Roopika Risam Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Roopika Risam is a published author. She is also an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth.

Her research looks into how histories of race, empire, and tech help to shape the modern world. She has written New Digital Worlds, which is taught in universities all over the world. She is also the co-editor of four collections. She has had her work supported by over $4.3 million USD in different grants from Mellon Foundation, the NEH, and more.

Roopika is known for her public scholarship and digital projects. She is a past president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, a U.S. scholarly organization for digital research in the humanities.

Her project Torn Apart/Separados was a data visualization project that helped children separated from their families at the border and received media attention as well as being featured in the 2024 documentary borderland.

Risam has written over fifty articles and five special issues on topics such as the digital humanities, media studies, community engagement, and higher education. She has also conducted over two hundred keynotes and talks at different institutions all over the world.

The author is the founder of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, the co-founder of the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium, and is the founding editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities with Jennifer Guiliano. She is the president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, and has spent nine years teaching at a regional public university with leadership roles. She also won the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for the 2023 International Association for Research in Service Learning and won the 2018 Civil Liberties Champion Award from the Massachusetts Library Association.

With a group of friends she runs the Data-Sitters Club Project and runs Keywords for Caribbean Studies with Kelly Baker Josephs. Different projects that she has worked on are The Harlem Shadows Project, Rocking the Academy podcast, and Social Justice and the Digital Humanities. Her in-progress work is being done at the Digital Ethnic Futures Lab at Dartmouth.

She is the director of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium and is the co-founder of the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium. She is a co-editor of Stanford University Press’s Text Technologies series and is a Higher Education Editor at Public Books. She is president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and is the co-PI of Landback Universities.

When not working on these projects, she can usually be discovered hanging out at the barn with Flight, her horse. They even went through basic mountie training and walked through fire.

New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy is a 2018 work by Roopika Risam. If you have been looking for something interesting to read, this might be the book for you.

Digital humanities and their emergence have been praised for the commitment that they have to being open, to access, to democratizing knowledge and more, but they also have spurred their own series of questions about omissions when it comes to things like sexuality, gender, race, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is another approach to uncovering and making right various inequalities when it comes to digital knowledge production, which is implied in an information age politics of knowledge.

In this intriguing book, Roopika Risam goes along with the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields. She identifies how they are able to intervene in knowledge production in the digital age and she also takes a look at the role that colonial violence plays in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives when it comes to resisting this violence.

Giving her audience a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she looks into the different efforts that are being made to de-center these institutions by putting an emphasis on the local practices that subtend global formations as well as the pedagogical approaches that help to support this de-centering.

Finally, the author is able to look to human futures in new digital worlds, examining how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects are able to come up with universalist notions of being a ‘human’ and how this can be resisted. Perfect for those who love to learn more about new topics or want to read more nonfiction, this is a fascinating look by Risam at a topic in depth that merits a look! Check out New Digital Worlds to read it all for yourself and become an expert by proxy on this subject.

Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate is a nonfiction book by Roopika Risam. It seems that in the past few years, data has been a word that is uttered by people more than ever. As in, ‘sure, that app is free, but they also mine your data’. It’s become part of our vocabulary, but readers might be surprised to find out that data has been a part of the game long before the age of computers came along.

Whether it was the time of the clay tablets or the modern algorithmic state, this book takes an up close and personal look at human history and takes the stance that information has always historically been the seed of power.

Before writing had even existed, in Mesopotamia at the dawn of civilization, rulers pressed their own marks into the clay so that they could keep careful track of the land, the people, and the grain. They had to keep count to rule, so it makes sense that the first written name in human history was an accountant instead of what one would assume it might be, like a god or a king.

Ships and navigation expanded horizons, and as they did, European empires entered into a new age where they took over more than 80% of the world’s surface– and they did it with censuses, maps, and ledgers. This is how they figured out who belonged, who owed money, and more. Now we live in the third great era, trading information in order for access. It can feel relatively harmless, but from targeted ads to mass surveillance, data has an impact on our lives.

Data Empire goes over how data and information have always been relevant and desirable for those who rule. Data has power– how can it be resisted? Read this book from Roopika Risam to find out.