Institutional Culture

The Claremont Colleges are a consortium of five undergraduate liberal arts colleges—Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College, Pomona College, and Scripps College—and two graduate institutions—Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute. The Claremont Colleges consortium is a complicated but highly stimulating environment to work in, and presents many challenges for intercollegiate programs and a single library that serves all seven institutions. The complex organizational structure lends itself to some natural benefits. The Claremont Colleges Library, for instance, serves all seven colleges and lies at the physical heart of campus; as an institutionally neutral, shared, and central space, the library became the natural hub of the digital humanities. Likewise, the library has come to serve as the locus of other intercollegiate grants and scholarship beyond the Mellon DH grant.

In October 2014, the five undergraduate colleges received a five-year $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for an initiative entitled Digital Humanities at the Claremont Colleges: Developing Capacity and Community. The mission of the grant is to “expand the use of digital resources in scholarship and research in the humanities at the Claremont Colleges [and] . . . facilitate training and education of faculty members [to] support innovative projects to be undertaken by faculty and students.”12 The grant’s administrative team originally consisted of a faculty director and a project manager in collaboration with a lead dean. In recognition of the evolving nature of scholarship and in support of the Mellon DH program, the Claremont Colleges Library also hired a digital scholarship librarian in January 2015. This position, filled by Ashley Sanders Garcia, played a key role in the initial phase of establishing a DH program at Claremont.13

The Mellon DH grant has four primary initiatives. These include a spring symposium to engage with DH practitioners outside of Claremont; a summer training institute for faculty, students, and staff; twenty-five course development grants for faculty; and a Digital Research Studio program that offers undergraduates an opportunity to work with faculty members on digital humanistic research projects. The first three years of the grant focused greater attention on pedagogy and the meaningful integration of technology in the classroom. In the final two years of the grant, the focus has expanded to include undergraduate engagement in academically and technologically sophisticated research projects. This grant launched a DH program founded on the principles of inclusivity, constructivism, experimentation, and play.14

The Mellon DH grant provided a catalyst for the Claremont Colleges Library to build on its existing scholarly communications initiatives and become actively involved in creating a community of practice around digital scholarship over the last three years. The library has become the center of digital humanities activities, but it is not just a container for DH events.15 Claremont librarians have made it a vital center for fostering digital scholarship among librarians, faculty, and students interested in integrating digital technology in their research and instruction. Through planning and facilitating symposia, workshops, a summer institute, and an introductory short course for faculty, librarians have become an integral part of the DH community and digital skilling process at the Claremont Colleges.

Infrastructure, Power, and Resource Allocation

Initially, the Mellon DH grant proposal outlined a limited infrastructure to support the nascent community of DH practitioners, but it did not keep pace with the growing desire to learn digital skills and provide new opportunities for students. It took three years to determine the optimal size and composition of the team and steering committee—at least for the present and the foreseeable future. Along the way, the DH team experienced multiple transitions in its administrative home, leadership, and staffing, but its mission has remained the same: to foster an inclusive, welcoming, and affirming learning community.

When Sanders Garcia became director of the Digital Research Studio, she continued her efforts to grow and support the DH community of practice and was empowered to further develop the needed infrastructure. In this position she expanded the DH team to meet the increasing demand for workshops, support, and outreach in ways that she could not in her library roles. The administrative structure supporting the digital humanities initiative has grown commensurately with the needs and interests of the Claremont Colleges community. In addition to the original administrative structure, the DH team as of 2018 included four graduate student Digital Research Studio fellows and a reconstituted and active steering committee to provide additional support and guidance. Digital Research Studio fellows provide marketing, digital publishing, and teaching assistant support as well as consultations and workshops for faculty, student groups, and classes based on their various areas of expertise. A steering committee comprising faculty members, librarians, administrators, and other intercollegiate grant leaders assists with outreach, offers programming suggestions on the basis of their constituents’ needs and interests, and provides guidance in navigating the complex social and political terrain of the various campuses and intercollegiate organizations. One person alone cannot build a community of practice or provide all the training, skills, and support required to advance digital scholarship—even on a small liberal arts campus.16 Building a successful DH learning community takes many dedicated people in dedicated roles, with financial support. It also requires environmental and institutional knowledge with strategic, targeted outreach in order to achieve inclusiveness and maximize resource use and impact.17

