Category: 2016 Special Issue

Given the proliferation of the word, digital, amongst library communities it would be wise to discuss what the term, digital, represents. From an engineering perspective, digital technology, as its name implies, allows information to transfer via digits. These digits may take the form of ones and zeros that make up binary code, numbers that represent colors on our screens, or flashes of light in fiber optic cables. Regardless of their medium, the use of digits and the math that comes with them means that communications are precise. Before digital technology we came to accept only approximations of source material when making transfers—sources are copied—such as hissing audio on analog cassette tapes. However, now, with the digital, we can assume that transferred assets can be exactly like their original—sources are duplicated—when they are moved from one place to another in digital form. At the same time digital duplicates may become differentiated from the original and/or each other through changes in format or resolution, making them substantially different from the original source, or, via manipulation software, they may include dramatic alterations often impossible with physical materials.[pullquote]What does it mean to have the same exact object spread across various devices, screens, and contexts?[/pullquote]

Before digital duplication, the age of mechanical reproduction has, of course, existed for centuries. Even after so much time contending with the analog form, there is still much effort applied to the management of copies. Consider a print book, the creation of which often requires a painstaking process of curating individual, print-quality images and the permissions that come with them. Sometimes, after great lengths have been made to clear the rights to an image, it can’t be used at all due to copyrights set by far-reaching legislation such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extends copyright terms past the human lifespan. Due in part to the CTEA, publishers now have rigid protocols for dealing with media for their print books. Likewise, libraries have adapted with protocols of their own for archiving and making materials available to their academic audiences, as well as training faculty, students, and staff how to use and reuse content in ethical ways. These adaptations have taken time, often decades, to introduce new practices to existing workflows. Decades-long timeframes may be acceptable within print contexts where even copying takes a measurable amount of time. With the onset of the digital, though, it is essential to quickly grasp new protocols, particularly their duplicative properties, to keep pace with the digital’s rapid and exponential growth.

Turning our attention to digital technology, media in digital formats can be copied via analog means such as printing with an inkjet printer, but it can also be duplicated exactly across digital devices instantaneously with the click of a button. Consider JPEG images on a few separate computers, all created from the same source photograph. They might have been processed by tools such as Photoshop to have different sizes or resolutions, their colors changed, or made into something different. If we are only now adapting workflows to capture the legal implications of producing and storing copies that have noticeable differences, where are our tools to grapple with the many situations that media find themselves online? At the same time, these JPEGs might have no discernible difference at all, unchanged by human or machine before being duplicated across vast digital distances. What does it mean to have the same exact object spread across various devices, screens, and contexts? World Wide Web originator Tim Berners-Lee warned that the web was filling up with digital material void of context and meaning. Now this problem is compounded by having thousands of duplicates, sourced from untouched originals or inexact copies, each with little or no provenance, propagating on web servers across the Internet.[pullquote]The digital brings with it not just new mediums but also important new considerations about source material, metadata, and distribution.[/pullquote]

In 2008, Catherine Marshall, then of Microsoft Research, published a paper in D-Lib Magazine consolidating a number of studies on so-called “personal digital archives” that define how Internet-connected people interact with their digital files kept on personal and cloud computers. A primary concern for Marshall is the common practice of keeping one’s files, “distributed among different stores for a variety of reasons,” (emphasis hers) such as for creating backups, sharing with friends, or, importantly, “to use online files locally.” The last point is particularly interesting to Marshall due to its opacity to the user; most people are not aware, or do not care, that duplicates are being created on one’s local computer, in My Document folders and elsewhere, each time they interact with online material. Compound these duplicative actions with intentional edits, such as a user resizing an image in Photoshop, and a single digital file may spawn a “dozen versions of a photo she liked, each subtly different from the last.” Whether creating a media-rich document in MS-Word, writing a post with images in WordPress, or, in cases common to librarians, creating assets of different resolutions in Photoshop or establishing a media node in CONTENTdm, chances are that the way to accomplish the task is to download a digital file to one’s local computer, then later upload the local file into a new place online.

Particularly when cultural institutions, such as libraries, are striving to enrich digital material with metadata and provenance records, new tools should seek out existing objects from trusted archives and repositories rather than fall back on more troublesome practices, such as creating yet another version of the same resource. In the event that new assets must be created, these same tools can make easier the insertion of provenance and versioning metadata through techniques common in contemporary user interface design. One such tool is Scalar, a digital publishing platform that discourages uploading media directly into Scalar “books” while offering technical linkages directly to partner archives. Scalar’s database is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the standard transfer format of Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web, which allows Scalar and other “Semantic Web systems” to read and apply metadata to assets across the Internet including concepts such as versioning history and annotations. Unfortunately, even though software plugins for working with RDF and related technologies are readily available, the Semantic Web is not the first thing that comes to mind when people think of library tools.

The digital brings with it not just new mediums but also important new considerations about source material, metadata, and distribution. Therefore, as we attach the term, digital, to our various practices consider the revealing new descriptions that are produced:

• “Digital scholarship” assumes that sources are abundant, so the focus can be on connecting interpretations and insights with both online and offline materials.
• “Digital preservation” contends with new protocols for maintaining cultural assets that might have a single source or many sources, and many versions. It also establishes provenance, determines values of sources, copies, and duplicates, and migrates materials when necessary to ensure longevity and access.

Put another way, how do meanings shift when the term, digital, is conjoined with other words like “scholarship,” “libraries,” and “preservation”? First, consider the nature of the “digital humanities” (DH). Work in DH takes advantage of digitized artifacts and interacts with them in ways that are often impossible or ill-advised with their physical originals. Digital archive, analytical, and annotation tools allow scholars to add content directly to digital files, make duplicates for long term storage, create versions at different resolutions, extract specific information, and combine it with other digital assets without altering the progenitors. Much of this work would be unmanageable or inefficient without the affordances of digital technology. What is more, DH also entails studying and critiquing born-digital materials that are not a copy of anything physical but may themselves be remixes of existing data or duplicated assets. The product of each of these research processes, then, may be digital itself and/or a physical manifestation of scholarship. But unlike “traditional” scholarship that generally reads similarly whether published digitally or in print, digital scholarship creates and conveys through rich, layered, linked, and interactive engagements that are only possible in the digital realm.

[pullquote]Digital scholarship encompasses both products and the processes used to create them, as well as methods of preservation, curation, and consideration of access and intellectual property rights that are complicated by actions such as copying, duplicating, and remixing.[/pullquote]Digital scholarship is, of course, more than simply scholarship that appears in digital formats, although that is certainly an important part. It also includes scholarship made possible through interacting with digital, often digitized, content, using computational methods of both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The scholarly record continues to evolve and not only includes traditional articles and monographs that now appear in a digital format, but it also makes the underlying research more transparent through open books, open access databases of primary source material, and interactive data visualizations. Digital scholarship encompasses both products and the processes used to create them, as well as methods of preservation, curation, and consideration of access and intellectual property rights that are complicated by actions such as copying, duplicating, and remixing. This has important implications for academic libraries on the whole, not just “digital archives,” from making digital (and physical) content discoverable to the ability to advise scholars on the ethical use of materials, as well as assist in preserving the products of research. Librarians, then, are perfectly positioned to enable scholars to locate, evaluate, and even create new forms of scholarship.

The impact of the digital on librarianship is more significant than a semantic analysis may imply. As more and more scholarship may reasonably be prepended the term, digital, inside and outside the humanities, the digital touches every aspect of librarianship: from collection development, curation, exhibition, and preservation to user services, reference, and instruction. Digital librarianship, therefore, is librarianship that concerns itself with enabling and empowering faculty, students, and staff to discover, engage with, create, and preserve quality content whose properties extend beyond mechanical reproduction into areas that include duplication, manipulation, and remix.

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“Successful technologies rely on social resources.” – Susan Brown

The Digital Humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary methodology that spans departments, faculties, institutional divisions—including libraries—and nations. There are librarians practicing DH, DHers practicing librarianship, and many examples of successful collaborations between libraries and DH initiatives. It is therefore impossible to speak of “DH” as a singular entity or to lump the myriad projects into a single category. But, to raise a provocative issue, we would like to suggest that major cultural differences between the library and humanities community in terms of funding and tenure & promotion models impede closer collaboration— especially when it comes to tool development and envisioning long-term access to digital scholarship.

Promotion and Tenure

As a whole, DH shares many of the values of the library community: interdisciplinarity, openness, and collaboration (Spiro, 2012). Yet, many DH projects operate within departmental structures that have traditionally prioritized individual achievement and monograph publication in the tenure and promotion process. Thus, scholars—especially assistant professors on the tenure track— are encouraged to produce work that fits this individual-focused, competitive evaluation mold. For humanists, being a co-author or co-developer on a project can sometimes be a liability in disciplines that are not accustomed to recognizing collaborative work.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) produced the “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media” to aid humanities departments when appraising the value of digital work. Notwithstanding the attention paid to evaluating digital scholarship, including tool development (Mandell, 2012), “[p]romotion and tenure (P&T) values do not always align with the practice of digital humanities in academic settings” (Odell & Pollock, 2016).

The P&T process encourages a focus on quick development so that the project can produce as many academic papers as possible before the end of a funding cycle. Librarians, on the other hand, are often rewarded for developing solutions by consultation and collaboration; they are credited for producing initiatives that have demonstrable reach and impact for the larger library or university community. Although the P&T process for most academic librarians does carry an expectation of some academic publishing, by far the larger part of merit has traditionally derived from professional practice: that which is accomplished in the service of the organization, its patrons, and the wider community (Park & Riggs, 1993).

Not all blame should be placed on P&T. Traditionally, academic funding models in DH have favored innovative projects that deliver quickly over projects that are built to last—it has only been in the past few years that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) have required “preservation plans” as part of the grant application. The requirement for preservation plans has produced an opportunity for library involvement in digital humanities projects—but many, if not most, libraries do not have a “grants librarian” to help align DH project needs with library services—including the time-consuming process of metadata creation that must accompany digital collections.

Not all DH projects are intended to last forever. Some are simply an effort to develop a prototype or a proof-of-concept in order to create or support an argument (Galey and Ruecker, 2010). Many DH projects, however, produce unique digital assets including mark-up, transcriptions, tools, multimedia content, and interpretive material that have ongoing value for research. Without the expertise of librarians and archivists, many DH projects fail to achieve a long-lasting plan once the project ends. If data is lost, future research questions are negated. For example, in their investigations of library archives and stacks, the originators of the Women Writer’s Project were shocked to find that every generation of women writers until the late-19th century had to re-invent the idea of the woman writer. Women were continually excluded from the canon, their works lost until rediscovered in the next generation, only to be immediately forgotten again (Woods, 1994).[pullquote]Without the expertise of librarians and archivists, many DH projects fail to achieve a long-lasting plan once the project ends. If data is lost, future research questions are negated. [/pullquote]

When a DH project does not have a long-term plan, it repeats these historical erasures, even though it is common for DH projects to explicitly work to redress gaps in gender, race, and sexuality representation in academic work (Hwang and Patuelli, 2016; Wernimont and Flanders, 2010). If these revisions are to have long term impact on humanities scholarship then it is critical that the digital archives survive for future use. Preservation cannot be an afterthought. The DH Curation Guide recommendations should be a part of all project planning (Muñoz and Flanders).

Susan Brown makes the astute observation that successful technologies rely on social relations as well as technological resources (Brown, 2015), and this is especially true in an environment like DH where resources (financial or otherwise) can arrive in short bursts and long-term sustainable project funding is difficult to secure. This problem of long-term sustainability and preservation of digital humanities projects and their assets (including tools) is well documented (Marcum, 2016; Smith, 2016). Projects that are able to engage broad communities of users and developers stand a much better chance of survival in the context of constant technological churn (Kretzschmar and Potter, 2010; Grumbach and Mandell, 2014). For more successful DH/Library collaboration, our attention must turn away from short term development encouraged by P&T models towards models of care and repair.

Solution: Care and Repair

At the 2016 Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) conference, Jentery Sayers presented on his work on “Sustaining and Repairing Research Infrastructures.” He examined the “care and repair paradigm” in conjunction with “digital fabrication and rapid prototyping in terms of remaking or reconstruction” as a way of anchoring “creativity and critique in labor and infrastructure studies” (Sayers, 2016). He builds upon the work of Steven Jackson (2014), whose work theorizes the inherent “fragility of the worlds we inhabit—natural, social, and technological” and asks, “Who maintains the infrastructures within and against which our lives unfold?”

[pullquote]Technology should not be seen simply as a means to an end, but as part of a larger ethical system of reuse and repair[/pullquote]Jackson argues that technology is created and used within ideologies of power, which is clearly seen in market economies that privilege obsolescence and rapid product cycles over long-term sustainability. Technology should not be seen simply as a means to an end, but as part of a larger ethical system of reuse and repair: “foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility” (Jackson).

Historically, academic libraries and archives have tended to be the care and repair facilities for the technologies of scholarly communication. Libraries have been involved in collaborative software development since the days of Gopher and Telnet, and have developed a large number of widely-used open source software applications, protocols, and models in this time. Libraries and have been the driving force behind two agile toolsets that show promise in creating modular systems for digital scholarly communication and long-term storage: Project Hydra and Islandora provide open and stable Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS) and are built on top of a Fedora Commons repository.

