PART II | Chapter 10

A “No Tent” / No Center Model for Digital Work in the Humanities

Brennan Collins and Dylan Ruediger

Georgia State University (GSU) is a large, urban, public institution and one of the most diverse universities in the country, with a high percentage of first generation and Pell-eligible students. We are an R1 university, but in terms of endowment, funding, and a focus on undergraduate education we share more with comprehensive teaching universities than with flagship public schools or elite private institutions. As is the case in many similar institutions, the humanities have been a low institutional priority. However, GSU does have a strong commitment to undergraduate education and the sum total of resources spread across the university is considerable. The Student Innovation Fellowship (SIF) takes advantage of these dispersed resources, gathering bits and pieces of resources from many university units to collaborate with faculty and staff on research and pedagogy projects, particularly those that involve emerging technologies, creative media, and humanistic inquiry. By accessing this network of human, technological, location, and funding resources and connecting our work to undergraduate education at every turn, we have managed to create something that looks like a DH center at an institution that otherwise is unlikely to fund one.

Although it took four years to fully realize it, SIF is a node rather than a tent. We connect people and spaces rather than claim them. Our projects arise through an opportunistic willingness to find interesting work being done anywhere in the university and connect ourselves to it. Though this decision arose out of contingency rather than intention, it has helped us avoid the territorialism and silos that often prevent transdisciplinary, interinstitutional, and public-facing work. This has given SIF a distinctive shape. Our direction has often been set by proximity and chance rather through foresight and strategic planning. At times, the resulting amorphousness has caused substantial problems of identity and made it difficult to produce high-quality work. Yet, as we have developed a labor model designed to engage with diffuse and surprising collaborators, we have recognized that our interstitial institutional location and readiness to redefine our work is perhaps our greatest strength.

After four years of developing the program, SIF became consciously situated as a student labor node intaking and working on projects across disciplines and centers. Funded by student tech fee dollars and managed by faculty and staff from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and the University Library, the SIF program hires around twenty students (roughly half grad and half undergrad) to work on digital projects. Graduate fellows work twenty hours per week and undergrads work between eight and twenty hours. These students come to the program with a mix of developed skills including coding, web development, 3D modeling, teaching, writing, video production, marketing, database design, and archival research. They are asked to develop new skills as they work on projects. SIF students come from many different disciplines, although proportionally we have moved toward hiring a large number of computer science undergrads and humanities grad students. Faculty and staff leadership of the SIF program has been voluntary, and although based in CETL and the library, for the most part they have humanities backgrounds.

We have done some literary DH work, but our projects have also included the creation of open educational resources, promotional materials for university centers, and active learning modules for courses. The sprawling range of projects, the selection of which for our first couple of years was based on interest and circumstance, suggests our initial lack of a clear mission beyond putting student tech fee funds toward student work. As the program has developed, we are increasingly looking to take advantage of our location in a major metropolitan area, using our physical location to drive our project selection and mission. This has helped us develop a coherent identity while we retain our ability to engage with projects from many fields and connect with individuals, offices, and centers around the university. It also means that we are now increasingly engaged with projects that are difficult to label as digital humanities, in part because our work is less interdisciplinary than transdisciplinary. Rather than forming research questions from English or history, for example, we are clustering our efforts around using technology to understand the spatial experience of urban life in Atlanta. This is humanistic work, but it is also connected to the methodologies and subject knowledge of disciplines outside of the humanities, sometimes making the DH label an uncomfortable fit.

The SIF program is not a digital humanities center operating under another name. We own no real estate and we have no dedicated leadership staff beyond volunteers. Most of our student fellows, particularly the undergraduates, are not humanities majors. We do relatively little traditional DH work, particularly in the sense of disciplinary projects. However, if as Patrik Svensson has suggested in “Beyond the Big Tent,” the “[DH] community may benefit from a ‘no tent’ approach,” the SIF program may be a useful model for seeing how large digital projects, often guided by humanities questions and methods, can be developed outside of humanities departments or digital humanities centers (36). At the end of his essay, Svensson posited that “it could be argued that the digital humanities is not a discipline and that the intermediary role of the digital is useful to the digital humanities in multiple ways” (47). By opening this possibility, he has avoided debates over the definition of DH or whether DH should be situated within or across humanities disciplines and instead focuses on three useful roles for a decidedly uncapitalized digital humanities:

“It allows connections to all of humanities disciplines as well as to the large parts of the academy and the world outside”;
“The digital can be used as a way of canalizing interest in rethinking the humanities and the academy”; and
As “a site for innovation, dialogue, and engagement with the future” in institutions that need “intersectional meeting places” (47).

