Category: Features

As a digital humanities librarian, E. Leigh Bonds (The Ohio State University) undertook an institutional environmental scan as the basis for assessment, identifying gaps, and developing recommendations. In this post, Bonds details her approach and framework, which prompted conversations and coordination across campus.

In August 2016, I became The Ohio State University’s first Digital Humanities Librarian. I’d already been “the first” at another institution, so I was acutely aware that distinction is both a gift and a curse: on one hand, I have the opportunity to define the role; on the other, the responsibility of defining that role. More importantly, I knew “the first” typically has the task of mapping previously uncharted (or partially charted) territory—the scope of digital humanities on campus—and exactly one week into my new position, I received that first charge: conduct an environmental scan of DH at OSU.

Having never conducted a formal environmental scan before (or even witnessed someone else doing one), I turned to the literature: no one charged with such an undertaking—regardless of campus size—does so without consulting those who have already charted their own environments. From recent publications (see Works Consulted), I gleaned that the scan should determine the nature of DH work underway, researchers’ interests, researchers’ needs, existing resources, and gaps in resources. All of the information gathered would then be complied into a report—in my case, an internal report for the Libraries’ administration and the head of the research services department—that included  recommendations based on the findings.

[pullquote]Environmental scans should determine the nature of DH work underway, researchers’ interests, researchers’ needs, existing resources, and gaps in resources.[/pullquote]

What follows is my strategy for making these determinations and framing my report. Rather than provide a one-size-fits-all template (which would most likely work for no one), I explain the process I followed—and the thinking behind that process—to guide other “firsts.”

Identifying Key Researchers

Determining who was doing DH and who was supporting that work seemed the logical place to start. I spent the first week scanning the twenty-three humanities and arts departments’ web pages, skimming every faculty page, and noting the names of those I needed to meet and the work they were doing or supporting. Unfortunately, very few identified with “digital humanities,” so I found myself delving into CVs, looking for DH-related keywords in publications and presentations (network, data, mapping, visualization, computational, digital archive, etc.).[1. Several months after my initial scan of faculty pages, I participated in the University of Illinois iSchool Spring Break Program and guided three MLIS students—Brett Fujioka, Tanner Lewey, and Abby Pennington—through a second scan of humanities faculty pages and CVs to identify faculty either using DH methods and tools or with research interests that lend themselves to their use.]

To validate my findings, I next met with the subject librarians for each of these departments. I shared the findings from my “distant scan”; they gave me further information about what I’d found and, in a few cases, about what I hadn’t found. Additionally, these meetings gave me the opportunity to talk with my new colleagues about DH and my role, and to gauge their understandings, interests, and experiences with DH work.

In the subsequent months, I met with the majority of the faculty on my list. I asked them about their interests, experiences, and ideas for both their research and for integrating digital humanities methods and tools into their courses; the resources they have and those they lack; their graduate students interested in this work; and about what they envision for DH on campus. From these conversations, I learned about the various digital methods and tools being used, and the resources available and still needed on campus. I also learned about the initiatives faculty had undertaken prior to my arrival on campus, like establishing a working group and proposing an undergraduate minor.

In addition, I scheduled appointments with the directors of the humanities- and arts-related programs, centers, and institutes on campus with affiliated faculty doing DH work. During these meetings, I asked them many of the same questions I asked the faculty, but I focused more on the forms of support they provide and the resources they have available for humanities research.

Identifying Support & Resources

As I met with the key researchers, I also began meeting with faculty and staff in several support units across campus. Within the Libraries, I found several staff supporting digital research projects in a variety of capacities: special collections, archives, digital imaging, digital initiatives, copyright, metadata, acquisitions, and application development. In meetings with each, we discussed their involvement in this work thus far, interests in continued involvement, and resources. In the College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services, I met with three department heads to learn more about the research consulting (computation and data storage), academic technology (media and eLearning resources), and application development services. From them, I learned the specifics of the services offered, who in the humanities and arts were using their services, the types of projects they’d been involved in, and, in the case of application development, what costs were involved. In the Office of Research, I met with the development specialist to discuss funding opportunities for DH work and a research integrity officer to discuss university policies governing intellectual property and data ownership. Not only was it important for me to learn about these matters myself, it was also important to learn to whom to send faculty to discuss funding opportunities and intellectual property matters as they arise.

