DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Preview
2019
Volume 13 Number 2
2019
Volume 13 Number 2
Introduction: Questioning Collaboration, Labor, and Visibility in Digital Humanities Research
Two Days in Tallahassee: Articulating New Grounds for a Recurring Set of Problems
Beginning in 2015, a group of colleagues in the humanities, information sciences,
and libraries at Florida State University met sporadically to talk about their
projects, plans, and roadblocks, helping one another ask and answer a range of
questions, from critical to technical, without inhibition or judgment. We needed
this group, for the immediate and quotidian challenges for faculty pressed with
meeting wide-ranging institutional duties, working within balkanized
departments, and managing projects without explicit digital humanities
programming, had masked a significant yet invisible roadblock to getting our
projects done. The absence of a sustainable infrastructure — intellectual,
physical, temporal, and human — emerged more than once as the underlying
problem, a form of institutional invisibility always acting against our
interests and activities in the digital humanities.
Six months later, “invisibility” emerged again during a
meeting of the Digital
Scholars Reading & Discussion Group, where we were all in
attendance, this time to consider discussions from the prior year surrounding
the boycott of academia.edu, various instances of cybercolonialism, and building
repository environments — all topics that texturized the need for large public
research universities like our own to understand and practice the digital
humanities as a way of critically questioning our working philosophies. It
became clear that “invisibility” was not a simple matter of
demanding more recognition in a particular context, but rather a key term in our
university ecosystem, and a problem of vital significance for the sustainability
of DH.
In November 2016, we hosted the first symposium in our region on “Invisible Work in the Digital Humanities (IWDH)”, based
on an awareness of the challenges that resource-straitened campuses face as they
struggle to build and maintain the collaborative infrastructures necessary to
sustain DH work as a humanistic endeavor [Voss 2015]
[Shirazi 2014]
[Wernimont 2013]. Fifty attendees from colleges, universities,
libraries, and/or DH centers in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia —
along with three keynote
speakers from across the United States — convened at Florida State
University on November 17-18, 2016 to talk, listen, reflect, apply, and begin
taking action toward starting or sustaining healthier DH partnerships on their
own campuses or in their own locales. The resulting two-day symposium helped us
identify the unspoken assumptions that surround collaboration by exploring questions about diverging
expectations, unequal labor, and invisible work. Our first keynote,
Mark Algee-Hewitt, Assistant Professor of English and co-Associate Research
Director of the Stanford Literary Lab, challenged the group to consider its
underlying assumptions about collaboration. Our second keynote, Cheryl Ball,
then Associate Professor of digital publishing studies at West Virginia
University, presented alternative notions of un/equal labor by examining the
rigors of online peer-review through a disciplinary lens. Finally, our third
keynote, Roxanne Shirazi, dissertation and digital research librarian at the
CUNY Graduate Center, interrogated visibility as a guiding concept for achieving
equitable work, asking us instead to adapt a documentary impulse. The Symposium
organizers, along with a cadre of volunteer graduate students, librarians, and
faculty, moderated and took notes during the various small-group and large-group
sessions each day.
Our goal in designing and conducting this Symposium was to explore the hypothesis
that Digital Humanities projects involving content specialists and scholars
working with digital experts and technologists, frequently proceed under the
assumption that the collaborators share common goals; yet this is not always
true. For example, in a typical project between a professor of history and a
university digital scholarship center, does the digital scholarship center
simply provide a service, or are they considered equal partners in the work? Do
both partners necessarily share common expectations or goals, or do they have
conflicting desires that could influence the outcomes of the project? The
historian might be focused on building an online repository, and the impact of
such a repository on the field, how others might add to it, and how to
materialize several years’ worth of research that would otherwise go unmeasured,
while the digital scholarship center might be thinking about recycling the
resulting code for use in other projects, contributing to broader digital
scholarly efforts beyond that single project. On the surface, none of these
goals is inherently contradictory, but in practice, subtle differences emerge
that may influence (or stymie) these partnerships when they go unnoticed.