One of the most challenging questions with which the DH team grapples is how to provide sustainable support for the consortium. As it turns out, the answer appears to lie in one of the most obvious of shared resources on campus—the library. The Claremont Colleges Library offers an inclusive, equitable, supportive, and safe space for all members of the consortial community to learn and practice new skills. The organizational structure of DH at the Claremont Colleges Library most closely resembles a network model.18 The library “is a more organic connection of services and resources on a campus, a connection that grows to meet other needs, but all the services have resources to contribute to the success of a Digital Humanities project.”19 The Claremont Colleges Library embodies this framework, as it provides a central point for all seven colleges to find interdisciplinary research support, including support for digital scholarship. Physically, the library houses the Digital Tool Shed, offices for the Mellon DH program team, and the Digital Research Studio.

Over the first three years of the grant, participation in the Claremont DH summer institutes has grown exponentially. In the summers of 2015 and 2016, the Mellon grant provided $1,000 stipends via an application process for ten faculty members each year to attend a week-long Digital Humanities training institute that the Claremont DH team hosted. The first summer saw eleven participants; one academic technologist audited the institute without a stipend. The second summer institute included eighteen participants, only ten of whom were funded by the grant; two graduate students, one undergraduate, and five other faculty members audited the institute. Given this success, the DH team enjoined the Mellon Foundation to reallocate the budget and continue both the spring symposium and the summer institute (without stipends) on an annual basis for the remaining years of the grant. The foundation approved this request, and forty-five faculty, graduate students, and IT staff signed up to attend the 2017 DH summer institute. The growth in participation, despite the lack of financial incentive to attend, demonstrates that professional development opportunities such as the summer institute are sustainable endeavors that have a high impact at a relatively low price point.20

The grant also provided minibursaries for faculty to develop new courses or redesign previously taught courses by infusing technology in order to improve student learning and engagement. For the first three years, the DH team issued a call for applications for the course development grants and convened a review committee composed of faculty and IT leaders from the various campuses to select each year’s recipients. As the Mellon grant moves into its fourth year, it has awarded all twenty-five of the available minigrants to faculty who, upon accepting the funding, agree to teach their new or redesigned course at least twice. With an average of about ten students per class, this means that Mellon DH–funded courses will reach approximately five hundred students over the life of the grant and beyond, through this one initiative.21

To support faculty members who were interested in applying for this grant or launching other kinds of digital projects, Sanders Garcia, in her sequential roles as digital scholarship librarian, digital scholarship coordinator, and director of the Digital Research Studio, provided digital pedagogy workshops and numerous one-on-one course and assignment design consultations. This work was supported by Mellon DH project manager Alexandra Margolin, who has expertise in digital storytelling and offers consultations and workshops as well. Through an in-house professional development series, Claremont Colleges librarians now have greater familiarity with digital humanities methods and approaches in research and teaching. As a result, librarians have begun to support faculty as they explore digital research and instructional tools. In addition, four graduate students from Claremont Graduate University serve as Digital Research Studio fellows and provide workshops and support for both grant-funded and nonfunded classes.

As a shared, centrally supported entity, equitably serving all faculty, students, and staff, DH finds a natural home in the library. Some campuses in the consortium have more support for emerging technology than others, so the library plays an important role in the impartial provision of services, resources, and technology. The Claremont Colleges’ unique focus on undergraduate research broadens the potential scope of DH projects and collaborations between faculty, students, and librarians. Librarians’ own experience with DH as fellow practitioners has positioned them to support the Claremont Colleges community through research partnerships and acquisition decisions informed by librarians’ personal knowledge and experience. The library has historically supported DH professional development for librarians, faculty, staff, and students, as well as DH projects and instruction. Moving forward, there are signs that the library will continue this support through additional training in specific tools and methods for librarians, the technology lending program, and strategic partnerships with academic technologists.

The Challenge of Equitable Distribution of Resources

The library is committed to aligning resources and services to the colleges’ teaching, learning, and research needs. In addition to creating new pathways to knowledge and empowering faculty, staff, and student information literacy and use of information resources, the library strives to be a vital center for academic and intellectual engagement for all stakeholders. The unique collaborative nature of the colleges is illustrated by the fact that 80 percent of funding for library resources comes from formula funding that is supported by all seven institutions. The remaining 20 percent comes from supplementary funding from endowments and gifts, as well as from consortial and departmental contributions. This is supported by memoranda of understanding with the campuses and with licenses for electronic resources. The library is poised to further support research and teaching with well-established policies and procedures (provided that funds are sufficient) for purchasing and making available additional print, electronic, and data resources requested by faculty, staff, and students.