Defining DH

[pullquote]I was less interested in labeling than I was in learning what researchers were doing or wanted to do, and what support they needed to do it. Ultimately, I viewed the environmental scan as the first step towards coordinating a community for researchers with DH interests.[/pullquote]At some point in nearly all of my conversations, the question “What is digital humanities?” was inevitably asked. Rather than tell, I preferred to show, so I explained DH in terms of the range of work being done by researchers across humanities and arts disciplines. I also clarified that, for the purposes of my environmental scan, I was less interested in labeling than I was in learning what researchers were doing or wanted to do, and what support they needed to do it. Ultimately, I viewed the environmental scan as the first step towards coordinating a community for researchers with DH interests.[2. Approaching DH from “the liminal position” of the Libraries, outside “of discipline or department,” as described by Patrik Svensson, I adopted the view of “the digital humanities as a meeting place, innovation hub, or trading zone,” which I see as essential for building the community I envision.]

For the report itself, however, I realized I had to tell in addition to show. To reflect “the breadth of DH work being produced at OSU,” I defined the digital humanities simply as “the application of digital or computational methods to humanities research.” I explained it “involves both the interpretive, critical analysis skills developed through humanities study and the technical skills required by the digital/computational method.” “For this reason,” I added, “digital humanities projects are often collaborative with each collaborator contributing a different skillset required by the critical or digital aspects of project.” I created a simple graphic to show “the extent of humanities analysis of content and context, and the variety of digital and computational methods currently being employed to conduct and/or disseminate that analysis.”

 

As Alan Liu remarked about his “Map of the Digital Humanities,” I never intended this to be “the last word.” Instead, I wanted it to be a catalyst for continuing conversations on our campus.

Tracking DH

Likewise, I wanted the history of DH on campus to raise awareness that researchers had been “doing DH” for quite some time—without an institute, center, program, or other form of structured support. For this section of the report, I opted to show rather than tell.

 

Admittedly, this timeline of initiatives and projects was not comprehensive; it did, however, reflect the key points that DH had been on campus since the early 2000s and the projects are increasing both in number and in complexity.

Framing the Report

As I began thinking of how to structure the report, I realized I needed a framework—and a clear set of terms—for discussing project requirements. Using the phases outlined by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, I created a DH project lifecycle graphic to provide that framework:

And in the report, I explained the specific support and resource requirements for each stage, including consultations with experts in digital methods, content/project management, platforms/tools, and funding.

Existing Support & Resources

[pullquote]I wanted the history of DH on campus to raise awareness that researchers had been “doing DH” for quite some time—without an institute, center, program, or other form of structured support.[/pullquote]That framework then provided the structure for the subsequent discussion of existing support and resources related to specific project requirements:

• digital content
• content management and project management
• DH methods, platforms, and tools
• development, hosting, and curation

In each of these sections, I outlined who provides the support/resources on campus and off-site, the specific support/resources available on campus and off-site, whether costs are involved, and any conditions that apply to the support/resources.

The section about digital content focused on three common forms: content in older formats requiring digitization, content existing in digital formats, and content generated by the project. I listed the specific sources for each content form (e.g. researcher, collaborator(s), OSU Libraries, external libraries/museums, vendors, work for hire), and indicated whether any costs are involved or whether any conditions apply (e.g. limited format types, limited permissions). Due to the costs involved, I differentiated work for hire (e.g. students, staff, external services) from collaborator(s) as a source.

The discussion in the development, hosting, and curation section was further divided by whether a project has funding or not. In the infographic included in my report, the specific units on campus providing support in these areas were listed, and off-site was included as a resource option for hosting and curation. Again, I differentiated work for hire from collaborator(s) for cost reasons.

To highlight gaps, it was important to emphasize that some of the resources remain conditional (indicated by a dashed outline) even when a project is funded and some of the resources involve costs (indicated by the dollar sign) even when a project is not funded.

Surveying Key Researchers

Finally, I invited thirty-eight faculty identified during the scan to complete a survey about their experiences developing a DH project and about their needs (and the needs of their graduate students).[3. Ithaka S+R “Sustainability Implementation Toolkit” survey by Nancy Maron and Sarah Pickle guided the one I developed, particularly for the questions related to the support received for digital projects.] I asked those who’d developed a project to rate the level of support they received for specific stages of the project lifecycle—from refining project scope to development to maintenance—and to identify which units on campus provided that support. I asked about funding, collaborators, external support, and work for hire for past and current projects; and I asked everyone what support they would need to develop a future project. The twenty responses I received—a 52.6 response rate—validated and further supported the findings from my conversations.

Additionally, I asked what workshops/sessions would interest them and their grad students, grouping the possibilities into three categories:

• best practices—like project management and content/data management
• DH methods—like data scraping, spatial analysis, visualization
• tools/platforms/languages—like ArcGIS, Python, Scalar

These categories reflect the scaffolding I envision for DH programming with different sessions, workshops, and working groups building upon one another and becoming increasingly more specialized and project-specific.

