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What We Teach When We Teach DH: What’s the Value of a Graduate Digital Humanities Degree?

What We Teach When We Teach DH
What’s the Value of a Graduate Digital Humanities Degree?
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Series Page
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. Introduction. What We Teach When We Teach DH | Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki
  9. Part 1. Teachers
    1. 1. Born-Pedagogical DH: Learning While Teaching | Emily McGinn and Lauren Coats
    2. 2. What Do We Want from the Standard Core Texts of the Digital Humanities Curriculum? | Gabriel Hankins
    3. 3. Teaching the Digital Humanities to a Broad Undergraduate Population | Alison Langmead and Annette Vee
    4. 4. Teaching Digital Humanities: Neoliberal Logic, Class, and Social Relevance | James O’Sullivan
    5. 5. Teaching from the Middle: Positioning the Non–Tenure Track Teacher in the Classroom | Jacob Heil
    6. 6. Why (in the World) Teach Digital Humanities at a Teaching-Intensive Institution? | Rebecca Frost Davis and Katherine D. Harris
  10. Part 2. Students
    1. 7. Digital Humanities in General Education: Building Bridges among Student Expertise at an Access University | Kathi Inman Berens
    2. 8. (Hard and Soft) Skills to Pay the Bills: A Both/And Approach to Teaching DH to Undergraduates | Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
    3. 9. Digital Humanities across the Curriculum, or How to Wear the Digital Halo | Scott Cohen
    4. 10. Rethinking the PhD Exam for the Study of Digital Humanities | Asiel Sepúlveda and Claudia E. Zapata
    5. 11. Pedagogy First: A Lab-Led Model for Preparing Graduate Students to Teach DH | Catherine DeRose
    6. 12. What’s the Value of a Graduate Digital Humanities Degree? | Elizabeth Hopwood and Kyle Roberts
  11. Part 3. Classrooms
    1. 13. Codework: The Pedagogy of DH Programming | Harvey Quamen
    2. 14. Community-Driven Projects, Intersectional Feminist Praxis, and the Undergraduate DH Classroom | Andie Silva
    3. 15. Bringing Languages into the DH Classroom | Quinn Dombrowski
    4. 16. DH Ghost Towns: What Happens When Makers Abandon Their Creations? | Emily Gilliland Grover
    5. 17. How to Teach DH without Separating New from Old | Sheila Liming
    6. 18. The Three-Speed Problem in Digital Humanities Pedagogy | Brandon Walsh
  12. Part 4. Collaborations
    1. 19. Sharing Authority in Collaborative Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Library Workers’ Perspectives | Chelcie Juliet Rowell and Alix Keener
    2. 20. K12DH: Precollege DH in Historically Underprivileged Communities | Laquana Cooke and Andrew Famiglietti
    3. 21. A Tale of Two Durhams: How Duke University and North Carolina Central University Are Increasing Access and Building Community through DH Pedagogy | Hannah L. Jacobs, Kathryn Wymer, Victoria Szabo, and W. Russell Robinson
    4. 22. Expanding Communities of Practice through DH Andragogy | Lisa Marie Rhody and Kalle Westerling
    5. 23. What Is Postcolonial DH Pedagogy and What Is It Doing in Nonhumanities Institutions? Case Studies from India | Dibyadyuti Roy and Nirmala Menon
    6. 24. Finding Flexibility to Teach the “Next Big Thing”: Digital Humanities Pedagogy in China | Lik Hang Tsui, Benjun Zhu, and Jing Chen
    7. 25. What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in the Classroom? | Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Contributors

Part 2 — Chapter 12

What’s the Value of a Graduate Digital Humanities Degree?

Elizabeth Hopwood and Kyle Roberts

Despite the emergence of digital humanities (DH) as an institutional expectation for many universities over the past decade, there are still relatively few graduate programs in the United States dedicated to DH graduate training. Advanced DH degrees, however, provide unique opportunities for comprehensive training built on a deliberate and consistent pedagogical approach. These degrees tend to be offered by interdisciplinary programs and research centers, unmooring students from traditional “home” departments in the humanities or computer science. They integrate subject domains from across disciplines, drawing together diverse coursework in cultural studies, public history, large-scale textual computation, machine learning, and digital storytelling.

This essay considers advanced graduate DH degrees as framed both by subject matters and by sets of theories and methodologies requiring distinct pedagogies that prepare students professionally to contribute to the larger field and a range of careers. Questions about what an advanced DH degree is actually supposed to do and how program directors assess whether it is working animate daily pedagogical, infrastructural, and institutional decisions. Program directors continue to assess whether students are learning the kinds of tools and transferable skills they need to be competitive in the job market and whether their degree program is balancing rigorous training in both the “digital” and the “humanities,” while asking faculty to develop pedagogical approaches appropriate for collaborative, interdisciplinary work.