Even though the library ceased funding her salary as a result of her move to a director role, Sanders Garcia remained an important advocate for digital humanities both in and outside of the library.22 With the full support of library leadership, Sanders Garcia and her team continued to facilitate requested staff and librarian training in digital humanities. She also continued to do extensive outreach, providing support to digital humanities initiatives across the campuses, and served as a crucial link connecting research and instruction needs to technical support and resources. This assistance is equitably available to all Claremont faculty, students, and staff.

Recent major renovations in the library have resulted in the creation of the Digital Tool Shed and Digital Research Studio, which are technologically enhanced facilities that provide space, digital tools, and support for research and media projects.23 These spaces were funded in several ways. The Mellon DH grant paid for the technology; library operational reserves covered the furniture; and consortial delayed maintenance funds covered the rest. The Digital Tool Shed initially took advantage of graduate and undergraduate student workers’ expertise to provide training to library users on the newly available specialized technology. Due to budgetary constraints, however, these positions were not renewed after the first year of operation. Research software and hardware, including GIS, R, Tableau, 2D/3D modeling software, and programming packages such as Python, are available on laptops as well as the workstations in the Research Studio. Media production and postproduction technology is available in the form of DSLR cameras, audio and video recording equipment, and the Adobe Creative Suite. This reflects the inclusive nature of library resources. Except in rare instances of provider-specified limitations, all students, faculty, and staff are welcome to use and reserve the facilities. If the Digital Tool Shed and the Digital Research Studio were housed in a department on one of the seven campuses, it would not be feasible to provide such broad access.

In addition to providing support for faculty and student research, the library also invests in its own staff. Librarians and library staff may request time and professional development funding in order to build out and share DH projects. Librarians and staff have requested time for DH-related projects. Professional development funding, also from seven-college-supported formula funding, is 1.4 percent of the total library budget. Much of the operations budget is predetermined by assessments. However, if the operations budget is limited to the portion that the library can actually control, the professional development funding is a significant 21.2 percent of the library operations budget. This translates to substantial support for librarians’ presentation and publication opportunities for their DH projects, as evidenced by at least four librarians’ taking advantage of this support. Through funding continuing education opportunities, the library is truly cultivating a “community of learners.”24

Despite this funding support, it is worth noting some persistent challenges. Time for projects and outreach as well as knowledge of technical skills remain limiting factors for librarians, as does the cost of some specialized software not already provided by the library. Additionally, knowledge and experience extracting data, particularly from previous library systems, can be difficult to obtain on a deadline. IT resources remain a challenge in certain areas; individual campuses are working on several solutions, but the consortium has yet to resolve these issues for everyone. Server access and space in a consortial but centrally managed environment is scarce, particularly for web services. Progress on a solution for these issues has been institutionally slow. While the campuses work on a funding solution, grant applications for specific projects must address this need through outside sources. Last, staff laptops as well as campus broadband and storage networks may not be robust enough for uploading and manipulating large files.25

Checks and Balances for Equitable Access

An initial driving force for the library was developing better, more complete ways to support researchers, particularly in the areas of scholarly communication, digital humanities, big data, and data management. Librarians and staff studying DH through Sanders Garcia’s workshops and project time quickly applied newly learned DH methodologies to projects that surface library resources to new or increased use and to analyze the library collections. A library staff member with an idea or project that aligns with library strategic initiatives is able to propose it for library leadership’s consideration through their division’s director. Experimentation and the pressing of traditionally perceived library and librarian boundaries is encouraged as long as it aligns with the mission of the library and funding obtained.

Under Sanders Garcia’s leadership, a DH reading group for faculty and librarians formed to address continued education and training in text analysis and to discover faculty interests and needs. The text analysis working group continues through faculty participation and cofacilitation efforts. Currently, the members are developing a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project that utilizes text mining methods. They intend to apply for grant funding both for the project and for the support of continued digital and infrastructural improvements to advance digital scholarship at the Claremont Colleges.

Frequently, resource and technology connections are made between campuses and with the library. Faculty can find real-life DH projects for students to work on using library data sets. Students learn about the library’s spaces and resources available to support their DH and media project work. Research appointments with subject and technology specialists, loanable tech, and room reservations are available for research and project needs.