Although Svensson only briefly mentioned infrastructure in his essay, issues of management, organization, location, and funding for digital work at a particular institution would seem to dictate the likelihood that these goals are met. Theoretically, at least, a center for digital work in one humanities department is less likely to fill these roles than a DH center. The no tent model that Svensson has advocated, however, does not lend itself to a similarly easy comparison, which would necessarily depend on where and how digital work in the humanities was taking place. In our case, Svensson’s list fairly accurately describes the roles that the SIF program has played across our large, sprawling institution. This has not been an intentional journey. Had we read Svensson’s article earlier, we may have gotten here sooner but may not have learned as much along the way.

That SIF has been able to play these roles is likely connected to the infrastructure of the program being located outside of humanities departments. One of the defining factors of SIF is that senior leadership and administrative support has come out of CETL and the University Library. The people who run SIF are located outside of disciplinary departments and thus outside of standard tenure-track professional concerns. Upper-level administrators of these units, including deans and directors, are highly supportive of the program and allow a great deal of autonomy, not only because of the quality of our work but also because we support their missions yet use little or none of their funding. Both CETL and the library are disconnected from disciplinary silos and so are natural places for interdisciplinary work across the university. This interdisciplinary focus is more than just an ideal. In practice, our spaces and programs connect us to hundreds of faculty members, giving us direct and deep connections to the work going on across the university.

Projects and Accomplishments

As we have come to understand our strengths and weaknesses, we have narrowed the scope of projects we take on. In particular, we have moved away from instructional design and promotional media for campus centers and toward mapping, virtual reality, and curation projects focused on Atlanta. These changes have come from shifts in leadership, the skills and interests of our students, and a better understanding of our strengths and weaknesses. The following list of projects and accomplishments are all from the 2016–17 academic year. This is not a complete list but gives a sense of how our work is connected to the humanities, the type of work we do, and what is possible with our particular model.

ATLMaps: ATLMaps.org is a mapping platform that connects archival collections at Georgia State and Emory University libraries to allow users to explore and mash up archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user-contributed multimedia geolocation pinpoints. The project has received Knight funding and was exhibited at the UN Habitat III conference, where it was shortlisted for a CityVis Award. SIF students have played a role in content creation, project management, community outreach, and metadata creation.
Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern: UnpackingManuels.com is another joint project between GSU and Emory. The project was created in light of the forthcoming renovation of the building in order to preserve, via 3D scans and gigapan photography, the original appearance of the interior of the historic Atlanta restaurant and bar. It also provides an opportunity for future classroom and community research into the stunning collection of artifacts housed in the building and into the role Manuel’s Tavern has played in Atlanta history. The project has been featured in the New York Times and GSU’s magazine. SIF students have stitched together the gigapan photos, developed the 3D environment, collected data on the wall artifacts, and written stories for the online exhibit.
Open World Atlanta: Open World Atlanta, a third project with Emory, is re-creating downtown Atlanta circa 1928 in virtual reality using archival photographs and maps and other resources to build a historically accurate, properly scaled simulation that will serve as a platform for educational gaming. SIF students have been researchers for the project, built many of the 3D models in Blender, and created the Unity build.
NEH Next Generation PhD Planning Grant and White Paper: The SIF program was the centerpiece of GSU’s successful NEH planning grant, aimed at broadening career preparation for humanities PhDs by integrating SIF projects into departmental training. SIF students played a major role in writing the proposal and white paper for the grant.
VR for the Visually Impaired: This project focuses on establishing virtual reality environments for the visually impaired community. SIF fellows are developing an environment for the Oculus Rift that utilizes audible cues and gaming scripts, allowing users to experience virtual worlds without relying on sight.
Hoccleve Archive: A true digital humanities project, the Hoccleve Archive is working toward a crowdsourced, digital variorum edition of the works of the Middle English poet Thomas Hoccleve. SIF students worked as coders and project managers for the project.
Executive Approval Database: The EAD automates data collection practices for an application that conglomerates polling data on Latin American politics. SIF fellows built the algorithm and managed this portion of the project.
DALN: The Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN) is a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, and audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors as those practices and values change. Working with faculty and staff at GSU and Ohio State University, SIF fellows redesigned the site to improve administrative functions, user experience, and mobility.
Building Capacity with Care: Graduate Students and DH Work in the Library: The SIF program was connected to a day-long workshop at the International Digital Humanities conference in Krakow in summer 2016. The workshop (including GSU, Emory, Brown, Columbia, UCLA, and Penn State) focused on best practices for programs that have graduate students work on digital scholarship projects.