The interface layers (Ruby on Rails for Project Hydra and Drupal for Islandora) allow individual tools to be developed and integrated into these systems. Because these systems are both open, any development/improvement of a tool can be reincorporated back into the codebase using github so that every library/archives or DH project can mutually benefit from the development. Rather than working on a model of quick development, DH scholars who work in established but agile frameworks can contribute to a care and repair mentality by nurturing common collaborative tools that can be of use to entire communities; rather than repeating the cycle of obsolescence and short-lived bespoke projects, building on long-term toolsets can give librarians, archivists, and DH practitioners a common goal of mutual care and responsibility concerning the data and tools we create.[pullquote]Rather than working on a model of quick development, DH scholars who work in established but agile frameworks can contribute to a care and repair mentality by nurturing common collaborative tools that can be of use to entire communities[/pullquote]

We have seen some very successful library-DH development partnerships. One of the most impressive of these from The University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab led to the development of Blacklight, an open-source discovery environment that has been in active development since 2007, and which has been implemented as production software in a number of large libraries (Cartolano, 2015); Blacklight has more recently sparked Hydra. Projects such as Blacklight and Hydra have benefited immensely from tapping into huge library development networks. Although both examples started as funded projects among small groups at specific institutions, they quickly spread to multiple libraries, sparking new funding opportunities and attracting a critical mass of development time. One of the essential factors in both cases is that humanists and librarians worked together from project inception (Nowviskie, 2011). Both groups felt a strong sense of ownership that encourage the continued commitment of resources, and significant consultation ensured that the software was meeting real needs within its target community.

Libraries and digital humanists have a number of common objectives. These include the development of new research and discovery tools, the recovery and availability of new and rare resources, the transcription, mark-up, and interpretation of existing collections, and the long term preservation of research outputs. Librarians have resource management expertise, and scholars have content expertise. Scholars can easily attract funding for innovation and research, whereas libraries have sustainable funding for longer term infrastructure. Libraries have permanent staff who can manage operations, and scholars have access to graduate students who bring fresh ideas and new skills to bear in the short term. On the face of it, these two groups are poised for a beautiful partnership, but this requires overcoming disciplinary schisms that have so far stubbornly persisted.

Conclusion

DH research requires the continued help and participation of libraries and archives. Libraries are able to provide the social resources needed for the long-term preservation of DH projects, and thus should be part of DH planning from inception to “completion” (though the job of preservation never ends). Granting agencies need to take a more active role in requiring library and archives involvement in DH project planning (libraries must also continue to support librarian/DH subject specialists who can provide expert assistance with this planning).

One immediate change could be allocating set funds by granting bodies for the preservation and description of resources in online environments by librarians/archivists; metadata creation must be valued in all DH endeavors. Even more important could be an exhortation to build new tools for preexisting agile systems like Hydra and Islandora.

Librarians must support our colleagues operating in outmoded P&T models by challenging departments and administrations to recognize collaborative work that benefits the entire university community. In most cases, our goals will never be totally aligned (humanities will continue to theorize and prototype; libraries will continue to preserve and standardize), but there will be always be much overlap between our professional goals.

Libraries are undertaking significant work to make space for the humanities in software (Muñoz, 2012), in staffing, in budget allocation, and in physical space allocation. It is now time for humanities funding models to make more space for the library; otherwise, the gap between these two naturally collaborative methodologies will continue to exist.

References

Brown, S. (2016). Tensions and tenets of socialized scholarship. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31(2), 283–300. http://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu063

Cartolano, R. (2015). History of Blacklight. Presented at the Blacklight Summit, Princeton University. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8J38S9M

Galey, A., & Ruecker, S. (2010). How a prototype argues. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25(4), 405–424. http://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqq021

Grumbach, E., & Mandell, L. (2014). Meeting Scholars Where They Are: The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) and a Social Humanities Infrastructure. Scholarly and Research Communication, 5(4). Retrieved from http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/189

Hwang, K., & Patuelli, C. (2016). Visibility and Discovery: Linked Open Data and the Politics of Cultural Narrative. In Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books/Library Juice Press.

Kretzschmar, W., & Potter, W. (n.d.). Library collaboration with large digital humanities projects. Literary and Linguistics Computing, 25(4), 439–445. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqq022

Mandell, L. (2012). Promotion and tenure for digital scholarship. Journal of Digital Humanities, 1(4). Retrieved from http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/promotion-and-tenure-for-digital-scholarship-by-laura-mandell/

Marcum, D. (2016). Due diligence and stewardship in a time of change and uncertainty (Ithaka S+R Issue Brief). Retrieved from http://www.sr.ithaka.org/publications/due-diligence-and-stewardship-in-a-time-of-change-and-uncertainty/

Modern Language Association. (2012, January). Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media. Retrieved June 17, 2016, from https://www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/Committees/Committee-Listings/Professional-Issues/Committee-on-Information-Technology/Guidelines-for-Evaluating-Work-in-Digital-Humanities-and-Digital-Media

Muñoz, T. (2012, August 19). Digital humanities in the library isn’t a service. Retrieved June 17, 2016, from http://trevormunoz.com/notebook/2012/08/19/doing-dh-in-the-library.html

Muñoz, T., & Flander, J. (2014, March 28). An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation. Retrieved from https://guide.dhcuration.org/contents/intro/

Nowviskie, B. (2011). A Skunk in the Library. Retrieved from http://nowviskie.org/2011/a-skunk-in-the-library/

Odell, J., & Pollock, C. (2016, April). Open Peer Review for Digital Humanities Projects: A Modest Proposal [University]. Retrieved June 14, 2016, from https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/

Rumsey, A. S. (2016, May 4). The Risk of Digital Oblivion. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Risk-of-Digital-Oblivion/236342

Sayers, J. (2016, January). From Make or Break to Care and Repair. Retrieved April 21, 2016, from http://maker.uvic.ca/inke16/

Singh, A. (2015, September). The Archive Gap: Race, the Canon, and the Digital Humanities. Retrieved from http://www.electrostani.com/2015/09/the-archive-gap-race-canon-and-digital.html

Spiro, L. (2012). “This Is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities. In M. K. Gold (Ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities (pp. 16–35). University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://minnesota.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677948.001.0001/upso-9780816677948-chapter-3

Wernimont, J., & Flanders, J. (2008). Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives: The Women Writers Project. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 29(2). Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/461386

Woods, S. (1994). Recovering the Past, Discovering the Future: The Brown University Women Writers Project. South Central Review, 11(2), 17–23. http://doi.org/10.2307/3189986

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Academic libraries have engaged increasingly in both critical librarianship and critical pedagogy, calling, for example, for “a more critical praxis for ILI [information literacy integration],” (Baer) and exploring the intersections between critical information literacy and scholarly communications (Roh). The digital humanities sit at the nexus of these various conversations, as DHers—librarians and non-librarians—cast a critical gaze toward their own practices.

[pullquote]Libraries can advance a vision of DH that is more inclusive and expansive, and at the same time less universal in its methods and approaches.[/pullquote]The 2015 Digital Humanities Forum, held September 24-26 and organized by the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH) at the University of Kansas, points to a praxis of critical librarianship and digital humanities in several ways. IDRH’s role in coordinating the Forum demonstrates how libraries can advance a vision of DH that is more inclusive and expansive, and at the same time less universal in its methods and approaches. IDRH is a small, minimally-staffed and funded DH center supported by KU Libraries, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, with the Libraries serving as IDRH’s primary administrative and physical home. IDRH’s focus on training, community building, and events programming (rather than building digital projects), and our position within the Libraries (all the authors were members of the Forum planning committee and based in the Libraries), has allowed us the flexibility and versatility to approach DH in a cross-disciplinary, inclusive way that is not limited by any one disciplinary, departmental, or methodological perspective. Our positionality presents an opportunity to develop and propose an alternative conceptual baseline for our work at KU, as well as broader DH practice.

From this stance, the 2015 planning committee set out to organize a Forum that would explore DH practice from critical race, gender, and postcolonial perspectives. Rather than focusing on DH work as a set of varied methodological practices within which critical approaches exist, the Forum proposed these critical approaches as the starting point for a three-day conversation (to our knowledge one other conference, “Digital Diversity 2015: Writing | Feminism | Culture,” had taken a similar stance).

The Forum was our way of asking what happens when we center critiques of archival gaps and arbitrariness, digital universalisms, and DH practice more broadly. Answering this question extended beyond crafting the conference theme—peripheries, barriers, hierarchies: rethinking access, inclusivity, and infrastructure in global DH practice. We purposefully recruited speakers—both leading and emerging scholars—from traditionally underrepresented groups and countries beyond the United States to create a space where a multiplicity of voices and perspectives could come together. This approach culminated in three days of workshops, keynote talks, papers, panels, and posters that generated conversations about critical praxis within digital humanities, with implications for DH and library/archival practices around building, curating, and providing access to digital collections. Within this broader framework, several interrelated motifs rose to the fore.

Turning a critical eye towards archives and open access, many presenters highlighted questions of audience, access, and ownership in digital projects and archives that challenged prevailing trends and approaches—even seemingly progressive ones. For example, in a passionate Saturday keynote talk on her work helping indigenous communities manage digital collections of their cultural heritage, Kim Christen Withey demonstrated how our technocentric approaches to DH practice often fail to address community concerns. Metadata schemas and access models in our common digital platforms don’t take into account the significance and use of those cultural materials within indigenous contexts. Even favorite tools of librarians and open access advocates, such as Creative Commons licenses, can work against the interests of local communities, effectively taking control of their own heritage out of their hands. To help address this, Withey has been helping develop Traditional Knowledge licenses that offer more nuanced approaches to managing cultural materials. She encouraged us to beware of one-size-fits-all approaches and to “pause, reflect, slow down and bring back an emphasis on building relationships” as a central value of our practice.

Many other speakers emphasized the importance of building relationships, fostering community ownership of their archives and belongings, and engaging local communities and their histories and cultures. In her Friday evening opening keynote talk on human rights archives, T-Kay Sangwand argued that post-custodial digital archiving (in which archivists provide oversight for digital records of items that remain in the custody of the original record creators) can respond to historical inequities by empowering community ownership of their own archives to help ensure a robust historical record. Anita Say Chan’s closing keynote addressed the myth of digital universalism in corporate/government attempts to digitize education in rural Peru without engaging with local histories and knowledge.

[pullquote]A significant portion of the Forum focused on challenging current assumptions of archival, library, and DH practices that privilege and preserve the memory and narratives of one group of people, often by writing other groups out of the archive[/pullquote]Several speakers brought a postcolonial lens to bear on digital archiving practices and digital humanities methods. Dhanashree Thorat, winner of the best graduate student paper, interrogated the September 11 Digital Archive, showing how the very structure, design, and organization of the archive helps frame an insular, nationalist perspective of 9/11. By focusing on archival structure, rather than on content, Thorat suggested that we can think about alternative archival practices that can undo erasures of minority voices and decenter hegemonic narratives. Amardeep Singh argued that studying someone as canonical and problematic as Rudyard Kipling is not possible without looking at his broader family (and not just the men) or Indian newspapers of Kipling’s period. Singh asked us to consider “what is lost when some authors are not deemed worthy of the intense curatorial labor digital humanities scholars have afforded to canonical figures,” and contended that by reading through archival gaps, and by shifting from a single author perspective to a network of authors and contexts, we can use the archive to critique its subject (Kipling) in an attempt to recover what was not originally collected. As these two talks exemplify, a significant portion of the Forum focused on challenging current assumptions of archival, library, and DH practices that privilege and preserve the memory and narratives of one group of people, often by writing other groups out of the archive (see, for example, the work of Lauren Klein (2013), as well as archival recovery projects such as “The Early Caribbean Digital Archive”).

[pullquote]This panel illustrated the importance of collaborating with scholars and practitioners on a global scale in order to understand the regional and cultural dynamics and complexities of DH.[/pullquote]Later in the day, a panel on international DH practices highlighted some of the barriers, infrastructural issues, and practices of DH activity in three countries. Jonathan Dettman considered these issues in the context of infrastructure in Cuba, while Titilola Babalola Aiyegbusi explored the barriers to DH in the Nigerian academy. Adriana Álvarez and Miriam Peña addressed the practicalities and experience of using digital technologies in the classroom at the National University Autonomous of Mexico’s eLaboraHd. This panel illustrated the importance of collaborating with scholars and practitioners on a global scale in order to understand the regional and cultural dynamics and complexities of DH. In recent years we have seen growing attention to this issue, for example, in attempts to make the annual Digital Humanities conference more globally inclusive through initiatives such as the Translation Toolkit and a forthcoming intent to expand the conference reviewer pool.

Embedded within and intertwined throughout these ongoing conversations was another motif about intersectionality and representation in DH—who gets to speak, when and where diverse voices are heard, how credit for DH work is distributed, and who does or does not get represented in the archives and in the scholarship. Rachel Mann questioned the labor practices of DH that silence (female) (graduate) students and prevent them from getting credit for their contributions.[pullquote]Who gets to speak, when and where are diverse voices heard, how is credit for DH work distributed, and who does or does not get represented in the archives and in the scholarship?[/pullquote] Amy Earhart critiqued the structure of DH—from its conferences to its practices—as a process of omission and exclusion. She called for us to look backward in order to look forward, noting that lowering the technology threshold of activist digital projects might enable us to use technology to promote inclusion and community building. Older, so-called “recovery” projects that used more “primitive” technology—as compared to today’s “high end” technological approaches—can be more persistent, and facilitate the participation of more people with a broader range of technical skills. And Jacque Wernimont’s work on haptic archives called for the humanizing of data—reinserting the personal into aggregate medical data sets to create connections between people. These presentations challenged the predominant infrastructures of DH funding and practice—the need for large-scale funding and high-end computing, traditional methods of scholarly review, publication, and academic labor—and suggested ways that important DH work can and must be done outside of these structures. In this regard they align with other emerging grassroots initiatives within the DH community, such as the voices calling for more formal visibility and recognition for those who contribute to digital projects (see, for example, “A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” or the Minimal Computing working group of GO::DH, which promotes principles and practices of minimal computing to facilitate the creation, communication and curation of significant humanities work that might otherwise be overlooked or never get made).

Overall, the presentations and conversations at the 2015 Forum pose important questions about how libraries and cultural institutions partner with students, faculty, and community members to build and curate digital collections. We learned many lessons from the 2015 DH Forum—lessons about DH librarianship and practice, as well as lessons about the powerful role librarians can play in creating safe, cross-disciplinary, and inclusive spaces to foster these kinds of conversations. We are proud to share this brief overview of the Forum here and encourage readers to view the video recordings of all the presentations online. The success of the 2015 Forum has inspired us to continue these conversations in the upcoming 2016 Forum on “Places, Spaces, Sites: Mapping Critical Intersections in Digital Humanities” and we look forward to sharing those conversations later this year.

