[en] Introduction:
Questioning Collaboration, Labor, and
Visibility in Digital Humanities ResearchTarez Samra Graban, Florida State University; Paul Marty, Florida State University; Allen Romano, Florida State University; Micah Vandegrift, NC State University
Abstract
[en]
An introduction to the Special Issue on “Invisible Work in
Digital Humanities” where the authors address a 2016 symposium on the
issue, interrogate critical factors which effect the invisibility of work,
and offer a potential framework to move forward.
[en] Manifesto: A Life on the Hyphen: Balancing
Identities as Librarians, Scholars, and Digital PractitionersHélène Huet, University of Florida; Suzan Alteri, University of Florida; Laurie N. Taylor, University of Florida
Abstract
[en]
The work of digital humanists and librarians is often invisible to the larger
communities in which they work, particularly in academia. This opinion essay by
three librarian-scholar-digital practitioners explores invisible work and life
on the hyphen — between the academy and the library and between the human and
the digital. In this essay, we illustrate how librarian-scholar-digital
practitioners can feel overworked and underappreciated, working in and with
multiple fields and communities who have different and sometimes competing
methodologies. Through two examples, we look at how living on the hyphen takes
its toll for librarian-scholar-digital practitioners. We end our essay by
detailing steps faculty and administration can take to help us solve the problem
and realize the promise of digital humanities.
[en] Raising Visibility in the Digital Humanities
Landscape: Academic Engagement and the Question of the Library’s RoleKathleen Kasten-Mutkus, Stony Brook University; Laura Costello, Rutgers University; Darren Chase, SUNY Oneonta
Abstract
[en]
Academic libraries have an important role to play in supporting digital
humanities projects in their communities. Librarians at Stony Brook University
Libraries host Open Mic events for digital humanities researchers, teachers, and
students on campus. Inspired by a desire to better serve digital humanists with
existing projects, this event was initially organized to increase the visibility
of scholars and students with nascent projects and connect these digital
humanists to library supported resources and to one another. For the Libraries,
the Open Mic was an opportunity to understand the scope and practices of the
digital humanities community at Stony Brook, and to identify ways to make
meaningful interventions. An open mic is a uniquely suitable event format in
that it embodies a dynamic, permissive, multidisciplinary presentation space
that is as much for exercising new and ongoing research (and technologies) as it
is for making discoveries and connections. The success of these events can be
measured in the establishment of the University Libraries as a nexus for digital
humanities work, consultations, instruction, workshops, and community on a
campus without a designated digital humanities center. The digital humanities
Open Mic event at Stony Brook University locates the digital humanities within
the library’s repertoire, while signaling that the library is — in a number of
essential ways — open.
[en] The Invisible Work of the Digital Humanities
Lab: Preparing Graduate Students for Emergent Intellectual and Professional
WorkDawn Opel, Michigan State University; Michael Simeone, Arizona State University
Abstract
[en]
This article illuminates the ways that digital humanities labs might foster
experiences for graduate students that fulfill what Alexander Reid (2002)
postulates as the “central task” of the digital
humanities graduate education. We argue that while the digital humanities lab as
an institutional economic model does not necessarily promote a focus on graduate
student professionalization, it uniquely has the capacity to push back against
competing discourses of neoliberal vocationalism, funding and labor precarity on
one hand, and technological utopianism and tool fetishization on the other, to
train students agile, contextual, and rhetorical mindsets with which to enter
technologically-mediated workplaces and lives. To begin, we review the
discussion of digital humanities labs in the literature: digital humanities
institutional models, how these models are practiced, lab funding, and the
resultant position of labs as sites of training for graduate students. From
there, we offer a teaching case from the Lab’s fall 2015 “Stories from Data”
workshop in order to render visible a set of principles to guide
professionalization of graduate students in the digital humanities lab. We
conclude with reflections on how these principles might alter current
discussions of the success or failure of the Mellon Foundation and NEH ODH
digital humanities funding initiatives in the United States.