Library and CETL Connections

That SIF is run out of Georgia State’s university library and Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning places our program in a unique yet central position within larger DH discussions about infrastructure. Much attention, from Diane Zorich’s A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States to Melissa Dinsman’s “Digital in the Humanities” interview series in the Los Angeles Review of Books, has focused on the physical location of DH infrastructure. The standard models are department-based labs, independent DH centers, or library centers. Our connection to the library places us within a fairly standard model, but our close relationship with CETL has meant that our projects and work consistently attend to pedagogy. Although, as Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold pointed out in “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field,” “pedagogy has become a central point of concern and investment” in the DH community, our origins as a pedagogical program give us deeper ties to classrooms than DH centers with teaching components or Centers for Teaching and Learning with DH components (xiii). Certainly, in our case and many others, institutional location is less a deliberate choice than a matter of circumstance. Nonetheless, location has both practical consequences and ideological implications.

In her interviews, Dinsman has situated the library as the obvious alternative to departments through her question, “does the future of digital work lie in individual departments or libraries?” At the heart of this question is whether resources for DH work should be located in traditional disciplinary structures or in a center that serves the humanities or the entire university, the former model promoting a focus on more traditional discipline-based scholarship but with digital components, and the latter disrupting departmental silos and encouraging, or at least facilitating, digital work across or beyond disciplines. Most institutions do not have the funds for an all-of-the-above approach, so the answer to this question of location has consequences. In the Dinsman interview, David Golumbia argued against the interdisciplinarity that a library-housed DH center would entail—“I would really like to see DH move away from the idea that it covers all of the humanities—which I think is false—and parcel itself out into disciplinary studies.” Golumbia’s answer here was a strongly stated defense of traditional disciplinary boundaries. The humanities is made up of multiple disciplines, and so, he argued, digital work and the resources to make this work possible should be situated within departments. For Golumbia, this is not just a practical choice of where to locate DH infrastructure. In both the Dinsman interview and the much discussed “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” cowritten with Daniel Allington and Sarah Brouillette, Golumbia has connected digital work in the library to neoliberal trends in universities. In contrast, departments are presumably less exposed to the influence of capital in higher education.

Bethany Nowviskie, in her interview with Dinsman, has offered a far less ominous take on DH and the role of libraries in doing digital work in the humanities. She has argued that “we’ve moved into an era in which the library itself—which has always been a kind of laboratory for the liberal arts—takes on [humanities interdisciplinary work] in new ways and at a vastly greater, networked scale.” Nowviskie insisted that there is a long history of the library encouraging humanities work between and across disciplines. She then laid out the new ways the work of the library furthers this project:

work in digitization, data curation and digital stewardship, metadata and description, search and discovery interfaces, visualization and analysis, embodied interaction like augmented reality and physical computing, leveraging linked open data so as to help scholars make meaning across a variety of disparate datasets—all the things that libraries are and do today—plus the ways they interact with and serve the communities (and not just academic research communities, but also larger publics) that they’re embedded in.

Nothing in Nowviskie’s explanation of the potential for library-based DHCs supports Golumbia’s concerns. Libraries have long served units across universities without suggesting that disciplines do not exist or are not important. Situating digital centers outside of departments, however, does require researchers’ coming out of disciplinary silos. Library centers do not prevent discipline-specific work whereas departmental centers are far less likely to be able to do interdisciplinary work. Nor is it clear how disciplinary boundaries provide insulation against neoliberalism. SIF has always had one foot in the library, giving the program a direct connection to archival collections and the expertise that Nowviskie has catalogued. GSU’s library collections have certainly shaped what projects the SIF program takes on, but it is the expertise that the library offers that has made much of our work possible, whether disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary. Most of our projects raise questions about metadata, rights, and storage. For those of us without a background in library sciences, we quickly realized that ignoring these issues immediately limits the possibility, success, and longevity of a project. Most humanities faculty do not have a background in solving these problems. The library offers both the neutral space for disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary projects and much of the expertise needed for tackling digital projects.

If SIF’s connections to the library place the program in a fairly standard DH model, our links to CETL make the program fairly distinct. Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold argued in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016) that essays like Luke Waltzer’s and Stephen Brier’s in the 2012 edition of the book had “intervened in the discourse of the field” and that “in the ensuing years, pedagogy has become a central point of concern and investment” (xiii). Certainly, DH conferences and journals increasingly include discussions of pedagogy. Klein and Gold pointed to several examples, and many of the contributors to this volume suggest that the pedagogical resources and networks devoted to teaching undergraduate students are a core component of a sustainable infrastructure for the digital humanities, especially at teaching-focused institutions. At such institutions, internal funding and institutional support for DH work depends on building connections to undergraduate instruction. Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) often serve as nodal points for innovative pedagogical practices, particularly those involving technology, and many offer DH and digital pedagogy workshops or have faculty learning communities on these issues. CUNY’s (not surprisingly, where both Brier and Waltzer are located) CTL is deeply immersed in DH and digital pedagogy, but we are unaware of other centers producing large digital projects in the humanities with roots in a CTL. One lesson of the SIF program has been to consider the CTL as an essential bridge between DH and the classroom.