References

Baer. A. (2013). “Critical information literacy in the college classroom: Exploring scholarly knowledge production through the digital humanities.” In Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis (An Edited Collection), eds. Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins. Library Juice Press: Los Angeles, 2013. pp. 99-120. Retrieved from http://libraryjuicepress.com/ILSJ.php

Klein, L. (2013). The image of absence: Archival silence, data visualization, and James Hemings. American Literature, 85(4), 661-688.

Roh, C (2016). Changing scholarly publishing through policy and scholarly communication education. College and Research Libraries News (February 2016): 82-85. Retrieved from http://m.crln.acrl.org/content/77/2/82.full

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Situated in the Scholars’ Lab, a small, research-oriented unit within the University of Virginia Library, we have come to expect the question, “What is digital humanities and why is it in the library?” We have excellent resources and responses to engage that question as well as questions about digital humanities (DH) more broadly. Those questions are typically asked by people outside of libraries. However, the recent University of Virginia Library reorganization flipped this question to, “What is the library and how does it practice DH?” The question was more inward focused—asked by and for fellow librarians—and made the practices and products of our DH work part of larger questions of identity and purpose of the University Library. This shift in question has been productive and given us opportunities to evaluate our locus within a university library.

The purpose of our Library’s reorganization centered around aligning its priorities to support the strategic goals of the University. The Library’s new goals included a deeper involvement with the research and teaching of our faculty, a sustained support for communities of scholars, and a commitment to innovation. In the Scholars’ Lab, we distilled these broad goals into two questions: 1) how does our Library practice DH, and 2) how can our experience enrich—and benefit from—this vital conversation among the Library staff as a whole. Ultimately, the reorganization prompted deep reflection into the nature of our Lab, its value within the Library, and how we communicate that value internally to the Library and externally to the broader University.

As embodied by our charter and ethos, the role of the Scholars’ Lab has been to conduct original research and development, support graduate methodological training, and foster advanced research in the humanities. We viewed ourselves—as did the Library with the wider campus community—as a unique center somewhat distinct from the larger Library system. The reorganization fronted tensions inherent in our situation: inside versus outside of the Library; bespoke research projects versus broadly applied systems and platforms; and creators versus consumers of digital tools as modes of best supporting digital work.

As the university and library reevaluated their priorities, it became clear that the Scholars’ Lab needed to revisit the value of in-depth consultations as well as the ways we attend to and share the value of our work. [pullquote]We are a small unit, focused on empowering researchers to fully understand and own their digital research process and product.[/pullquote] Although our Makerspace is changing this calculus, we have historically interacted with comparatively fewer people, at greater depth, than other service units within the Library. Before the reorganization, we assumed our work would speak for itself. We promoted the results of our collaborations but did not carefully track their number or pace, nor did we develop specific Library-centered language to better describe the nature and depth of our work with researchers.

Our charter succinctly outlines the approach we take to our own work and the work of others. We pride ourselves on welcoming anyone, regardless of knowledge or background, to come into our lab and learn how to do digital work. We’ve tried to foster an atmosphere of respectful but playful intellectual curiosity, where there’s no shame for not knowing something. We meet people where they are. And we try, as much as possible, to spend more time showing someone how to work on their projects than we would actually building a project for them. Our goal is to help researchers develop a better understanding of, and respect for, the diverse levels of expertise that can be present in any digital humanities project. [pullquote]What the reorganization unveiled, though, is that fostering an intellectual safe space—meeting people where they are—is also a Library ethos, a connection we have not yet fully explored or cultivated.[/pullquote]

This approach to DH work is difficult to practice, for several reasons. First, there is a tension between incorporating the Library’s service-oriented outlook (while resisting a perception of the Lab as a drop-off service for digital projects) and empowering researchers to own their projects. Second, depending on our own research interests, we do often commit more time to technical development on patron research projects than we publicly promise. Ultimately, this revealed a gap between our aspirational language of encouraging others to deeply understand and engage with their own work—from the technical to design to dissemination—and the messy day-to-day practice of collaboration. This has led to a lack of awareness, even within the Library, of the degree to which we support researchers who consult with us.  While we prioritize empowering project owners, we also aim to remove technical or process barriers to digital scholarship, even if that requires a significant investment of time from our staff.

The reorganization also forced us to examine the ways we had been complicit in unintentionally masking or segregating our work. For example, we share our output via different information pathways, including our own website, at conferences, and in publications geared towards digital humanities and GIS rather than libraries more broadly. Additionally, by prioritizing consultations with graduate students and faculty, we sometimes forget to include valuable adjacent work of other Library units, such as metadata services or digital curation. [pullquote]It became clear that we needed to realign both the platforms and modes of our DH work as well as to translate the DH-centric jargon back to the Library.[/pullquote] Similarly, as the Library redefines itself as a space central to advanced digital work, it needs a unified sense both of what digital practitioners do and of what resources, including time, staffing, and intellectual rigor, are required.

To achieve this, we need to demystify our own work, and make the pathways into collaboration with the Scholars’ Lab or use of the Makerspace more explicit. This clarity is lacking not only in the Library but in the rest of the University as well. Local practitioners, both those who are already engaged in DH work, and those who have an interest in and willingness to explore digital methods, find themselves unsure of relevant resources within the University. They may be unaware of other scholars who are investigating similar questions or complementary techniques. Further, many are unaware of conversations, including events, happening outside of home departments.

In response, we have launched the DH@UVA website in an effort to network the broad community of DH practitioners and newcomers across the University. Within the Library, we have reinvigorated conversations, begun before the reorganization, to pilot a Library Praxis program. Emerging out of our Praxis Program for humanities graduate students, and influenced by innovative adaptations of Praxis for Libraries—such as Columbia’s Developing Librarian Project—as well as the feedback we received from our DH 2014 workshop on digital humanities immersion as library professional development, we hope to further demystify, seed, and scale advanced digital research within the library. Overall, both initiatives seek to bridge our aspirational language of how we work with the materially-grounded learning-by-doing practice of the Lab. In essence, these projects help us both clarify why this approach is valuable and exemplify how it is quintessentially Library work.

Further, while the practitioners in the Scholars’ Lab may hold technical knowledge, they are in no way the only—or even the best—voices within the complex ecology of a digital project. One additional goal of Library Praxis is to map the digital project lifecycle, to tease out potential intersections with other units in the Library—from subject knowledge and metadata creation to scholarly communication and digital preservation—with an eye towards capitalizing on the expertise therein. In advance of Library Praxis, we are reconfiguring our process to one that incorporates Zach Holman’s opt-in transparency, including more robust public documentation on platforms that are utilized by librarians and more librarian collaboration on research. Moving forward, we want to build a framework which details the preliminary interview/memorandum of understanding between the Lab and researcher, a set of milestones detailing when other Library units may roll on or off of the project, and projected preservation plans for the extended life of the project. The framework would emphasize the iterative nature of digital work, and include prompts for the necessary two-way conversation around it.

Throughout the UVA Library’s reorganization, the Scholars’ Lab has had to re-evaluate its working process and, more importantly, the language by which we describe our process. Surprisingly, we found many shared concerns across the Lab and the Library, yet our language did not yet make those shared directions clear or point to clear modes of collaboration. The question of “what is a library and how does it support DH?” prompted us to begin examining our value, and aligning our public statements about our digital work and our actual practices.

While we are taking steps to ameliorate the discrepancies we uncovered, several significant challenges remain. How do we continue to be active participants and practitioners within the DH community while fostering clear bridges among Library staff, both in terms of skill acquisition and project experience? Further, how do we, as a public-facing research and development Lab, shape the research agenda of the Library? Our hope is that by realigning our language to speak to both the DH and library communities and fostering ways to share more broadly approaches to digital work, we can contribute to the the Library’s sense of itself as both a place that supports and does advanced digital research.

Bibliography

Jackson, Stephen J. “Rethinking Repair,” in Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, eds. Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society.  MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 2014.

Holman, Zach. “Opt-In Transparency” Zach Holman. 12 October 2015. Web. 16 June 2016.

Nowviskie, Bethany. “too small to fail.” Bethany Nowviskie. 13 October 2012. Web. 16 April 2016.

Ramsay, Stephen. “Care of the Soul.” Stephen Ramsay. 8 October 2010. Web. 16 April 2016.

–––, “Centers Are People.” Stephen Ramsay. 25 April 2012. Web. 16 April 2016.

Star, Susan Leigh and Anselm Strauss. “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 1999. Web 16 April 2016.

Unsworth, John. “Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of Failure.” Volume 3, Issue 2 Journal of Electronic Publishing. December 1997. Web. 16 April 2016.

Vandegrift, Micah. “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in the Library?” In the Library with the LeadPipe. 27 June 2012. Web. 16 April 2016.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Many pieces on libraries and digital humanities focus on the library as a space, an organization, and an institution, with the roles of librarians typically understood as functioning primarily within that space.[1. Among the examples are the excellent essays collected in White, J. W., & Gilbert, H. (2016). Laying the foundation: Digital humanities in academic libraries. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press; and Hartsell-Gundy, A., Braunstein, L., & Golomb, L. (2015). Digital humanities in the library: Challenges and opportunities for subject specialists. Chicago: American Library Association.] While librarianship is, obviously, most often practiced in the library, the perspectives, skills, ethics, and approaches librarians bring to digital humanities research and pedagogy may operate outside of the contexts of the library as an institutional unit. Librarians—MLS holders and academics with work experience in the library—may work as digital humanities specialists in departments and colleges, as faculty members in departments, in DH centers not located within the library, in campus IT units, as instructional designers, in writing centers, or in any number of other contexts. Based on our experiences working as DH specialists “on-site” within academic units, we will examine the nature of work when digital humanities librarianship is practiced and embedded outside of the institutional contexts of the library (Carlson & Kneale, 2011).

In 2014, two units at Michigan State University independently sought to bolster digital humanities pedagogy and research by hiring digital humanities specialists to work within disciplinary units. In these positions, we have been practicing digital humanities in the disciplines in a manner that is heavily imbued with the values of librarianship. We bring to our positions a focus on digital and information literacy, scholarly communication, sustainability, information ethics, and access and serve as advocates for libraries and librarianship in both pedagogical and research contexts (Smiley, 2016).

Library-influenced Pedagogy in the Classroom

Like librarians in the library, we provide modular or session-based classes for disciplinary faculty on a range of topics. Additionally, we both teach semester-long courses on digital humanities and digital history. In any of these pedagogical contexts—the one-shot session or the semester long course—we advocate for information literacy sessions, special collections and archives visits, and librarian sessions as crucial components of digital humanities education. Through our placement directly in the disciplines, we are able to advocate for library involvement  from within, and provide another voice and level of support for the value of librarian-student interaction.

[pullquote]Students in the class were able to connect with librarians on a more substantive and sustained level through this continued face-to-face and virtual interaction.[/pullquote]In our own classes, we actively involve librarians through classroom visits or class trips to the library. When availability allows, we have included an embedded librarian in the course. For example, one of the MSU Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Librarians was the embedded librarian in “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” in which he led two class sessions, answered questions as a librarian resource on the course Slack, and attended four final project working class sessions to assist in providing one on one support with student projects. Students in the class were able to connect with librarians on a more substantive and sustained level through this continued face-to-face and virtual interaction. This model of embedded librarianship was greatly beneficial to the students, and shows the opportunity that comes from deep involvement of librarians in course design and teaching, and can serve as a model for other instructors to implement. Through our direct contact with disciplinary faculty, we use our own collaborations with librarians in the classroom to provide models for disciplinary faculty to follow and for librarians to encourage. From librarian class visits to information and digital literacy focused projects and assignments, there is a productive continuum of embeddedness to encourage.[2. The practice of embedded librarianship can range from having a librarian’s email be on the course syllabus to having the librarian attend every class session. Resources and willingness determine what is possible in any particular context, although “fully embedded team teaching is the gold standard” (Sullivan and Porter, 2016). See Sullivan, B., and Porter, K. (2016). From one-shot sessions to embedded librarian: Lessons learned over seven years of successful faculty-librarian collaboration. College & Research Libraries News 77(1), p. 34-37. http://crln.acrl.org/content/77/1/34.full and Andrews, C. (2015). Embedded Librarianship: Best practices explored and redefined. International Journal of Educational Organization and Leadership 22(2), p. 1-14. http://academicworks.cuny.edu/bx_pubs/3/]

Beyond the enhanced opportunities for librarian instruction and interaction with our classes and students, our own training leads us to imbue our syllabi and pedagogical style with the values of librarianship. Courses in the Digital Humanities curriculum strongly reflect key aspects of digital humanities in libraries, including open access, sustainable formats and tools, archives and archival theory, data sharing, information ethics, metadata, openness, and digital publication.[3. See information about Michigan State University Digital Humanities curriculum at http://digitalhumanities.msu.edu/curriculum] In addition to leading or co-leading courses in our Digital Humanities curriculum, we also have the opportunity to integrate smaller digital components into a substantial number of courses and reach a larger proportion of the student body. Instruction and exercises led by us blend disciplinary concepts and course content with critical lessons on multimodal composition and publication, data evaluation and usage, and archival theory to produce digital projects in courses of all levels.