Articulating these issues for DH scholars, researchers, and professionals is
critical for identifying and thinking carefully about the invisible work
underlying their projects, yet it seemed to be a topic that received little
explicit attention in our curriculum, our journals, and our seminars, outside of
discussions of student labor. Over those two days in Tallahassee, several common
factors emerged, pointing to what we now recognize as a predictable set of
institutional, disciplinary, and epistemic tensions that helped guide the
creation of this special issue:
- problems associated with prioritizing external over internal validation of DH projects [Ball 2017] [Brennan 2016] [Hsu 2016] [Ball and Eyman 2015] [Waltzer 2013];
- problems resulting from relying on “DH” as an umbrage or umbrella term [Jones 2016] [Fiormonte 2016] [Watrall 2016] [Underwood 2016];
- problems associated with making inclusion or agency the ultimate goals of the Digital Humanities [Earhart and Taylor 2016] [Risam 2016] [Binder 2016] [Duarte and Belarde-Lewis 2015] [Firomonte 2015] [Risam 2015] [Gil 2014]; and
- problems resulting from flattening disciplinary distinctions within DH work [Robertson 2016] [Senchyne 2016].
While Symposium participants represented a range of institutional types, we
consider these challenges primarily in the face of innovating — and then
sustaining critical innovation in — the digital humanities on public
research-intensive and -extensive campuses, when those campuses operate under a
dual deficit of resources and knowledge, delivered through austerity measures
determined by their states.
Critical Factors in In/Visibility
The conversations that occurred over these two days demonstrated to us that our
experiences with in/visibility prior to the Symposium had been determined by its
use as a binary construct, if not a standpoint. (See, for example [Losh 2016]
[McGrail 2016]
[Fitzpatrick 2012]
[Spiro 2013]
[Nowviskie 2011]. While not all of these discussions are motivated
by explicit complaints about in/visibility, their recurrence points to
visibility as a fundamental intertext in the enactment of digital humanities as
a discipline, and moreover as a problem of identification to scale.) Our desire
to identify alternative standpoints through the Symposium resulted in the
discovery of four paradoxes we face frequently in our work:
How do we achieve internal validation without promoting utopian visions of DH?
One of the essential questions that emerged for us was, To whom is this work
in/visible? Much of the work that takes place in DH projects is invisible to
multiple levels of authority, both external to the academy (i.e., the
public, state legislatures) and internal (i.e., Department Chairs, Deans,
Provosts). This occurs on all scales and even to varying degrees in
para-institutional publications, for example, in the coverage of
“labor” as a critical topic in discussions in Hybrid Pedagogy, as
well as a special issue of First Monday dedicated to “Feminist Perspectives on Digital
Labor”. Clearly there are ample institutional practices, ossified
academic hierarchies, and individual ways of thinking within different
academic roles and communities that contribute to making work that is
perfectly valuable seem perfectly invisible, and we must work against such
visible flattening. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes, “We in the humanities
often resist opening our work to these publics, fearing the
consequences of such openness…keeping our conversations private,
might protect us from public criticism, but it can’t protect us from
public apathy, a condition that is, in the current economy, far more
dangerous”
[Fitzpatrick 2012].
However, we risk creating a kind of circularity to our discussion if we
always (or only) privilege invisibilities or labor practices that can be
solved by external validation, such as not knowing when enough recognition
is enough, not knowing whether there is enough credit and compensation to go
around, or now knowing how much of that compensation is in the hands of
people, institutions, or systems that are “not
us.” Moreover, if we are concerned only with making invisible
work visible to external validators, we risk invalidating humanities
research entirely, in moves analogous to saying that the humanities matter
only in terms of helping STEM students become more well-rounded. We learned
through the Symposium that perhaps increasing transparency in DH projects
requires a decoupling of transparency from external validation, a recoupling
of transparency with internally validated assumptions, and then moving
beyond notions of validation as credit.
The problem of invisibility is at its core a problem of validation, where the
goal of visibility exists principally to make it easier to validate the
internal work of the DH participants. Even then, having decoupled
transparency from external validation, we must not, a priori, take any of
our activities as an unalloyed good. In a utopian vision of DH, one might
imagine that if we all received credit for our work, and if institutions
recognized and supported all the parties who worked on a DH project, then
all would be well. Indeed, there is much to be said and done to advance
those goals. But among other general concerns, saying that “all DH work is by nature collaborative and thus
democratically realized” may undercut some good work that needs
to be singly authored or individually completed.