As the costs of a graduate education continue to increase and with no guarantee of employment, the importance of articulating the value of an advanced degree in DH has become all the more crucial. From the authors’ experience as past and present program directors of the MA in Digital Humanities program at Loyola University Chicago—a two-year, thirty-credit degree—they offer this essay as a case study to think through affordances and challenges of offering an interdisciplinary program in the hope they can open conversations about what an advanced DH degree can (and should) look like at other institutions. This essay reflects on the changing nature of degree programs in DH; the case that faculty in DH graduate programs make to prospective students and non-DH faculty about the outcomes and goals of such a degree; the importance of a specially tailored curriculum modeled on a deliberate and consistent pedagogical approach; the need for ongoing assessment to understand the value alumni see imparted by the program; and preparation of students for the professional job market. The authors take seriously the charge of asking themselves—and communicating to their various stakeholders and, above all else, their students—the value of a graduate degree in DH. When they speak about a degree’s “value,” they consider the tuition cost of attending a private institution weighed against the increasingly tight job market into which students will enter. Graduate programs—particularly terminal MA programs in DH—are costly and often underfunded, with the price of tuition credits and university fees set by the graduate school without the input of faculty.1 Yet MA and PhD degree and certificate programs equip students with a toolkit for the study and application of DH methodologies in their research not provided by traditional programs. The value of DH degrees is ultimately grounded in interdisciplinary training, exposure to a pedagogy rooted in the classroom and hands-on skill building, and preparation for a variety of professional careers.

Degrees in DH

The rise of DH certificate and degree programs has been a welcome turn in the humanities, one that responds to the imperative Stephen Brier set forth in the 2012 edition of Debates in Digital Humanities, where he called for DH practitioners to take seriously the role of teaching and pedagogy.2 The authors of a 2017 survey of DH programs describe them as, on the one hand, only part of the makeup of the field and its practitioners, but on the other hand, often “the public face of DH.” Put differently, such programs signify to current and prospective students, faculty, and university administrators the kinds of rigorous research and learning that accompany the field as a discipline.3

In North America, graduate students today have more options for formal DH training than the days when scholars—like the authors—were largely self-taught. Certificate programs are gaining in popularity: an ever-increasing number of graduate certificates in DH are available in U.S. and Canadian institutions. Stand-alone graduate degrees, the MA or PhD in digital humanities, have proliferated in Europe, but they are still relatively new elsewhere.4

Rarely do DH programs emerge from single departments, and often they respond to student desire for interdisciplinary training. George K. Thiruvathukal and Steven E. Jones, founding directors of Loyola Chicago’s Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH), launched the MA program in 2011. They felt particularly well positioned to create this degree because of the strong relationship between their respective programs (the Computer Science and English Departments). Recalling the emergence of the program, Thiruvathukal shares, “I sometimes have a hard time putting my finger on the precise moment when we really started . . . but it was part of a convergence of activity. Basically, my first memories of digital humanities thinking at Loyola actually took place when I started noticing some English majors in my COMP 336 (Markup Languages) class. Little did I know that these students were being sent there by Steve Jones, who was sending them there after telling them that if they wanted to do textual studies, it would behoove them to learn something about the technologies, too.”5 Reflecting that an advanced degree might offer a pathway for undergraduates to consider DH in a professional capacity, Thiruvathukal and Jones first considered a certificate program but decided instead on a thirty-hour interdisciplinary professional graduate program. They perceived the need to foster technical skills as well as to teach methods for doing collaborative work and theoretical approaches to how and why digital humanists “do” DH in the first place. From its inception, the program was designed to be interdisciplinary and to encourage collaboration across departments. Core courses in topics in DH, as well as electives in computer science, public history, and textual studies, provided students with exposure to a range of different teaching approaches and methodologies. Theoretical and hands-on training instilled transferable skills that would support them in the rapidly evolving job market.