Research Collaboration through Relationship Building

We often serve as partners or advisors on digital humanities research projects, alongside others in the libraries and in Matrix.[4. Matrix is MSU’s center for digital humanities and social sciences, and their staff includes Catherine Foley, digital librarian.] Because of our affiliations within departments, disciplinary faculty members are in close contact with us, are organizationally bonded, and develop personal relationships that fuel our work with them on research projects. The on-site embedded librarianship that we practice seeks to address some of the challenges that can occur in research relationships between disciplinary faculty and librarians. At times, faculty may not think to consult librarians until they are far along in their research, and many see librarians as service providers, not as skilled experts with whom to collaborate. Assumptions and historical professional divisions between the work of librarians and the work of disciplinary faculty are well known (Keener, 2015). Studies on faculty-librarian collaboration have shown mixed experiences—some faculty tend to view librarians as collaborators and partners, while others see them as service providers (Manuel, Beck, and Molloy, 2005). [pullquote]We are able to act as a channel for the faculty to connect with librarians best suited to collaborate on a project with them, whether that person is a subject specialist, a metadata expert, or an instructional designer.[/pullquote]As Andrews discussed anecdotally, “resistance is a common issue” (2015). Despite these challenges, there are great opportunities from collaboration, and success in bringing together librarians with faculty is essential to the larger project of digital humanities. Our experiences echo findings in Keener (2015) that the collaborative model can succeed if librarians and disciplinary faculty can engage with each other and recognize what each brings to the table.

Our close working relationships with faculty have shown to be beneficial to digital research in two ways.[5. As discussed by Carlson and Kneale, “build<ing> trusted relationships” is a cornerstone to successful embedded librarianship.] First, they foster an environment where disciplinary faculty think of us first when embarking upon a project, and they don’t hesitate to consult with us about their work. In turn, they gain the perspectives and advice of librarians (us), and receive contact information for librarians—wherever they are located—and other specialists immediately.[6. These conversations may take place informally but also often occur as more formal consultation meetings, echoing the type of librarianship performed in the traditional reference interview. See Visconti, A. (2016, Feb. 28). Service +/- collaboration for digital humanities in the library (a DH job talk) http://literaturegeek.com/2016/02/28/DHjobtalk for the connection between the reference interview and the digital humanities consultation.] This early contact helps to move crucial conversations about digital humanities scholarship production, metadata, digital curation, or other topics upstream in the research cycle. The second benefit of this contact is in fostering working relationships that view digital humanities work as a partnership between librarians and specialists and disciplinary experts, rather than a service model. Our personal familiarity, histories of collaboration, and early involvement in these projects situate librarians as intellectual partners, and less as individuals who provide a service. The relationships and working habits that we form with disciplinary faculty are related to those valued by subject librarians. Yet rather than substitute for the subject librarian in any one discipline, we are able to act as a channel for the faculty to connect with librarians best suited to collaborate on a project with them, whether that person is a subject specialist, a metadata expert, or an instructional designer.

[pullquote]We have integrated topics like information ethics, archival theory, and scholarly communication into close to fifty courses where it did not exist previously; we have connected at least a dozen faculty with librarians to provide course sessions on information literacy, user experience, and special collections; and, we have provided early research consultation with dozens more faculty and graduate students.[/pullquote]Our position of embedded librarianship is also bolstered by our participation in library digital humanities initiatives. We work alongside other librarians to coordinate, promote, and create programming, serve on the MSU Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Committee, meet with job candidates, and serve on hiring committees. By functioning in multiple spaces and building strong relationships with individuals in multiple units, we are able to bridge disciplinary experts and library experts, connecting people based on their needs.

We believe the benefits from working closely with disciplinary faculty have been crucial to the successes we have encountered thus far. We have integrated topics like information ethics, archival theory, and scholarly communication into close to fifty courses where it did not exist previously; we have connected at least a dozen faculty with librarians to provide course sessions on information literacy, user experience, and special collections; and, we have provided early research consultation with dozens more faculty and graduate students. We also recognize that this process of relationship-building and collaboration takes time and are fortunate to have been given the time from day one within our daily work to organically grow these rapports. Our unique positions have enabled us to see that digital humanities librarianship can succeed in any unit through active participation in courses, community-building activities, and individual research consultations, throughout the process promoting the central values of librarianship and the intellectual contributions of librarians. We hope these lessons can be applied more broadly to digital humanities and digital scholarship librarians, subject specialists and liaisons, and others to focus on relationship building, to have discussions with faculty about joining research groups, to meet with faculty often, to play larger roles in classes, or to have more embedded librarians in digital humanities courses.

Works Cited

Andrews, C. (2015). Embedded Librarianship: Best practices explored and redefined. International Journal of Educational Organization and Leadership 22(2), p. 1-14. http://academicworks.cuny.edu/bx_pubs/3/

Carlson, J., Kneale, R. (2011). Embedded librarians in the research context. College & Research Libraries News 72(3), p. 167-170. http://crln.acrl.org/content/72/3/167.short

Hartsell-Gundy, A., Braunstein, L., & Golomb, L. (2015). Digital humanities in the library: Challenges and opportunities for subject specialists. Chicago: American Library Association.

Keener, A. (2015). The arrival fallacy: Collaborative research relationships in the digital humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9(2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000213/000213.html

Manuel, K., Beck, S.E., and Molloy, M. (2005). “An ethnographic study of attitudes influencing faculty collaboration in library instruction.” The Reference Librarian 43.89-90 (2005): 139. doi:10.1300/J120v43n89_10

Smiley, B. (2016). ‘Deeply embedded subject librarians’: An interview with Brandon Locke and Kristen Mapes. dh+lib Scene Reports. https://dhandlib.org/2016/02/10/deeply-embedded-subject-librarians-an-interview-with-brandon-locke-and-kristen-mapes/

Sullivan, B., and Porter, K. (2016). From one-shot sessions to embedded librarian: Lessons learned over seven years of successful faculty-librarian collaboration. College & Research Libraries News 77(1), p. 34-37. http://crln.acrl.org/content/77/1/34.full

Visconti, A. (2016, Feb. 28). Service +/- collaboration for digital humanities in the library (a DH job talk). [Blog]. http://literaturegeek.com/2016/02/28/DHjobtalk

White, J. W., & Gilbert, H. (2016). Laying the foundation: Digital humanities in academic libraries. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Last year, I had a conversation where I felt especially articulate about the collaborative aspects of my work. “I don’t write code for people,” I explained, “but it’s important to me to work with them; not only because I enjoy that, but also because my goal for them to be able to learn about technology/digital humanities without feeling isolated.” The person I was having the conversation with nodded knowingly and replied “Oh, so you’re doing the hand-holding. I won’t do that work.” I was aware of feeling nonplussed by that reply, but it took me a few minutes of thinking about it to figure out why. Then I realized that “Oh, you do the hand-holding” felt synonymous to a couple of other comments that I’d heard before, from various people: “You’re the faculty security blanket.” “You’re their DH teddy bear.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard these comments, but it was the first time that I had genuinely processed how negative they were, both in regards to my work, and to the people I was working with. It was the first time I fully recognized the pejorative views of emotional labor that circulate particularly in digital humanities and library-related contexts.

[pullquote]If I am sometimes the security blanket, then at other times I am the nightmare in their closet, a harbinger of mistakes in data curation or a spectre of the increased work that digital humanities scholarship requires.[/pullquote]Perhaps I was more alert because of the rise in discussions about emotional labor in the last year. While there is a growing body of academic research, at least some of the uptick is due to Jess Zimmerman’s article “Where’s My Cut?: On Unpaid Emotional Labor” in The Toast, and to the ensuing discussion on Metafilter, which contains 2,113 comments and when printed, is 857 pages long. While much of the Metafilter thread is oriented towards emotional labor in the context of marriages or romantic relationships, posts throughout discuss, contrast, and draw connections between domestic and workplace emotional labor.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart was the first book-length scholarly discussion of emotional labor, defining it as “induc[ing] or suppress[ing] feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.”[1. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 7.] Her initial example of emotional labor workers were flight attendants, whose jobs involve helping passengers feel safe and cared for while in transit.

Flight attendants’ emotional labor can involve people being afraid for their lives. The emotional labor I perform as a DH librarian is more focused on the lives of people’s projects; and specifically, I would define it as “managing people’s emotions so that they can make effective project decisions.” One reason that I was caught off-guard by the exchange with my colleague is that when I think of my work as a DH consultant and librarian, emotional labor is not the first label that I would use to categorize it. Instead, I would characterize my activities in a variety of ways, including project design, technology/method implementation, risk assessment, and scalability and contingency planning. These areas have aspects of design and logistical work—but they involve emotional labor because of the ways that they are closely entangled with optimism and expectations.

In DH, one of the most important processes that new scholars and practitioners go through/work towards is the realization that not knowing something, and not even knowing where to begin looking for the answer, doesn’t mean that you’re not a “real” digital humanist. It’s the equivalent of the process that Tilde Ann Thurium describes in her Model View Culture article on the emotional labor involved in learning to code: “Getting stuck on a problem bubbles up worries that I’m not cut out for my chosen career. In addition to debugging techniques, I had to teach myself how to calm down enough to get un-stuck.”

[pullquote]…the emotional labor I perform for scholars as a digital humanities librarian is partly about offering confidence that they can learn that skill, even if it feels strikingly different from their existing abilities.[/pullquote]The people I work with are still substantially teaching themselves to get un-stuck, though I provide some specific problem-solving techniques. In these contexts, the emotional labor I perform for scholars as a digital humanities librarian is partly about offering confidence that they can learn that skill, even if it feels strikingly different from their existing abilities. It’s also about transparently disclosing some of the potential obstacles they might face, and which are hard for newcomers to imagine in advance. My goal is to underscore that obstacles, like bugs, are par for the course; and also, to give people a sense of what digital work involves so that they can decide whether it’s something that they want to pursue. I’m not interested in being an evangelist. But if scholars feel that their identity as novice computer users is incompatible with DH, then they’re not likely to feel any more a part of the field when they have greater knowledge of technology and still encounter difficult questions, whether technological or not. If I am sometimes the security blanket, then at other times I am the nightmare in their closet, a harbinger of mistakes in data curation or a spectre of the increased work that digital humanities scholarship requires. In these instances, my goal is not to toughen them up via academic hazing rituals. Instead, it’s to render potential challenges less surprising, and to prepare scholars by having them practice speculative design thinking and problem-solving.

If I were a departmental professor engaged in formal supervision of graduate students, then this sort of work might be more readily characterized as advising, mentoring, or teaching; and valued as such. Instead, as a librarian, my consulting relationships are almost entirely voluntary,[2. Except for the occasional instances where I teach graduate and undergraduate courses.] and could theoretically dissolve easily at any time. While I can make strong recommendations, the scholars I work with are the ultimate decision makers; and this is why my work is emotional labor, as opposed to pure technical advice. The way that I provide guidance and information will have an emotional impact, and people will make better decisions if they are feeling steady, resilient, and energized, rather than depleted, by their work.

[pullquote]People are often quite right to be thoughtful and cautious about embarking on DH research, and I am angry on their behalf about the linguistic implications of terms… [that] infantilize researchers, and reduce me to little more than a comfort object.[/pullquote]I happen to enjoy emotional labor, and feel fortunate to have supervisors who recognize my activities as valuable, and also know that my capacity for such work isn’t limitless. I’m all too aware that the acknowledgement and support that I receive is an exception to the norm. Perhaps the hardest part of this work is that so many DH endeavors inevitably involve unpredictable elements; and the stakes (tenure files, big grant applications) are high, and long-term. People are often quite right to be thoughtful and cautious about embarking on DH research, and I am angry on their behalf about the linguistic implications of terms like “hand-holding,” “security blanket,” and “teddy-bear,” which infantilize researchers, and reduce me to little more than a comfort object. These characterizations suggest that emotional labor shouldn’t be necessary, if only researchers were more competent.

While many aspects of digital humanities emotional labor are related to working with researchers entering the field, it would be a mistake to characterize it as merely a start-up cost: emotional labor is a component any time that a question or decision can’t be easily reduced to a straightforward answer of numbers or costs with no risks involved; or in any situation that involves changes from standard procedures—so, most questions. Many people in academic environments feel some sort of risk associated with DH, whether they’re embarking on a new type digital research and worrying that a methodology will fail (i.e., a researcher who has worked with text mining, but is beginning to work with GIS), or are fearful that their colleagues will see their efforts as service rather than scholarship; or, alternatively, concerned that a colleague’s digitally-based research will make non-digital scholarship seem less valuable.

I think of those situations as institutional contexts, but there are research contexts as well: emotional labor is a factor in the choices that are made around data/metadata creation, normalization, and analysis. The choices made in categorization and controlled vocabularies are frequently about human subjects. While much of my DH emotional labor is about the individual or personal impacts if a project succeeds or fails, I also regularly find myself prompting researchers to consider the emotional ramifications of their choices for other people. If a project is built on objectification or othering, if it veers towards technosolutionism, then I have a responsibility to raise concerns—and when I raise them, I’m aware that the response will be affected by the level of trust that I’ve built in the relationship. The outcomes of these conversations can have higher stakes than are immediately apparent, because digital research (especially when it includes data curation and creation) is positioned to become infrastructure that is used and reused. As Deb Verhoeven observed in her recent keynote “Towards a Model of ‘Digital Infrapuncture'” at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School, cultural infrastructure catalyzes—and even tiny pieces of infrastructure can have substantial impacts.  Considering those impacts fully requires empathy and emotional contemplation—and someone who, if necessary, can channel those emotions into productivity.[3. “Infrapuncture” is Verhoeven’s combination of “infrastructure” and “acupuncture,” and derived from Marco Casagrande’s theory of urban acupuncture, which blends urban design with micro-interventions in order to effect larger change. For a concise summation of Verhoeven’s principles of infrapuncture, see slide 21 in the set linked above.]

[pullquote]… messiness can be synonymous with complexity and, in that regard, can be generative rather than unproductive, and generative of engagement, rather than just tidying.[/pullquote]For a variety of reasons, too numerous to discuss at length in this essay, digital humanities work (whether it involves developing research or infrastructure) is frequently and accurately described as messy. Any time that a situation can be characterized as messy, or in any situation where changes in practice are warranted, emotional labor will play a role in how smoothly those changes are implemented and how lasting they will be. My position is focused on research; however, other contexts for this work include transitions between technological systems such as library catalogs. “Mess” has negative connotations that intersect with gendered labor: messes are things that women clean up; emotional labor, if we think of it as merely dealing with emotions, is just another type of mess that people assume women can/should handle. However, messiness can be synonymous with complexity and, in that regard, can be generative rather than unproductive, and generative of engagement, rather than just tidying.