Brier’s and Waltzer’s essays in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) did not only ask that pedagogy have a seat at the DH table but argued that an increased focus on teaching and learning would be potentially transformative to DH, the humanities, and institutions of higher learning. In his essay “Digital Humanities and the ‘Ugly Stepchildren’ of American Higher Education,” Waltzer maintained that “Even though many digital humanists think and speak of themselves and their work as rising in opposition to the traditional structures of the academy, much current work in the digital humanities also values research and scholarship far more than teaching, learning, and curriculum development. In this sense, the digital humanities are hard to distinguish significantly from other academic disciplines” (338). This lack of distinction, Waltzer argues, directly ties the DH community to the traditional structures of the academy and thus to the failure to prepare students for the digital and online worlds in which they live, the lack of vigorous arguments for the relevancy of the humanities, and the rise of #alt-ac positions and contingent labor. He and Brier have insisted that a focus on pedagogy, particularly digital pedagogy, is part of the solution. In his essay, “Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities,” Brier suggested that

If we are willing to broaden our definition of digital humanities beyond academic research and related issues of academic publication, peer review, and tenure and promotion to encompass critical questions about ways to improve teaching and learning, then CUNY’s various digital pedagogy projects and strategies offer an alternative pathway to broaden the impact of the digital humanities movement and make it more relevant to the ongoing and increasingly beleaguered educational mission of contemporary colleges and universities. (398)

Since 2012, the definition of DH has widened to increasingly include work in teaching and learning. This shift brings to the fore how pedagogy should be a part of the infrastructure of DHCs.

Thanks to our ties to CETL, the SIF model has a pedagogical mission at its core. This was as much circumstance as intention in the first year of the program. Many of our early projects were connected to instructional design simply because we had instructional design projects lined up and because key early personnel had a background in the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program and Atlanta’s Digital Pedagogy Group. From the beginning our project intake, even for more research-focused projects, included questions about how a project would connect with classrooms. Over the past few years, the pedagogical roots of the program have led us to more fully consider the needs of SIF students and our role in the educational purpose of the university. Our pedagogical goals include the following:

Training graduate and undergraduate students to understand, create, and interact with DH work;
Training students to successfully participate in an increasingly online and digital world;
Training humanities students, particularly PhD candidates in English and history, to manage complex projects, supervise teams, and communicate ideas to stakeholders with different perspectives;
Making library resources usable and available to the public;
Developing student skills by giving them meaningful work in building public-facing projects; and
Connecting digital research projects to classes and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to DH projects.

We have not fully met these goals, and we do not intend to suggest that other DHCs do not have similar goals. Our CETL roots, however, do place pedagogy as a definitional part of the program and connect us to pedagogical resources including CETL faculty and staff, training workshops, and our most innovative teachers at the university.

Student Funds Driving a Student-Centered Program

Our initial mission was directly tied to our source of funding. Students at GSU pay a technology fee in addition to tuition and other fees. SIF was created in response to the perception that the university spent too much of it on technology and not enough on the people who could use that technology to create meaningful projects, platforms, and experiences. In spring 2014, George Pullman, the head of the Center for Instructional Innovation at the time, piloted the Tech Fee Fellows program. The guiding principle was to create a program that would put student tech fee funds in student hands. Using a small amount of excess funds from our Writing Across the Curriculum program, we hired six grad students from English, Communications, and Computer Science to work ten hours per week on faculty- and staff-led projects at the university. The pilot project proved successful enough to receive a second year of significantly expanded funding. In the fall of 2015, the Tech Fee Fellows, now dubbed the Student Innovation Fellows, became a joint venture of the University Library, the Center for Instructional Effectiveness, and the Center for Instructional Innovation (the last two soon afterward combined to become CETL). Using student tech fee funds, the SIF program hired twenty-six student fellows, eighteen graduate students working twenty hours per week, and eight undergraduates working varying hours per week (after the first year, funding decreased and we had around twenty students). This dramatic expansion of labor was not accompanied by any well-conceived plan for managing what had become a large workforce of students, ranging from first-year undergraduates to advanced PhD candidates from eleven university departments. We quickly learned that we needed to develop a leadership structure capable of ensuring that work was getting done. Our decision to use humanities graduate student fellows as project managers grew from these challenges and is an essential component of our subsequent success.

