The Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship was convened by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), with the support of the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views represented in the report are those of the members of the Commission and ACLS and do not necessarily reflect the views of either of the funding agencies.

The image on page 3 and used throughout the document is of a textile created by Marilou Schultz.

“In 1994 The Intel Corporation commissioned Marilou Schultz, a Native American weaver, to make a blanket featuring their Pentium microprocessor. She was to use the traditional techniques that she learned as a child growing up on the Navajo/Diné reservation. As part of a publicity campaign, the Silicon Valley-based company proposed—not for the first time—affinities between Native American aesthetics and advanced technologies. More specifically, Intel aligned the expertise of the skilled textile maker with the dexterity of the Indigenous female workforces hired to assemble circuit boards in a factory newly constructed on Navajo/Diné land.”

Caption text from the National Gallery of Art exhibition: Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
Used by permission from American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) © 1994. photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

© The American Council of Learned Societies 2025

The publication is available at https://www.acls.org/resources/other-stories-to-tell/

Suggested citation:
Other Stories to Tell: Recovery Scholarship and the Infrastructure for Digital Humanities. The Report of the Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship. The American Council of Learned Societies, 2025.

The title of the report comes from Mark Dery, by way of Alondra Nelson’s citation of his 1994 work:
“Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers – white to a man – who have engineered our collective fantasies? … But African-American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come.”

[Emphasis added]

Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (edited by Mark Dery): Duke University Press: 1994.

Cited by Alondra Nelson in “Introduction, Future Texts” in Afrofuturism. Social Text 20.2 Summer 2002.