Global DH Keynote by Cindy Anh Nguyen on Interpretive Digital Humanities: Multivocal Meaning Making between Computation and Culture

How do we confront the ongoing epistemological violence of colonialism upon the cultural record? This keynote for Global DH2026 seeks to confront this cultural record of colonialism that perpetuates an epistemological divide between the west and rest, modern and traditional, global north and south. I draw from an extended digital humanities case study of a French colonial visual encyclopedia of Vietnamese crafts, cultural practices, and technologies. In conversation with decolonial and feminist theory, indigenous and Southeast Asian studies, I argue that a critical interpretive digital humanities can make visible the layers of colonial representation, surface plural voices and multidirectional narratives, and dwell in the discomforts of unknowability. This commitment seeks to challenge top down, linear, static, hegemonic colonial representations that often materialize in static forms of data representations, the privileging of Western frameworks of authorship, and a scientific push towards empirical argumentative findings. As a provocation on research praxis, this keynote confronts disciplinary global north structures of knowledge production and advocates for multivocality as research design principle. 

Bio: Cindy Anh Nguyen is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles with appointments in Information Studies, Digital Humanities Program, and Asian Languages & Culture. Her forthcoming book, Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2026) uncovers how libraries functioned as both instruments of colonial dominance and an experimental space of public critique. Her transdisciplinary research examines the historical and socio-technical production of knowledge in Southeast Asia through libraries, encyclopedia, visual media, and language through feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches. Her work has appeared in Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asia, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, the Vietnamese American Refugee Experience Model Curriculum, and numerous edited volumes on history and digital humanities. She is also a public scholar and community artist. For more information, follow her work at cindyanguyen.com.