This chapter seeks to link digital humanities and African American/Black studies to question “how humanity is framed in the digital humanities” with the purpose to explore the ways that technology create humanities as a racialized social construct (1). It seeks to intervene in the racialized systems of power in our understanding of digital humanities and how to utilize technological techniques for this purpose. It contributes to archive ethnographic theory and practice by drawing from Alexander Weheliye to challenge categorization of humanity, thinking critically about how people are marginalized through studies of interest. The text focuses particularly on technology of recovery, “the construction of humanity that has been historically excluded”, a main topic for black digital studies to connect black studies and digital humanities (3). With these two in mind, the text suggests that technology, applying to archives as well, can categorize humanity as well as build alternate human modalities that are politically based or social movement oriented.