The Loyola program’s early objectives were consistent within the context of existing and newly developed DH graduate and certificate programs, where pedagogical objectives were balanced, sometimes precariously, between content and tools. Chris Alen Sula, S. E. Hackney, and Phillip Cunningham’s 2017 survey on DH graduate studies found less emphasis on content areas and more focus on tools and platforms, such as visualizing and analyzing large datasets.6 A question that remains for Sula and coauthors is how skills are developed through modes of teaching and what forms of critical self-reflection—and critique of tools and platforms—accompany them. Julia Thompson Klein, for instance, has noted how an orientation to DH focused primarily on tools “perpetuates the belief that digital humanities is primarily about technical production and methods, rendering it a handmaiden to humanities.”7

Faculty in DH programs must be cognizant of how their teaching prepares students to work in and with emerging technologies, while foregrounding DH as interpretive knowledge work. As the authors have found via their own experience and ongoing assessment through course review and alumni surveys, modes of instruction must be designed for students who seek demonstrable technical training and skill sets that they can apply to their own research and careers, such as database design, coding, text mining or machine learning techniques, and geomapping. Particularly for students with humanities backgrounds, the barrier to entry into DH is rooted in feeling like they are insufficiently prepared in terms of their technical expertise. However, a robust training in DH must foreground humanities inquiry within coursework and research; this is not the same thing as supplementing required computer science courses with humanities electives. The value—and stakes—of a program lies not in technical mastery or coding but the ability to investigate ways of thinking and enter into the conversations and arguments of the field.

For example, before teaching students how to construct a database in a DH class on the American Revolution, faculty have to challenge them to interrogate the nature of the historical source that will provide the dataset, in this case white Loyalist property claims that include large numbers of enslaved Black women and men. This requires students to reflect on how technical choices in data and interface design could perpetuate long-standing patterns of commodification and quantification of human beings, as Black DH scholars have powerfully reminded the field.

Such self-reflexive, critical practices seem to be where DH coursework and graduate programs are headed: a combination of hands-on, often experimental work and training in epistemology, ethics of production, and theorization and critique of the practices in building and making. Scholars like Miriam Posner, Jessica Marie Johnson, Roopika Risam, Jentery Sayers, and Julia Thompson Klein (among others) argue for DH as a field that asks us to think about critical cultural studies of race, gender, sexuality, class, and access.8 Interventions at the level of institution and curriculum can bolster DH research and thinking in such areas as critical code studies, cultural studies, public history and engagement, and activism.

Making the Case

Articulating the value of an advanced degree in DH begins even before a student enrolls in a program. Unlike traditional humanities disciplines, DH has no undergraduate feeder at Loyola. This makes the degree something of an unknown entity for prospective students. In 2021 there were a steadily increasing number of DH minors, and even majors, at North American colleges and universities, but for most students in their undergraduate careers, they might only get to take a course or two with DH content or work on a project with a DH-engaged faculty member.9 Students discover graduate programs in DH through personal connections and web searches. When asked in a 2016 survey why they applied to Loyola’s MA program, alumni shared that they wanted to learn specific, often technical, skills. To varying degrees, they also indicated a curiosity for the field, the desire for more intellectually fulfilling work, and the wish for professionalization and credentialing that comes with such a degree, seeing it as a means to advance their professional standing and increase their career marketability.

The case must be made not only to prospective students but also to stakeholders in the faculty, administration, and broader discipline. Marketing for these programs is often dependent on the goodwill of faculty who recommend the degree to talented students.10 The number of applications for the Loyola DH graduate program has been modest since the program’s inception, which remains a concern for program directors and administrators, but the number of matriculated students is significantly higher than in traditional disciplinary programs. In the authors’ experience, university administrators appreciate the buzz that DH continues to have among faculty, funding agencies, and university communication offices. The degree program allows them to point to forward-looking approaches.

However, the authors are well aware of the many thoughtful critiques brought to DH educators and administrators of DH programs. They would not speak of the degree’s financial value divorced from charges that DH has been a tool of the neoliberal university to increase streams of income.11 In chapter 4 of this volume, James O’Sullivan contends with such critiques of DH in detail. The authors join him in seeking to confront the tensions between the price tag of the degree and the material opportunities that DH often promises to provide. DH is not a panacea for the humanities student or job seeker nor for higher education as a whole. As a program, DH, like any other academic department, is enmeshed within the pushes and pulls of higher education administration (in terms of available budgets, number of funded students, and so on). Concerns about pedagogy and curriculum sit alongside questions of enrollment, graduate assistantships, and program promotion. Thus, the authors’ conversations about the value they build into the program and the value students receive need to happen often and regularly, and need to assess not only the monetary worth of the program but the responsibility they as educators have to provide students with a foundational toolset of humanities-driven skills that can be drawn on for what comes next. To do this, they have looked toward models of interdisciplinary programs in their own university that draw on support and buy-in from multiple departments. Focusing on and articulating a diversity of content and pedagogical approaches (as will be seen in the next section), as well as demonstrable project management and technical skills, is important; so too is having these conversations with students, to practice discussing how traditional humanities degrees and digital literacies can be spoken of (and traded for compensation) in the labor market.12

Curriculum and Infrastructure

Once enrolled in a DH graduate program, students depend on a specially tailored curriculum modeled on a deliberate and consistent pedagogical approach grounded in the classroom, with hands-on work within the research center or library to learn and develop expertise.