Student tech fee dollars made up the vast majority of our funds with smaller additional amounts from CETL and the office of the provost. Each year, we made a funding request to a tech fee committee of faculty, students, and staff who vote on our proposal along with others. This process made our funding and thus our existence unstable from year to year. We were told by leaders of the tech fee committee that funding was unlikely to continue; however, for six years we continued to receive support. On principle, we would like to continue receiving tech fee funds for the program on the basis of our achievements and the belief that some student fees should go directly back to students. Practically, we would be happy to receive stable internal funding from any university budget.

As we struggle to secure stable internal funding, we are finding ways to cobble together extra resources to hire more students. The goal is to have a stable pot of funds to work from every year that can expand or contract as we receive grants or additional internal funding for projects or students. We have received funding from the Knight Foundation for the ATLMaps project and an NEH Next Generation PhD Planning grant. Around half of those funds went into the SIF program, allowing us to put a team of students on those projects and then hire more students. SIF students have created several prototype projects with GSU faculty interested in applying for outside funding. The program has also connected to already-funded projects. Instead of using those funds to hire one student who likely does not have the skills to complete a project on their own, we can put an interdisciplinary team of students on a project and the funds can be added back to the pool of labor so we can hire more students. PhD students in English with a funded package have the option of increasing their stipend in exchange for one hundred hours of professionalization each year. This professionalization has traditionally included serving as GRAs for professors, working in administrative roles, or helping run one of the several journals connected to the department. In the summer of 2017, the SIF program became one of the choices that students could take for their professionalization hours. The funds will not become a part of our budget and these students will not be official fellows because their work will be limited. The hope is that these students can choose a SIF project to work on over the year that will allow them to develop a skill and to connect their name to a large, public-facing digital project. The SIF program gains more student work hours. We are discussing similar funding mechanisms in other departments. GSU is currently considering developing a DH graduate certificate. Part of the program could include practicum hours with SIF projects as an option.

Creating a Human Infrastructure (Faculty, Student, and Staff)

SIF’s success has depended on the development of a network of collaborators spanning multiple core constituencies and areas of expertise across the university: tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty, academic administrative staff, librarians, and undergraduate and graduate students. After the pilot program, none of the overall leadership for the SIF program has been tenure-track. While tenure-track faculty remain involved and are essential to many SIF projects, overall program management comes from staff and faculty from CETL and the library, with reasonably secure positions that could be described as #alt-ac and/or administrative. Brennan Collins, associate director of CETL for digital pedagogy and Atlanta studies, has helped manage the program from the pilot onward. Justin Lonsbury, assistant director of CETL in charge of instructional design, and Joe Hurley, GSU’s data services and GIS librarian, were a part of the management team for the first and second years. Spencer Roberts, the GSU digital scholarship librarian, comanaged the program for years four and five. Their work is completely voluntary and uncompensated. No official title is connected to these positions.

This lack of official existence has its disadvantages. As with our funding for students, these leadership roles, while encouraged by higher administrators, are not stable. With full-time work in other areas, taking on a SIF leadership role can often mean overwork, and eventual burnout is to be expected. The negatives of this leadership model are very real and will need to be addressed if the program is to continue.

There have, however, been advantages to developing a funded student labor program with little official existence run by non-tenure-track faculty and staff outside of academic departments. It is important to note again that those in SIF leadership are in stable positions, and we are not arguing for the advantages of more contingent #alt-ac labor. Our positions give us skills, experience, and exposure outside of what most tenure-track faculty know or even want to know. We are more likely to understand budgets and the funding mechanisms at our institution. We regularly work with faculty, staff, and administrators across the university. Our research interests are not governed by the tenure hoops and disciplinary expectations that tend to undervalue digital, interdisciplinary, teaching-focused, collaborative, and public-facing work. All of these factors, combined with little program oversight, have allowed us to experiment, fail, and learn.

