Mastodawn

Tom Scheinfeldt

I am increasingly convinced that #DigitalHumanities cannot and should not be operated as a service—of the library or any other unit. We should not be hiring people to help others do #DH. We should hire people to do #DH themselves. Those people should be faculty, yes, but also librarians, archivists, developers, designers, and managers. And they should be empowered to range the campus to build teams of their own making to work on ideas of their own devising.

Putting people in service to others’ work doesn’t scale, isn’t sustainable, and, most importantly, produces bad work. When administrators (especially library directors) recruit a “digital scholarship librarian” or similar to support digital humanities on their campuses, they’re setting them up to fail. @dh

Zoe LeBlanc Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory @dh thanks for sharing this Tom!

Curious if you have thoughts of why this has become such a norm in #DH (as opposed to hiring people to do DH themselves like you describe)? You sort of elude to administrators and job ads, but wasn't sure if you had further thoughts!

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 9, 2022

@dh @zoeleblanc Deans, provosts, and library directors face twin pressures to support #dh in their campuses. First, of course (and somewhat cynically) is the pressure to keep up with the Jones’s. [Peer/aspirant] university has digital humanities, so we need one of those too. This is something I can tout at my next job interview!

Second, and more generously, is internal pressure from the faculty and staff, who really want to do things and are clamoring for resources. Administrators really want to support them, but they have limited budget. They also can’t be seen to be playing favorites by giving the faculty or staff member or collaboration with the most promise a big chunk of change. So instead they split the baby, put one new position in a “neutral” site like the library or humanities institute, and say that they’re there to support everyone.

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 9, 2022

@dh @zoeleblanc “Fairness” of this sort can be seriously overrated

Zoe LeBlanc Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory @dh super helpful perspective and couldn't agree more about the use of fairness here as being fairly suspect!

It will be interesting to see if this keeping up with the Jones aspect stays consistent or ends up fizzling out and we see the last decade as a DH boom (something that I think @scott_bot has warned about recently, though think he was talking more from the tech bubble bursting side)

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 9, 2022

@dh @zoeleblanc Yes, I saw @scott_bot’s hot take on that. I didn’t reply at the time, but I will now.

Not to argue with my good friend , but I actually think we may be heading into a #digitalhumanities boom. The last two booms (of the early 2000s and early 2010s) coincided with market downturns, and at least the first, with a tech bubble bursting.

I think there are a few reasons for this.

First, market crashes drive a lot of talent away from industry and into grad school. I don’t know if that’s good or bad for the individuals or for the economy, but it’s good for us.

Second, the demise of tech companies and platforms and the ingrained practices they support opens up new fields of experimentation (e.g. our current experiments on this platform).

Third, and related to the first two, the failure of the technology business refocuses the gaze of people interested in technological innovation on the university.

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 9, 2022

@scott_bot @zoeleblanc @dh

#DigitalHumanities has never received any real money from the tech industry, even when they were flush, so the fact that they’re poorer shouldn’t really hurt us. If anything, as they decline in cultural clout, ours should increase, certainly in relative terms, but perhaps also in real terms.

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 9, 2022

@zoeleblanc @scott_bot @dh An example of this that I’m familiar with is #Zotero. It’s only because the bubble burst, and took Netscape with it, that Mozilla/Firefox became available to open source tinkering by digital humanists. Without that platform, there is no Zotero. And it was only because industry was starved for cash that EndNote stopped innovating, which created an opening for something new and better. I don’t love the term creative destruction, but there you have it.

Frederik Elwert Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory @dh For the most part, I agree. And for similar reasons, I am also sceptical of “collaborate with the computer science department” as a general mode of DH. But I do think this is also depends on why we use the DH label and for what. I think there is an infrastructural part where service roles can help. E.g., libraries providing an instance of TEI Publisher like they already do with OJS. I'm just not sure one needs to wave the DH flag for that.

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 9, 2022

@dh @felwert I think that’s right. Some of those things really are services and slapping a DH label on them just confuses things.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory @dh I totally agree, and yet I keep running up against one stumbling block that I'm not sure how to contend with: the building of those teams. Right now, many faculty only get "credit" for projects on which they are PI or co-PI, or are otherwise seen as leading "their" project. So how do we build a culture in which folks get appropriate rewards for contributing to the projects that are led by others, thus cultivating a more genuinely collaborative faculty?

