Multilingual Digital Humanities

This chapter explores how multilingual approaches to Digital Humanities challenge the Anglocentric methodologies, paradigms and assumptions that have historically permeated the field. It argues that fostering multilingual practices broadens the scope of the discipline, encourages the incorporation of non-English-speaking voices into the debate, rethinks the design of infrastructures in digital scholarship and addresses many of the questions – regarding theory and praxis – faced by Digital Humanities at large. Building on extant work by scholars such as Domenico Fiormonte and drawing also on further theoretical and practical work by multilingual DH practitioners, this chapter lays out a set of recommendations for Anglophone scholars to expand their engagement with DH beyond the Anglophone world. The structure of this chapter divides these recommendations in subsections that respond to problems observed in different aspects of Digital Scholarship. The first section looks at the challenges faced by non-English-speaking scholars when publishing in international DH Journals; the second explores how the language divide observed within the DH community can be tackled with more positive attitudes towards multilingualism; a third section is dedicated to multilingual approaches to the design of DH tutorials and tools; a final section offers pedagogical advice to DH scholars teaching in multilingual contexts.