Category: Recommended

Roxanne Shirazi (CUNY Graduate Center) has written up a talk delivered as part of a panel sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Section of the ACRL on “Digital Humanities and Libraries: Power and Privilege, Practice and Theory.” The panel, at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 30, 2014, also featured Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez (Center for the Study of Political Graphics), Jane Nichols (Oregon State University), and Megan Wacha (Barnard College); Heather Tompkins (Carleton College) organized the session.

In her talk, “Reproducing the Academy: Librarians and the Question of Service in the Digital Humanities,” Shirazi (a founding editor of dh+lib) focuses on the relationship between digital humanities and librarians, addressing how “the question of service in the context of the history of librarianship as a feminized profession” impacts questions of “service, scholarship, work, and power.” Can all librarians transcend the call to service?

So when we call for librarians to approach collaborative digital work as partners and not service providers, I would like to see some acknowledgement of the fact that there are different power relations at play in these collaborative relationships. Power relations that are embedded in the hierarchies that make up academia, in both the social stratification of varying job ranks and the hierarchical classification of service and scholarship. Let’s have a more nuanced conversation about how librarians position ourselves as collaborators in the digital humanities and accede that some of us might need to embrace the label of service—or, perhaps, might not be able to escape it.

In a post rich with references to concepts of the “feminized profession,” “affective labor,” and “reproductive labor,” Shirazi observes that librarians “perform labor that reproduces the academy… This work is vital and it is intellectual labor, but because it does not conform to the publish or perish model at the top of the academic hierarchy, it is reduced to (and devalued as) ‘service.'”

Shirazi calls for librarians to integrate “working conditions (dedicated research time) and structure (status shield)” into conversations about “librarians as true collaborators in the production of digital humanities scholarship. We need to talk about the library profession and its ‘underlying system of recompense’: money, authority, status, honor, and well-being.”

The May/June issue of Educause Review takes “Digital Scholarship” and its theme and includes several articles and online supplements on DH and libraries:

Trends in Digital Scholarship Centers: Joan K. Lippincott (Coalition for Networked Information), Harriette Hemmasi (Brown University), and Vivian Marie Lewis (McMaster University) provide an overview of the broader institutional context played by digital scholarship centers, as well as case studies profiling the centers at Brown and McMaster.

The University Library as Incubator for Digital Scholarship: Bryan Sinclair (Georgia State University) discusses how libraries, the “natural home for these technology-rich spaces” can “create exciting shared spaces, both virtual and physical, where that inquiry can take place.”

Librarians and Scholars: Partners in Digital Humanities: Laurie Alexander, Beau David Case, Karen E. Downing, Melissa Gomis, and Eric Maslowski (University of Michigan) explore how libraries have “numerous capabilities and considerable expertise available to accelerate digital humanities initiatives” by examining successful partnerships between the library and scholars at Michigan.

The “Digital” Scholarship Disconnect: Clifford A. Lynch (CNI) provides an overview of recent transformations to scholarship wrought by information technologies, highlighting persistent challenges in “organization, preservation, and evaluation in the digital environment.”

Digital Collections as Research Infrastructure: Lorna Hughes (National Library of Wales) describes the National Library of Wales’ establishment of a Research Programme in Digital Collections. As Hughes puts it, the program addresses the research question: “what do people do with all this digital stuff?”

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Creative Arts: The HuNI Virtual Laboratory: Toby Burrows (University of Western Australia) and Deb Verhoeven (Deakin University) describe the history, tools, impetus, and design of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI), developed by a consortium of thirteen Australian institutions and bringing together cultural heritage datasets in a central aggregate.

The closing keynote address to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2014 was given this year by Alex Gil (Columbia University), under the title, “The (Digital) Library of Babel.” With nods to both Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, Gil reminds us of the intellectual urgency surrounding the work undertaken by digital humanities scholars, and calls for a more inclusive, global, and universal practice among both individual scholars and institutions.

I for one take dead seriously Jerome McGann’s impossible injunction that the role of the humanist in the XXI century is to tend to the history of our documentary pasts—recorded, written, painted or built—and oversee their remediation for our digital futures.

…

For the first time, though, we have within our reach the means for both the production and dissemination of our own scholarly work at a massive scale. Provided the bloodstained cables, circuits and energy sources that support our digital mirrors clean up their act and survive our politics and commerce, we have an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild our collective memories on a different key. A humanities gone digital brings not the future, but a new past.

Gil goes on to discuss the genesis and recent work of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, the #aroundDH in 80 Days project, and, more generally, the burden of translation (and where it should be placed) in a field that aims to consist of a “global community of scholars.”