Librarians, faculty, and staff are constantly challenged by the rapid development of technical advances. Knowing how to program is not appropriate for everyone, but seeking and developing expertise in new tools not only enhances library services and support: it grows the library’s ability to adapt and benefit from change. Likewise, the nature of scholarship is quickly evolving, and there are new tools and research methods that make more effective use of scholars’ time, raise new questions, and provide more efficient means of answering classic questions. Long-term staff need to develop new skills, and those early in their careers also benefit from training and experience in technical skills. All stakeholders find it difficult to strike a balance between the time it takes to learn transformational technology and fulfilling their daily responsibilities. Providing time and resources for technical training and rewarding its application is crucial for maximizing opportunities in DH, and building communities of practice is a way to provide a social infrastructure to meet those needs.

Inclusion and Exclusion in DH

The inclusive nature of the DH community at the Claremont Colleges is not unique in the world of digital humanities, but it is one of its most significant characteristics. Claremont DH is dedicated to welcoming all members of the Claremont Colleges community, “regardless of their status or position.”26 Claremont DH is a human-centric learning community rather than a project-centered service organization. The team supports all members of the Claremont Colleges community, regardless of project topic or faculty standing. The combination of libraries and digital humanities can be a contentious one, with many debates about whether the role of libraries (and librarians) in DH is of service or of collaboration. Trevor Muñoz posits that “libraries will be more successful at generating engagement with Digital Humanities if they focus on helping librarians lead their own DH initiatives and projects.”27 Muñoz’s work, as is evident in this chapter, has been highly influential in shaping the approach to digital humanities at the Claremont Colleges, particularly its role in the library.

Within the first year of the Mellon DH grant, it became clear to the DH team that significant disparities in access and financial support were embedded in the original grant proposal. Funding to attend the first two summer institutes existed only for faculty members and only faculty members at the five undergraduate colleges. Furthermore, only faculty at the five undergraduate colleges were able to apply for the course development grants. This imbalance was unavoidable, however, as the Mellon grant was available only for undergraduate-serving liberal arts colleges. At the same time, in a consortium that includes two graduate institutions, the uneven distribution of support was painfully obvious. This inequity served as an additional incentive to create the short course for those left out of the grant proposal: faculty at all seven institutions, graduate students, and all the staff members, especially academic technologists and librarians who would be asked to support the integration of technology into classrooms and research projects. Additionally, in the first summer institute, the DH team welcomed anyone who was interested in learning more about the digital humanities to participate even though a stipend could not be provided for them. Consequently, the summer institute saw dramatic increases in attendance every year.

In its inclusiveness, Claremont DH adheres to a big tent philosophy but with a few caveats. Big tent DH argues for a broad disciplinary scope and developed out of the Digital Humanities 2011 conference at Stanford University. The danger of casting such a wide net, according to Patrik Svensson and Melissa Terras, is that it may result in a poorly defined field without a clear goal or sense of direction.28 Johanna Drucker also argues that the value of the humanities and the way humanists see and understand the world is being lost and will be lost unless humanists carry their epistemology into the digital world and engage in it in a meaningful way.29 Creating an all-inclusive definition of DH may obscure the humanities in favor of a sole focus on the digital. In the case of Claremont, a focus on the humanities in the creation and use of digital tools allows arts and humanities scholars to remain true to their disciplinary standpoints even as they employ innovative methodologies. In this way, Claremont DH seeks to create greater equity in accessibility across the disciplines, a goal that closely aligns with the purpose of libraries.

Creating a Library-Based DH Community of Practice

A “community of practice,” according to anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger, is a group of learners united in their shared interest in a particular topic. The group comprises both newcomers and “old-timers” who learn together and from one another in a social context.30 The work of Lave and Wenger extends the theory that knowledge is constructed and contends that learning takes place through one’s interaction with other people, not just in the individual’s mind. Through the process of learning in community, novices and mentors both undergo a shift in their identities, even as they cocreate a shared sense of identity within the community.31

The scholarship on library-facilitated professional learning communities for faculty in the area of scholarly communications, of which DH and digital scholarship are cousins, reveals several additional insights. Between 2011 and 2013, the Miami University librarians Jennifer W. Bazeley, Jen Waller, and Eric Resnis created and facilitated their own successful scholarly communication community of practice. Through institutional financial support and commendation, faculty felt empowered to participate in the community, committed to attending meetings every two to three weeks, shared their growing knowledge through public presentations, and developed an agreed-on deliverable—a website to disseminate knowledge about scholarly communications for their campus and the wider academic world.32 Their innovative work has shown that with proper institutional support, faculty interest, and a small team to facilitate it, a librarian-run community of practice can be highly effective.