DH approaches, methodologies, and skills change at a faster clip than those in traditional humanities programs, creating ongoing pressure to assess and revise the education on offer, the resources required, and the mode of instruction. The syllabus for an Introduction to DH course taught in 2010 will look significantly different from one offered in 2015 or 2020. Machine learning, public humanities, and critical archival work concern DH practitioners today in ways that tool design, defining the field, and debating hack versus yack did a decade ago. The DH canon similarly continues to evolve, with faculty needing to integrate new approaches, platforms, and tools into their teaching to replace those once seen as cutting-edge. Add to this the challenge of creating a curriculum attentive to the intellectual ambitions of students more disciplinarily diverse than ever, who arrive with previous training in fields such as history, literary studies, museum studies, media studies, and computer science.

Any core DH curriculum needs regular review. Over the 2018–19 academic year, an internal committee assessed and made recommendations about Loyola’s curriculum, which had remained largely the same since the program’s inception. In making the assessment, the committee solicited and evaluated student feedback, performed market analysis, and undertook a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threat analysis of existing courses to identify areas of growth and change.

Loyola’s revised core curriculum offers a sequence of four dedicated courses that combine seminar-style learning with hands-on building and reflective practice. The sequence is premised on the expectation that DH projects are created collaboratively, rather than individually. For students who come to the program from traditional humanities backgrounds, where the individual model of research persists, this is a new mode of working. Faculty in Loyola’s course sequence teach students how to progressively gain experience and confidence in working as part of a collaborative team. They ground their instruction in their own experience as DH researchers, offering pathways to success but also guidance in how to learn from failure. Coursework culminates in students learning how to design and implement their own projects. Over the course of two years, DH faculty variously play the role of instructor, mentor, collaborator, and employer for graduate students.

The sequence begins in the first semester with an Introduction to DH Research Methods course that addresses practical problems involved in DH. This course is taught as a seminar but integrates lab-like hands-on practice to apply the theoretical concepts to project building. A lesson on metadata standards, for instance, is followed by a tutorial on Omeka collections and the Dublin core, or a discussion on accessibility might be followed with building static websites using Markdown and Jekyll. Faculty instill the principles of reflective practice in the classroom through weekly writing assignments on the approaches, skills, and theories being taught and how they are developing as DH professionals. Each student has his or her own shared document with the instructor where he or she receives feedback, asks questions, and charts development over the semester. For their final assignment, students propose projects to advance and support public digital humanities grounded in a common theme or set of materials. In one semester, students worked with a MacArthur Genius grant recipient to design digital projects that connected residents with images of public housing communities he had photographed over forty years, bridging fine art and community memory. In another, students applied the concepts and resources from their “lab” practices into creating collaborative public digital humanities projects centered on Chicago history. In both, faculty designed in- and out-of-classroom assignments to teach students how to undertake public-facing, community-engaged work.

The second and third core courses teach skill building, theoretical approaches, and project management. DH Design surveys human–computer interaction and design theory with the final goals of developing an interface and a technical report that explains what design decisions were made, and why. The course is taught as a discussion-focused seminar in which students engage with readings from DH and design fields, exploring affective design, ethics and representation, interface studies, and access and usability. Students are asked to apply theoretical knowledge of accessible design to their own projects. One student, Eliora Horst, identifying a need within the field, developed an accessible prototype of a WordPress theme intended to make the creation of digital editions more seamless for scholars who may not have the technical background or necessary funding to create their own from scratch.