Identifying Gaps & Making Recommendations

All of the information I gathered during my first eight months at OSU exposed seven foundational gaps related to infrastructure, development/design support, and learning opportunities. Of course, anyone reading the report could have surmised the list themselves: I’d pinpointed the project requirements for each stage, reviewed the existing support and resources, and conducted a survey of researchers using DH methods and tools (the results of which were included in an appendix).

As a result, the recommendations in the concluding “Future Directions” section prioritized addressing the gaps in the infrastructure—on which the majority of future initiatives rely—followed by providing learning opportunities for faculty and graduate students. I subdivided the section into recommendations for my role as the Digital Humanities Librarian; for the Research Commons as the research hub; for the Libraries as both DH producers and supporters; for a partnership between the Libraries and the College of Arts and Sciences; and for consortial partnerships. In making the recommendations, I took capacity and scalability into account, knowing that many of the infrastructural gaps—as well as researchers’ desires for academic programs and centralized support—could not be remedied by the Libraries alone. For the purposes of these recommendations, whether the Libraries or the College could or would meet these needs or fulfill researchers’ desires didn’t matter: I simply identified them as areas to address.

To show what others in the Big Ten Academic Alliance and other R1 institutions with established DH programs were doing, I included a spreadsheet in an appendix indicating whether, for these institutions:

• there is a DH center on campus
• the DH center is a partnership between the college and the library
• the library has its own center
• there is an undergraduate minor
• there are other undergraduate programs
• there is a graduate certificate program
• the campus is a Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) institutional partner
• the campus is a Reclaim Hosting Domain of One’s Own Institution

Not only did the spreadsheet provide a quick point of reference for who’s doing what, it also provided administrators with points of contact for further investigation.

Following Up

[pullquote]Rather than the culmination, the report was, in fact, the beginning—the first iteration in the environmental scanning process that will continue both formally and informally.[/pullquote]In May, I submitted my environmental scan report to the head of the research services department, who submitted it to the associate directors and the director. Over the course of the summer, the report was dispersed more widely within the Libraries, sparking a number of important conversations about workflows, scope, and scalable support structures. In addition, it directly informed the planning for workshops, learning sessions, and working groups through the Research Commons.

In the fall, conversations across campus ensued as I shared my environmental scan with faculty, institute/center/program directors, and technology services directors. In addition to partnering with colleagues to teach sessions on the top areas of interest identified by the survey, I held a “DH Forum” for faculty and graduate students to review the key findings in my environmental scan and “discuss ideas for advancing the digital humanities at OSU.”

As administrators and deans discuss funding and partnerships in the coming months, I’ll be consulting with researchers, collaborating on projects, and coordinating the DH program. Each of these points of contact provides opportunities to continue environmental scanning, to expand the campus support network, and to establish the community of researchers. Rather than the culmination, the report was, in fact, the beginning—the first iteration in the environmental scanning process that will continue both formally and informally for the remainder of my time as the first.

 

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Recommended Readings

Anne, Kirk M., et al. “Building Capacity for Digital Humanities: A Framework for Institutional Planning.” EDUCAUSE, 31 May 2017. Accessed 28 Dec. 2017.

Brenner, Aaron. “Audit of ULS Support for Digital Scholarship.” University of Pittsburgh, Sep. 2014. Accessed 28 Dec. 2017.

Lewis, Vivian, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne. “Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective.” Council on Library and Information Resources, Oct. 2015. Accessed 28 Dec. 2017.

Lindquist, Thea, Holley Long, and Alexander Watkins. “Designing a Digital Humanities Strategy Using Data-Driven Assessment Methods.” dh+lib, 30 Jan. 2015. Accessed 28 Dec. 2017.

Lippincott, Joan K. and Diane Goldenberg-Hart. “Digital Scholarship Centers: Trends & Good Practice.” Coalition for Networked Information, Dec. 2014.

Maron, Nancy L. and Sarah Pickle. “Sustainability Implementation Toolkit: Developing an Institutional Strategy for Supporting Digital Humanities Resources.” Ithaka S+R, 18 June 2014. Accessed 28 Dec. 2017.

Rosenblum, Brian and Arienne Dwyer. “Copiloting a Digital Humanities Center: A Critical Reflection on Libraries-Academic Partnership.” Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries, 15 Mar. 2016, pp. 111-26. Accessed 28 Dec. 2017.

 

Laura Braunstein is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Dartmouth College and co-edited Digital Humanities and the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists (ACRL 2015).