Similarly, we may not all want the same things, the same rewards, or the same
types of credit. The utopian vision of DH as an ideally collaborative and
public activity makes some activities resistant to necessary criticism and
questioning. Thus, another reality that emerged during the Symposium was the
affirmation that not all DH projects need a lot of hands; often what they
need is more time — a commodity for which we can and should collaboratively
argue even when our projects have disparate goals. While such fractures in
the utopian vision of DH may seem threatening, we argue that they are a
useful interpretive lever which can expose the complexities of invisibility
in practice. For example, Cheryl Ball’s presentation on the evolution of the
open-access platform for the journal Kairos gave us options for imagining
how to translate that kind of work into rigorous evaluation tools/measures,
adaptable to other local or institutional contexts, for defining scalable
levels of involvement, and for accounting for different levels of
contribution on our reporting mechanisms, such as curriculum vitae. In other
words, Ball argued, we have much to gain by observing the processes of
activist collectives such as Kairos journal that serve open-access
communities while also preserving the values and ethics of particular
scholarly groups or disciplines. While the volunteering and mentoring models
underscoring Kairos journal were already reflected in the disciplinary
ideals of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, other disciplines may support
epistemologies or value systems that give us various opportunities for
acting visibly in DH — and thus, for transforming how we think about
transparency — by promoting shifts in perspective in other areas of the
university (e.g., research, service, and infrastructure), and by scaffolding
our DH projects so that they necessarily involve short- and long-term
training.
While Symposium discussions reflected the fact that material and technical
access are recurring problems across United States institutions, we
acknowledge that internal validation isn’t always (or exclusively) obtained
through idyllic notions of access, unless and until we can enable the
transformative nature of access as an internal goal. Doing so requires
thinking innovatively about how to commodify our processes and not merely
our projects or products for outside groups. Transformed notions of access
would open up spaces for rewriting involvement, for responding
humanistically to the market forces driving our universities, and for
carving out institutional positionings for our work that supersede the
material advantages often associated (correctly or incorrectly) with DH
initiatives. Transforming the nature of access also involves increasing
transparency of motives and goals, affirming the differences among them, and
defining our working communities beyond the question of who has principal
control over certain kinds of credit.
How do we achieve a collaborative vocabulary for DH without letting the “Digital Humanities” limit us?
Another essential question that emerged for us through the Symposium was, How
much are our problems of visibility caused by our moniker? As expected, the
variety of people, professions, and perspectives represented at the
symposium highlighted the multiplicity of definitions of Digital Humanities
under which we function. In some respects, “big tent”
metaphors have served the scholarly community well, establishing a
supra-discipline and welcoming all comers [Watrall 2016]
[Ridge 2014]
[Reid 2013]. However, the big-tent paradigm may prevent
campuses like ours from being able to conceive of the uniquely collaborative
nature of the DH Laboratory both as a collective and as a group of
individuals. Moreover, implying the desire to name the digital humanities as
if it were a coherent shibboleth, rather than a set of extant and
contrasting methodologies, creates a stultifying vision of what DH could or
should be, diverting our attention from how DH can promote transformative
notions of access in the immediate and near future [Battles 2016]. While definitions of DH have, often with good
reason, sought to situate DH in contrast to existing methods, it is equally
important to emphasize the continuity of humanistic modes of interrogation.
Thus, we take as a starting point the assertion that DH work is first and
foremost work in the humanistic tradition — the selfsame tradition that may
enable us to resist being defined by what we are not. It is a question of
humanistic thinking to ask what we value preserving, documenting, and doing
the work. It is also a question of humanistic method to ask corresponding
questions about practice. In contrast, defining DH work by what it is not
(i.e., the “traditional” print-based humanities, the
completion of singly-authored work) or what it aspires to be (i.e.,
“empirical” or “data-driven”,
following several lab-based sciences) has the unfortunate consequence of
locking us into well-worn modes of thinking about both methods and practice.
