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 threadKathleen Fitzpatrick
@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?
Dec 9, 2022 at 3:44pmWeb
Show threadTom ScheinfeldtDec 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.