DH discussions of #alt-ac labor rightly criticize the often contingent, ambiguous, overworked nature of these positions. At the same time, critics like Waltzer (“Digital Humanities and the ‘Ugly Stepchildren’”) acknowledge that their typically “support oriented” labor is critical to the research and educational roles of the university:

The very presence and growing prominence of #alt-ac work is evidence that cracks have opened in the academy that are being filled by talented people, many of whom would prefer to be on the tenure track. If folks in the digital humanities had their way, those positions would not be space fillers but rather secure jobs that come with allowances for some of the generative autonomy that faculty enjoy (“Alternative Academic Careers”). Yet there is little indication that the labor structure of the academy will adjust to accommodate the inglorious work that so many #alt-ac academics are actually doing. (340)

In calling much of #alt-ac work “support oriented” and “inglorious,” Waltzer seems ambivalent about the service labor often associated with these positions. This work includes “building curricula; organizing faculty development initiatives; and planting, congealing, and connecting communities of practice,” work that Waltzer clearly champions in his essay (340). However, service also suggests a lack of “generative autonomy” and is often connected to short-term and overburdened positions. Sharon Leon, in her interview with Dinsman, explicitly argued against a service model, at least in the context of a DHC: “One of the things that has been really freeing for us at the Center for History and New Media is that we don’t service the university. We don’t answer people’s technology questions. We don’t have faculty who come and say ‘help me do this project.’ Because we are mostly funded by grants, we don’t have somebody who is salaried to be on call to answer those questions.” It would be difficult to argue against the success of George Mason’s center, although its long history and endowment do not necessarily make it a replicable model for most schools.

Instead, we have tried to make a virtue out of service, looking for collaborative, connective, and interstitial advantages to offset the well-known costs of being branded as “service workers” at a research university. The SIF program is decidedly service oriented, and the managers of the program all have service-oriented jobs. This orientation certainly comes with the “inglorious” work of answering questions and helping faculty, both in the work of the SIF program and the roles connected to the library and CETL. This work can, at times, be overwhelming, thankless, and frustrating. However, our service focus has also allowed us to do much of the work we do. Hundreds of GSU faculty have gone through our intensive two-day WAC training, attended the many workshops that CETL and the library offer, and contact our offices for help with questions and on projects. We know faculty and staff from most departments and units across the university and have talked with them about their research and teaching. The SIF program does offer project assistance for faculty, but far more often we partner with or ask faculty for assistance on projects that originate partially or fully in the SIF program.

Despite our leadership’s service and administrative experience, we had little preparation for managing the SIF program. This has been a problem we are still attempting to address. SIF grad students have played a major role in figuring this out. In its first year, graduate students played no unique role in SIF projects—they were simply team members among an egalitarian team. However, it soon became apparent that in addition to the deeper disciplinary perspective they brought to SIF work, they brought something perhaps even more valuable to the table: leadership and organizational skills and a willingness to mentor undergraduates. This was an unexpected but welcome discovery, and it quickly emerged as a potential solution to one of the earliest flaws in the SIF model, the shortage of staff time available to provide logistical support to a dozen or more projects. By the beginning of the second year of the program, we began experimenting with making the most experienced graduate students responsible for managing one or more projects.

The initial impulse was essentially self-interested, insofar as a number of graduate students in the program were proving interested in taking on increasing responsibility for organizing and regularizing workflows and supervising the progress of several SIF projects. Before long, an early cohort of humanities grad students, including English PhD candidates Thomas Briedeband and Ashley Cheyemi McNeil and history PhD candidate Dylan Ruediger, became instrumental to the daily running of SIF projects and began to push for a more formalized and coherent identity for the program as a whole, engaging in conversations with each other and in consultation on an increasingly equitable standing with SIF staff leads on discussions relating to strategic planning, branding, and organizational structure. The fruits of this are still in development. Rocky starts as project managers for several projects made it clear, for instance, that we needed to develop opportunities for graduate students to receive feedback and advice from professional project managers. We continue to struggle with lines of authority, as graduate students are asked to lead teams of faculty and undergraduates, none of whom are under their direct authority. Nevertheless, the decision to hand the daily administration of many SIF projects to graduate students was a key step in creating an organization that began making substantial and consistent progress.

More importantly, grad students began making the case, in a series of blog posts, conversations, and conference papers, that the SIF program had real implications for the training of graduate students in a rapidly shifting marketplace for intellectual labor. Recent work being done by the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association suggests that PhD programs in the humanities need to do considerably better at teaching students digital skills, flexible communication skills, and managerial and administrative skills and at providing meaningful exposure to collaborative work. Although not explicitly designed to do so, the SIF labor model provided for all of these.

This was a new angle for the program, and rapidly began pulling it in new directions. The origins of the SIF were based on the idea that collaborative teams could help realize the promises of technology to transform undergraduate educational experiences. What would happen if the SIF was also treated as an intervention in graduate pedagogy? This possibility was already emerging as an important part of the future of the SIF by the summer of 2016, but when the NEH announced funding for its Next Generation Humanities PhD program, grants designed to foster innovative ways of thinking about how graduate students in the humanities are trained, we saw an opportunity to more fully articulate how the SIF could contribute to graduate education in the humanities.