Last June, a group of librarians, technologists, and scholars met at Middlebury College in Vermont to think about how to move forward on a proposed network, the Digital Liberal Arts Exchange, that would support digital humanities scholarship and teaching across institutional boundaries. There was much discussion, as we looked out over the Green Mountains on a perfect early summer day, of the particular stresses on library infrastructure when it came to supporting, leading, and engaging with digital projects, in contrast to how libraries support traditional humanities scholarship. At one point, someone noted that the conversation was drifting back toward the tired dichotomy of “hack” and “yack”–that is, DH as coding and making things versus DH as critique of digital culture. I suggested that we might think about a third term–“stack”: the often invisible technological, social, and physical structures within which scholarship is produced and disseminated. Since that meeting, I’ve been considering different concepts of “stack” in relationship to DH as models for these structures of labor. I’ve also found myself having more and more conversations–at work, at conferences, on social media–about how exposing DH infrastructure (in terms of how it supports both making/”hack” and thinking/”yack”) can reveal the conditions that make all kinds of scholarship possible.

In this post, I would like to “browse” the DH stack through three different frames: first, the technology stack of globalized computing; second, the social stack that manifests as institutional infrastructure; and finally, the physical library stacks that are a synecdoche for the information architecture that arranges scholarship. I’m curious to explore what these three frames–technological, social, and physical–could offer in terms of different ways to understand and reveal DH labor in the academy. My thoughts here build upon both Shannon Mattern’s idea of library as infrastructure and David Weinberger’s idea of library as platform. Rather than thinking of the library itself as an infrastructure, platform, or stack, I would like to consider what–and who–these concepts hide. As I’ve observed elsewhere, the people who “hack” and “yack” can’t work without the people in the “stack” (or without the people in the library stacks). At a time of political crisis, when the core values of libraries and access to knowledge are being challenged, we need to take responsibility for showing what we do. DH librarians, whose highly collaborative work is dedicated to social justice and public engagement, may be one particularly vital community of practice for exposing the changing conditions that create knowledge. How do we make labor in the “stack” visible?

The Technology Stack

Benjamin Bratton, in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT, 2015), suggests that we think of the vertically integrated organization of global computing as a more pervasive version of the software stack, whereby a web application, like the WordPress platform for this blog, runs on top of a database that runs on top of an operating system (which runs on top of the hardware). Bratton’s global Stack is totalizing: it rises from raw materials mining at the bottom to hardware manufacture as the next layer, and thence upward from network infrastructure to web programming to user interface design to tech support. It has emerged as “an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image.”[1. Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT, 2015), 5.] This is the megastructure of globalization, whereby computing networks transcend and surpass national boundaries and identities. The Stack is not just a new technology, but operates as “a scale of technology that comes to absorb functions of the state and the work of governance” (kind of like the Matrix).[2. Bratton, The Stack, 7.] What Bratton calls the Stack as megastructure also shapes (and perhaps defines) the globalized university, in that basic internal services, such as communication, record keeping, and financial management have been outsourced to cloud-based enterprise systems. In turn, research libraries within this megastructure operate in an economy that deemphasizes (and sometimes discards) ownership of local collections in favor of access to licensed resources that are facilitated by institutional relationships with multinational corporations. Yet–like the fish who asks “what is water?”–most scholars are unaware of the extent to which their work, professional interactions, and finances are imbricated with the global technology Stack.

How does DH fit within this megastructure? According to some critics, DH is part of the problem of the neoliberal university because it privileges networked, collaborative scholarship over individual production. If creating a tool (hacking) or using computational methods has the same scholarly significance as writing a monograph, then individualized knowledge pursued for its own sake, the struggle at the heart of humanistic inquiry, is devalued. Yet writing a book always depended on invisible (gendered) labor in the academy. Word processing, library automation, and widespread digitization are just three examples of the support labor for traditional scholarly work that Bratton’s globalized technology Stack has absorbed. (And we know that the fruits of that labor are in no way distributed equitably.) What has changed in the neoliberal university is that the humanities scholar becomes one more node in a knowledge-producing system. Does it matter, then, whether DH work produces ideas or things, critics say, if all are absorbed into a totalizing system that elides the individual scholar’s privileged position? This is of course a vision of scholarship that is traditionally specific to the humanities; lab science and the performing arts, for example, have always been deeply collaborative (but with their own systems of privilege and credit).

