Digital Humanities and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

In this article I briefly discuss the connections between the geopolitical scenario emerging from the creation of the BRICS New Development Bank, and the digitization of languages and cultures carried out in a substantially Anglophone-driven economic and technological context. The appearance of the new BRICS bank, and especially the plan for an “independent Internet” are not only challenging the financial system, but in the long-run could also affect the current digital knowledge monopolies, activating new ways to encode and decode cultural objects, and challenge present digital standards. Digital Humanists, on all levels, are called upon to react to this developing geopolitical scenario, asking themselves questions about political representation and cultural diversity, encoding standards, digital infrastructures and linguistic hegemonies. An old equilibrium based on unequal power relationships is perhaps close to an end, and this is a unique time and opportunity to create a genuinely democratic and international scholarly community. Dans cet article, je discute brievement des liens entre le scenario geopolitique qui emerge de la creation de la nouvelle banque de developpement des pays du BRICS, et la numerisation des langues et des cultures realisee dans un contexte economique et technologique essentiellement anglophone. L’apparition de la nouvelle banque des BRICS et en particulier le projet d’un « internet independant », remet en question non seulement le systeme financier, mais a long terme pourrait aussi toucher les monopoles de connaissances numeriques actuelles, en mettant en oeuvre de nouveaux moyens d’encoder de decoder les objets culturels, et remettre en cause les normes numeriques actuelles. Les humanistes numeriques, a tous les niveaux, sont invites a reagir au sujet de ce scenario geopolitique emergent, et a se poser des questions au sujet de la representation politique et la diversite culturelle, les normes d’encodage, les infrastructures numeriques et les hegemonies linguistiques. Un ancien equilibre fonde sur des relations de pouvoir inegales est peut-etre pres de prendre fin, et il s’agit d’une periode et d’une occasion unique de creer une communaute erudite veritablement democratique et internationale. Mots-cles: geopolitique (de connaissances); BRICS; dialogue sud–sud; diversite technologique et culturelle; fiscalite linguistique

Dans cet article, je discute brièvement des liens entre le scénario géopolitique qui émerge de la création de la nouvelle banque de développement des pays du BRICS, et la numérisation des langues et des cultures réalisée dans un contexte économique et technologique essentiellement anglophone. L'apparition de la nouvelle banque des BRICS et en particulier le projet d'un « internet indépendant », remet en question non seulement le système financier, mais à long terme pourrait aussi toucher les monopoles de connaissances numériques actuelles, en mettant en oeuvre de nouveaux moyens d'encoder de décoder les objets culturels, et remettre en cause les normes numériques actuelles. Les humanistes numériques, à tous les niveaux, sont invités à réagir au sujet de ce scénario géopolitique émergent, et à se poser des questions au sujet de la représentation politique et la diversité culturelle, les normes d'encodage, les infrastructures numériques et les The BRICS have signed agreements in different areas and aim to establish their own rating agency, their financial circuit and a "private Internet" that would bypass the USA hubs, now a mandatory bottleneck-filter for all Internet traffic (Patrizio 2015;Lee 2016). Geography and politics are destiny even on the Internet (Blum 2012: 113), and some of the most important material pieces of the global network, from cables to data centers, are concentrated in few hands and places. When direct control is not technically feasible, governments take appropriate steps, as shown by the "security agreements" signed between the US government and foreign telecommunication companies for securing access to undersea cables' data (Timberg 2013;Timberg and Nakashima 2013). The Internet infrastructure is not flat; it crosses borders and tends to overlap with existing paths of historical disputes and foster new political aspirations. In other words, "everything you read about geopolitics, about spheres of influence and national interests and so forth has a counterpoint on the Internet, and how Internet structure plays out" (Cowie 2011; cited by Hurst 2013).
One relatively transparent aspect of this intricate geopolitical scenario is the map of the major connectivity providers, the so-called 'tier one providers' (T1P).
Their networks are comprehensive in so far as they do not need to purchase transit agreements from other providers (DeNardis 2014: 109-111;Blum 2012: 124-125). Although the financial and commercial arrangements between these Undoubtedly, this condition does not favor the BRICS. They represent the 25% of the world GDP, 43% of world population (3 billion people) and possess hard-currency reserves estimated to be around 4.4 trillion dollars. Recently, other emerging countries, such as Turkey and Indonesia, with yearly GDP growth rates of respectively around 5% and 6%, have been considered for inclusion in the group.
Keeping in mind these data, I would like to describe the "Cost of Knowledge"  The United States and the United Kingdom publish more indexed journals than the rest of the world combined… Most of the rest of the world then scarcely shows up in these rankings. One of the starkest contrasts is that Switzerland is represented at more than three times the size of the entire continent of Africa. The non-Western world is not only under-represented in these rankings, but also ranks poorly on average citation score measures.
Despite the large number and diversity of journals in the United States and United Kingdom, those countries manage to maintain higher average impact scores than almost all other countries. (Graham et al. 2011: 14) The linguistic bias of the global journals system, an ingredient often neglected in the literature against the publishing oligopoly (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015; Kieńć 2016), introduces a second devastating element: an evaluation system based on the "core journals" does not only limit or make impossible scientific innovation coming from non-core journals and geographic peripheries, but constitutes the biggest threat to cultural diversity. Many non-Anglophone countries in fact adopted evaluation criteria that favours English over native languages, Although there is no necessary relationship between international visibility, language of publication and research quality, what happens today is that an Italian or Latin American Lliterature scholar publishing in English would score/rank better than a colleague that writes on the same subject in Italian or Spanish. But are scholarly texts, as cultural products, independent from their language of production? And what will the destiny of our cultural heritage be if we will be discouraged to describe, analyze and study it through our own languages (Fiormonte 2015)? Unfortunately, it turned out to be impossible to discuss these issues in a plenary assembly as proposed during the previous members meeting of the AIUCD. That said, what is interesting to analyze, in my opinion, is the nature of the reasons (and of the argument) behind decisions which are quite common in academic and scientific organizations. What we are dealing with here is an anxiety and fear of being "cut out" from the "international" game. Does this sound familiar?