This vision was predicated on the idea of integrating SIF work into the curriculum of humanities departments at GSU via an institutional commitment to digital humanities projects as ways of training humanists. At its core was the idea of turning the SIF into a funding platform for humanities graduate students and an institutional home for student-led, outward-facing digital humanities projects, combined with curricular changes designed to help students develop digital skills. The SIF could serve as a kind of hub, collaborating with academic departments, research institutes at GSU (notably the recently opened Humanities Center and the Creative Media Industries Institute), and a panel of representatives from Atlanta’s media and technology industries to design and support new long-term DH projects designed to combine meaningful humanities research with specific technical and soft skills necessary to succeed in 21st-century careers inside and outside the professoriate.

Faculty are under increasing pressure to incorporate digital scholarship into their research and teaching. But they often lack the technical expertise to do so. At GSU, even those who do are unlikely to have ready access to the staff support necessary to tackle even modestly scaled projects. Working with the SIF program offers faculty access to students with technology skills and graduate student supervisors who can take on much of the logistical burden. In exchange, faculty agree to help train and participate as team members in the work.

Faculty often “own” SIF projects but are not actually supervising them, and generally do not fully understand the technical challenges of the work. Grad student and SIF faculty supervisors often have this limitation as well and sometimes—no matter how well trained—do not see what is and what is not possible. Reaching out to staff in CETL, the library, and other centers has improved our hiring practices, project intake, project management, workflow implementation, training options, and development capacity. For the first couple of years of the SIF program, one of our primary struggles was with managing our computer science students. None of the managers were coders and the program could not offer the training or leadership that they needed. These computer science students either had the technical, collaboration, and organizational skills needed for a project or they did not, and this was a major failing of the program. Eventually, we connected with Jaro Klc from GSU Instructional Innovation and Technology on a couple of projects. His interest in the SIF program was to help develop a pipeline of talented computer science students to eventually work under him on university projects. He has helped interview student candidates, making us less reliant on student reporting of their skills, and met with faculty proposing new ideas to help us determine if we had the necessary resources to complete the project. Jaro also introduced us to a project manager who worked with us on a project and provided some training for some of our graduate student managers. Other staff members in CETL and the library have also joined SIF projects because of proximity and interest. Taylor Burch, an instructional designer in CETL, works next to SIF’s two high-powered computers and started conversations with our main student working on our 3D and VR projects. Taylor has a background in 3D modeling and graphic design and has offered assistance on coherent organization, standards, and workflow for these projects. Eric Willoughby, a lead programmer at our library, set up GSU’s GeoServer to host our geospatial material for the ATLMaps project and started working on the development team for the project with SIF students and a lead developer at Emory’s library.

Physical Spaces

The SIF program does not own real estate. We have been fortunate to have privileged access to technology and meeting spaces connected to the library and CETL, as well as some access to IT meeting rooms and departmental spaces connected to project work. Not having a space of our own has its disadvantages. While we have fairly stable access to space, we are not certain from year to year that this will continue. Shared space can occasionally cause conflict over reservations and noise levels (particularly considering that we are working with around twenty students, half of them undergrads). We are gradually understanding, however, that there are advantages to not having our own location. We have space that is managed by others and is likely better than our own space would be. Our students have a sense of multiple resources spread out over campus and regularly come in contact with the faculty and staff connected to those spaces. Also, as more technology spaces open on our very large and expanding campus, we are being encouraged to use those spaces because our students and projects are what these spaces want to highlight. With the building of these spaces, most of the initial effort is put into buildout and technology and not the content and labor that will need to activate these spaces. Using space opportunistically has allowed us to focus on mission rather than expend energy managing our own spaces.

The SIF program had around ten computers located in CETL’s offices along with some equipment in the space’s storage closet. CETL also has several meeting and workshop spaces that students and faculty can reserve. Most of our meetings and much of the individual and group work on our projects took place here. The CETL space opened in 2016 with two rows of tables set aside for SIF students. Beyond work and meeting spaces, the office also has a small green room, two audio recording rooms, and a 3D printing area. The open nature of the office has led to some tension as we figured out the appropriate etiquette for clusters of sometimes unsupervised undergrads working in close proximity to faculty and staff, but the close proximity has also had the unintended benefit of putting SIFs in close proximity to an experienced multimedia team and instructional design staff. Through some direct communication but also through inevitably overheard work discussions, CETL staff began to advise and work on SIF projects.

