Author: R.C. Miessler

The last couple of weeks have been kind of nuts, with a couple of Digital Humanities/Scholarship conferences more or less back to back (Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference and Keystone Digital Humanities Conference). The Oberlin conference had its first meeting, Keystone DH its second. Both were smaller conferences, something I tend to appreciate more, with some friendly faces to hang out with and eat meals alongside. Oberlin was library-focused, and Keystone had a wide variety of participants, many from outside Pennsylvania. A common theme throughout both, though, was the idea of DH work as something that can be used to bring social justice and equality to the academic world, at least, if we let it.

DH, with its ideas of openness and extensibility, really forces us to look at our values as people who work in higher education and see if we are putting them into practice. Are we publishing our data and methods? Are we making sure our research is available to the widest possible audience? Are we using ethical student labor to assist with developing and implementing projects? Are we being sensitive to cultural meaning given to various artifacts we place on the public web? Are we making our code and technology available to the wider community, and also documenting it in meaningful ways?

We talk a lot about technology at DH conferences, we show a lot of cool projects and discuss research findings. But we also talk a lot about why we do this work in the first place and why we should keep doing it, why we keep fighting for money and time and recognition from the people who hold the account lines, the authority, the privilege and power. We fuss a lot about if we are doing things as well as our peer institutions; there’s almost a competitive attitude to see who is doing the most with the least, while we dream for bigger things and think that every other institution has it better off than ours. We think of the cities on the hill, like Hamilton College and other small liberal arts schools with dedicated DH centers, and think we want to be them.

The reality is, nearly all of us who are doing DH are in similar straits; we have limited institutional support, a small core group of faculty who support the work, people waiting in the wings to learn about DH, and a lot of people on the outside who are looking in with interest and curiosity, but for whatever reason, are unwilling or uninterested to get involved. We’re doing things ad hoc, piecing them together as we best know how, and dreaming about the future, a future where we have this DH thing figured out and have found our own city on the hill.

In many ways, having a dedicated DH center/institute alleviates some of these issues, yet brings even more administrative things to deal with, and with it, a loss of control. What I can appreciate about doing DH in a more non-centralized way is the ability to be nimble and responsive, and be more measured in the types of projects we support and get more deeply involved with students and faculty willing to undertake the work of DH. I get to work with a lot of people cross-departmentally/divisionally, and I also get to meet a lot of interesting people who are doing similar things. Our apprehensions about the future of DH at our institutions draws us together, and we can support each other and let each other know we’re doing it the best way we know how for our students and faculty.

So, yes, I dream for more, but I’m also ok where we are (for now) … and we can keep moving forward.

This is, by far, my favorite tweet. https://t.co/Vl19Z4I7Cq

— Roopika Risam (@roopikarisam) June 24, 2016

It’s not often that I go to a keynote speaker at a conference and feel like I’ve come away from a sermon.

Normally, keynote speakers are generally useful for setting the tone of a conference; library conferences tend to have a keynote speaker that coaleses around some common theme, especially emerging issues. Diversity, understandably, is discussed a lot (which is really helpful in DH conferences that sometimes straddle the line of pedagogy/library/tech) as DH practitioners try to come to grips with the reality that it is still a white male-dominated corner of academia (perhaps more so than the other corners).

At the 2016 Keystone DH conference, keynote speaker Roopika Risam talked more about love than any sort of technical/practical understanding of DH; yet her methodology re: love is vital to understanding how we do DH in our institutions and as a broader DH community. She spoke a bit on how love builds community and care in the digital humanities; that we, as DH practitioners, put a lot of ourselves into these projects because not only do we value what we do, but because we think we can build a better world through the world we do. We can tear down walls, seek to repair damage done from colonialism, and empower the powerless to do amazing things.

Dreamers and tinkerers can be builders of better worlds, ones built on love – @roopikarisam #keydh

— R.C. Miessler (@iconodule) June 22, 2016

We are dreamers and tinkerers in DH; one of the themes of this summer’s fellowship has been “Dream big,” which we try to take to heart. We want people to be ok with tinkering, with messing around, with failure, all on the way towards realizing dreams. Of course, not all dreams can happen immediately, but we can get them started, and nurture them throughout our fellows’ academic careers.

Of course, love has a dark side as well; as discussed, love can be exploited, especially for free/cheap labor. Often bandied about is the idea that if you really love doing something, it isn’t work … and in turn, that can become an excuse to deny or reduce compensation for something. DH practitioners at all levels should be compensated in some manner for their work in a sustainable and ethical way; often we turn to grants in DH (and higher education in general) to fund something new and exciting, but love in this context means that grants may not cut it, that we need to look to ways to make sure those doing DH are going to be taken care of in the long haul.

That love for digital humanities is why this fellowship was created, in a lot of ways, so that students could explore DH in a safe environment, with funding, and be able to tinker and dream to create new worlds. I’m glad to be a part of this endeavor, and honored to work with this core group of students.

Week 2 is in the books. It was a bit of an odd week logistically, bookended by Memorial Day and a field trip to Lafayette College to meet their Digital Humanities Summer Scholars. It was great to talk to fellow librarian and DH-er Sarah Morris and her group of students, do a little bit of cross-institutional networking, and think about the wider networking that goes on in DH on Twitter. It’s really important to know that we are not alone in the DH world; not only for the students who are engaged in the practice of DH, but also for those of us who are doing the teaching, the mentoring, the curricular builds, etc. Sometimes it seems like we are doing a lot of this work on our own, and it’s tempting to think we are islands on to ourselves. But, as we saw this week, we’re not, and we can learn from each other. A Lafayette student is working on a social justice project that mirrors Lauren’s project quite a bit, and also overlaps with Keira’s interests as well. Overall, a great experience! Plus, the Skillman Library is pretty neat.