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 9, 2022

@kfitz @dh This is the hardest part. Greenhouse Studios was organized from the ground up (our governance, design process, staffing structure, etc.) around the idea of equitable collaboration, and yet even we still struggle with the problem. It’s so structurally ingrained that even when faculty don’t take or even want “credit,” the university, their colleagues, their disciplines, and even sometimes their non-faculty collaborators give it to them.

Demmy Verbeke Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory @dh Agreed - we provide the best service by not designing it as a service. In that context: Nowviskie's DOI: 10.1080/01930826.2013.756698 was front and center when we set up https://bib.kuleuven.be/english/artes/artesresearch

Artes Research

pam lach (she/her)Dec 9, 2022

@dh @foundhistory As a DH librarian hired to create a library space for a burgeoning community, it often feels like I’ve been set up to fail. But I’ve also worked to shape the space not as a “service point” and more as a values-based place for exploration, collaboration and partnership. I’m at an R2 with an insufficiently funded library (what academic library isn’t?) and I wonder if this institutional context necessitates an approach that emphasizes capacity building over services. DH in our library is me (w a FTE staff line to be filled) so we don’t have a team of experts who can do things for faculty. Very few of our faculty approach me with that expectation (it helps that librarians on my campus are faculty in full standing). The tension in part is that admin thinks of what I do as a service and I think of it as a partnership. Either way, what we’ve built is currently unsustainable 😔

Karin Dalziel Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory I'm having a really hard time envisioning how this would work. I agree that one DH librarian can't carry a campus, but the Center model has been very good to me as staff. I started as an office assistant and even then, was (mostly) made to feel like a collaborative partner in DH projects, something I find hard to imagine would be the case if I was doing the same tasks (minutes, setting meetings, etc) as a generic office staff person. That feeling like a part of things led me to get a library degree and work to Designer, Developer, head of dev team, and now Assistant Manager of the department.

The other thing about hiring specifically for DH is that every part of the process can be seen as an essential part of the team. So when our server admin points out the security implications of something a PI wants to do, it's not from a service model, its from the perspective as full collaborator on the project.

Karin Dalziel Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory It may be different that we are emphatically NOT a service center, and work hard on the messaging for that. We're collaborators.

But the team synergy we get from being a cohesive unit focused on DH is hard to overstate

Eric Kansa Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory @dh

Agreed. #DH as "hired help" is a bad idea. #DH people as intellectual partners and collaborators with their own agency is better.

cyocum Dec 9, 2022

@ekansa @foundhistory @dh I have followed this thread and I have found it interesting. As someone who got a PhD in a Humanities discipline and is a professional software engineer, I have always done my own thing. I would like to see coding skills more evenly distributed among Humanities scholars so they can solve their own research questions with CompSci tools (coding, data modelling, algorithms, etc.).

Caroline T. (Carrie) Schroeder Dec 9, 2022

@foundhistory @dh I think what you are describing is more of a lab model where the DH scholar (who much of the time can’t really do allTheThings on their own, yeah?) has a lab w/ some combo of postdocs, grad students, undergrads, staff working on research, as in STEM. HOWEVER in the US there is no money for this model. DH grants are fractions of STEM grants, startup funds for humanists do not include lab costs, etc, etc. And so we have faculty clamoring for staff lines elsewhere to support there work.

(Also most humanists don’t know how to run a lab, but that can addressed for future gens if we can figure out how to restructure.)

(Also also I think non-DH humanists will object to this funding model because it could be perceived (and in some cases would actually be constructed as) a drain on traditional humanities funding or disparities in humanities funding.)

I fundamentally agree with you and also think what you’re describing requires a sea-change in US Humanities infrastructure

Ted Underwood Dec 9, 2022

@ctschroeder @foundhistory @dh Everything you say is true, but I still think the path forward is for us to do what can be done effectively with our own hands (1 prof, or 1 prof + 1 grad student), and not to imagine that humanities research can be supported long-term by convincing admin to fund staff positions that do the programming.

Caroline T. (Carrie) Schroeder Dec 10, 2022

@TedUnderwood @foundhistory @dh I agree with you on the issue of staff positions but a lot of DH work requires multiple people with different skills. There is not a person on the planet who could have created the main project I work on single-handed, or only with a grad student, and the project is used by most people in our little field.
And meanwhile ECRs get hired into fac positions to “do DH” with the funding equivalent to writing a monograph with startup money for trip to an archive once a year.
I agree with you that staff to do the programming is not the way, but a model of solo practitioners also really limits the work that can be done.
Stanford’s model of scholar-practitioner staff embedded in departments and research centers with specific foci (rather than 1 overarching DH center) seems closer to a goal though obviously not perfect or absent of exploitation

