(Hard and Soft) Skills to Pay the Bills

The Lay of the Land

Small liberal arts colleges—particularly here in the Northeast—are in the midst of a challenging period in which it feels like every move is deeply consequential.2 Just one misstep, it sometimes seems, can kick off a chain reaction that could end with the closure of a college. Add to this the challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the landscape appears even more treacherous. Fortunately for Regis, our administration read the tea leaves years ago—the shrinking college demographic, the resonant fear from the economic decline of the previous decade, the persistent notion of college as primarily job training, and so on—and made necessary adjustments. They built a strong nursing major and diversified the student body to include online learners and graduate students. These changes, of course, have not come without controversy, but the doors are still open, enrollment is up, and the embattled Humanities Department hired four new faculty members in the past few years—increasing our small department’s size by nearly 25 percent. This is remarkable because, while these troubling times affect small liberal arts colleges across the board, humanities departments have been particularly hard hit. Though studies show that the skills and practices we teach in the humanities are in high demand, the notion that one needs to major in something “practical” persists.3 Thus, in an effort to shore up struggling humanities departments—particularly at smaller colleges and universities—administrators in recent years have turned to DH to act as a conferrer of the kind of practical skills that students value in other, more professionally focused majors. This perception of DH—as a source of marketable expertise—gives rise, however, to a tension: this is not how humanists actually conceive of our work; we tend, instead, to privilege the importance of interpretation of humanities or digital objects over skills-based learning. Likewise, digital humanists who possess and utilize skills in programming and data analysis do not value these skills primarily for their “marketability.” Rather than a means to the end of employment, such skills are the means to the end of theorizing and interpreting texts.

Given these divergent perspectives, what do we teach when instructors’ understanding of the field is something very different from—and perhaps at odds with—administrators’ conceptions? When my colleagues and I began to conceive of a DH program at Regis, I thought I knew what the administration was looking for: from their view, DH represented a skills-based training course for humanities majors. And I resisted this. I was, after all, less than a year out of my PhD program, where I had worked on what I thought of as “Important DH Projects.” My work at Northeastern was not about the skills I learned and used, I thought, but about the knowledge I created. Though, to be fair, I did gain a number of skills that I did not previously have and that arguably made me a more attractive candidate on the job market. But, I thought, that is all beside the point! In a sense, this is a challenge faced by many newly minted PhDs who are trained as researchers and need to quickly pivot to think of themselves primarily as teachers, especially if they land at small liberal arts colleges. Further, it is likely that this pivot amounts to whiplash for those trained in DH. How do we turn skills that had a very particular use in research and interpretation into skills with a broader, and perhaps more marketable, application for undergraduates?

Indeed, necessity really is the mother of invention, even when what you are trying to invent is a digital humanities program at a small liberal arts college. The truth is, the process of creating the concentration at Regis helped me work through my own biases and blind spots. My colleagues and I had to figure out a way to craft our program so that it would meet the needs (or at least expectations) of all stakeholders: the administration, faculty, and students (and, if we are honest, the students’ parents). Throughout this process, I learned a few things—consequential things—about the way DH can work at my small liberal arts college. First, there is no room for elitism. Elitism, in this context, takes various forms: traditional humanities scholars look down on DH practitioners for their emphasis on skills, and within DH, those with advanced programming skills look down on all others. Second, theorizing and producing interesting interpretations of humanities artifacts are actually skills, just as much as, say, coding a website. We might describe these as soft and hard skills, respectively, but there really is no conflict between interpretation and DH-related skills like coding. In fact, skills-based learning can, and often does, lead to interesting interpretations of humanities artifacts—I call this “pragmatic tinkering.”4 It is “pragmatic” in the philosophical sense: “an approach that evaluates theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.”5 According to this definition, pragmatic tinkering positions learning and enacting new skills as fundamental to theorizing—in the humanities sense of seeking “deeper understanding of something already given”—rather than supplanting it.6 Third, and finally, hardly anyone at my college really cares to scrutinize the relationship between interpretation and skills, what counts as digital humanities and what does not—least of all the undergraduate students.

No Room for Elitism

Elitism has long marked the digital humanities; just one year after William Pannapacker made his now-famous “first ‘next big thing’ in a long time” remark, he warned of an encroaching elitism.7 In “Digital Humanities Triumphant?,” he writes, “The field, as a whole, seems to be developing an in-group, out-group dynamic that threatens to replicate the culture of Big Theory back in the 80s and 90s, which was alienating to so many people. It’s perceptible in the universe of Twitter: we read it, but we do not participate. It’s the cool kids’ table.” Pannapacker worried that “the growing tendency of the digital humanities to become an elite community—always pursuing the cutting edge—may leave most of us behind, struggling to catch up with limited support.”8 Pannapacker identified a kind of “us versus them” elitism, a response to dismissiveness from a previous generation of traditional humanities scholars that, ironically, risks replicating that same elitism.