The DH Practicum in the third semester is premised on the idea that graduate students learn by making contributions to established faculty research projects. Instructors teach students not only new interfaces and processes but also theoretical research questions that animate their projects by making them part of their project team. Rather than using students as research assistants to implement predetermined work, faculty invite them to collaborate through a contribution to—or an intervention in—the project. This requires faculty to make themselves vulnerable, but those who have taught the course have found student contributions and interventions to be formative in reimagining the possibilities of their projects. “Students’ lack of familiarity with the specifics of the content, and to some extent the particularities of disciplinary and professional context of the approach, has served as a kind of formative evaluation of the project’s goals and methods,” reflects Catherine Nichols, a professor of anthropology who directs a project to digitize an ethnographic museum collection. “Their questions and ideas, drawing on their own backgrounds and interests, have led to iterative revisions in the project’s design and execution.”13 In Nichols’s class, students designed a public-facing, community-engaged interface that carefully considered internal systems of databases and data entry while examining how a public-facing website might work toward the digital repatriation of museum objects. In such faculty projects, students obtain important real-life training in areas such as project management, web design, TEI/XML, grant writing, digitization, and community engagement while receiving contributor credits on the project (often leading to conference presentations and coauthored articles about their contributions).14

In the fourth and final semester, faculty support students in developing a capstone project in an area of research and practice of their choosing. Some create solo projects, but others collaborate. Xiaolin Sun used his experience learning from faculty mentors to assemble a team of computer science and first-year DH students to help him create his project, East Asian Textiles (http://eastasiantextiles.ctsdh.org/). Faculty play active roles as advisers, training students in project management and providing feedback, as their colleagues in the humanities would do, but also guiding them in how to find answers to the technical and support problems they encounter. Students leave the program with a sophisticated digital project, demonstrative of their humanistic interests and technical skills, at the heart of their portfolio of two years’ intensive work.

Teaching is not limited to the classroom. To support their curricula, DH programs require a more complex infrastructure than traditional humanities programs. What program directors ask students to accomplish in their coursework requires a supportive and dedicated space where practice and experimentation can be carried out. Whether conceived of as a “studio,” “lab,” or “maker space,” it is a site for inquiry, research, and threading together critical theory with praxis. Loyola’s CTSDH provides administrative assistance and access to technological, spatial, and mentorial resources, as well as an opportunity for faculty and students to participate in workshops and training seminars, to hear talks from leading experts in the field, and to learn by doing through work on sponsored research projects. The research center is also a key site for teaching students how DH works on a foundational level by training them to teach others. A majority of students in the program have held fellowships where they work five to ten hours a week in the center.15 The program directors deliberately created a structured experience where, in their first year, student fellows learned the ropes of running the center’s equipment, teaching students and faculty how to use it, planning and running public programs, and managing communication streams. In their second year, student fellows have taken on project support and sometimes management roles within center research projects. Every second-year student is also able to lead a public workshop where they teach a particular skill. Such an approach not only immerses students in the field in a way different from traditional humanities programs but also has the added value of providing crucial professional training for those aiming for administrative careers within universities and libraries.

For DH faculty, this means playing the part of the employer as well as classroom teacher and mentor. It expands the expectation placed on faculty beyond what traditional disciplines require, but it has provided the opportunity for those faculty to learn a more holistic pedagogy that centers the students’ intellectual and professional development and values the students’ contributions to DH projects.

Student-Assessed Value

Surveys help assess the value students see imparted by coursework and working within the research environment. Course evaluations can reveal whether a class achieved its learning objectives, while surveys of alumni provide valuable insight into the long-term value of a DH degree. Loyola’s program was assessed three times over its first eight years: in fall 2015 as part of a larger Graduate School survey of humanities alumni, in February/March 2016 as part of a focused survey of DH program alumni and current students, and in January 2019 as part of the curriculum review process. The absolute number of respondents (n) for each study is small, but as a percentage of the sample invited, the response rate is impressive (2015: n = 5, 71 percent; 2016: n = 12, 67 percent; 2019: n = 10, 42 percent). Each survey was constructed differently, but all sought to assess the curriculum’s value, the skills it imparted, the faculty’s pedagogical approach, and the professional development of graduates.

The first (2015) survey was administered by the Graduate School as part of a larger study of degrees in the humanities. It asked alumni to reflect on four key intellectual skills identified by the American Historical Association, as well as five professional skills selected by the Graduate School.16 Across these categories, high marks (80 percent reporting that they were prepared “well” or “very well”) were given for written communication, preparing presentations, collaborating with colleagues, working with a team, and project management. More tempered marks (60 percent or less reported that they were prepared “well” or “very well”) were given for preparation for public speaking, data analysis, understanding quantitative data, mentoring, grant writing, publishing, and teaching. Instilling intellectual self-confidence registered an impressive 80 percent positive response; a majority of graduates felt strongly that the program prepared them “to quickly master information, to form intelligent opinions, and to pivot among many tasks.”17