Emotional labor is needed in academia and libraries—whether because it plays a part in working through difficult and potentially groundbreaking research questions, or because it is necessary in dynamic situations, and neither technology nor academia show signs of stabilizing any time soon. It has correctly been characterized as a labor problem that frequently results in burnout, anxiety, and depression. More wide-ranging discussions like those that have occurred in the last year can play a part in improving the situation—but also risk sequestering emotional labor as women’s work, rather than less gendered forms of expertise, and consequently, relegating those who engage in it to lower-paid positions with fewer opportunities for advancement. Understanding what type of labor problem emotional labor represents, and the possible solutions, will depend on how we classify and name the activities that fall within its scope.

[pullquote]If emotional labor is ongoing, and acknowledged as work that deals with risk-focused, administrative, and scholarly decisions, then it can contribute to reframing the relationship between scholars and librarians as one of more equal partnership, rather than mere service provision.[/pullquote]For librarians, and digital humanities librarians in particular, the question of whether this labor is part of start-up or ongoing support is a key question, and not only because it affects the ability to scale and assess how much labor is needed (and how much any laborer is able to provide without transgressing their limits). If emotional labor is ongoing, and acknowledged as work that deals with risk-focused, administrative, and scholarly decisions, then it can contribute to reframing the relationship between scholars and librarians as one of more equal partnership, rather than mere service provision.

While I can point to activities that involve emotional labor, I am hesitant to try and set firm parameters on its boundaries in libraries. Some of these components are more malleable than others. For example, I strongly suspect that the voluntary and informal nature of librarian consulting relationships contributes to emotional labor going un- or under-acknowledged. I see a tendency to conceptualize a librarian’s role as being available for research collaboration, rather than actively involved. And yet, merely formalizing the consulting relationship isn’t the answer, because the voluntary nature of working with a librarian also has a positive influence on the emotional context in which librarians and scholars work, specifically because I informally advise, rather than formally direct; and I would hate to relinquish the freedom that characterizes my interactions.

Emotional labor is not going away. The real question is what it will become.

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In The Archival Turn in Feminism, Kate Eichhorn notes that “…what might be properly described as ‘women’s archives’ or ‘women’s collections’ have long been governed by the teleological assumptions upon which most archival collections are structured, there is nothing necessarily teleological about the development of explicitly feminist archives and special collections” (Eichhorn, 2013, p.31). One might even say that feminist archives and special collections exist in order to complicate seemingly innate assumptions of a singular narrative of history. The question of how to ensure a feminist method of curation and even that the act of archiving itself is a mode of feminist action has been a prevalent dialogue among various publics.

[pullquote]The question of how to ensure a feminist method of curation and even that the act of archiving itself is a mode of feminist action has been a prevalent dialogue among various publics.[/pullquote]We hope to further this discussion by asking what digital feminist curation looks like using our recent work on Smith’s first Massive Open Online Course “The Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World” as a case study.[1. This article is an overview of thinking and questioning throughout the process. Because of the limited scope of this piece, we could not fully represent all of our questions and challenges throughout our case study. Instead, we hope the points we’ve chosen spark dialogue to continue to think through all aspects of process.] Detailing how we worked with partners, in particular undergraduate students and activists, we were compelled to rethink the ethical boundaries in an exciting but risky public sphere. We carved out room for a dialogue for activists to “talk back” and work with us to locate critique and interpretation rather than merely producing a flat, transactional analysis. Through this model, we suggest that the application of “media translation,” as coined by media scholar Katherine Hayles, to digital formats must be as feminist as its product (Hayles, 2005).

In 2014, Smith College launched an initiative to create a distinctive, women’s-focused, liberal arts-grounded Massive Open Online Course, “The Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World.” It launched in early 2016. The course is based off of a seminar that has been taught for over a decade by Smith Psychology Professor Lauren Duncan (who also is the MOOC instructor). Core to its MOOC iteration was inclusion of Smith undergraduates’ research.

Through the framework of psychological theory, students of Duncan’s Spring 2014 seminar mined primary resources from the Sophia Smith Collection of Smith College, the oldest and one of the largest women’s history collections in the United States and specializing in women’s activism, social justice, reproductive justice, rights, and equality across racial and class boundaries. Each student chose one of nine activists, Virginia (Ginny) Apuzzo, Byllye Avery, Joan Biren (JEB), Katsi Cook, Luz Alvarez Martinez, Loretta Ross, Gloria Steinem, Nkenge Toure, and Carmen Vazquez, selected from the Voices of Feminism Collection in the Sophia Smith Collection and spent at least four hours a week in the archives over the course of a semester. From the activists’ oral histories and donated papers, students used Trello and then Timeline JS to curate timelines, which highlighted key moments in the activists’ personal and political development. Their scholarship is central featured in the MOOC as each unit of the MOOC highlights a different contemporary activists. The timelines are foundational for each week in the MOOC course, which focuses on a different contemporary activist.

[pullquote]When we embarked on the MOOC, we made a commitment to our team—and to ourselves—that it would a feminist project. … Defining what a feminist project could be was a challenge.[/pullquote]When we embarked on the MOOC, we made a commitment to our team—those within special collections including a fifteen-person staff, those on the partnership MOOC production group, and to ourselves—that it would a feminist project.[2. Credit was another mediation. Our goal with credit has always been to acknowledge the foundations of other feminists’ work and scholarship we built upon. However, we also know that all histories elide labor. This endnote is an imperfect marker of collaboration to acknowledge the many hands across time and place of this work.] Defining what a feminist project could be was a challenge. From the outset, we knew that collaboration, co-creation, and focused attention on structure, especially the structure design which often equates to the representation or re-creation of power dynamics, would prove key. As part of a larger production team, bridged across College units, equally commingling faculty, staff, students, and activists, human collaboration pushed against theories, resulting in compromise. For example, the largely non-hierarchical structure lent toward creating literal and digital space for feminist methodology, but also fostered mediation. Design was especially crucial as we thought about working in a mode that thus far had been defined as less rigorous, less thoughtful modes of learning. In “Will MOOCs be Flukes?,” Maria Konnikova suggests MOOCs would likely be more effective if they didn’t shy away from challenging students, rather than presenting a fluid experience which gives the false impression of the learning and retention” (Konnikova, 2014). Through each phase of the project, we encountered an opportunity to wrestle with the practical application of feminist theory, ethics, and ideologies.

In her foundational essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House,” anthologized in the equally influential This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981), Audre Lorde foregrounds how crucial the process of inclusion must be from the very seed of feminist project: “Within the interdependence of mutual (non-dominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant to effect those changes which can bring our future into being” (Lorde, 1983, p.107). As a feminist collection and archive, the Sophia Smith Collection is rich with many women’s voices, documenting the diverse lived experience of women, especially through the Voices of Feminism Collection which the activists were selected from. As such, the seed project was feminist in concept and expression.

However, despite the misconception in some public quarters that archives are stagnant fragments of the past, we believe that archives must not only document the past and its silences but that they must also inform the present and guide us in crafting a future. As a result, the way we (re)present the digital manifestations of archives must revisit the kinds of questions asked when such collections were created as well as additional questions that address new capacities, especially circulation and scale.

[pullquote]We believe that archives must not only document the past and its silences but that they must also inform the present and guide us in crafting a future.[/pullquote]Inspired by media scholar Tara McPherson’s provocation to “design —from their very conception—digital tools and applications that emerge from cultural theory and, in particular, from a feminist concern for difference,” we undertook the challenge to “design for difference” in a collaborative approach to content strategy (McPherson, 204, p. 178). Essentially asking: Can we reclaim the structure of the MOOC and transform it into a feminist space that reflects the principles of access and intersectionality our archive is built upon?[3. We would like to note FemTechNet’s DOCC model (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) which revises the format of MOOCs in order to create a feminist distributive framework. We share the commitment of FemTechNet’s principles to learning, diversity, collaboration, history and transparency, and experimentation. We offer this MOOC as complementary model which does not change MOOC framework but rather turns it on its head.]

The “act of translation” in digitizing these women’s stories could have easily blunted the feminist foundations of these activists’ personal collections. To curate activists’ stories from their collections and display them without a dialogue would be recreating the dominant-submissive spectator dynamic that feminist critic Laura Mulvey exposes in her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey notes that in the medium of film, “A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude” (Mulvey 1989). While the genre/dynamic of a male-female fictional narrative is not present, Mulvey’s work reminds us that the politics of viewing are inherent whenever we designate a “subject.”

Questioning dynamics of viewing, we began to consider: Whose feminism are we representing? Who has agency? How can the power of digital representation be distributed? Structures such as the legal obligation to filter activists’ materials through intellectual property (IP) rights were further challenges of mediation. Did these practices limit the self-representation of the individuals involved? Conversely was IP, exercised through a stringent feminist ethics sieve, a better way to ensure authenticity of self-representation?

Our answer was to co-create the content with students and activists. As noted earlier, students generated content in the form a digital timeline, making appraisal decisions that weighed content value against visual interest against creating signposts for psychological theory. Each of the nine activists to be featured in the MOOC were invited back to the Smith College campus to review and revise the narrative timelines students’ curated using each of the activists’ collections, to speak back to the psychology theories that were chosen as a framework, and to learn about signing off on this project would mean for the circulation of their collection. Continual feedback loops between all layers of the partnership affirmed the process as iterative and inclusive.

[pullquote]We knew that a feminist approach to labor, in addition to a less hierarchical structure, meant fully acknowledging and compensating our partners whether that be through honoraria, paid internships, or class credit.[/pullquote]Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Andzalúda in This Bridge Called My Back, noted “This anthology was created with a sense of urgency…In compiling this book we both maintained two or more jobs just to keep the book and ourselves alive” (Moraga and Andzalúda, 1983, p. lv). Like Moraga and Andzalúda, we heard similar stories from activists we collaborated who jumped into their work because they saw/experienced a need but often still had to juggle jobs and family. We were sure to build labor into our budget proposal.Too often in collaborative projects, labor is expected but not fully valued. We knew that a feminist approach to labor, in addition to a less hierarchical structure, meant fully acknowledging and compensating our partners whether that be through honoraria, paid internships, or class credit. We were two of many.

Feminist theory should have the room to imagine perfection without constraint, because although we cannot ever reach it in practice, it suggests a vision that makes its realization worth grappling with. As we move into new modes of representation such as digitization, however seemingly “only” technical or easily translated, we must make space to do the hard work of theorizing alongside it. To do so is to fulfill the ethical obligations we have as stewards and feminists. To not do so is contribute to the building of a house we do not want to live in.

Bibliography

Eichhorn, K. (2013). The archival turn in feminism: Outrage in order. Philadephia, PA: Temple University Press.

Hayles, Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2005. Print.

Konnikova, Maria. “Will MOOCs Be Flukes?” The New Yorker. N.p., 7 Nov. 2014. Web. 10 June 2016.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. By Gloria Anzaldúa. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983. N. pag. Print.

McPherson, Tara. “Designing for Difference.” Differences 25.1 (2014): 177-88. Web.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color, 1983. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures (1989): 14-26. Web.

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Support for digital humanities, either through a dedicated physical center or a collection of skilled positions under the “digital scholarship” banner, are increasingly found in libraries, rather than in departments. It is often argued that this is a practical move, since libraries facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. While the disciplines move to the library’s physical space, few are invested in moving their curricula into the library’s intellectual space. As libraries scramble to accommodate the needs of digital humanists, they struggle to incorporate the questions of the digital humanities into their graduate curricula. This discussion between Micah Vandegrift and Sarah Stanley explores how our current educational systems create miscommunications between library professionals and humanists. Through a review of self-described “digital humanities” syllabi, half in humanities programs and half in Library and Information Studies (LIS), this paper examines how digital humanities’ curricula often fail to emphasize efficient and meaningful cross-disciplinary collaboration. The conversation gestures towards pedagogical alternatives that address the shifting mode(s) of labor in DH.

Micah: As the digital scholarship coordinator at FSU Libraries, I’ve invested in the practical applications of digital work in the library. My path began when I studied “digital librarianship” in library school after completing a traditional humanities M.A. My experience in both of my graduate degrees culminated in a blog called Hack Library School, where I and a group of co-bloggers interrogated our educational experiences, questioned our curriculum, and challenged the supposed bridge from library school student to working librarian. I’ve remained interested in library schools curriculum and the preparation of librarians for the actual work of the profession.

Sarah: Although I am the Assistant Digital Scholarship Coordinator at FSU Libraries, my background is in the humanities. I received a master’s in English from Northeastern University in August of 2015. Part of my interest in digital humanities education (both in LIS and humanities programs) stems from the fact that I am a library professional with a non-library educational background—which is increasingly common in the “alt-ac” landscape.

Syllabus Analysis

Affiliated data set:

Vandegrift, Micah; Stanley, Sarah (2016): Crossdisciplines at the Crossroads. via figshare. https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3443468.v1

Sarah: For this study, we decided to look through the Digital Humanities Syllabi collection in Zotero. We wanted to specifically look at courses that marketed themselves as being “Digital Humanities” courses, so we only collected syllabi that either had “Digital Humanities” in the course title or featured heavily in the description. For the humanities syllabi that I studied, I left off courses that referenced only one specific subfield in its title (e.g. Anthropology, or New Media) and focused on courses with broader titles. Micah similarly looked almost exclusively at courses entitled “Intro to DH” or simply “Digital Humanities.” I studied 12 humanities syllabi and Micah studied 15 Library and Information Science syllabi.