Caroline T. (Carrie) Schroeder Dec 10, 2022

@TedUnderwood @foundhistory @dh and part of the key investing in faculty who are collaborative and credit and lift up ECRs instead of lone-wolves who want an employee to to do the programming they get credit for. (I know that’s a bigger problem in academia of course)

Alex Gil Dec 10, 2022

@ctschroeder @TedUnderwood @foundhistory @dh I agree with Tom. I started saying what he said back when I was in the service position. Now I'm faculty free to partner with whoever I want to work on things that *exclusively* interest me. I already started doing just that. I'm not with Ted on this about the 2 person model. Those are useful for many things, but not for the type of stuff Caroline is talking about. For that though, I really really believe that one shouldn't have a single position in the university that participates in a project because they are there to provide support. Even sys-admin. 3rd party for that. We either form our own teams based on our own job freedoms, or no DH. -- Signed, someone who was support for 10 years. Fuck that.

Caroline T. (Carrie) Schroeder Dec 10, 2022

@elotroalex @TedUnderwood @foundhistory @dh yeah yeah I don’t think I’m disagreeing with Tom (or you). Just trying to map out what it looks like wrt infrastructure. And I don’t work with my library colleagues in that way either (as support staff); our Coptic Scriptorium project has always been fac, grads, undergrads, postdocs, external contractors

Alex Gil Dec 10, 2022

@ctschroeder @TedUnderwood @foundhistory @dh yeah, I figured we weren't disagreeing at all. I would just clarify that what Ted says should work for most things. I think it does. It describes most of what I do succesfully: 2 people, 3 tops, can do most things around here. Just not all. I do believe that large projects like yours can be very valueable if done right. The devil is in the details, of course. What you do is way more difficult to do and historically has led to a lot of misery, with a trail of vaporware in its wake.

Ted Underwood Dec 10, 2022

@elotroalex @ctschroeder @foundhistory @dh Agreed, and there's a blurry boundary in reality between just two people, and a lab with two faculty + six students (but no funding), or one that has funding and external contractors, etc. I just need to conceptualize what I do in a way that isn't, in principle, dependent on funding, because I can't count on persuading funders.

Alex Gil Dec 10, 2022

@TedUnderwood @ctschroeder @foundhistory @dh word. The trick is avoid funding. Even this huge Mellon grant that is mostly a redistrubutive one, where we're mostly giving all of it away to other parties is probably my last one. A good chunk of the money we're giving away is going to contractors, perpetuating the dependency model. Our hope is to balance it out with training that would break the dependency model. I would be happier with a DH that is mostly people who can do their projects themselves (or 2-3), and have those projects count towards dissertations and tenure and promotions, etc. Support of independence would lead to a lot better projects. I know this from experience, because I have worked on many dreams of others. They're rarely better than our own.

Ben W. Brumfield Dec 10, 2022

@foundhistory @dh I'm curious what role you see for external , for-pay development consultancies in this? I've seen orphaned code messes built by them as well as amazing, reusable tools (and have probably been responsible for both myself).

Tom Scheinfeldt Dec 10, 2022

@benwbrum @dh It’s a great question that I haven’t thought enough about. My gut tells me there should be more. I’d love to have a few, good, trusted commercial partners with a variety of I could call, both for longer term partnerships and also for occasional piece work. But they’re very few and far between and the good ones tend to be too busy to pin down or plan on.

Peter Webster Dec 10, 2022

@foundhistory @benwbrum I occupy a space something like this, and there aren't many of us in the UK either.

Mia Dec 10, 2022

@foundhistory @benwbrum @dh or too expensive (entirely fair enough, good for them!)

Adam Crymble Dec 11, 2022

@foundhistory @dh what you’re looking for is the model used in the UK. It’s quite American to put DH as a service in the library.

Martin Ruskov Dec 14, 2022

@adam_crymble @foundhistory @dh care to elaborate what the UK model you talk about is? Asking from Italy

Adam Crymble Dec 22, 2022

@mapto It's common in the USA for 'digital humanities' people to be hired in libraries and their job is to teach DH skills across the whole university, without having students of their own. That's fairly unusual in the UK where (if they exist at all) they're often hired into traditional academic posts.

barefootliam Dec 19, 2022

@foundhistory @[email protected] related topic - making grant-funded projects long-term sustainable - means having continuity as well as perspective, so maybe suggests a mix of roles? And maybe a technical coordinator role (a code librarian, in Fred Brooks' terminology i think)?