The second (2016) and third (2019) surveys yielded more feedback on the content of DH coursework and instruction. In 2016, respondents identified content, particularly technical training, as both a strength and weakness of the program. “The readings about DH concepts and the comfort with learning new software / computer programs have proven vital,” shared one graduate. “I continue to work with new and evolving technology which would not be possible without this MA.” But respondents also desired more opportunities to write software, code, and learn relevant programming skills. “The coding I learned never really connected into the projects I worked on for coursework,” another graduate shared. They suggested that “classes like DH402 [DH Design] or Textual Criticism could have been fun places to be asked to utilize some of the coding stuff in the earlier classes”; the committee took this recommendation to heart in revising the curriculum.18 A perennial anxiety emerges among students, especially those with humanities backgrounds, that they are not learning enough coding. The 2019 survey asked respondents what they had not learned but wished they had. Answers included, again, coding (50 percent), as well as graphic design (20 percent), three-dimensional modeling (10 percent), and digital archiving (10 percent). The coding languages they suggested varied widely from JavaScript to XPath and XSLT to MySQL, reflecting an ongoing challenge for DH graduate programs to meet a range of interests. Managing expectations and connecting students with the appropriate computer science classes is an ongoing requirement for any advanced degree program in DH.19

Both qualitative and quantitative feedback reveals the value students see in coursework and points to the importance of mentoring for students in a DH degree program. Varied disciplinary backgrounds, technical and humanistic competencies, experience with project management, and career aspirations require more active mentoring than traditional humanities programs to ensure student success. The graduate program director bears the burden of this work, but incoming graduate students are now assigned a faculty member in their area of disciplinary interest to provide support throughout their coursework. In 2018, the Loyola program also instituted peer mentoring between first- and second-year students to further acclimate the former to the program.

DH at Work

Graduate students across the humanities express anxiety about what comes after graduation, and students in Loyola’s DH program are no exception, even as program assessments reveal they are highly successful at landing positions. Preparation for the professional job market is one area where the program failed to score highly in initial surveys. “I would have liked more of a sense of what I could do with that degree upon graduation,” one alumna shared in the 2015 survey. “However with all that being said, this MA is the only thing that makes my PhD and current work possible. It informs every aspect of the work I do.”20 A majority raised concerns about training for interviewing and conducting job searches, while they were more positive about the value of their training and career possibilities. Coming out of this program assessment, the program directors have made efforts to situate career preparation as a core part of mentorship from the start of the degree program. Biweekly brown-bag or virtual lunches for DH students focus on aspects of career preparation. Speakers for the campus-wide DH lecture series are asked to talk about their career trajectories; alumni are featured on the website; networking opportunities are fostered at conferences and events; résumé, portfolio, and cover letter workshops are held; and job search counseling is incorporated into the curriculum for the final capstone project. Early indications suggest these changes have been valued by students. “All the workshops, lunchtime lectures, and other events at the CTSDH were a real highlight,” noted a recent graduate. “I loved the workshop bringing in the career services rep. I still love the idea of alumni profiles on the site, to help envision future careers after the DH program.”21

Students in DH programs desire a broad range of career paths. Respondents to the 2016 survey, for example, each indicated a different type of job they wished to obtain after graduation.22 Much of the preparative work for the job market involves understanding how to translate the skills imparted by a DH degree to the broad range of potential employers, many of whom have not encountered such candidates before. Professionals in university career centers are adept at thinking about transferable skills, even when they have greater experience working with students from traditional disciplinary tracks. It is important for DH faculty to be in career workshops with students so that the former can reinforce those skills and aptitudes in the inevitable reference calls from potential employers. Employers often admit their unfamiliarity with a DH degree and ask probing questions about the skills it imparts. Many express excitement about its unique combination of traditional humanities training (communication, collaboration, qualitative and quantitative literacy) and technical (coding, web design) and project management skills. Over time an increasing number of companies have reached out to us in search of candidates for new hires.

Job placement records confirm graduates are highly successful in landing in jobs, an important indicator of value. Alumni from the Loyola program (2011–19) have gone into positions at places as diverse as the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley; the Chicago Metro History Fair; the University of Michigan Library; the English Department at Norfolk State University; and Alto Pharmacy. The twenty-one alumni for whom job placement is known are employed in libraries (four), in the tech sector (four), in digital editing and publishing (three), in doctoral programs (three), as consultants (two), in teaching (two), in public history (one), in development (one), and retired (one). At a time when humanities departments are undergoing significant soul-searching about what they are training students to do as the academic job market collapses, students with DH degrees are finding a broad range of options open to them.23