In order to meet Claremont’s evolving needs for digital humanities support, Sanders Garcia, as digital scholarship coordinator, developed a customized Introduction to DH short course for Claremont Colleges librarians and staff. This five-week course covered definitions of digital humanities and digital literacy; concepts of data, spatial, and temporal pattern finding; network analysis; and topic modeling. Starting in November 2015, librarians and library staff met weekly for seventy-five-minute scaffolded seminars covering topical readings, exemplar projects, and discussions about how that week’s digital research method could be used in their own work as well as in that of faculty and students.

Four-member teams applied what they had learned in the short course by designing their own experimental pilot projects. The teams’ proposals included a project description, justification of value statement, identification of audience, technical specifications, and a work plan that addressed sustainability. Short-course participants were then invited to build out their projects during a dedicated library DH Maker Week in July 2016. Library leadership agreed to give project team members half-days throughout the Maker Week to devote to their projects. The proposals drafted during and immediately after the short course served as road maps for cross-divisional project teams in the creation and successful launch of four DH projects. These included a collections-as-data project, a scalar book that features an eighteenth-century paper fan from the King’s Theater, a WiFi mapping project, and digitally formed critical maps of biblical passages.33 The projects were significant at the time they were developed, and after the library DH Maker Week, they have continued to evolve. The WiFi analysis project, for instance, has been used to communicate the value of the library to all seven campuses. The library uses the compelling data visualizations to demonstrate that there is representation from each one of the seven Claremont Colleges in the library every day of the week. Not only did these projects provide material for on-campus communication, conference presentations, and publications, the Maker Week also meant a great deal to the individuals involved. According to feedback provided in a post–Maker Week survey, all participants mentioned how much they appreciated the committed time to work on a research project they found meaningful. Over time, participants also reported that working on cross-divisional teams helped to create a greater sense of community and connection throughout the library.

Application, collaborative learning, and project-based experimentation contributed to participating librarians’ understanding of new research methodologies and skills. By bringing their visions to life, they also embodied and enacted the heart of digital humanities, according to Stephen Ramsay’s definition in his 2013 article, “On Building.”34 Participants did not just read maps; they made them. They did not simply imbibe written texts through traditional reading methods; they dismantled and reconfigured them as a database within which they could query, experiment, and generate new meanings. Librarians and library staff did not just learn how to support faculty projects in DH, they learned how to develop and launch their own.

Project-based learning in DH was, perhaps, most successful because it fostered a culture of process (rather than product) by building up the tentative confidence of participants and by focusing on play and experimentation.35 In an otherwise ambitious and goal-oriented academic culture, the DH project teams were free to dream up ideas without fear of failure or punitive repercussions if a project was not actualized. The participants who did manage to design successful DH projects were, in fact, noted as having gone above and beyond expectations in contributing to the library’s development as a center for DH. Furthermore, library leadership formally recognized individuals who wished to align their experimentation with professional goals through performance evaluations and the chance to present their findings at staff meetings. This freedom and flexibility made learning fun and empowered a community of motivated DIY DH learners and practitioners. A culture that allows for play and mistakes enables members to persist in their learning and motivates continued participation.

Although it is not unusual for a DH community to include librarians, their presence prompts several existential questions. Are librarians practitioners or theoreticians? Neither? Both? Digital Humanities scholarship depicts a divide between practitioners and theorists in the humanities and notes the tension between those with expertise in the doing versus the knowing of humanities.36 There is power in both positions, and there are real repercussions in the academy when the two become competitive. In “Inclusion in the Digital Humanities,” an article published alongside David Ramsay’s “On Building,” Geoffrey Rockwell contends that “the applied nature [of jobs in the digital humanities] will generally exclude those that have a strong critical understanding of information technology but little experience with implementation in computing environments.”37 In many ways, Claremont Colleges librarians now have one foot firmly rooted in each camp, enabling deeper connections and collaborations with both faculty and students.

