Like many practitioners of digital humanities, we frequently find our services and insights in high demand because of our combination of skills. We give guest lectures via Skype and speak at other institutions, not just on our scholarly output but also on librarianship, digital practice, and teaching. We provide support ranging from consultation to project management on large-scale digital humanities projects, and we advise colleagues on smaller digital projects, often serving as both project managers and technicians. We also create our own digital humanities projects based on our research and professional responsibilities.

And yet, despite demands for these services and insights and consultations, we are aware that many faculty do not position us as scholarly equals, and that we are underserved by the outdated criteria used to evaluate our performance. Our supervisors applaud our scholarship yet nonetheless struggle to view research as a billable aspect of our roles and responsibilities, rather than an extracurricular activity done outside of working hours. And they struggle to justify our extracurricular activities according to the guidelines they use to determine tenure and promotion. This makes the invisibility of our work as consultants, technicians, and digital scholars more apparent.

When we do receive credit for our digital research activities, faculty and administrators may fail to understand that our work is necessarily separated between subject-specific research and library research and must therefore be weighted differently. At other times our involvement is neither explicitly librarianship nor explicitly digital humanities scholarship, but still fulfills essential work in the spaces between, causing some of our colleagues to consider us second-class researchers because our work does not fit clearly within one silo or discipline. Suzan Alteri, University of Florida’s Curator of the Baldwin Library of Historical Literature, encountered this problem after receiving grant funding to produce an online annotated bibliography. This digital research project combined Alteri’s expertise in rare books, book history, and children’s literature. While the bibliographic aspect of the project fell under her professional responsibilities, the research required to compile the bibliography and contextualize texts was largely ignored. Having to combine subject research with librarianship makes being a librarian and a digital scholar a real struggle. The invisibility of non-discrete research intensifies the difference from invisible labor to expected presentation, making it acute.

Living on the hyphen, we are constantly juggling positionings and identities. When someone asks us what our research is about, we struggle to answer. Do we detail all of the work we do: our research in library science, our area specialty, and digital humanities? Or do we only detail research that will be most relevant to the person with whom we are speaking?

Dr. Hélène Huet, the University of Florida's European Studies Librarian, is a digital humanist and a specialist in both book history and the French literary movement known as Decadence. Thus, Huet is both a digital practitioner and a digital humanities expert for the community in which she works. On a given day, depending on whether she is talking to librarians, digital humanists, or French and Francophone Studies scholars, she discusses a different area of her current research. Her example highlights one of the issues we are facing. Indeed, while we love our multi-faceted professional identities, we sometimes think we are losing our identity, and that by participating across so many different fields, we are alien to all of them.

Living on the hyphen takes its toll, as we spread our inadequate research time too thin or fail to adequately demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of our work as scholars and professionals.

Faculty and administration can take several positive steps toward realizing Risam’s promise and helping us solve the problem.

First, we must all take responsibility for making all aspects of our work visible to others. Therefore, at your next conference presentation, please talk about how you completed your digital humanities project, what tools you used, what decisions you made, who your collaborators were, and how your community and working conditions made it possible. Encourage other presenters to focus on the methodological aspects of the collaboration, as well as the results. Open up calls for papers to include not just scholarly and theoretical concerns, but practical concerns as well. Encourage practitioners and scholars to see each other as equals. This is a call for all of us to be generous, generative, and inclusive.

Second, departments and programs need to revise their tenure and promotion standards to ensure that hyphenated scholars — individuals who increasingly represent the norm within academia — are recognized for their work. This requires reflecting on the origins of the term hyphenated, and is indicative of a change to better support our colleagues of color and colleagues from different cultural backgrounds who face additional demands from hyphenated identities and systematic oppression.

Finally, we all need to push for a cultural change that includes all people involved in academic work thus making visible the invisible work of those on the hyphen, including but not limited to librarians-scholars-digital practitioners. Achieving this cultural change within and alongside other communities pushing for recognition of labor conditions and labor communities only makes sense. Alone, our work is rendered invisible, but working collectively towards changing the daily practices of academia can make the full scope, impact, and import of our work visible. In doing so, we might make visible understandings of work that are appreciative, compassionate, and connected.