From the traditional humanities perspective, theorizing and interpreting texts are more valuable than training students toward a particular hard skillset. Thus, the digital humanities are often on the receiving end of this elitism as DH indirectly produces or emphasizes what might be perceived as more practical “hard” skills—coding, mapping, and building archives, for example. In a critical essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia blame DH for “the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives.” They recognize the general trend toward “the market-oriented evolution of knowledge and education” and mark DH as a contributor since, they argue, DH “seeks to prove that a humanities education is beneficial to job seekers by reinventing that education as a course of training in the advanced use of information technology.”9 Thus, traditional humanists might decry the teaching of “hard” skills altogether, forgetting or perhaps denying that traditional humanities “soft” skills like critical thinking and interpreting texts are also beneficial to job seekers. Further, this elitist view operates on a rather narrow view of theorizing, one interested in generating interpretations for interpretation’s sake rather than a sense of theories as, themselves, tools, “useful instruments for living, not the high mark of scholarship.”10

Just as insidious as this perspective from outside digital humanities, however, is the elitism that exists within DH. Richard Grusin, in his contribution to the “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,” published in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, calls out “boundary drawing,” and he describes his experience at MLA 2011: “I learned that I was not a digital humanist because I did not code (‘Keeping a blog does not make you a digital humanist’) or because I did not ‘make things.’”11 Recently, computational text analysis, for example, has been touted as more of an elite skill than, say, the ability to create a digital archive. Boundary drawing is a perpetual problem in DH; questions about what kind of work qualifies, who is in and who is out, have crept up every few years over the past few decades. Indeed, we see elitism within and elitism without.

Another elitist critique relates to the resources available at small liberal arts colleges. If the ability to code and perform complicated computational text analysis—both of which require advanced skills and expensive computing equipment—are considered paramount in DH, then it would follow that small liberal arts colleges are underresourced to adequately support a digital humanities program. When I first began planning Introduction to Coding for the Humanities, I was still captive to this brand of elitism. I bristled at the notion that I would teach anything other than Python or R, two favored languages of digital humanists. While it made sense, under the auspices of this new program, to teach a markup language that students might be more likely to encounter in their careers, such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, doing so did not seem like real DH work to me. Further, when my colleagues and I were in the initial planning phase for the DH program, I felt that creating a DH center or lab would greatly benefit the image of our upstart program; but in retrospect, this is mostly just because the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern was so central to DH work there, as well as to my own experiences. In both these cases, I recognize that I had been—perhaps in some ways still am—marked by a kind of elitism around my work in digital humanities.

This is not a complete picture of the field, of course. If there is elitism, there is also tremendous generosity, care, and fairness. That said, it is worth continually investigating our stance toward others inside and outside DH. And of all places, in the context of small liberal arts colleges where teaching is the focus and the time and funding available for research are both limited, there is no room for elitism or boundary drawing. As DH scholars who believe that the field has the potential to be valuable to a liberal arts education, we have to find productive ways to reconcile skills and interpretation if we want the opportunity to teach either of them.

Pragmatic Tinkering

What is the relationship, then, between DH-related “hard” skills and “soft” skills like interpretive work or theorizing? As I began to develop my syllabus for Introduction to Coding for the Humanities, I was forced to address this question head on. I knew that the administration would want to see me teach “practical” skills, but still working to shed any remaining bits of latent elitism, I wanted to teach “Big Ideas” and interpretive frameworks. Ironically, I found my way forward by looking back; I revisited two syllabi from courses taught by Ryan Cordell at Northeastern. The first was from a course titled Texts, Maps, and Networks, which is Northeastern’s introduction to DH for graduate students and one of the first courses I took in grad school. The second syllabus was from a graduate course, Humanities Data Analysis, which I took with Benjamin Schmidt and later worked as the teaching assistant for when Cordell taught it. These syllabi proved immensely helpful in reminding me that the way I had actually been introduced to DH was to see a complete synergy between interpretation and skills—that one without the other was a disservice to each. And in fact, as Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell write, using technical skills to build archives and maps can be “a distinct form of scholarly endeavor.”12 Conversely, the interpretation of texts is, in itself, a practical skill. In my grad courses, we did not learn how to archive with Omeka or map with Neatline in a contextless vacuum; rather we were encouraged to create projects related to our scholarly interests. We were taught to use those newly learned skills in the pursuit of interpretation and theorizing—“communicating scholarship through artifacts,” as Ramsay and Rockwell write.13 Thus, at Regis, I wanted my students to enact what I call “pragmatic tinkering,” which is a concept that came to me, significantly, as I was meeting DH for the first time in those grad classes and trying to reconcile the relationship between the skills I was learning and the theories they were built on.