Before the new CETL space opened, most of our work was done in the library’s Collaborative University Research & Visualization Environment (CURVE). CURVE’s centerpiece is a 24-foot touch-controlled visualization wall. The center also has an 84-inch 4K display, 3D scanners, and six collaborative workstations with large displays, high-powered computers, and movable whiteboards. The space is open and large and is able to accommodate multiple groups of different sizes. For the first couple of years of the SIF program, most of our meetings and much project work was done here. The large touch displays have been game changers for many of our projects involving maps, photography, and 3D visualization that benefit from the ability to see clearly at multiple scales and angles. CURVE also provided a dramatic space for events showcasing the SIF program and SIF projects. Unlike CETL, CURVE is open to any faculty or students who reserve the space. Opened in 2014, the space has gradually become more filled as classes, faculty, and students understand the potential of the space. Although this has caused some problems when our group meetings are taking place at the same time as a presentation, our group often comes into contact with students, faculty, and staff who are working on interesting projects and who sometimes become resources or advocates for our work. The open-access nature of the space also requires the regular erasing of files from their computers. With strong processing and display power, these computers are perfect for meetings, research, testing, and showcasing but are not ideal for much of our project work.

After several years of figuring out location we landed in an ideal, if somewhat unstable, situation. We had dedicated work and storage space with easy access to meeting, showcase, and workshop space. We were in regular physical contact with students, faculty, and staff doing innovative work across the campus. As more technology spaces opened on our campus, SIF students were invited to help activate these locations by working on and showcasing our projects. SIF students and projects are ideal for helping demonstrate the potential of these spaces as they open, and we hope to form immediate, mutually beneficial relationships.

Beginning in the fall of 2019, SIF lost access to the student tech fee, our main source of funding for the program. Although loss of this funding dealt a major blow to the SIF program and is a clear example of the precarity of our model, the experience of developing and running a highly adaptable student labor lab largely rooted in humanities projects has directly led to the development of, and leadership in, a much larger project-based learning initiative at GSU. Many of our students from the previous year graduated, and we have been able to fund most students who wanted to continue on our projects. Seven of the SIF students continue to work on our projects, which are now part of the new Project Labs initiative at GSU. Project Labs are based on the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program at Georgia Tech that is now practiced at over thirty universities around the world. The VIP approach allows students to earn course credit over multiple semesters while working on faculty-led, public-facing, interdisciplinary projects. One of our Project Labs is currently based in mapping projects started in SIF, and two labs that are planned to start in fall 2020 are partially based in projects connected to the program. We were recently awarded three years of funding from the Teagle Foundation, which will allow us to continue creating Project Labs in the humanities and social sciences as well as connect these labs to a liberal arts core curriculum. We are currently securing internal funds from colleges and centers at GSU for student support of these initiatives. The hope is to use the SIF paid labor model to place experienced student workers on new Project Labs teams, training students earning course credit to take on skilled leadership roles within their lab. Paid students would gradually be placed in developing labs as they became no longer needed in stable labs.

The humanities at GSU, as in many other universities, are underresourced. Had we asked for a digital humanities center, the odds of receiving it would have been low. However, GSU’s commitment to the quality of its undergraduate education gave us a backdoor into the digital humanities via digital pedagogy, albeit one gained by squatting on resources that were allocated for other purposes. In ways that we did not always intend and certainly could not always foresee, this has profoundly shaped us. Our squatting has, perhaps surprisingly, generally been welcomed. We have been able to build alliances with many branches of the university because in addition to ideas and expertise, we bring a source of labor and a collaborative ethos to the table. Our early decision to focus on projects with a strong pedagogical focus has connected us with classrooms and teachers from across the university that would not likely have engaged with a digital humanities center. If our trajectory has necessarily given us a certain amorphousness and a sometimes precariously interstitial institutional location, it has also been central to our successes. Without our roots in pedagogy and opportunistic willingness to take on worthwhile projects from any discipline, we could never have arrived where we are.

Bibliography

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/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/.
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. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/8.
Dinsman, Melissa. “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Bethany Nowviskie.” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 9, 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-humanities-interview-bethany-nowviskie/.
Dinsman, Melissa. “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with David Golumbia.” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 30, 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-humanities-interview-david-golumbia/.
Dinsman, Melissa. “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Sharon M. Leon.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-digital-in-the-humanities-an-interview-with-sharon-m-leon/.
Klein, Lauren and Matthew Gold. “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/51.
Svensson, Patrik. “Beyond the Big Tent.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/22.
Waltzer, Luke. “Digital Humanities and the ‘Ugly Stepchildren’ of American Higher Education.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/33.
Zorich, Diane W. A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States. Washington, D.C.: CLIR, 2008.

11. After Autonomy: Digital Humanities Practices in Small Liberal Arts Colleges and Higher Education as Collaboration

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