The Geopolitics of DH
The membership of EADH was, after all, a secondary question. The real issue was ADHO, an organism that defines itself as internationally representative of the Digital Humanities, but that still lacks a bottom-up democratic structure. The members of the Steering Committee are not elected by the members, but by the boards of each Constituent Organization. The reason is that ADHO was created by a club of "constituent organizations" (USA, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan), which, in fact, gets to decide the who, how and why of membership. The conduct of these and similar organizations, consortia and associations, recalls what the Finnish jurist Martti Koskenniemi wrote in criticizing international law: "Universality still seems an essential part of progressive thought -but it also implies an imperial logic of identity: I will accept you, but only on the condition that I may think of you as I think

Standards, Codes and Biocultural Diversity
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999) have pointed out that standards and information infrastructures (code and tools) have a strong symbolic value, which can be even more powerful than their material aspect, and that control of them At the core of digital communication protocols and languages there is therefore a mix of semiotic and/or representational issues. As George Steiner wrote in After Babel: [T]he meta-linguistic codes and algorithms of electronic communication which are revolutionizing almost every facet of knowledge and production, of information and projection, are founded on a sub-text, on a linguistic 'pre-history', which is fundamentally Anglo-American (in the ways in which we may say that Catholicism and its history had a foundational Latinity).
Computers and data-banks chatter in ' dialects' of an Anglo-American mother tongue. (Steiner 1998: xvii) The central issue is not the English language per se, but the hegemony of a single code (and encoding system) for everything. It is this 'Anglo-American Esperanto', which allows the inflection and organization of the digital knowledge Empire in accordance with proportions and modes never experienced before in history (not even under

Conclusions and some proposals
In my view, the only way to begin to limit the damage caused by monolingualism and received geographies of knowledge in DH is to undertake a plan of action and adopt a kind of "border thinking" (Mignolo 2012) from the margins, where often the means are less, but the freedom to innovate is greater. In the last decade the global north seemed to have abandoned theory, but "for the global south, the refusal of theory has long been an unaffordable luxury" (Comaroff and Comoroff 2012: 48). Nevertheless the principle must also be established that the cost of Anglophone monolingualism cannot borne entirely by non-Anglophones. The suggestions set out below should not prove too costly to implement, and more importantly, do not renounce the use of English as a lingua franca: 1. Apply the concept of "pluricentric standards" to publications in DH (Schneider 2014)   On the other hand, article 9 says that states have a duty to create the necessary conditions for the efficient circulation of "diversified cultural goods and services through cultural industries". In the opinion of some legal experts the cultural exception thus protects not only sectors that operate traditionally in the marketplace (cinema, TV, music), but also those areas of cultural heritage which are excluded by definition (rites, beliefs, folklore, etc. [Foà and Santagata 2004: 3.1]). Finally, there is an explicit reference (art. 6) to the preservation of multilingualism. While the Declaration does not cover the products of science and invention, which fall within the legal jungle of patents and copyright, it could form a viable basis for fashioning a more culturally and linguistically inclusive form of Digital Humanities.
In addition, on point 1) above, there is a case where institutional representation intersects with the linguistic and semiotic hegemony. One of the key slogans of the American Revolution was "no taxation without representation". If it is impossible to avoid the Anglophone domain, then we can invert the slogan: "taxation against overrepresentation". There are two ways to fight a monopoly: you either withdraw from the monopoly, which in the case of the English language is impossible, or you make some concessions to its competitors. If all the languages and cultures should be on the same level, and we all agree that the extinction of diversity must be avoided, then a moderate and symbolically variable "tribute" levied against the normative center would be one of the few viable options.

Acknowledgements
This article combines and elaborates ideas and contributions that I have developed in different places and occasions (Fiormonte 2014a(Fiormonte , 2014b(Fiormonte , 2014c(Fiormonte and 2015, or are currently underway (Fiormonte 2016). I am grateful to Ernesto Priego for agreeing to use some of the ideas developed together in our proposal (Fiormonte and Priego 2016) and to Desmond Schmidt for revising and translating from Italian many parts of this text.

Competing Interests
I declare that I have no significant competing financial, professional, or personal interests that might have influenced the performance or presentation of the work described in this text.