In that particular fantasy of the field, traditional humanities disciplines
might be typecast as the lone scholar toiling in the library, and
collaboration becomes a counterbalancing virtue of DH work [Ridge 2014]
[Anderson 2016]. In contrast, the science/lab model of the
hard sciences, including conventions of generous co-authoring, would become
a similarly typecast hero-subject [Keralis 2016]
[Nowviskie 2011]. Instead, we hope to complicate this binarism
altogether, so as to separate out recognizable ideals from harmful truisms.
Mark Algee-Hewitt’s presentation on the nuances of the digital humanities
collective afforded us different perspectives between and among the roles we
typically name in our project teams, by articulating connections between our
humanities economy within the institution and the larger digital economy we
share with other institutions. Recommending “collaborative individualism” over “mere
individuals collaborating”, Algee-Hewitt drew on his experiences
in the Stanford Literary Lab to illuminate the terministic constraints with
certain professional roles when they fall under the DH moniker, and to share
his observations about who might be more focused on output as a standalone
product, and whose contributions to the projects are often overlooked or
take divergent forms that are undervalued in an academic context. What
emerged from his keynote presentation was this triad of intellectual
conditions: the need for individual goals to be brought to bear on a common
set of problems; the need to determine the points at which the individual
nature of specifically humanities research becomes at odds with the
cooperation that is necessary for most DH projects; and the knowledge of how
to respond when that is the case.
If the Symposium exposed anything to its participants, it exposed the
elusivity of some of our familiar working terms. Without a shared vocabulary
in place, we could not always make progress towards practical solutions in
the space of our conversations over two days. In addition to the nuances of
“in/visibility”, we found we needed more neutrality
in other terms, including “service” and “sole
author”. In the case of the former, recognizing the inherent
flexibility in what it means “to serve” exposes the more
expansive view we must take towards notions like “rigor”
and “ethics”. In the case of the latter, single-authored
work has historically been built on the work of others, whether acknowledged
or not. Thus, a more expansive notion of “DH
collaboration” would focus not on the existing conventions of
marking collaboration but rather on identifying and exercising a generosity
of spirit in academic work.
How do we define critical agency for DH research while questioning shared credit as an end goal?
A third essential question that emerged through the Symposium was, How does
our approach change when we acknowledge that while some forms of labor and
laboring bodies are deliberately overlooked by those in power, others are
made more vulnerable by greater exposure? More problematic than
“collaboration” for many Symposium participants was
the notion of “credit”, as credit can occur in multiple
forms (monetary, reputation, public acknowledgment, private acknowledgment),
yet without yielding participatory agency. Reifying credit in existing
academic structures — or, rather, in the presumption of a shared
understanding of what constitutes credit — makes it too easy to speak past
each other about what constitutes the value of work.
While we agree that credit should be discussed or assigned in the early
stages of DH projects and processes, we also acknowledge that it may not or
need not always be equal. The Symposium revealed that equal partnerships
rely less on equal credit and more on an open communication of goals and on
an understanding of cash vs. cache — that is, an understanding that equality
may be determined not in precisely the same outcomes for each participant,
but each participant should still have access to what they need, whether
that is in financial compensation (cash) or in project stakes (cache). Put
simply, there are types of credit which are often overlooked in a too-rigid
framework of credit equals pay or prestige. It might be more important to
have ongoing responsibility for a work, or rights to modify a work, than to
have public visibility about one’s past contribution or to have continued
ownership of it. Reframing the question of credit as a question of epistemic
agency [Fricker 2007] — as a way of validating others as
knowers, and validating their right to know — transforms the shared goal
from developing a precise system of attribution to recognizing the agential
labors through documenting work and telling the story that we want to tell.
