POST: Q&A with Cindy Nguyen, Author of “Bibliotactics”

The University of California Press Blog has published an interview with Cindy Anh Nguyen (Department of Information Studies and Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles), author of a new monograph titled, Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam. 

The book “examines the Hanoi and Saigon state libraries in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, uncovering the emergence of a colonial public who reimagined the political meaning and social space of the library through public critique and day-to-day practice.” Nguyen engages with digital humanities research methods when approaching historical evidence as data. In the Q&A she states:

There was a lot of unstructured data because they were primary sources and digital humanities gave me the intellectual background to structure and organize the data in systematic ways and to criticize it to see which spaces have data silences and biases–this type of information literacy is even more crucial and important now with the widening impact of artificial intelligence systems upon knowledge production.

The full Q&A post is available on the UC Press Blog. A free ebook version of Bibliotactics is available to read online through Luminos, the University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program.