Dr Izzy Fox, Postdoctoral Researcher, Maynooth University
We’re excited to present the final post in our special four-part blog series featuring insights from DARIAH-IE’s 2025 Early Career Researcher Bursary awardees.
DARIAH-IE was delighted to be able to support four Early Career Researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event, which took place in Göttingen, Germany in June 2025. The event was attended by almost 200 participants from across Europe, with 20 presentations, plus posters, over the course of the 3 days. As well as attending the event and benefiting from the networking and learning it offered, the awardees were given the opportunity to provide a short blog about their own work to share with fellow Irish Digital Humanities researchers on the DARIAH-IE website.
Blog post by Dr. Izzy Fox, Arts and Humanities Institute, Maynooth University
As the theme of this year’s DARIAH conference in Germany was “The Past”, it is no surprise that discussions focused on leveraging digital tools and platforms to uncover, share and store our data of historical importance. Consequently, open data and science, represented by the FAIR (Findable Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles of data governance informed many of the posters, papers, plenaries and keynote addresses. While ensuring the accessibility and long-term sustainability of data is of paramount importance for those working across the Digital Humanities, the FAIR principles raise ethical questions for those handling sensitive data that relate to minoritised communities, as well as the more recent past. Consequently, there is a growing body of research emerging from minoritised spaces that challenges the universality of FAIR, which often “[ignores] power differentials and [the] historical conditions associated with the collection of data” (Carroll et al., 2021). This problematising of FAIR has manifested in the CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) principles developed by, and for, Indigenous communities.
This tension between the FAIR and CARE principles became evident during interviews I conducted, as part of my role as postdoctoral researcher on Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities (FSFDH), with digital practitioners, including artists, activists, archivists, academics, and coders who represented communities traditionally marginalised within DH, on the basis of their identity (or intersecting identities), research or praxis. FSFDH is an on-going conversation that emanated from a three-year research-action project (2021-2024), jointly funded by the Irish Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, under their ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research Grants Call’. The project aims included embedding intersectional feminist thinking and practices across Digital Humanities and digital cultural heritage, more broadly, while also incorporating an ethics of care to the research process (Webb and Fox 2022).
The tension between FAIR and CARE raises important questions regarding the political nature of concepts such as ‘openness’ or ‘accessibility’, as they invite the question, ‘open and accessible for whom’? For example, data can be simultaneously ‘open’ and ‘closed’, depending on the privilege of the user. This oxymoron is best articulated in the interviewee Deb Verhoeven’s neologism, “clopenness”, in relation to digital databases, archives or publications that are free to publish and ‘open access’, on the one hand, but require institutional access, on the other. However, openness in relation to the code needed to build digital infrastructure is key for those on the margins, not only to bypass the gatekeeping involved when accessing propriety software, but also to build platforms with and by the communities most at risk of the kind of digital biases identified by Costanza-Chock (2020), (see also D’Ignazio and Klein 2020; Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018; O’Neil 2017). Furthermore, while acknowledging that informed consent is an on-going process in relation to data management, rather than a once-off tick-the-box exercise, the FSFDH team view the FAIR and CARE principles as being compatible, once the complexity and care required to govern, preserve and make as accessible as necessary the data of minoritised communities, is taken into account.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Ruha. Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. John Wiley & Sons, 2019.
Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press, 2020.
D’ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. MIT press, 2020.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press, 2018.
O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Crown, 2017.
Carroll, S. R., Herczog, E., Hudson, M., Russell, K., & Stall, S. (2021). Operationalizing the CARE and FAIR Principles for Indigenous data futures. Scientific data, 8(1), 108. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00892-0
Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group. CARE principles for Indigenous data governance. (The Global Indigenous Data Alliance, GIDA-global.org, September 2019).
Webb, Sharon, and Izzy Fox. (2022). “A Feminist Framework for Research.” Full StackFeminism, December. https://doi.org/10.21428/6094d7d2.52fc83d9.
Biographical note
Dr Izzy Fox is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Maynooth University in Ireland. She worked on the recently concluded GEMINI project, and before that on the AHRC and IRC-funded Full Stack Feminism project. In April 2025 Izzy was awarded seed funding by Maynooth University to develop a research project exploring the impact of SWERF and TERF online discourse and moral panics on the wellbeing of sex worker and trans communities in Ireland.