I was also reminded of the discussion of the relationship between theorizing and practicing skills in the introduction to Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, edited by N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman: “Without theorizing, practice can be reduced to technical skills and seamless interpolation into capitalist regimes; without practice, theorizing is deprived of the hands-on experience to guide it and develop robust intuitions about the implications of digital technologies.”14 Or as Bethany Nowviskie put it in her takedown of the overly persistent, and mostly manufactured, “hack versus yack” controversy, “Humanities disciplines and methods themselves are not either/or affairs. The humanities is both/and.”15 Of course, the two must go hand in hand!

And so, I returned to my syllabus as a rehabilitated former elitist and with a renewed sense that theorizing is a complementary skill to the technical skills that DH programs can confer. Whereas once teaching HTML and CSS, which I perceived as not really DH coding languages, felt to me like part of a trade-off—I’ll teach HTML and CSS so that I can also teach R—now I approached the course with a new, more synergistic (and nonelitist) lens, and it actually started to make sense that I would begin this way. I wanted the course to challenge students to broaden their notion of a “text.” So we would read essays that interpret what a text is or can be—such as “The Rationale of Hyper Text,” by Jerome McGann, and “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” by Michael Witmore—and then the following week we would begin learning skills to create HTML texts under this expanded definition. Having thought about what a text is, we could, while reading Ramsay and Rockwell, think of documents beyond traditional writing: “To ask whether coding is a scholarly act is like asking whether writing is a scholarly act.”16 I envisioned the transition from learning HTML and CSS to introducing students to R to be a matter of moving from creation to interpretation. But this, too, ultimately felt oversimplified; after all, an interpretation is a constructed thing too. Thus, we could shift to some lightweight computational text analysis with the notion that we are now using newly learned skills to complement their already-extant skills in interpreting texts. In this way, the students would be creating digital artifacts as “hermeneutical instruments through which we can interpret other phenomena.”17 Then, at the end of the semester, for their final assignments, the students would present their findings in a website that they created, using HTML and CSS.

While Introduction to Coding for the Humanities was still under development, I was asked to teach the Digital Scholarship course, a requirement for all humanities majors at Regis. I saw this as a way to test out my ideas for the coding course in a more introductory environment. As such, I decided to begin the course by requiring the students to create their own website, an assignment I encountered in Cordell’s Texts, Maps, and Networks course, which he, in turn, had borrowed from Brian Croxall. I introduced the students to HTML and CSS as I planned to do in the coding course, but ultimately opted to have them build their sites in WordPress. This site would serve as the platform for digital projects that they would develop over the course of the semester. Students could choose to do a mapping or networking project, create a digital archive, or try out some basic text analysis. While I conducted in-class workshops to teach the skills, these lessons were informed by readings from the ever-growing DH literature that showed how these skills could be put to use in service of interpretation. It was interesting to see how my students’ sense of their final project shifted as they became interested in mapping projects like the Map of Early Modern London, archives like the Women Writers Project, and text analysis projects like Ted Underwood’s experiments with the HathiTrust corpus. Teaching Digital Scholarship was proof positive that the melding of theorizing and practice, ideas and skills, could work after all. In the day-to-day classes, as my students worked to build their own election maps or visualize the movements of characters in their favorite podcasts—as they made interpretations—they were finally enacting my graduate school goal of “pragmatic tinkering.”

They Do Not Really Care

In his contribution to the 2016 volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities, titled “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities,” Cordell writes, “I want to suggest that undergraduate students do not care about digital humanities.” He clarifies: “Undergrads do not care about DH qua DH.” That is to say, all the boundary drawing and hand wringing about what DH is and who does it and whose criticisms of it are fair “often preclude[s] engagement with [DH] projects and theoretical engagements.”18 My experience with undergraduate students at Regis confirms this. During the registration period, a student told me that she planned to enroll in my Digital Scholarship course, but before she did, she wanted to know what “digital scholarship” even meant. I explained that it was a course in which I would introduce the field of digital humanities. She stopped me again to ask what that meant. I did my best to explain in broad terms what I meant by DH, and as I did I could see her eyes glazing over. I tried a different tack and explained not what DH was, but what kind of DH work I had done. I told her about teaching a computer to “read” nineteenth-century newspaper texts and to detect their genres, and suddenly she was interested. She would definitely take the class, she said, but she suggested I change its name.