The latest issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies is organized around the theme, In the Shadows of the Digital Humanities (subscription required). The issue draws on ideas first presented at an MLA 2013 session titled, “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,” and later expanded into a 2-day conference sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “The Dark Side of the Digital” (both were organized by Richard Grusin).

In their Editor’s Note, Ellen Rooney and Elizabeth Weed note:

The contributors to this issue approach the digital humanities from radically different perspectives and come to fundamentally different conclusions concerning its origins, nature, proper and improper objects, possible futures, and current impact on the university and its others.

For those without access to the issue, Matt Kirschenbaum has posted the full text of his essay, “What is ‘Digital Humanities’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?”

Citations for the full list of contributions are listed below:

Article

• “Editor’s Note.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): iii–v. doi:10.1215/10407391-2432538.

The Shadowy Digital Humanities

• Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, and Lisa Marie Rhody. “Working the Digital Humanities: Uncovering Shadows Between the Dark and the Light.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 1–25. doi:10.1215/10407391-2419985.
• Raley, Rita. “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 26–45. doi:10.1215/10407391-2419991.
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What Is ‘Digital Humanities,’ and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 46–63. doi:10.1215/10407391-2419997.
• Barnett, Fiona M. “The Brave Side of Digital Humanities.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 64–78. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420003.
• Grusin, Richard. “The Dark Side of Digital Humanities: Dispatches from Two Recent Mla Conventions.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 79–92. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420009.
• Koh, Adeline. “Niceness, Building, and Opening the Genealogy of the Digital Humanities: Beyond the Social Contract of Humanities Computing.”Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 93–106. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420015.

Shadowing the Digital Humanities

• Galloway, Alexander R. “The Cybernetic Hypothesis.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 107–131. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420021.
• Lennon, Brian. “The Digital Humanities and National Security.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 132–155. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420027.
• Golumbia, David. “Death of a Discipline.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 156–176. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420033.

In the Shade of the Digital Humanities

• McPherson, Tara. “Designing for Difference.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 177–188. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420039.
• Jagoda, Patrick. “Gaming the Humanities.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 189–215. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420045.
• Dieter, Michael. “The Virtues of Critical Technical Practice.” Differences 25, no. 1 (1, 2014): 216–230. doi:10.1215/10407391-2420051.

 

Miriam Posner (UCLA) has shared a video based on a talk she gave at The Graduate Center, CUNY recently following up on her original “How Did They Make That?” post. Posner introduces a three step process for interrogating the work that goes into a digital project in a way that is useful both to students and those seeking a framework for evaluation, helping viewers to “reverse-engineer digital projects on their own.”

Posner’s video includes conversations with Rachel Deblinger, Moya Bailey, and Elijah Meeks.

Miriam Posner (UCLA) has written a post calling for digital humanities centers and programs to focus on people rather than projects as a means of “investing in people’s long-term potential as scholars.” Posner outlines the benefits of investing in people and teams rather than projects, citing successful efforts at the Universities of Virginia and Maryland:

• They establish a wider body of DH expertise across campus.
• They establish a sense of camaraderie among participants.
• They allow participants to develop shared affinities and find collaborators.
• Choosing participants based on their potential, rather than their current knowledge, has the ability to introduce much-needed diversity to the DH community.
• They remove the pressure to produce something immediately, which so often results in poorly conceived projects.
• They allow non-developers to get to know and understand the way developers work and think, and vice versa.
• They allow project participants to take ownership of their work.
• They give people the confidence to keep trying.

Posner also suggests rethinking power dynamics among the people involved in DH projects:

Here’s the other thing: What if the group wasn’t (just) faculty? What if it was a mixed group of faculty, librarians, technologists, and students? How much healthier that would be than reinscribing academic hierarchies, which are just so exhausting.

Readers responded with comments about how to sustain collaboration among faculty, librarians, and technologists towards thoughtful incorporation of digital methods and technologies. For example, Ted Underwood (UIUC) points to a larger conversation digital scholarship needs to facilitate: “often, for digital methods to really make an impact, they need to be accompanied by a deeper rethinking of research agendas.”

