and annotation practices, and finally communication and publication formats. We want to develop ideas and principles of sustainability that are easy to understand and easy to control, so that small expertise is enough to contribute.

In our first year, we focused the collaboration with the international "Digital Humanities Climate Coalition" which was initiated during in the same time. We worked together on the Manifesto "Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis" [[link](https://dhc-barnard.github.io/dhclimate/)], which was presented before and which we presented at the DH conference in Tokyo (slides [[here](https://dhd-greening.github.io/slides/dh2022-manifesto.pdf)]) and which got the Digital Humanities Award in that year [[link](http://dhawards.org/dhawards2021/results/)]. We also collaboratively created the DHCC toolkit [[link](https://sas-dhrh.github.io/dhcc-toolkit/)].

We all started with great enthusiasm and the initiative was very well received and welcomed from all sides. However, the number of active participants until today is quite low and it seems difficult to activate people for the cause. At the online conference in Tokyo last year, the chair was honestly trying to induce a discussion, but most people hesitated to ask questions like they were scared by some elephants in the room. At the German DH conference this year, we are currently offering a workshop that got close to best possible reviews, but it seems that only a handful of people will attend. As much there is welcoming on one side, there is absence of engagement on the other side.

It feels a bit like the computer expo in 1994: everybody welcomes green ideas, only a few engage. And my current fear is that especially within an extremely tech-positive environment like Digital Humanities, ecological sustainability will be continuously marginalized category as long as it challenges the foundation of the business. I honestly believe that in the Digital Humanities, this is not malintended, but a perpetualizing unconscious pattern. And we need to find strategies to break that pattern. It seems about time to develop principles of ecological sustainability that can find their way into Digital Humanities practice.

### Links and Resources on the German working group "Greening DH"

Homepage: https://dhd-greening.github.io/
Mailing List: http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/mailman/listinfo/dhd-ag-greening-dh
Discord: https://discord.gg/APsHmGWU5u
Bibliography: https://dhd-greening.github.io/biblio