Roxanne Shirazi’s presentation on the labor activities required by truly
innovative historical recovery projects challenged us to become less “obsessed with consumer product thinking” and more
willing to embrace the processes required by shared emotional labor. Drawing
on the work of Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, and arguing through the lens
of Arlene Daniels’ article on “Invisible Work”, Shirazi
articulated a key critical distinction between invisible work and invisible
worker, suggesting a four-part matrix for DH collaborative teams to use in
complicating their values before determining value: visible valued; visible
devalued; invisible devalued; and invisible valued. These interplays, as
Shirazi called them, should give digital humanists a clearer sense of what
problems to scale in their particular projects. They should further
demonstrate to digital humanists that not only does in/visibility not have
to operate as a negative binary construct in relational work between
librarians and their multiple collaborators, in some cases it can provide
critical leverage by enabling other forms of recognition, remuneration, or
autonomy. The balance between these interplays is fluid, requiring digital
humanists to think creatively and strategically about the spaces in and
through which they work, before determining that visibility must occur in
the same way for all project participants, or that invisibility is solved
wholly through shared attribution.
Provoking us to consider positive invisibility and guarded professionalism,
Shirazi ultimately challenged Symposium participants to take up a
documentary impulse instead. Thus, our end goal was not the foregone
conclusion that everyone needs more credit, but rather the question of how
disciplines value and preserve their labor, and what interventions could be
made in those values. What is at stake in valuing particular work in
particular ways? How do we negotiate the values of differing stakeholders?
What have we, in the past, chosen to preserve about our methods or about the
process of doing scholarship? Many participants in the room recognized the
problem with only using DH to produce a highly equitable labor model. Should
some invisible work remain invisible? Should other work be made more (if not
totally) visible? What kinds of invisible relationships do we assume or
perpetuate when using proprietary tools to do our work, without raising
public expectations of us and of our work? Could there be nuanced
distinctions between invisible and unseen work (i.e., work that is
behind-the-scenes but traceable as opposed to work that has been put under
erasure)? It became apparent during and after the Symposium that we need not
only decide that visibility occurs through attribution, or that all
attribution necessarily increases visibility, or that DH’s main task is to
resist the erasure of attribution structures. That kind of accounting
procedure — even to one another — does not advance ultimately what we are
after, which is the advancement of knowledge and scholarship. We became
interested during the Symposium in how we might use DH to articulate and
propagate a critique of such labor economies inasmuch as those critiques led
us to realize other potential mindsets.
How do we achieve legibility without flattening disciplinary distinctions?
For many researchers and practitioners, the digital humanities are one place
where their discipline’s methodologies can best perform or make a critical
contribution. Conversely, for many disciplines, it is digital humanities
projects that effectively make their critical questions publicly accessible
or make their disciplinary approaches more textured. Conflating terms and
minimizing disciplinary distinctions may be holding us back from the most
compelling reasons why DH matters. At the Symposium, considering invisible
work from an ecosystemic perspective brought into deeper relief the
relationship between two conflated terms: visibility and value. As Shirazi
argued, instead of visibility, we might work toward legibility through a
renewed attention to documentation and to the everyday tasks of
recordkeeping.
The Symposium’s discussions of the critical value of legibility led two
participants — Will Hanley and Laurie M. Wood — to reflect on the
particularities of their discipline of History.[1] The argument they make about
collaborative dis/appearances in History seemed important if largely
unvoiced at the Symposium, and its importance became easier to discern by
the end of the second day. As Hanley and Wood point out, the problem of
uncredited (hence invisible) work by collaborators and assistants is
somewhat remote, because the workstyle of their discipline is deeply
individualist, causing most historians to do their research, analysis, and
writing alone. However, their digital historical work involves a different
form of invisibility and a different set of consequences that occur when DH
paradigms overlay the historical. One consequence of digital history is
that, because historians rarely articulate the details of their work
process, they are impaired when they wish to share their labor, document
their efforts, or show others (i.e., potential research assistants) what
they want to do. To assign a research assistant requires, as a first step,
that the historian make visible the methods he or she already has in play,
but when it comes time to enlist librarians, archivists, graduate students,
or even other historians as collaborators, the invisibility of their work
becomes an encumbrance because they have difficulty trusting others to do
it. If they are not practiced in articulating their approach in ways that
can be reproduced by others, then relying on intuition and experience might
fail them when the moment comes to collaborate. This raises questions about
how and when to delegate work that historians would otherwise complete
alone, over lengthy periods of time, and informed by their particular
specialties.
