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 threadCaroline T. (Carrie) SchroederDec 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

Show threadTed UnderwoodDec 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.
Show threadCaroline T. (Carrie) SchroederDec 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
Show threadCaroline T. (Carrie) SchroederDec 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)
Show threadAlex GilDec 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.
Show threadCaroline T. (Carrie) Schroeder
@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
Dec 10, 2022 at 4:06pmWeb
Show threadAlex GilDec 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.
Show threadTed UnderwoodDec 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.
Show threadAlex GilDec 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.