The Social Stack

If Bratton’s Stack is characterized by a globalizing rationality, the social infrastructure of the university is highly irrational, as Alan Liu discusses. What Liu calls the field of “critical infrastructure studies” could “’see through’ the supposed rationality of organizations and their supporting infrastructures to the fact that they are indeed social institutions with all the irrationality that implies.” Institutional arrangements of DH are often social and contingent (in the very concrete sense that many who work in DH–graduate students, postdocs, people in grant-funded term positions–are classified as contingent labor). Many DH programs, initiatives, and teams have arisen organically out of social connections rather than centralized planning. Understanding contingency can transcend the “but it’s not like that where we are” arguments that often get in the way of sharing information and practices in order to improve the working (and thinking) lives of actual people. As an example: the discourse of “center envy”–by which the speaker positions herself in comparison to a colleague at another institution who has more resources and can ostensibly accomplish more. If only we had more resources, a physical center, dedicated programmers, graduate students, postdocs, grants–the myth of scarcity shapes so much of how we think of DH inhabiting our institutions. Perhaps there’s no idealized arrangement for DH that would transcend local cultures; certain institutional configurations, like the small liberal arts college, may indeed be richer and more equitable environments for producing DH work. We may find ourselves comparing irrational institutional arrangements because all academic institutions are absorbed by the supposed rationality of the technology stack, but this is not the most productive way to understand the social conditions of academic labor.

Parallel to Liu’s discussion, Martin Paul Eve has recently argued in the context of open access publishing that the challenges we face in both supporting and crediting scholarship are not technological but social. When infrastructure is understood as an irrational social formation, emotional labor tends to compensate for a perceived lack of resources. Scholars who are used to the invisibility of traditional library services, for instance, find that digital projects expose hierarchies and bureaucracies that they don’t want to negotiate or even think about, and the DH librarian or one of her colleagues steps in to run interference. Why can’t the dean of libraries just tell that department to create the metadata for my project? After all, they already create metadata for the library’s systems. Why can’t web programming be a service you provide to me like interlibrary loan? I thought the library was here to support my scholarship. Why can’t you maintain my website after I retire–exactly the way it looks and feels today, plus update it as technology changes? In some conversations, these questions may be rhetorical; it may take emotional labor to answer them, but doing so exposes the workings of the library’s infrastructure–its social stack.

The Physical Stack

Scholars often presume that because libraries acquire, shelve, and preserve the print books that they write, that the same libraries will acquire, shelve (or host), and preserve digital projects. In her volume Bookshelf (Bloomsbury, 2016) for the Object Lessons series, Lydia Pyne describes how the cast-iron bookstacks manufactured by Snead & Co. around the turn of the twentieth century transformed library architecture and services. Standardized shelves enabled libraries to house more on-site collections, which in turn allowed open-stack browsing. Cast-iron stacks were the literal infrastructure that held up buildings, as the New York Public Library infamously discovered when it proposed to remove book stacks from its flagship Fifth Avenue location. If the university is what Shelby Foote apocryphally called “a group of buildings gathered around a library,” then the library might be a building gathered, or built around–on, out of–book stacks. Book stacks literally undergird (in the sense that a bookshelf is a small girder) the modern university.

Where are the stacks for a digital project? What does the architecture of the physical stacks — the core collections–suggest about how we might arrange (or derange) our digital scholarship? While libraries might be the organizations on campus best suited to arrange, acquire, and preserve digital scholarship, not all scholars think so, if repository participation rates are any evidence (and they might not be). Scholars may be extrapolating from their experiences with commercial ebook and journal publishers, and we can’t blame them for some apprehension. If publishers can revoke access to digital material at any time, libraries must resist to insure the free exchange of information, and advocate for alternative scholarly economies. As Pyne discusses, digital rights management is the new “chain” that secures books to shelves; unlike the chains that bound medieval codices, “digital chains are just more difficult to see.”[3. Pyne, Lydia, Bookshelf  (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 27.] As with Bratton’s technology stack that absorbs local decision making and curation of collections, digital chains obscure the agency of librarians and scholars.

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Speaking out about the very real conditions under which digital scholarship is produced and accessed can also reveal long histories of labor inequities in the academy. Thinking about stacks–technological, social, physical–as frames is not a foolproof approach to making this labor visible, nor do my conceptualizations lack inconsistencies. My thoughts are intended to open a conversation, here on dh+lib, on social media, and at conferences and in further publications. And while DH may be particularly generative, as a community of practice, to facilitate these conversations, we are by no means the only ones doing so (or who should be doing so). Making the digital stacks transparent and visible–as visible to library users and as fundamental to our libraries’ infrastructure as cast-iron book stacks are–should be our responsibility as librarians. Not because we need yet another responsibility, but because we are uniquely positioned to interpret the rapidly changing landscape of digital scholarship for all those with whom we collaborate.