Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Kristen Mapes, Assistant Director of Digital Humanities in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University.

As summer shifts into fall planning, I find my reading oriented toward articles that I may assign to my students alongside writings that speak to the DH values I try to put at the center of my work as a practitioner. After reading these three articles and providing a bit of a summary, I have noticed a common thread: we are still working out what DH really means in practice. What rhetoric do we use to frame our relationships to each other, or how we introduce people to our practices? What infrastructures shape what is possible and how we carry things out? And truly at the center of it all: how can we avoid being spread too thinly, whether on committees, in consultations, or across methodologies?

Morgan, P.C. (2018). The consequences of framing digital humanities tools as easy to use. College and Undergraduate Libraries, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2018.1480440 (Pre-print available at https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/librarypapers/3/)

Morgan challenges librarians working in digital humanities to look closely at the way we teach and frame DH tools when giving workshops, presenting in classrooms, and conducting consultations. Too often, we characterize DH tools as ‘easy’ without thinking through what is ‘easy’ about them and forgetting that ‘easiness’ is a relative concept for each learner we encounter. By framing a tool as ‘easy’, we hide the challenging data modeling and methodological work that underlies the work behind the tool.

Morgan posits that librarians rely on ‘easy’ DH tools due to issues of scalability in DH infrastructure. By placing the burden of learning to the learner and relying on the ‘easiness’ of the tool and pre-existing documentation for it (often created by the tool-creators themselves), we are doing two things: making up for the lack of time and support we can give to each person or project, and shifting the risk of success or failure to the learner. This shift of responsibility leads learners to blame themselves if they have trouble with the tool. Morgan points out that this decision to shift risk and rely on ‘easy tools’ is understandable in the labor contexts in which librarians operate, and it is often necessary considering the non-scalability of humanities projects due to the humanities’ complicated relationship to data.

If we want to grow participation in DH, we need to think carefully about how we frame introductions to its methods and tools by keeping in mind the situatedness of “ease” and the future infrastructures available to support nonscalable DH projects.

Risam, R. (2018) Diversity work and digital carework in higher education. First Monday 23.3 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i3.8241

In this article, Risam critiques the academic environment, in the form of the neoliberal university, by applying the theoretical frameworks of affective labor and digital carework to the field of digital humanities. Risam argues that diversity work is a form of affective labor that is disproportionately taken on—willingly or unwillingly—by women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and others whose labor writ large has been traditionally unseen and undervalued. Affective labor is baked into DH through expectations of ‘niceness’ and interdisciplinary collegiality. Digital carework—“a form of affective labor that relies on the deployment of affect through digital media to remediate inequalities within higher education”—is also baked into DH through expectations of community building, mentoring, and collaboration.

DH is seen as an opportunity to expand the archive and provide inclusivity by breaking canon, and yet the work of challenging the archive and challenging systems of oppression is itself disruptive and not “nice.” The promise of DH as functioning to support diversifying the archive and/or the academy is in direct odds with the rhetoric around DH as “nice” and the expectation that people performing DH work take on the affective labor of building community and being “friendly” and “supportive.” Risam returns several times to the critique that diversity initiatives in academic settings expect inclusion to be “visible but not transformational,” that diversity and inclusion are seen as boxes to check but that the academy has no real interest in shifting academic culture to live out those values. Risam centers her concern around the people undertaking this labor, asking us to consider at what point the labor of community building and visible representation venture into exploitation and where the balance between waged and unwaged labor lies in the academic context.

Caplan, L. (2016) Method without methodology: Data and the digital humanities. E-flux 72 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60492/method-without-methodology-data-and-the-digital-humanities/

This article is a critique of the Selfiecity project, and while not particularly new, something I just discovered. Caplan pushes against the tendency of digital and/or statistical projects to prioritize experimentation and visualization over analysis. Referring to Borges’ warning against creating a map the size of the place it is intended to represent, Caplan shares the context of Durkheim’s introduction of statistics into sociology and the revolution (albeit flawed) in method that followed. Big data, which at once provides granular, detailed data about individuals and operates on an unprecedented scale, tempts researchers into projects that seek to create such a doomed map.

The critique of Selfiecity focuses on the scale of data explored in the project. Caplan makes a strong point about the role of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the data processing from a labor ethics and humanistic perspective.

While Caplan discusses Selfiecity (as well as Phototrails) in particular, the caution against projects that lack methodological grounding and focus could be applied to many DH projects, large or small. This critique touches on a tension around the field of DH, as most practitioners find themselves encountering and embarking upon new methodologies which require new training and backgrounds before they can be fully engaged with.

Kristen Mapes

Kristen Mapes is Assistant Director of Digital Humanities in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University where she collaborates with colleagues from across departments and around campus. In particular, she is on the planning team of the Digital Scholarship Lab in the MSU Libraries and is a Core Faculty member in the DH@MSU program, teaching introductions to DH for undergraduates. Kristen’s research interests include academic communities online and exploring new ways of visualizing digitized cultural material. She also runs the Global Digital Humanities Symposium and is committed to finding ways for DH to advance social justice and equity in the academy.

• Web
|
• More Posts

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