Another consequence is that, because a historian’s labors are often made
invisible by the writing, much of their own work disappears in the
redistribution of digital labor. Historians generate a great deal of what
Michael Polczynski and Amy Singer have called the “intermediate product”, or the research
materials they produce between the archival records they read and the books
and essays they write — notes and indexes informed by years of concentrated
study. These notes and indexes are typically idiosyncratic and impenetrable,
and thus lost to other researchers. More importantly, they are not always
central to the digital tool. Because the intermediate product is not
documented and reproducible, it gets discarded and the work must be repeated
by other individuals in their own idiosyncratic manners later on. This
outcome seems ironic in a discipline so deeply invested in empiricism, where
one promise of digital approaches is the opportunity for historians to
become more explicit and articulate about their methodology.
Here, Hanley’s and Wood’s concerns about in/visibility are twofold. First,
they are concerned with identifying methods (already in use or created for
the task) that can be explained simply to collaborators who may or may not
already have the needed research competencies, such as with languages or
metadata. Second, supervising historians want to ensure that research
assistants gain new or improved research competencies, which they can deploy
(again) in the individual mode of historical scholarship. Again, the
historian has to articulate the necessary skills and methods, which more
often remain tacit, but by entrusting the work of historical research to
graduate students, empirical methods may inadvertently change. False
cognates might be translated incorrectly for the index, or the student may
still be learning how to distinguish unreliable from reliable sources and
how to replicate complicated workflows.
Though specific to their discipline, Hanley’s and Wood’s uptake of
“intermediate products” allowed us to consider that,
while recognizing invisible work can be a provocative methodological path,
it is difficult to make all empirical involvements equally visible. This
difficulty, in turn, urges us consider the different burdens of diversifying
roles and the resulting social labors that become involved in that
diversification. It matters whether we think of visibility as inherently
valuable and invisibility in academic labor as inherently invaluable.
Symposium discussions made clear that those value judgments around such
terms can be directly misleading, and that there may be critical and
practical value in allowing some labor to remain invisible and aiming
instead for making labor legible, if it means unflattening how our own
disciplines operate.
Changing In/Visible Mindsets: Offering a Conceptual Framework to Move Forward
As co-conveners of the Symposium, we encouraged a roughly hewn discourse,
recognizing that a binary relationship between visibility and invisibility was
not our aim, and neither was a clean resolution to the problem(s) of
recognition. Now, we see the intellectual investment of the authors included in
this special issue as central to our understanding and expansion of the ideas
ignited at the 2016 meeting. In the following seven pieces — five full-length
articles describing original research, and two opinion-driven essays on critical
terms, perspectives, or mindsets — Shirazi’s documentary impulse echoes
throughout, in individual markers of collaborations, project overviews, and
inquiries into praxis and theory. Several of the following contributors
participated in the Symposium, though several did not, and together their voices
reflect work begun in Tallahassee that gestures toward what still needs to be
done across our organizational, disciplinary, and professional statuses.
The issue begins with a position piece, where a call for the interdisciplinary
nature of digitally-minded humanistic scholarship is apparent, in Huet, Alteri,
and Taylor’s short manifesto “A Life on the Hyphen:
Balancing Identities as Librarians, Scholars, and Digital
Practitioners”.Their claim that “life on the
hyphen...fuels invisible work” recalls discussions from the Symposium
that invisibility and un-seenness are not necessarily the same phenomenon, and
they argue that apportioning credit does not always overcome the epistemic
assumptions determining unequal labor. The authors ask for shared responsibility
with raising the visibility of hyphenated practitioners, while recognizing the
cultural academic changes this intersectionality will require.
Community development is a throughline in many pieces that follow. Kasten-Mutkus,
Costello, and Chase’s “Raising Visibility in the Digital
Humanities Landscape: The Open Mic Event at Stony Brook University
Libraries,” illustrates a reliable model for providing space and time
to learn from and with one another. Establishing programmatic approaches for
digital humanities work is one path toward broader recognition, and the authors
examine their own program for that possibility. Recalling a statement from the
Symposium, that there are often “radically different
concepts of what counts as knowledge production,” this piece shapes
the conversation by arguing that investing in the local scholar/practitioner
community from a library perspective is productive and generative of/for the
digital humanities.