Micah: Lisa Spiro’s work on digital humanities curriculum grounded our research questions for this project; what can syllabi tell us about the program, students, professors, and ultimately the direction of the “field” of digital humanities? Instead of looking at a lot of syllabi from afar (as Spiro does), we decided to look at a small number up close. We looked individually at syllabi instead of doing a distant reading of the entire collection. We decided to look only at syllabi starting in 2011—the year of Lisa Spiro’s syllabi study—to take a more recent view of the field. Additionally, we were interested in the iSchools and Digital Humanities project, which promised to enhance LIS training with internships in three DH centers. That project successfully trained a cohort of students who became professionals in digital areas, but its influence on the wider LIS curriculum isn’t plainly evident.

Sarah: Syllabus analysis has proved a complicated way to determine what actually goes on in DH programs. Syllabi are necessarily an imperfect record of what happens in the classroom, but since (as resources like the Open Syllabus Project would indicate) syllabi are used to analyze the trends in a field or build out curricula, it means something if certain topics are absent from syllabi. It is common for instructors to draw heavily from pre-existing syllabi; even from the 12 syllabi that I studied, it became apparent that instructors were relying explicitly on the teaching techniques of people who taught and designed similar courses. Ryan Cordell acknowledges debt to Brian Croxall, Elisa Beshero-Bondar to David Birnbaum. The Digital Humanities course taught at University of Alabama had content passed down from David Ainsworth to Jennifer Drouin. This seems to indicate that some of the trends we note in this analysis are a result of the passing down of standards from syllabus to syllabus. The fact that syllabus content is being passed down indicates that topics that aren’t included in these records are likely to be left out of curricula.

Micah: The LIS syllabi I reviewed are unique in a few aspects. Because of the nature of expertise in this area, four professors taught multiple “Intro to DH” courses, providing a glance at the continuity and growth of DH pedagogy in library schools over time (Figure 1). Also, “digital humanities in libraries” came into its own during the years that I investigated (2011-2016). With each syllabus I looked for general focus (is it tools-, training-, or topics-focused?), the breadth of assigned readings (is the literature from librarianship, humanities fields, or both?), and the structure of project(s) (collaborative, individual).

Figure 1 – Continuity in LIS courses over time

Sarah: I analyzed DH syllabi (both graduate and undergraduate) from humanities fields from 2011 to 2015. I looked at whether the courses: 1) required a collaborative project and 2) set aside time to discuss the challenges of collaboration or cross-disciplinary research (or had readings that indicated such). Both Micah and I took a pretty hard line marking courses as explicitly discussing collaboration. We only marked “yes” for courses with readings or discussion topics focused around the logistics of interdisciplinary work, the labor of collaboration, and/or managing digital projects. We only marked syllabi “unclear” if 1) the specific readings for the course weren’t given or b) it was unclear if “collaboration” on the syllabus referenced a time to work collaboratively on projects or an actual discussion of the labor of collaboration (see for example the “Collaboratory” on Carol Chiodo’s syllabus). For the humanities syllabi, I also asked how many tools were being taught in each course.

Micah: A theme that I noticed in the LIS syllabi, echoing an ongoing discussion in DH in libraries, was emphasis on hacking/doing/building/making with a smattering of theory. A tools-and-skills-heavy curriculum, without a counterbalance of DH+LIS theory, could teeter toward DHaaS (digital humanities as a service), particularly when blended with traditional library courses which often emphasize service. Nine of the fifteen syllabi had readings that challenge the DHaaS perspective (Muñoz, particularly), but we can’t know to what extent the courses highlight librarians’ disciplinary perspective about information, content, and data.

Sarah: Humanities syllabi also tended to focus on multiple tools, rather than one specific methodology. I looked at thirteen syllabi, and twelve specified which tools and methods they would teach. Of these twelve, each course taught about five tools on average (see Figure 2).[1. I would like to mention here, that my method for counting the number of tools/languages taught in each course is a little imprecise. So, for example, I counted 7 in Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar’s course from 2014, but all of her tools were related to XML. So even though she included 7 tools, there was a methodological cogency to her course, where each unit built off of the previous unit. However, most of the courses did jump from tool to tool without building up on the previous technologies taught. I have listed the tools I thought were being taught in the analysis spreadsheet.] Yes, five tools per course may be a sampling of all the methods students could employ, but it does not promote any depth to their knowledge of DH methodologies.

Figure 2 – Humanities Syllabi: Tools Taught

Micah: Surprisingly, only 50% of the LIS syllabi clearly require a collaborative project, and only a few discuss project management or project design. While we both looked for an explicit or direct discussion of collaboration within each syllabi set, I didn’t find much beyond assignments to work together on the final project. Extrapolating, one could posit that students in this cohort of LIS courses are being taught to be software generalists but not necessarily how to work with disciplinary partners, or to advocate for the library’s essential role in DH projects.

[pullquote]Only one of the syllabi had readings that suggested a focus on the logistics of collaboration.[/pullquote]Sarah: Humanities programs don’t seem to promote effective collaboration either. Of the thirteen syllabi I looked through, ten required some form of collaborative project, one stated that collaboration was optional, and the other two were unclear. However, only one of the syllabi had readings that suggested a focus on the logistics of collaboration. It seems that humanists teach students to strive towards collaboration for vague reasons, rather than teaching them about the actual labor of collaborative research.

Micah: Six out of fifteen LIS syllabi dedicated a course module to scholarly communication. The overlap between openness and digital humanities “publishing” is clear, but the pedagogical goals of introducing students to scholarly communication through digital humanities is not. I wonder if exploring academic publishing in a DH course in an iSchool deepens the perception that open access is solely a library issue. Comparatively, seven of the syllabi introduce the students to seven or more digital tools, so it appears from my small corpus that working knowledge of scholarly communication is nearly as important in DH+Lib circles as competency with Omeka and TEI.

Sarah: The problems outlined here are interconnected. Many of the DH courses we reviewed don’t effectively discuss collaboration between humanists and librarians. This dynamic is evident in the way we teach tools and methods. The whirlwind-tool-tour in the humanities classroom leads to surface-level understanding, which prevents humanists from using digital tools in meaningful ways. Humanists cannot learn collections management systems from one week of Omeka, nor are they taught that librarians are trained in this area. By not connecting humanists to practicing librarians, humanities students may function under the false assumption that they are the most prepared to use certain tools. This perpetuates the idea that librarians are service-people and humanists are experts, which is the exact labor relationship we want to dispel!

Recommendations

Micah: Three words: critical digital pedagogy. It seems that DH is nearing a saturation/maturation point in both LIS programs and Humanities coursework, and taking a reflexive view of what is being taught—as well as how, through which lens, to what end, etc.—is timely. We have breadth in our curricula from DH’s evolution, what we need now is some depth and critical distance. The mad dash from “define ALL humanities” to “text encoding as the ultimate DH skill” in one semester may introduce a student to the field, but it doesn’t adequately prepare them to challenge labor conditions in the academy. Examining the curriculum with the goal to break and rebuild it is my primary recommendation.

Sarah: For humanities-based DH courses, it comes back to Bethany Nowviskie’s “It Starts on Day One,” where she says we need to “kill all the grad-level methods courses.” She does suggest incorporating digital tools and methods into humanities courses, but with the intent to foster meaningful collaboration. I would argue that the DH-methods course has replaced the grad-level methods course. Instead, we should be teaching students resources for working better (both together and alone), rather than what the GUI on different mapping tools looks like.

Micah: One goal for this dual-disciplinary investigation is to revive the questions that Spiro and others have initiated: are we sufficiently preparing students on both sides of the aisle for the shared labor of cross-disciplinarity in DH? I am heartened to see that the course the Tanya Clement is teaching at UTexas’s iSchool this Fall is co-listed with reserved seats for humanities students, perhaps related to their joint Masters in Info Studies and English. Creating cross-pollination between departments is laudable, and we want to see more co-listed and co-taught DH courses wherein instruction duties are shared between working librarians, LIS faculty, AND humanities faculty.

Sarah: Perhaps we should aim for a course designed for both humanists and library school students. Preferably one that covers both library and humanities literature and makes connections between the two. A course that attends to the fact that tools require infrastructure and preservation. A course that acknowledges that infrastructure and preservation are a whole area of study and expertise for some people.

Ultimately though, we need our DH courses to teach people more than they teach tools. We should structure our curricula not around vague gestures towards collaboration but meaningful practice of it. We should encourage library students to see their work as meaningful and integral (and we should demonstrate this to humanists as well). And we should teach humanists that there are faces behind the tools they learn in class. Not until we model effective relationships in our courses will we be able to produce digital humanities work that is just and equitable.

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Introduction

Whose voices are missing from the digital humanities (DH) and libraries discussions?

The users. Both DH and librarianship are inherently connected with users, yet user voices, especially those arising from empirical studies, are often missing from planning, developing, and implementing initiatives related to digital scholarship.

Humanists’ data management across the research lifecycle is a recent area of scholarly exploration that illustrates this problem. As Posner (2015) points out, digitization of humanists’ research sources has resulted in a situation where humanists “desperately need some help managing their stuff, and libraries are in a great position to help them.”[1. Posner, M. (2015). Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction. Available at http://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/; accessed June 26, 2016.] In order for this much needed collaboration to be successful, librarians and DH specialists need nuanced understanding of humanists’ research practices, that is, the insights arising from empirical studies of user behavior and needs.[pullquote]… librarians and DH specialists need nuanced understanding of humanists’ research practices, that is, the insights arising from empirical studies of user behavior and needs.[/pullquote]

In this essay we present selected findings from the Digital Scholarly Workflow project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and conducted at the Pennsylvania State University from 2012-2016. One of the core project activities was an ethnographic study of the scholarly workflow among the Penn State faculty, aimed at bringing user voices to the center of research and software development.

In the first project phase, (2012-2014), we explored the scholarly workflow of the Penn State faculty across disciplines, including sciences, social sciences, and humanities. This comparative perspective enabled us to identify specificities of humanists’ workflow, as well as the distinctive features of a software architecture that supports humanities users’ workflows. Through a web survey (N=196) and in-depth interviews (N=23) we studied how scholars engage with digital research tools and resources in different phases of their research process (please see Figure 1), as well as their attitudes and needs concerning digital research tools.

In the second project phase (2014-2016), we conducted a set of contextual inquiry sessions, observing humanists’ research process and use of digital research tools in situ (N=14). We then partnered with the Zotero citation management software development team from George Mason University to develop software architecture that supports humanists’ practices, thus enhancing the Zotero software based on our research findings.

In the following, we first summarize the results of our empirical user studies, and we then turn to describing how these studies and user voices informed the development of the Zotero software architecture.

Results

The results of our user studies showed that digital tools and resources have different roles and levels of integration at various phases of the scholarly workflow. The perceived and/or actual influence of these tools thus differed across individual segments of the workflow, as well as across academic disciplines. In this essay we focus on the results related to three research activities that were of particular relevance for the second phase of our project– finding, citing, and archiving research data and materials; for a complete account of the study results across all phases of the workflow see Antonijević and Stern Cahoy, 2014, and Antonijević, 2015.[2. Antonijević, S. and Cahoy, E. (2014). “Personal Library Curation: An Ethnographic Study of Scholars’ Information Practices.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 14,  No 2. Antonijević, S. (2015). Amongst Digital Humanists: An ethnographic study of digital knowledge production. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.]

Finding research data and materials

Finding and accessing research data and materials electronically is a daily practice of our study participants, regardless of their disciplinary background and/or level of technical proficiency. Among the humanities scholars, electronic access to research materials represented one of the key transformations in research practice. An associate professor of French explained, for instance, that for her “online bibliographies have been the major, major, major tool that has completely changed the possibilities for research projects.”

Across disciplines, the path towards finding information online commonly starts with Google Search and Google Scholar, especially for scholars engaged in discovery search. Library databases are more typical access points for humanities scholars engaged in confirmation search, that is, a known item search. Among the humanists, library databases are also a primary point for accessing journal publications, whereas monographs are predominantly accessed and managed in the print form.

[pullquote]…for a significant number of our humanities respondents, the main sites for finding and accessing primary research materials are physical archives and their print holdings.[/pullquote]The importance of paper-based materials in humanists’ research practices comes to the forefront when we consider primary research materials. Namely, for a significant number of our humanities respondents, the main sites for finding and accessing primary research materials are physical archives and their print holdings. This has important consequences for humanists’ research workflow, including the activities of citing and archiving, as we explain further in the text.

Citing research data and materials

Despite the apparent benefits of automating the citation process, our study revealed a relatively low use of citation managers across disciplines. Humanities scholars reported dissatisfaction with the existing citation managers as a common reason for bypassing those tools, explaining that even though they took classes or tested citation managers such as EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley, “all of those had issues” that made it easier for them to continue manually managing citations.

Another important reason for low uptake of citation managers stems from the fact that those tools are tailored towards scholarly publications, and not towards archival materials such as letters, maps, photos or diaries that humanists often use in their work. For instance, a professor of history related that none of the citation managers enabled him to store, annotate, and cite archival materials, which made those tools unproductive in his work.  “Engineers think the tools should be efficient, while they should be sufficient,” he explained, adding that his current workflow and use of technology were sufficient for his research needs.

Yet, most of the humanists’ believed that, with some improvements, citation managers would be beneficial for their work. A step towards such an improvement lies in the example of Tropy, a digital tool currently under development by the Zotero team and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, aimed at facilitating researchers’ management of archival materials.[3. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (2015). RRCHNM to build software to help researchers organize digital photographs. Available at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/news/rrchnm-to-build-software-to-help-researchers-organize-digital-photographs/; accessed June 30, 2016.]

Archiving research data and materials

The majority of scholars consulted in this study reported actively storing, archiving, and backing up research materials important to them, but actual preservation practices varied along disciplinary lines.  Storing information refers to the act of saving a document or other material for later use.  For instance, scholars in the humanities and social sciences frequently stored Word documents, while their colleagues in the sciences stored data files.  Archiving information, while similar to storing information, is a more finite activity, where the scholar saves a final, stable version of the document for use in the future.  An example of archiving in practice is illustrated by the scholar saving a published version of an article in their institutional repository.  Backing up research materials is the practice of creating another copy of important research materials, so that if a primary version is lost, the data remains.  All of these activities are similar in that they are inexorably linked with information preservation, and in that respect shed light on a scholar’s commitment to saving information for use later.