Last week, OCLC Research released the report “Does every research library need a digital humanities center?” Written by Jennifer Schaffner and Ricky Erway, the report is aimed at helping library administrators communicate with their deans and provosts about the library’s roles in digital humanities. Bethany Nowviskie (University of Virginia) offers a response that acknowledges the report’s value for asserting that there is no one-size-fits-all model for digital scholarship, but moves beyond the “click-bait question” posed in the report’s title to examine the constantly evolving role of DH centers in libraries. Nowviskie recounts her experience at the University of Virginia’s IATH (The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities) and now Scholars’ Lab to illustrate that “changing local conditions and the very advancement of scholarship and scholarly methods mean that every center must evolve — evolve, or die.”

Nowviskie details some of the conditions that make for a DH center that can adapt to and, more importantly, anticipate changes in scholarly discourse. For instance,

Given a modest but necessary amount of time for study, experimentation, and contemplation, the staff of a research library can become singularly effective collaborators, not only because they bring certain skills to bear — but because they have observed the humanities from a critical vantage point not enjoyed by people embedded in academic departments, and have had the opportunity to synthesize, in all the meanings of that term.

For more information about the report, along with an updated list of responses, visit our round-up. Additionally, dh+lib will feature responses from the community later this week. If you’re interested in including a 1-2 paragraph response, please email us or fill out our contributor form.

Last week Tom Scheinfeldt (University of Connecticut) gave a talk at the 2013 ACRL/NY Symposium, whose theme was “The Library as Knowledge Laboratory.”

His talk, “Looks Like the Internet: Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage Projects Succeed When They Look Like the Network,” addresses what he sees as a worrisome trend that is moving digital heritage content towards closed apps, instead of maximizing the potential of the open web. Scheinfeldt takes the end-to-end principle of network design, in which power is concentrated at the network’s nodes, and applies it to digital cultural heritage projects, both in the way they are managed and the distributive format they ultimately take:

Digital cultural heritage and digital humanities projects work best when content is created and functional applications are designed, that is, when the real work is performed at the nodes and when the management functions of the system are limited to establishing communication protocols and keeping open the pathways along which work can take place, along which ideas, content, collections, and code can flow. That is, digital cultural heritage and digital humanities projects work best when they are structured like the Internet itself, the very network upon which they operate and thrive.

Scheinfeldt points to the DPLA as one example of a  hopeful development in libraries, concluding:

As I see it, looking and acting like the Internet—adopting and adapting its network architecture to structure our own work—gives us the best chance of succeeding as digital humanists and librarians.

Josh Honn (Northwestern University) presented a talk last week at Western University titled, “Never Neutral: Critical Approaches to Digital Tools & Culture in the Humanities” (paper is available here). Honn continues recent discussions of cultural criticism in DH, examining “how the critical curation of digital tools can lead to a cultural critique of a hegemonic Silicon Valley ideology, and a productive self-criticism within the digital humanities.”

Honn ultimately urges the digital humanities to slow down and make a dedicated effort to understand how technology works, calling on librarians especially to “take into consideration the multiplicities of human acts, meanings, and ideologies that we embed into our digital tools.”

Stephen Ramsay, Alan Liu, Alex Reid and others have recently engaged in a fruitful conversation about the role of cultural criticism in the digital humanities. Ramsay begins the exchange with a post revisiting Liu’s 2011 article in Debates in the Digital Humanities, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Quoting Liu, “How the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today’s great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital is thus a question rarely heard.”

Ramsay critiques the status quo in digital humanities (as well as cultural criticism and humanities in general), ultimately stating,

I want a break with the past. I want a new, revivified humanities that resists current attempts at its destruction. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water, but I also don’t care if this new humanities looks like some kind of mashup between computer science and English.

In response to Ramsay’s post, Liu takes a deeper look at the social and cultural circumstances in which the digital humanities find themselves. Liu states,

The goal [of digital humanities] is to do research, to teach, and to live as if humanities technology is constantly intertwined with, reacts to, and acts on the way the links are now being forged between individuals (starting with those in the academy where we teach and conduct research) and the social-economic-political-technological constitution of contemporary society.

In “Ramsay, Liu, Cultural Critique, and DH,” Alex Reid weighs in on the conversation from his perspective as a digital rhetorician. He suggests:

In short the response to cultural critique should not respond to the critiques themselves (unless one finds them heuristically useful). Instead, we need to investigate a different ontological mode (and the methods it might suggest) and recognize the inertial drag of our print legacy on our disciplines.

There has also been a rich dialog in the comment section of each post that has expanded and continued the conversation.

Posts referenced above:

• Stephan Ramsay, “Why I’m In It“
• Alan Liu, “Why I’m In It x 2: Antiphonal Response to Stephan Ramsay on Digital Humanities and Cultural Criticism“
• Alex Reid, “Ramsay, Liu, Cultural Critique, and DH“