Also concerned with rethinking DH investments, Opel and Simeone’s “The Invisible Work of the Digital Humanities Lab: Preparing
Graduate Students for Emergent Intellectual and Professional Work”
explores the potential that spaces and informal learning offer to sustainable
models of how/who works together. In framing what a DH Lab is and does, Opel and
Simeone interrogate and return to central questions of who is in in digital
humanities and how the field inculcates new members. Focusing on their Stories
with Data workshop series, the authors argue the need “to
produce graduate students who can meaningfully render visible to the public
how the academy contributes to [or obfuscates] knowledge production
vis-a-vis technology”.
Shifting our attention from graduate professionalization to undergraduate
pedagogy, Rivard, Tilton, and Arnold’s “Building Pedagogy
into Project Development: Making Data Construction Visible in Digital
Projects” offers a case study in using a DH method to visualize the
labor of a classroom-based project and learning environment. The authors offer
three broad strategies for making labor more visible through their experience
co-constructing Photogrammar, teasing out the “politics of
attribution” within the content the project is studying, and the
collaborative relationships in the classroom. Throughout their argument, the
authors highlight the need to consider a variety of ways that collaborators,
especially students, may want or need their labor to be credited or made
valuable to their goals, which may not be the same as the goals of the
institutional researcher or project team.
Kelly’s “Gaining Access, Gaming Access: Balancing Internal
and External Support for Interactive Digital Project” offers a brief
but critical interlude, using a micro case study of a single teaching experience
“in order to explore how the oft-invisible policies,
procedures, and restrictions shape the way we compose, circulate, and make
accessible digitally-native work”. This short essay argues for a
logistically-minded approach, emphasizing that hurdles to digital pedagogy can
occur in the seemingly mundane, such as limited access to wifi, yet those
policies reflect boundaries whose transgression is key for activating critical
approaches to our own labor.
Chesley argues for applying those critical approaches to a hybrid collaborative
space in “The In/Visible, In/Audible Labor of Digitizing the
Public Domain” — this time from LibriVox, the public domain audiobook
platform and a unique “public, volunteer digital humanities
project”. The invisibility of this volunteer work “is part of the project’s strength and persistence” and
resists the generalization that the academy owns all of the digital humanities.
Chesley’s inclusion of a citizen-humanities, public service project reveals our
utopian biases and divergent expectations toward cultural knowledge production
as an academic affair.
Finally, in “Affective Absence: Risks in the
Institutionalization of the FemTechNet Archive”, Austin details the
dual challenge of re-presenting the labor of others in an archival collection,
and the risky work of archival institutionalization. Writing against erasure,
Austin says, “The small tasks of addressing power are
frequently unseen, unstated, or fed back through institutional lenses —
often resulting in approaches that are sanitized or obscured”. Their
essay complicates any easy concept of validation, reminding us that some
scholarly activities are not subject to, dependent on, or interested in the
credentialing system within which we continue to dwell.
Thus, a conceptual framework for continued forward motion is threaded within
these works. Taken together, these ideas, provocations, and inquiries mirror and
refract the conversation that began at Florida State University in 2016.
Together, the Symposium on Invisible Work in Digital Humanities and this special
issue make the case that:
- care is a first, essential collaborative tool;
- scales of credit and recognition are varied and variable for every individual connected to the work;
- the documentary impulse is a useful method for beginning to make labor legible;
- acknowledging a spectrum of “works” (e.g., volunteer efforts, workflows, and community development) offers an expansive understanding of scholarly activity; and
- the inherent paradoxes of DH work, often simultaneously “collaborative” and “singly-authored,” are a great strength, if also a great challenge.
Our hope is that the discovery and uncovering we attempted through this shared
project will illuminate many more curious and careful complexities in the
digital humanities and that, as individuals together, we will make, ask, and
interpret in new and more open ways.
Notes
[1] Our expansion on this
question of epistemic legibility would not be possible without the
significant contributions — written and otherwise — of Will Hanley and
Laurie M. Wood, not only during the IWDH Symposium, but also in
conversations preceding and following the event. We are grateful to
Hanley and Wood for allowing us use of this anecdote and acknowledge
their significant work in digital historical methods and archival
reconstruction, respectively.
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