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.