[en] Building Pedagogy into Project Development:
Making Data Construction Visible in Digital ProjectsCourtney Rivard, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Taylor Arnold, University of Richmond; Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond
Abstract
[en]
This essay responds to two questions at the heart of the Invisible Labor in the
Digital Humanities 2016 symposium at Florida State University: (1) what is at
stake in making unseen work visible, and (2) how can DH projects equally
distribute and value the labor involved in their construction? For us, the
answer to these questions lies in privileging the pedagogical affordances of
data construction by crafting a workflow that included undergraduates as
intellectual partners, and using DH methods to visualize and make public this
collaborative labor. By drawing on our work with Photogrammar, which visualizes
federal New Deal documentary projects including photography and life histories,
we highlight three strategies for making labor visible in the digital
humanities. First, we discuss how this project served as a tool for teaching
undergraduate students key methods in DH by giving them experience with
conducting original research with credit on the public site. In this way, we
explain how pedagogy can become a part of project development. Second, we argue
that DH visualization techniques can make the labor behind DH projects visible.
We focus on how Photogrammar uses a timeline and network analysis alongside the
traditional “About” page to make visible all
participants in the project. Third, we turn to an open discussion of the
challenges faced in the politics of attribution when working with university,
governmental and private historical organizations, including domain names and
the use of organizational logos.
[en] Interlude: Gaining Access, Gaming Access: Balancing
Internal and External Support For Interactive Digital Projects Matthew Kelly, University of Texas, Tyler
Abstract
[en]
This short essay describes the difficulties and impromptu workarounds that
emerged when using the video game “Minecraft” as the
central teaching tool in several professional writing seminars. More
specifically, the author discusses a key moment in the semester where students
needed to move between university and non-university technology infrastructures
in order to create multiplayer gamespaces that were accessible to their peers.
In narrating this experience, the author will demonstrate how a discourse of
“access” can be used to examine the oft-invisible
policies, procedures, and restrictions that shape the way we compose, circulate
and make visible digitally-native work. Furthermore, the author will discuss how
a critical emphasis on “access” can help teachers and
students better mediate the relationship between internal or university-supplied
technological infrastructures and external platforms when creating interactive
digital projects.
The underlying motivation of this essay is not to lambaste universities for lack
of institutional support nor is it to champion commercial organizations as
saviors for helping teachers successfully use digital platforms in the
classroom. Instead, the goal of this brief essay is to spur discussions
surrounding the following questions: how might we use issues regarding access to
better examine and navigate the hard-to-define boundaries that separate
university-sanction technology use from non-university sanctioned technology
use? How might calling students' attention to access refine the larger learning
objectives for Digital Humanities or DH-related courses?
[en] The In/Visible, In/Audible Labor of Digitizing
the Public DomainAmelia Chesley, Northwestern State University of Louisiana
Abstract
[en]
In this article I call for more recognition of and scholarly engagement with
public, volunteer digital humanities projects, using the example of LibriVox.org
to consider what public, sustainable, digital humanities work can look like
beyond the contexts of institutional sponsorship. Thousands of volunteers are
using LibriVox to collaboratively produce free audiobook versions of texts in
the US public domain. The work of finding, selecting, and preparing texts to be
digitized and published in audio form is complex and slow, and not all of this
labor is ultimately visible, valued, or rewarded. Drawing on an ethnographic
study of 12 years of archived discourse and documentation, I interrogate digital
traces of the processes by which several LibriVox versions of Anne of Green Gables have come into being, watching
for ways in which policies and infrastructure have been influenced by variously
visible and invisible forms of work. Making visible the intricate, unique,
archived experiences of the crowdsourcing community of LibriVox volunteers and
their tools adds to still-emerging discussions about how to value
extra-institutional, public, distributed digital humanities work.
[en] Affective Absence: Risks in the
Institutionalization of the FemTechNet ArchiveDr. Jeanie Austin, San Francisco Public Library
Abstract
[en]
FemTechNet is a relatively small and loosely affiliated feminist, anti-racist
collective which focuses on overlaps between and implications of feminism and
technology. It exists as a support and collaboration structure that challenges
traditional hierarchies through distributed power and collective creation. In an
examination of hidden labor and archival silences, this research addresses how
ideological underpinnings shaped the process of envisioning an institutional
archive of FemTechNet records, how principles held by FemTechNet reverberated
through the archival process, and how FemTechNet members conceptualized the
imagined institutionally-held archive. The research reveals that the collective
navigated institutional requirements and resources, the risks inherent in the
tensions between the personal and the collective, and affective presence as part
of the creation of the records that form the archive.
