Activist DH: NativeWeb

I have argued in my article "Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon" that many of the earliest DH projects are small scale, collective, activist digital projects.  Many of these early projects gathered links of primary and secondary materials and provided message boards and listservs for community building.

Native Web is an excellent example of such an early activist hyperlinked project.

Launched in 1994 out of the NativeNet listserv by Marc Becker, Gary S. Trujillo, Guillermo Delgado, and Susan O'Donnell, the project is typical of the small scale collective projects that would expand during the next 20 years to have a considerable impact. (Here I link the profiles of the participants that I could locate. If you have information on Trujillo and O'Donnell, please let me know, and I will update their information). The full history of NativeWeb is recorded here: http://www.nativeweb.org/info/history.php

NativeWeb is activist in construction, community-focused in orientation, with a primary goal “to foster communication among peoples engaged in the present,” a common thread in such digital recovery work. The importance of what I call “curated hyperlinked” sites has been unremarked upon by most digital humanities scholars, a remnant of late 1990s web culture that now seems simplistic and out of date. Yet such work is pivotal to the formation of digital literary culture and remains central to community self control of ideas, culture, and history.

NativeWeb continues to be a vibrant site that pulls together a global indigenous community.