Most students report being happy with the benefits brought by the degree. “I have been able to earn a higher salary as a result of having my LUC graduate degree,” wrote one graduate in response to a 2015 survey, while another noted, “Earning my LUC graduate degree has greatly improved the quality of life I can provide for myself and my family.” Overall, the highest levels of satisfaction in that survey were reserved for students’ feelings about earning potential, while slightly lower numbers said that the degree was a good financial decision and that it had improved the quality of their lives. Such focus on financial benefits is understandable for a terminal professional degree, but the program directors have been heartened by the high value students placed in the survey on the program’s focus on ethical issues and sensitivity to different cultural perspectives.24


In the face of all these questions and considerations, what is the value of a graduate DH degree? For a majority of graduates of Loyola master’s in DH program, the value lies in their interdisciplinary training, a pedagogy rooted in the classroom and research, and their preparation for successful professional careers. Quantitative and qualitative indicators alike point to success in training a rising generation of digital humanists to be adept and adaptable critical thinkers, builders, and project managers. Most importantly, they are self-confident in doing it by being required to translate their learning in the classroom to their work on research projects. They are generally satisfied with the content of the two-year curriculum and the effect this has had on their professional careers and lives. Concern persists about the need for more technical training, although what that specific training should be varies from student to student based on personal interest and career aspiration. Issues of organization, communication, and job market preparation are critical to student success and require special attention, but no more so, the authors would argue, than in other humanities programs.

By their nature, DH graduate degrees are more complicated and require more resources than traditional humanities degree programs, something that all stakeholders must bear in mind. Universities that approve such programs need to ensure the infrastructure is in place, including faculty to teach and mentor and a dedicated space for practice and experimentation. Students who enroll in these programs must have confidence that the curriculum is designed for their success. Faculty ought to diversify their departmental ranks, create interdisciplinary opportunities, and embrace new pedagogical approaches. Finally, employers should be open to hiring candidates whose training looks different from that of candidates they have traditionally recruited. Those willing to make this commitment are investing in a degree that situates a rising generation of scholars, practitioners, and working professionals to generate new forms of knowledge at the intersection of the humanities and computing.

In the years to come, particularly in a post-Covid-19 world where so much teaching, learning, and working has had to be translated to digital realms, the authors are very interested to see how certificate programs and other MA and PhD programs are developed or even reimagined across the country. They offer their experiences here not as a prescriptive formula for other institutions to emulate but instead as a model of how they have conceptualized their program and some of the challenges they have faced along the way. Continuing to regularly assess the value of a degree program is instrumental for growing interdisciplinary DH programs, which can, they hope, continue to be responsive, critical, future-oriented, and infrastructurally sound in order to train the next generations of DH scholars and practitioners.

Notes

  1. 1. The authors share the frustration of their colleagues in the DH community, especially those at private universities who run DH programs, with costs set by the university. A majority of students in the Loyola program under their leadership have had some form of work-based fellowship, partial tuition remission, and health insurance to offset this cost. This, of course, puts a significant burden on the program directors to work with the graduate school and other university units to create these opportunities. For an example of the critique of costs of degree programs at private universities, see Petersen, “Master’s Trap.”

  2. 2. Brier, “Where’s the Pedagogy?”

  3. 3. Sula, Hackney, and Cunningham, “Survey.”

  4. 4. As of April 2022, aside from the program at Loyola, there are eleven other MA programs in DH and related fields in North America. The one doctoral program in the United States is the Texts and Technology PhD at University of Central Florida. See Group for Experimental Methods, “Advanced Degrees.”

  5. 5. George K. Thiruvathukal, personal communication with the authors, November 2019.

  6. 6. Sula, Hackney, and Cunningham, “Survey.”

  7. 7. Klein, “Boundary Work,” 24.

  8. 8. See, for instance, Posner, “What’s Next”; Johnson, “Markup Bodies”; Risam, New Digital Worlds; and Sayers, Making Things.

  9. 9. Group for Experimental Methods, “Advanced Degrees.”

  10. 10. An important consideration here is that given how graduate admissions are declining across the board, the authors’ messaging to faculty across departments must be careful to emphasize their unique programmatic goals, rather than appearing to poach their applicants.

  11. 11. See, for example, Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools.” The authors’ sense is that their critique has been leveled more at research monies than teaching opportunities.

  12. 12. See, for example, Council of Graduate Schools, “NextGenPhD Consortium”; and American Historical Association, “About Career Diversity.”

  13. 13. Catherine Nichols, personal communication with the authors, May 2020.