The results also showed that the majority of humanists considered archiving a vital element of their workflow, yet they suffered loss of research materials. Some of them did not archive and backup research materials at all, commonly citing the lack of skill, habit or both: “It’s insane. I know it is [dangerous]. I don’t have any external storage devices because I don’t know how to use them, and I’m just absolutely ignorant about those [cloud-based services],” said an assistant professor of French and Linguistics.

Yet, such complete absence of preservation activities was rare among our participants. More frequently scholars’ archiving practices were hampered through a set of challenges corresponding to those identified in Marshall’s (2007) study.[4. Marshall, C.C. (2007). “How People Manage Personal Information over a Lifetime.” In: Jones and Teevan (eds.), Personal Information Management. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press: pp. 57-75. Available at http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall/PIM%20Chapter-Marshall.pdf; accessed November 18, 2014.] For instance, a significant number of our interviewees reported having inaccessible files, most commonly as a result of not migrating to new data formats, which suggested a need for promoting personal archiving literacy among scholars (see: Zastrow, 2014), as well as for developing self-archiving strategies integrated into scholars’ research workflows.[5. Zastrow, J. (2014). “PIM 101: Personal Information Management.” Computers & Libraries, Vol. 34, No. 2. Available at http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/mar14/Zastrow–PIM-101–Personal-Information-Management.shtml; accessed July 18, 2015.]

[pullquote]…even with electronic publications humanists had breakdowns between the stages of discovery and organization/storage, due to persistence of print-based organizational and archiving practices.[/pullquote]Our findings also showed that electronic publications were easier to store, while archival materials–which humanists consulted in our study usually stored as photo files– required more effort, and were more difficult to archive, search, and analytically manipulate. Yet, our findings indicated that even with electronic publications humanists had breakdowns between the stages of discovery and organization/storage, due to persistence of print-based organizational and archiving practices. These findings suggested that both discovery and self-archiving strategies must be integrated into other stages of the humanists’ scholarly workflow, which was one of the main tasks in the second phase of our project, which focused on enhancing Zotero citation manager.

Enhancing Zotero

[pullquote]…through user-focused and DH-centered research, the voices of the humanities scholars can come center stage and direct need-based software development with impact.[/pullquote]From 2014-2016, our research team partnered with George Mason University to develop enhancements for Zotero software that link to Hydra-based institutional repository services, and that allowed discovery of new articles to happen within the Zotero interface. Further software refinement focused on integrating additional scholarly activities with the existing workflow of citation management software.

The new Zotero/Hydra enhancement allows scholars to archive their materials throughout the research process, embedding self-archiving into the workflow. We recently tested new enhancements to the Zotero interface, including native feed support to enable easy discovery, management, and import of relevant scholarly publications from within Zotero. The Zotero enhancements are currently in public beta testing and will be formally available with the formal release of Zotero 5.0 later in 2016. We conducted preliminary user testing of these enhancements to assess the utility of the optimizations. Users responded very positively to the enhancements, particularly to the ability to archive self-authored works on the Zotero website. Users were also very enthusiastic about the possibility of finding new research articles from within the Zotero interface, although there was a high learning barrier to optimal use of RSS feeds for discovery.

The research lifecycle remains at the center of all digital humanities efforts. Large projects come to life through the efforts of individual digital humanists. Yet, if the scholarly workflow of a digital humanist is not optimized, work is stymied, information is lost, and efforts are not brought to full fruition. Enabling faculty to easily and readily find, store, cite, and manage digital resources is mission critical for libraries and IT professionals. Our study illustrated one of the “ways in which libraries could make meaningful interventions in the humanities research lifecycle” (Posner, 2015), showing that through user-focused and DH-centered research, the voices of the humanities scholars can come center stage and direct need-based software development with impact. These Zotero optimizations came directly from user research findings, which showed that discovery and self-archiving, along with annotation and organization, remain problematic for humanities users to manage. Optimizing the digital humanities requires a focus on the digital humanist as an individual; once the individual’s work is facilitated, the pathway is set for greater and broader contributions. For libraries and IT, this is an essential point of convergence: centering on the user’s workflow as a roadmap for developing services and technologies that facilitate all phases of digital humanities research.

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How can metadata become the most cutting-edge type of library outreach? In this article, we explore how engagement in collaborative library-based digital humanities (DH) projects is proving just that at the University of Alabama. In traditional scholarship, researchers encounter, rely on, and benefit from the work of metadata librarians every day as they access catalogs and online databases, yet metadata librarianship is rarely a directly public-facing role. DH can challenge  this status, bringing metadata librarianship to the foreground, because high-quality, customized metadata schemas form the core of all large-scale initiatives such as database-creation, network analysis, and Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) projects. Metadata has become one of the essential research tools for faculty members working on digital humanities projects, and at the University’s Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC) we are meeting that need and leveraging it as a new means of outreach to our academic community.

This article presents three different types of DH projects that our metadata librarians are collaborating on at the ADHC, in tandem with our digital scholarship librarian, IT specialist, and faculty members from fifteen different departments across campus. Some projects live in the traditional metadata provinces of indexing and cataloging: digitizing and making searchable the manuscript marginalia of John Stuart Mill, or indexing fabric swatches in a magazine. Other projects require tailored metadata schemas to encode a digital edition using TEI, an approach with scholar-librarian partnerships at its core. These projects reside in different departments across campus, but they share a need for metadata innovation. By virtue of its distinctive research needs, DH is transforming metadata into a new avenue for library outreach.

The Challenge

DH projects require high-quality metadata in order to thrive, and the bigger the project, the more important that metadata becomes to make data discoverable, navigable, and open to computational analysis. The functions of all metadata are to allow our users to identify and discover resources through records acting as surrogates of resources, and to discover similarities, distinctions, and other nuances within single texts or across a corpus. High quality metadata brings standardization to the project by recording elements’ definitions, obligations, repeatability, rules for hierarchical structure, and attributes. Input guidelines and the use of controlled vocabularies bring consistencies that promote findability for researchers and users alike.

[pullquote]Metadata is the heartbeat making DH projects usable, robust, preservable, sustainable, and scalable.[/pullquote]Metadata is the heartbeat making DH projects usable, robust, preservable, sustainable, and scalable. It scaffolds project data in a way that enables the project to expand to meet future research and technology needs. However, metadata is not something which the majority of faculty members in the humanities are trained in or have experience with. Enter metadata librarians, empowered by their skills and professional experiences to take leadership roles in bringing innovation to this part of DH projects. More than that, by raising awareness of the functions of metadata and introducing campus communities to its methods, metadata librarians can actively forge new connections with scholars working on DH projects, presenting a new kind of public outreach. The need is vital, and metadata librarians are uniquely well-positioned to meet it.

Background: Library Outreach For DH

Svensson (2012) argues for libraries’ roles in facilitating collaborative approaches to scholarship within the traditionally solo pursuit of the humanities. Similarly Harkema and Nelson (2013) and Hoeve (2015) offer case studies of librarian-scholar collaborations in DH projects for open access publishing initiatives and an introductory DH course respectively. Yet even in articles acknowledging the potential for libraries to partner with faculty for digital scholarship, metadata expertise is seldom touched upon. Even within libraries-DH discussions, metadata and the role of the metadata librarian remain backstage, even though high quality metadata is a vital ingredient for successful large-scale DH projects.[pullquote]Even within libraries-DH discussions, metadata and the role of the metadata librarian remain backstage, even though high quality metadata is a vital ingredient for successful large-scale DH projects.[/pullquote]

There are some exceptions: Padilla (2016) has argued for new approaches in metadata to render humanities data open to computational analysis, whilst much earlier Llona (2007) made the meta-argument that digital projects themselves need improved metadata in order to be discoverable and preservable. In an article explicitly advocating that metadata librarians and knowledge about metadata needs to emerge from the backroom, McFall (2015) gives an overview of the skills that metadata librarians already possess that can be applied to digital humanities projects; these include experience creating customized schemas and controlled vocabularies, a knowledge of different kinds of metadata standards such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and the Metadata Object Description Standards (MODS), and best practices for digital preservation.

However, this article aims to go one step beyond to argue that the paramount importance of high-quality metadata for DH projects means that metadata librarians have a unique opportunity for a new kind of outreach to faculty and students. It is time to leave the backroom and to partner with faculty and students on the frontiers of DH research, introducing them to metadata best practices and innovations, and sharing with them the creativity required to produce flexible, sustainable, and robust data for their projects.

Metadata Outreach at the Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC)

The Alabama Digital Humanities Center is part of the University Libraries, located in the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library at the heart of University of Alabama campus. It is funded primarily by the University Libraries, though there is a close relationship maintained with the College of Arts and Sciences, which currently funds 40% of the Center’s digital scholarship librarian position. The ADHC’s mission is to support faculty and graduate students in their digital research and teaching projects.

The ADHC’s position within the University Libraries is important in allowing faculty and students from all over campus to call on the library’s resources to pursue their digital projects. Through a combination of outreach in specific projects, brown bag events, and workshops, the campus is becoming increasingly aware of the kind of expertise needed for DH projects, and that the library is a hub for just that. In this way, engagement in DH is opening up new relationships and partnerships for the University Libraries across campus and with other institutions in joint projects.[pullquote]… engagement in DH is opening up new relationships and partnerships for the University Libraries across campus and with other institutions in joint projects.[/pullquote]

For each ADHC project, digital scholarship librarian Emma Annette Wilson assembles an appropriate team, typically consisting of the faculty member or student, the ADHC’s Information Technology specialist, and herself for smaller projects. A metadata librarian will join a team for larger, more complex projects; whilst initially these were all research-based initiatives, in the last year, we have expanded to include metadata expertise in hybrid graduate-level research and teaching components.

At the ADHC, we are fortunate in being able to call on a percentage of two metadata librarians’ time to work on large-scale DH projects. Innovation and creativity is required in these initiatives, as the materials described are frequently highly idiosyncratic, and the purposes for which they are being documented introduce complications and challenges best met through rigorous metadata setup. Fortunately, the metadata librarians are well-versed in Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) through their daily work with MODS, and have a wide range of experience from applying vocabularies used for archival collections to transform data to share with others.

Consultation is our modus operandi: from initial meetings through to the launch and onward reiterations of a DH project, librarians give metadata guidance by drawing on established schemas and related standards, and when necessary combining these to create custom schemas for highly specialized projects. It is important to note that metadata librarians don’t create the metadata itself for these projects. To do so would be prohibitively time-consuming and would drastically limit the number of projects feasible at any one time. Rather, through a collaborative, consultative approach, we teach faculty and students what makes good metadata and how to create it.

Indexing and Cataloging For DH

A number of ADHC’s projects involve indexing and cataloging materials in order to make them discoverable. For example, American Fashion and Fabrics is a trade publication for the clothing industry that was published under a variety of titles from the 1940s until the 1980s. Various partial indexes of its issues and articles exist, but when Professor Amanda Thompson from the Department of Clothing, Textiles, and Interior Design, approached the ADHC about this project, she did so because much of the most valuable material within the publications is not documented or searchable. Contents not indexed include advertisements indicating trends in fabric design and purchasing; trade reports; fabric swatches retaining their original colors thanks to living in library stacks; and some editorials, articles, poems, and advertorials. Knowing that a digital index would enhance the research and teaching use of this publication, Thompson approached metadata librarian Mary Alexander directly about the problem, and from there the project transitioned into a DH initiative at the ADHC.

Alexander, with the assistance of metadata librarian Vanessa Unkeless-Perez, has worked at length with sample issues of American Fashion and Fabrics to create a custom schema capable of documenting this wide variety of materials. Significant challenges have arisen in terms of describing the fabric swatches, a centerpiece of the publication and its importance in the field. For instance, how much detail is required to make these usable and findable? Can we, and should we, describe the type of weave used in a fabric? Its texture? Pattern? Weight? Color? In a project of this scale, multiple different people will need to create the metadata, and the more complex the information documented, the more specialized their knowledge needs to be, and the more prescriptive the input guidelines.

One of the most challenging aspects of this project involved the very human problem of perception. Everyone perceives colors slightly differently and they might describe patterns in fabric slightly differently. A controlled vocabulary for all of these different elements of the fabric swatches would be enormous to the point of unwieldiness not only in terms of finding the apposite terms but also the time required to describe every single swatch. Our current approach to this problem is under discussion and involves a two-pronged approach. The controlled vocabulary for colors will be primary and secondary hues, thus limiting perception differences by limiting the number of color terms available. The second prong will further develop critical thinking skills of upper-class students majoring in textiles, our proposed data-input workforce, to analyse characteristics of swatches and to apply appropriate terms from controlled vocabularies for weaves, patterns, and other areas, or to pause and seek more information when the degree of certainty for applying a term is below 100%. Thompson is responsible for answering student questions and proposing new terms to be added to the controlled vocabulary lists, so the lists can continue to expand.

Research Applications: Digitizing The Marginalia Of John Stuart Mill

Somerville College, Oxford, is home to the personal library of philosopher and political theorist John Stuart Mill, which Mill inscribed liberally with manuscript commentary. In Summer 2015, Professor Albert Pionke of the University of Alabama set up a partnership between the ADHC and Somerville to digitize and make searchable all of Mill’s marginal annotations. The project team at the ADHC includes Metadata Librarian Mary Alexander, Digital Scholarship Librarian Emma Annette Wilson, and IT Specialist Tyler Grace (see our Project Progress Blog for more information).

