Tom ScheinfeldtDec 9, 2022

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

Show threadZoe LeBlancDec 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!

Show threadTom ScheinfeldtDec 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.

Show threadTom Scheinfeldt
@dh @zoeleblanc “Fairness” of this sort can be seriously overrated
Dec 9, 2022 at 2:53pmWeb
Show threadZoe LeBlancDec 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)

Show threadTom ScheinfeldtDec 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.

Show threadTom ScheinfeldtDec 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.

Show threadTom ScheinfeldtDec 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.