  14. 14. Recent projects include Nichols, May Weber Ethnographic Collection; Caughie et al., Lili Elbe Digital Archive; Bradshaw, Amy Lowell Letters Project; and Hopwood et al., Reading Cookbooks.

  15. 15. These fellowships have come with a stipend, tuition remission for a certain number of courses, and in most cases health insurance.

  16. 16. Swafford, “Career Diversity for Historians.”

  17. 17. Hazen, “Report on the 2015.”

  18. 18. Hazen, “Report on the 2016.”

  19. 19. Survey by the authors, 2019.

  20. 20. Hazen, “Report on the 2015.”

  21. 21. Survey by the authors, 2019.

  22. 22. Hazen, “Report on the 2016.”

  23. 23. See Loyola University Chicago, “Where Are We Going?,” “DH Graduate Trevor Borg,” “Recent DH Graduate Hannah Gillow,” and “Recent DH Graduate Caitlin Pollock.”

  24. 24. Hazen, “Report on the 2015.”

Bibliography

  1. 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.
  2. American Historical Association. “About Career Diversity.” https://www.historians.org.
  3. Bradshaw, Melissa. Amy Lowell Letters Project. https://melissabradshaw.org/amy-lowell-letters-project/.
  4. Brier, Stephen. “Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 390–401. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu.
  5. Caughie, Pamela L., Emily Datskou, Sabine Meyer, Rebecca J. Parker, and Nikolaus Wasmoen, eds. Lili Elbe Digital Archive. http://www.lilielbe.org.
  6. Council of Graduate Schools. “NextGenPhD Consortium.” https://web.archive.org/web/20180326134105/https://cgsnet.org/nextgenphd-consortium.
  7. Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research, Columbia University. “Advanced Degrees in Digital Humanities.” GitHub. https://github.com/dh-notes/dhnotes/blob/master/pages/dh-programs.md.
  8. Hazen, Timothy. “Report on the 2015 Humanities Alumni Graduate Study: Digital Humanities.” Graduate School, Loyola University Chicago, 2016.
  9. Hazen, Timothy. “Report on the 2016 Digital Humanities Graduate Study.” Graduate School, Loyola University Chicago, 2016.
  10. Hopwood, Elizabeth, Regina Hong, Prakruti Maniar, Eliora Horst, Andrew French, Anna Kroon, Scarlett Andes, and Ve’Amber Miller. Reading Cookbooks: Tastemaking in the Atlantic Kitchen. GitHub. https://github.com/lizziehop/reading-cookbooks.
  11. Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57–79.
  12. Klein, Julia Thompson. “The Boundary Work of Making in Digital Humanities.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, edited by Jentery Sayers, 21–31. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu.
  13. Loyola University Chicago. “DH Graduate Trevor Borg.” Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. https://www.luc.edu/ctsdh/stories/archive/dhgraduatetrevorborg.shtml.
  14. Loyola University Chicago. “Where Are We Going? Alumni.” Digital Humanities. https://web.archive.org/web/20221221122646/https://www.luc.edu/digitalhumanities/wherearewegoing/alumni/.
  15. Loyola University Chicago. “Recent DH Graduate Caitlin Pollock Takes Position at IUPUI.” Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. https://www.luc.edu/ctsdh/stories/archive/recentdhgraduatecaitlinpollocktakespositionatiupui.shtml.
  16. Loyola University Chicago. “Recent DH Graduate Hannah Gillow Kloster Takes Position at University of Bergen Library.” Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. https://www.luc.edu/ctsdh/stories/archive/recentdhgraduatehannahgillowklostertakespositionatuniversityofbergenlibrary.shtml.
  17. Nichols, Catherine. May Weber Ethnographic Collection. https://web.archive.org/web/20221113105600/https://www.luc.edu/digitalhumanities/whatarewedoing/currentresearch/decolonizingthemuseumcataloguemaywebercollection/.
  18. Petersen, Anne Helen. “The Master’s Trap.” Culture Study (blog), July 21, 2021. https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-masters-trap.
  19. Posner, Miriam. “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities.” Miriam Posner’s Blog, July 27, 2015. https://miriamposner.com/blog.
  20. Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
  21. Sayers, Jentery, ed. Making Things and Drawing Boundaries. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu.
  22. Sula, Chris Alen, S. E. Hackney, and Phillip Cunningham. “A Survey of Digital Humanities Programs.” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy 11 (2017). https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu.
  23. Swafford, Emily. “Career Diversity for Historians: Phase II Kickoff in DC.” Perspective on History 52, no. 8 (November 2014). https://www.historians.org/perspectives.

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