How can you make both verbal and non-verbal handwritten marginalia searchable in an online database? This is the challenge of the Mill Marginalia Online project. Traditional searching purposefully eliminates non-verbal inclusions such as punctuation, but frequently Mill’s annotations consist of only that: an exclamation point, question mark, or underlining of a word. Alexander worked closely with Pionke to fit these non-verbal marks in addition to verbal commentary to elements from several metadata standards. The creative element of metadata librarianship came to the fore to capture Mill’s exclamation marks, crossings-out, exasperated strike-through corrections, inter-linear edits, and pithy judgements from the margins of his library to be shared with modern readers. Without a robust and tailored metadata schema, none of this information would be discoverable. The resultant metadata schema is one that could be adapted for use by any DH project documenting handwritten or printed marginalia, an innovation that is rooted in metadata in combination with humanities scholarship.

To ensure that the schema is appropriately represented within the project’s NoSQL database structure, extensive collaboration has taken place between metadata and IT. In this project, Pionke devised a master spreadsheet to capture information about the published text and the marginalia. Another spreadsheet captured the full bibliographic information of the published text at the title level, including related sources for comparison such as translations, and digitizations of full text from identical printed editions, since the project’s sources have never been digitized in full. Spreadsheet headers are in the form of instructions that facilitate the training of students in data input. All headers were mapped to elements comprising a unique metadata schema with elements resembling parts from familiar standards (MODS and TEI), whilst custom elements allow values to describe the location of marginalia at the page level, and specific in-page level.

From Research To Teaching

In 2010, Professor Connie Janiga-Perkins of Modern Languages and Classics travelled to Bogota to retrieve digital images of a late-seventeenth/early eighteenth-century manuscript spiritual autobiography of nun Jeronima Nava y Saavedra. Working with the ADHC and relying upon metadata librarian support, Janiga-Perkins learned how to encode the manuscript for a digital edition, beginning with core elements found in TEI Lite. This enabled Perkins to identify four different authors within the text (the nun and her three confessors), as well as documenting waves of revision. As other text features were identified, more TEI elements were easily added to the schema using the TEI community’s tool for generating custom schemas, Roma.

In Fall 2015, she had obtained another autobiographical manuscript, this time of Madre Maria de San Jose. Janiga-Perkins wanted her graduate students to transcribe and encode the manuscript as part of their 500-level class, so Alexander and Wilson partnered with her as co-teachers of TEI. For the last four weeks of the class, Alexander taught students how to create and follow a metadata schema to encode a section of manuscript that is otherwise unavailable to the general public. Earlier class sessions taught by Janiga-Perkins were spent preparing the transcription using paleographic techniques. Wilson and Janiga-Perkins worked alongside Alexander to elucidate questions from a digital and Modern Languages perspective to ensure the digital edition taking shape captured the manuscript accurately and appropriately for researchers. Students transcribed twenty pages (or one section) of the manuscript before pasting that text into a TEI Lite template using oXygen, an XML editor. Students learned the syntax of XML, the underlying mark-up language of TEI, first by coding line breaks in their transcriptions. They went on to document features of the text including strikethroughs and an unusual image of a cross written by Maria de San Jose at the top of every page. Due to the class’s decision to link to an image of the cross, the schema was expanded beyond TEI Lite giving the students the opportunity to learn about Roma. Through mediated discussion, students played an instrumental role in defining what the final TEI schema would document.

During the class sessions, students experienced first-hand some of the questions and difficulties that had arisen for Janiga-Perkins and Alexander in encoding the first manuscript. How can you describe non-verbal manuscript marks accurately? How do you distinguish between different pen weights and brushstrokes – and does it matter if you do? If you mark up interlinear annotations, to what extent can these be displayed in a web setting? Some of these questions remain undecided and will be debated afresh by the incoming graduate class in Fall 2016, and that very process of indecision or indeterminacy has added a valuable component to the learning experience, as DH projects typically morph as both technology and researchers’ experience working with digital techniques evolve. One interesting outcome of even unresolved discussions was that the class formed a strong bond as they identified the intellectual questions at stake in their project. The class came to be about the research process as well as accumulating TEI-specific knowledge.

This project represents outgrowth from research into a combined research and teaching initiative, meaning that Alexander is able to conduct outreach not only by consulting with a faculty member, but also by actively leading multiple class sessions teaching students about sophisticated metadata techniques outside the remit of Library and Information Studies.

Conclusion: Takeaways From Metadata Outreach

[pullquote]By engaging with faculty and students first-hand through project meetings, training sessions, and co-teaching graduate classes in different fields, metadata librarians are able to disseminate knowledge about metadata in both specific and also conceptual ways.[/pullquote]Metadata outreach is enabling the ADHC to form new cross-campus connections with faculty and students alike in a way that meets a very specific new research need generated by and generative of digital scholarship in the humanities. By engaging with faculty and students first-hand through project meetings, training sessions, and co-teaching graduate classes in different fields, metadata librarians are able to disseminate knowledge about metadata in both specific and also conceptual ways. DH projects tend to be fluid in light of the swift technological developments taking place in the field, so an important part of this kind of outreach is introducing faculty and students to ways of approaching metadata questions, in addition to working with one specific schema. Faculty and student takeaways include not only an enhanced understanding of and experience working with metadata, but also greater knowledge about the fundamental approaches to structuring data in DH projects, which can empower them to engage in further such projects in the future. In short, DH projects depend upon good metadata, and, in turn, metadata librarians have a great opportunity to make a significant impact by collaborating with and teaching faculty and students how to conceptualize and create good metadata to generate current and future projects.

As part of a collaborative effort, it is important to recognize that the research goal is the ultimate objective and the selected metadata schema must be a good fit. Each team member’s expertise must be understood and valued, and project planning should provide learning opportunities for all involved. The metadata librarians have learned new schemas and vocabularies that may be drawn upon by their institution in the future.

References

Harkema, Craig, and Nelson, Brent. “Scholar-Librarian Collaboration in the Publication of Scholarly Materials”. Collaborative Librarianship 5, no.3 (2013): 197-207.

Hoeve, Casey. 2015. Digital Humanities and Librarians: A Team-Based Approach to Learning. In Kathleen L. Sacco, Scott S. Richmond, Sara M. Parme, and Kerrie Fergen Wilkes (Eds.), Supporting Digital Humanities For Knowledge Acquisition in Modern Libraries (107-131). IGI Global: Hershey, PA.

Llona, Eileen. “The Librarian’s Role in Promoting Digital Scholarship: Development and Metadata Issues”. Slavic and East European Information Resources 8, no. 2 (2007): 151-163.

McFall, Lisa M. (2015). Beyond the Back Room: The Role of Metadata and Catalog Librarians in Digital Humanities. In Kathleen L. Sacco, Scott S. Richmond, Sara M. Parme, and Kerrie Fergen Wilkes (Eds.), Supporting Digital Humanities For Knowledge Acquisition in Modern Libraries (21-43). IGI Global: Hershey, PA.

Padilla, Thomas. “Humanities Data in the Library: Integrity, Form, Access”. D-Lib Magazine 22, no.3 (2016): DOI: 10.1045/march2016-padilla.

Svensson, P. “Envisioning the Digital Humanities”. Digital Humanities Quarterly 6, no.1 (2012): retrieved from http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000112/000112.html

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What are the points of contact between digital humanities and libraries? What is at stake, and what issues arise when the two meet? Where are we, and where might we be going? Who are “we”? By posing these questions in the CFP for a new dh+lib special issue, the editors hoped for sharp, provocative meditations on the state of the field. We are proud to present the result, ten wide-ranging contributions by twenty-two authors, collectively titled “Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library.”

We make the in/of distinction pointedly. Like the Digital Humanities (DH), definitions of library community are typically prefigured by “inter-” and “multi-” frames, rendered as work and values that are interprofessional, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary. Ideally, these characterizations attest to diversified yet unified purpose, predicated on the application of disciplinary expertise and metaknowledge to address questions that resist resolution from a single perspective. Yet we might question how a combinatorial impulse obscures the distinct nature of our contributions and, consequently, our ability to understand and respect individual agency. Working across the similarly encompassing and amorphous contours of the Digital Humanities compels the library community to reckon with its composite nature.

Points of contact between digital humanities and libraries are troubled when we push against the notion of a role that is bound by physical space and administrative structure. In a piece that complicates assumptions often made about library digital humanities work, Brandon Locke and Kristen Mapes present a model of deeply embedded librarianship that emphasizes the values and expertise of librarians working outside of the institutional structure of a library. As professional librarians based in disciplinary units, Locke and Mapes are situated to promote direct partnerships with teaching faculty and facilitate further connections with librarians based in other units. Conversely, DH centers located in libraries may find themselves in need of translation when seeking to communicate their value and role to a diverse array of librarians and digital humanists. Prompted by a reorganization of the University of Virginia Library aimed at alignment with the strategic goals of the university, Purdom Lindblad, Laura Miller, and Jeremy Boggs of the Scholars’ Lab detail shifting organizational identities that brought out “… tensions inherent in [their] situation: inside versus outside of the Library; bespoke research projects versus broadly applied systems and platforms; and creators versus consumers of digital tools as modes of best supporting digital work.” Through a process of reflection, translation, and building, grounded in the learning-by-doing practices of the Lab, the work of the Scholars’ Lab was re-positioned as “quintessentially Library work.”

Characterizations of the library community as interdisciplinary substantiate and extend arguments for the library itself to function as an optimal site for research to occur. Variants of this argument have been utilized time and again in recent years to support the development of digital scholarship units, centers, initiatives, and positions in libraries large and small. Sarah Stanley and Micah Vandegrift’s contribution speaks directly to the tension between significant library community investment and the degree to which graduate school curricula are tuned to support the aspirations those investments are meant to realize. Through their examination of a split corpus of self-described Digital Humanities syllabi from Humanities programs and Library and Information Science programs, Stanley and Vandegrift make strides toward better understanding how coursework aligns– or does not align– librarians with rhetoric encapsulating ideal institutional roles.

Invisibility and/or systematic undervaluing of librarian work forms a theme across several contributions. Emma Annette Wilson and Mary Alexander provide a strategy for making the expertise of librarians more visible and accessible to digital humanities partners by exposing metadata work as “… the heartbeat making DH projects usable, robust, preservable, sustainable, and scalable.” Through discussion of several case studies, Wilson and Alexander argue that a collaborative approach to metadata consultation brings library labor to light. As a digital humanities librarian, Paige Morgan engages with “project design, technology/method implementation, risk assessment, and scalability and contingency planning” while consulting on projects. This work, which is “closely entangled with optimism and expectations,” frequently involves unacknowledged–or disparaged– emotional labor. In a call for recognition of complexity, Morgan urges a closer examination of the labor dynamics of librarian-faculty consulting relationships and the potentially generative messiness of DH work. J. Matthew Huculak and Lisa Goddard argue that tenure and promotion models in the humanities, with their emphasis on short term output and results, serve as impediments to collaboration between humanities scholars, whose focus may be on theories and prototypes, and librarians, focused on standardization and preservation. Calling for increased awareness of these tensions, Huculak and Goddard assert the importance of long-term planning for DH work that ensures the care and repair of DH work.

Librarians play an integral role in developing tools and frameworks that attend to the affordances of digital and print resources. In a meditation on what “digital” suggests in the context of scholarship, with particular attention to the acts of copying and transferring, preserving and proliferating, Craig Dietrich and Ashley Sanders go beyond amorphous definitions of digital scholarship to consider the current and emergent parameters of the digital in libraries. “Digital,” they argue, is no mere semantic imposition; rather, it deeply affects every aspect of librarianship, “from collection development, curation, exhibition, and preservation to user services, reference, and instruction.” Smiljana Antonijević Ubois and Ellysa Stern Cahoy call for “… nuanced understanding of humanists’ research practices . . .  arising from empirical studies of user behavior and needs.” By arguing for re-centering user experience in DH/library discussions, Antonijević and Stern Cahoy present a more holistic approach to understanding the analog and digital components of scholarly workflows, applying their findings to an optimization of the Zotero research tool.

Engagement with digital environments provokes re-examination of library and archive community roles. Two contributions responded to this provocation by asking how critical archival and library praxis could support ethical engagement in a digital environment. Jennifer Rajchel and Elizabeth Myers raise and explore the, “question of how to ensure a feminist method of curation.” Working on Smith College’s first Massive Open Online Course, The Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World, Rajchel and Myers ask, “Whose feminism are we representing? Who has agency? How can the power of digital representation be distributed?”, and respond with a series of critically nuanced design decisions. In doing so, they model an engaged, ethically grounded example of what it means for librarians to collaboratively build in a digital environment. A “praxis of critical librarianship and digital humanities” guides the contribution by Pamella Lach, Brian Rosenblum, Élika Ortega, and Stephanie Gamble, who argue that “… libraries can advance a vision of DH that is more inclusive and expansive, and at the same time less universal in its methods and approaches.”

***

dh+lib’s first mini-series, “Make It New?,” explored themes of continuity and disruption. As that series introduction observed, contributors made: “ . . . some claim to the core functions of libraries as they explore[d] where digital humanities methods and implementations fall along that spectrum, while questioning whether DH represents a paradigm shift for libraries or simply an extension of existing services.” Now, three years removed from grappling with questions of novelty, two years removed from digital humanities’ classification as an Association of College and Research Libraries’ “top trend,” contributions to “Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library” reflect maturation of library work in this space; broadly, the special issue gestures toward greater consensus around Bethany Nowviskie’s argument for the place of “technology-inflected humanities research services” in every library and the wise resistance to a one-size-fits-all model of implementing them.

We hope you enjoy “Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library.” Many thanks to the twenty-two contributors who authored the ten pieces that comprise the series. This special issue deployed the entire dh+lib editorial team– Roxanne Shirazi (City University of New York), John Russell (Pennsylvania State University), Patrick Williams (Syracuse University), Caro Pinto (Mount Holyoke College), Zach Coble (New York University), and ourselves– to oversee the many layers of framing, correspondence, edits, and WordPress tweaks that enabled publication. Roxanne, in particular, was a driving force in bringing the series to light and keeping an unruly (if spirited!) editorial team moving in sync; we are grateful for her leadership.