Bilious. My colleague, Kim Blank, asked me the other day about out-of fashion words I’d like to use if I got a chance. And in my anti-national-stereotype, post-Paddy’s Day-dysphoria, I thought how much I want to use bilious. A greeney-yallery kind of word. The kind of nausea-inflected adjective that fits me after a week of well-intentioned “top o’the morning” greetings, invitations to green beer, and sly references to my wholly imagined propensity for blarney, song, and parties. Yet this morning, reading the latest stats about the blogosphere, I caught myself generalizing about Those Americans.

Who’s blogging? According to a recently released report from BIG research, bloggers are

younger and better educated but earn less than the general U.S. adult (18+) population - and they are more likely to be single, male, and actively engaged in new media

So I scroll through the summary, noting with pleasure (I’m a card-carrying Category Error) I don’t fit most of these criteria, until I come across the following:

Ethnic minorities are highly represented among bloggers:

• 12.2% of bloggers are African American/Black (compared with 11.4% of the general population)
• 20% are Hispanic (vs. 14.8%).
• 3.7% are Asian (vs. 2.0%).

Hispanic? In Canada? Likely accurate for a US population, but not, surely, for all bloggers.
Intrigued, I look for a Canadian study, and find Ipsos did one a year ago: nothing startling (to me) there, but all data is carefully qualified as “Canadian” bloggers or “Canadian” consumers.
So I’m caught in this intellectually uncomfortable, post-national undertow, wanting to look beyond tags like “American” or “Canadian” or, for that matter, “Irish,” but irritated by assumptions that US views of the blogosphere are accurate proxies for everyone else.

This all reminds me of my childhood perplexity about BBC weather coverage, that somehow blanks (sorry, Kim) at the borders of the Republic. Or in my North American years, US weather coverage that fuzzes out their neighbours in The Canadian Attic.

In my current scan of digital humanities coverage, I can’t help noticing–for all the chatter about globalism–a similar, probably unself-conscious, US focus. Maybe it’s unthinking, slice-and-dice statistical demographic hegemony. Maybe it’s a transitional moment, while we move from old taxonomies to new. But for my part, I’m going to make a determined effort to reach beyond the North American digital humanities nexus, and find out how humanists are adapting to new media in other parts of the world.

So I’m mortified to feel absurdly pleased that Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library mentions Canada’s TAPoR tools in her engaging posting about becoming a digital scholar in the humanities.

Grrrrr.