Undergraduates (and their parents) know that they need to acquire skills in college in order to be competitive in the job market. They are less certain, however, as to what those skills are, and this is nowhere more true than in the humanities. We can tell them all day that, according to LinkedIn, the most in-demand skills are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and time management, all skills that are central to the humanities curriculum.19 Or we can show them graphs that indicate that, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, business executives and hiring managers put a premium on skills like the ability to communicate effectively and to apply knowledge to real-world settings.20 But these are “soft” skills; they are not exactly tangible skills that our graduates can put on their résumés. Collaborative work on a project that produces some result, however, or familiarity with a coding language—these are “hard” skills they can enumerate. I am under no illusion that I am training the next crop of digital humanities researchers, and given the challenges of the academic job market, perhaps that is just as well. But if I can teach undergraduate humanities majors to rethink their conception of what constitutes a text, consider the power structures that shape their lives online and off, and reconfigure their sense of literary history to take scale into account, all while adding a few lines to their résumés, I will call that a win.

In much the same way that my students approach the humanities disciplines with questions about their practicality, prospective students subject small liberal arts colleges like Regis to the same scrutiny. What can Regis offer them that a larger research university cannot? Or, why shouldn’t they attend a simultaneously less expensive and better-resourced state school? In order for Regis and other small liberal arts schools to stay viable, we have to both keep up with those larger and better-endowed schools and offer our own unique value proposition. A digital humanities program at a research-intensive university may have access to more resources, but undergraduates may not enjoy the close working relationships with their professors that are available at small liberal arts colleges. Likewise, while collaboration between faculty and graduate students is common at research universities, at a school like Regis with few graduate programs (and none in the humanities), collaboration between faculty and undergraduates is much more common. In short, small liberal arts colleges are often, out of necessity, nimble and adaptable, thus creating “their own brand of digital humanities,” as Alexander and Davis write.

What Is Next?

At Regis, Digital Scholarship and Media Studies is now an official concentration under the humanities major. The program’s description captures the both/and approach that conceived it: “From studying film to using computational methods to analyze texts, from writing for the web to creating digital archives of historical media, this course of study offers robust possibilities for intellectual engagement.” Even as my colleagues and I wrote this description, I realized that a former version of myself might have bristled at the merging of media studies and DH—as a new managing editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly several years ago, it seemed particularly important to me that the two fields should remain distinct. And yet I now recognize that impulse as overzealous boundary drawing—as elitism. As Tara McPherson has shown, DH and media studies share a similar history and perhaps future, under McPherson’s notion of the “multimodal scholar.”21 And ultimately, the distinction is not one that our undergraduates would care about in the least. Doing DH at small liberal arts colleges requires flexibility and humility. It requires putting students and their needs first. But as my experience thus far has shown, a small liberal arts college can be a great place to test new ideas and put them into practice, to model the both/and approach to teaching DH.

Notes

1. 1. Alexander and Davis, “Should Liberal Arts?,” 382, 370.

2. 2. See chapter 9 in this volume by my geographical and textual neighbor Scott Cohen for more on this.

3. 3. Association of American Colleges and Universities, “Presentation.”

4. 4. Fitzgerald, “Pragmatic Tinkering.”

5. 5. Oxford English Dictionary, “Pragmatic, adj. and n.”

6. 6. Ramsay and Rockwell, “Developing Things,” 77.

7. 7. Pannapacker, “MLA.”

8. 8. Pannapacker, “Pannapacker at MLA.”

9. 9. Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools.”

10. 10. Ramsay and Rockwell, “Developing Things,” 80.

11. 11. Chun et al., “Dark Side,” 499.

12. 12. Ramsay and Rockwell, “Developing Things,” 77.

13. 13. Ramsay and Rockwell, 78.

14. 14. Hayles and Pressman, Comparative Textual Media, xvii.

15. 15. Nowviskie, “On the Origin,” 69.

16. 16. Ramsay and Rockwell, “Developing Things,” 82.

17. 17. Ramsay and Rockwell, 79.

18. 18. Cordell, “How Not,” 460.

19. 19. Petrone, “Skills.”

20. 20. Association of American Colleges and Universities, “Presentation.”

21. 21. McPherson, “Introduction,” 120.

Bibliography

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2. Allington, Daniel, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia. “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org.
3. Association of American Colleges and Universities. “Presentation: Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work.” https://web.archive.org/web/20201126214716/https://www.aacu.org/research/2018-future-of-work-presentation.
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6. Fitzgerald, Jonathan D. “Pragmatic Tinkering, or Against Truthiness.” Jonathan D. Fitzgerald (blog), November 4, 2014. https://jonathandfitzgerald.com/blog/2014/11/04/pragmatic-tinkering-or-against-truthiness.html.
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10. Oxford English Dictionary. “Pragmatic, adj. and n.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com.
11. Pannapacker, William. “The MLA and the Digital Humanities.” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 28, 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20110603201536/https://www.chronicle.com/blogPost/The-MLAthe-Digital/19468/.
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