This week was pretty heavy on the philosophical/project management/practical/planning aspects of DH, with workshops on project management and copyright; both are vital to the development of digital projects, even if they aren’t the most visceral things to be thinking about. However, if a project doesn’t have a strong charter, with clear deliverables and a timeline, it’s probably going to struggle when timing is the worst. And as we learned from Miriam Posner’s work this week, “Copyright kills dreams,” but by knowing a bit more about how copyright works, maybe our dreams die a little less (or we dream up something new).

But, back to the road trip. The trip out was a hodgepodge of different topics, from ranging from various school activities to religion, the sorts of things that people chat about when in a van for 2.5 hours. During the trip back to Gettysburg, our fellows asked to put on the soundtrack to Hamilton … I tend to run from ambivalent to hostile to musicals, but I had heard enough about it to be curious enough to turn over control of the speakers.

And honestly, it wasn’t that bad.

But enough about my personal issues with musical theater. What caught my attention is the repeated line, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”, which, I think, is a way to think about the DH/DS/public humanities world. All of our fellows are doing something narrative-based, from women’s history, to social justice, to Civil War cadets. They are telling the story of various people, some living, some dead. In some cases, these stories have never been told before; other stories will be presented in a new way, visualized and contextualized for audiences to be determined. At some institutions, the DH/DS model is very data/text analysis driven; in others, there’s a lot of network/topic modeling and visualization, and in others, like Gettysburg College, we are narrative/interpretive in how we develop these digital projects (at least, so far). This comes from having an outstanding Special Collections staff who put a lot of time and effort into collecting the materials that tell the stories of people at Gettysburg College. Stories are important to us, and telling them is a vital part of the projects we are working on this summer.

So, more Hamilton-themed posts for the summer? Maybe, we’ll see how long it shows up on my jogging playlist.

–R.C.

 

 

We had a great first week with the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows! I am impressed with Julia, Keira, and Lauren’s enthusiasm and energy, and the way they have dived headlong into this experiment in student learning and digital scholarship. They took over their group space, and even started doing some crowd-sourced research on the aesthetic properties of Civil War cadets.

Something we talked about a bit this week was the idea of failure in digital scholarship, which Anne Burdick, et. al, speak to in Digital_Humanities:

Digital Humanities must have, and even encourages, failures . Outside the normative core, there is space to iterate and test, to create precarious experiments that are speculative, ludic, or even impossible. That research can benefit from failure should not be any sort of surprise—stress-testing metals and other materials is what gives us bridges that don’t collapse and buildings that stay up—but so too can the classroom digital_humanities 22 benefit from an academic culture that welcomes frequent (productive) failure. The methodologies of Digital Humanities are robust precisely because they place lasting pedagogical value in the creative, generative, and experimental processes of design-based research. Process is favored over product; versioning and extensibility are favored over definitive editions and research silos. The Digital Humanities capacity to ask, design, and model new research questions opens new possibilities for those who are willing to take risks. Too often in established cultural discourse, the experimental is absent or hastily erased, the dialogue already so well-established that new approaches are incremental at best. But it is not an experiment if it cannot fail (21-22).

This summer is an experiment, a pilot, a way for us to see if we can find a new way to engage students at Gettysburg College. We don’t have all the answers, and sometimes what we do just won’t work. Failure will happen, simply because we haven’t stress-tested this idea in production. But that’s ok; if we learn from it, if it’s a “productive failure.” We just need to get up, make the adjustments, and continue on. By letting our fellows know that failure is ok, it takes some burden off of them to think they have to “get it right the first time,” but it’s also places a burden on them to learn from their mistakes. It also places that burden on the shoulders of those of us who have worked on this project to this point, and will continue to refine and adjust through the summer. No pressure, right? At any rate, we had a strong start, and we will keep up the momentum through the summer.

But enough about failure … there was lots of productive conversation this week. When we talked about the elements of digital scholarship projects, each DSSF had great examples for projects:

• Julia: Julia talked about Project Chop Suey: Immigration and Cuisine in America’s Chinatowns. This is one of Miriam Posner’s DH101 class projects. Discussion of this led us to think about what sorts of data we could mine from past Servo menus and recipes … something worth thinking about!
• Keira: The Knotted Line, a project that was new to me, had a really cool timeline visualization, as well as a Scalar structure, which falls in line with her interests. Also, Keira showed us Remembering Lincoln, which we talked about in the Special Collections visit; this project has a great collaborative element and has a well-organized structure and display.
• Lauren: Digital Detroit was Lauren’s project to share, she liked its emphasis on action verbs in the navigation, as well as its different types of visualizations. The two-tiered navigation structure was also a good feature from a digital project perspective, since it puts the emphasis on the content, while allowing access to the data and relevant information about the project itself.

In many ways, this first week gives me confidence that we can capture some of the spirit of other collaborative efforts, such as the ILiADS gathering at Hamilton College. Students get excited about this sort of work, and it’s infectious. We hope that is the vibe throughout the summer, and something we can bring to the Fall 2016 semester to the rest of the campus.

Looking forward to week 2!

–R.C.

Welcome! Musselman Library’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows will be blogging in this space during the 10 weeks of their fellowship. They will be posting 3 times a week, reflecting on their experience about the fellowship.

Comments, questions, and conversation are welcome.

–R.C.