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 threadAdam Crymble
@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.
Dec 11, 2022 at 10:14amWeb
Show threadMartin RuskovDec 14, 2022
@adam_crymble @foundhistory @dh care to elaborate what the UK model you talk about is? Asking from Italy
Show threadAdam CrymbleDec 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.