The goal of the short course was not to transform librarians into solo researchers but to enable them to learn enough, and to be confident enough, to successfully handle a DH-focused research interview in the same way that they would approach a traditional reference interview. Through the seminars and personal experience conducting DH research and building projects, librarians now recognize when a traditional research project might benefit from digital exploration and are able to identify resources necessary for digital scholarship. What is more, librarians have reported that they feel more comfortable fielding questions and providing guidance as increasing numbers of digital project ideas emerge during interactions with faculty members.

Factors for Successful Communities of Practice

The DH community of practice at Claremont is notable for its inclusiveness. Through the aforementioned professional development offerings, librarians are equipped and empowered to participate in both library-specific and broader DH communities of practice. This section provides research-based suggestions for creating a community of practice that will help to sustain a DH program or center. According to the literature on successful communities of practice in higher education, there are six essential features. First and foremost is trust. Participants must trust themselves as learners who have much to contribute to the group, even as neophytes. Equally important, participants must trust each other, the facilitators, and the process. This can be a challenge in individualistic, competitive environments in which tenure and promotion hinge on individual research and publication rather than collaborative projects.38

At the Claremont Colleges, the DH community of practice seeks to foster trust by identifying and highlighting shared experiences, interests, and goals. Faculty, in particular, must trust the facilitator(s) and the community members enough to be vulnerable and admit when they do not know or understand something. The Claremont DH team members have found it most helpful to address this need by being transparent about their own learning process—their successes, but just as importantly, their failures. This level of transparency requires a safe and trusting environment in which such revelations do not diminish participants’ perceptions of one another or the facilitators but rather bolster the confidence of all members. Success in DH hinges on participation rather than outcomes.

In order to create a safe environment, it is vital for facilitators to understand common barriers to adult learning. These include technology anxiety, library anxiety, a fear of looking incompetent, and adults’ investment in their own prior knowledge. According to the literature on andragogy (instruction for adult learners), these barriers can be mitigated through consistent employment of the following practices.39 First and foremost, facilitators need to be empathetic and remember their own struggles with difficult topics or skills. As a corollary, they should also be open, welcoming, and willing to answer any question, especially when the person asking states that the question might be obvious. The community must be a safe space where one is free to think out loud, make suggestions, and brainstorm. In addition, learning community leaders need to carefully scaffold knowledge and skills, in the same way that an instructor stages learning activities in classes and workshops for younger learners. Communities of practice should also create a flexible schedule to accommodate hectic academic schedules and the fact that many adult learners also shoulder child care and other family care-taking responsibilities. Finally, to help adult learners overcome preconceptions and potential biases from previous learning experiences, facilitators should assess participants’ prior knowledge and ask them to reflect on how their learning compares to their former understanding of the concept(s) or skill(s).40 Second, members of a successful community of practice share a commitment to their project and to mutual support structures put in place, both of which are necessary for the group to cohere.41 Faculty attending the first summer institute and the second introduction to DH faculty course were asked to commit to attending most, if not all, of the meetings. In the summer institute, attendance was required for participants to receive the stipend from Mellon. However, the first time Sanders Garcia taught the short course, she did not ask for such a commitment. She had a rotating cast of four of the eight learners, and only two participants came to more than four meetings. In subsequent offerings, those registering for the short course have been asked to commit to attending at least five of the six classes to create a stronger sense of camaraderie.

The third feature of a successful community of practice is university and departmental support for faculty involvement. Most beneficial are tenure and review processes that take such involvement into consideration as professional development or service. Additionally, university or grant-funded financial support is a useful incentive, especially for new endeavors. Perhaps of even greater consequence, particularly at liberal arts colleges where teaching and service loads are often heavy, course or work release time allows community of practice members to explore, learn, collaborate, innovate, build, and write with greater freedom.42

Participation in Claremont’s introductory short course, summer institute, and course development grant program has been entirely voluntary for faculty, which means that the DH program is reaching those with the most interest, motivation, and commitment. Although this seems self-evident, it is crucial to the development of a cohort of “old-timers” who can then serve as a pool from which to draw future mentors. Those who are most excited about DH also make the greatest ambassadors and advocates for DH on their home campuses and within their departments. Excitement tends to generate more interest, which then makes it easier to extend the community of practice to incorporate those who may have been hesitant to dive in right away.

The final three characteristics of successful communities of practice hinge on their voluntary nature. Learning communities are most collegial and productive when participants willingly join and contribute. Members are more likely to engage in the shared construction of skills, knowledge, and their respective identities when they have freely chosen to join the community and the practices are of interest.43 Those willing to join and make a commitment to the community must also exhibit openness to change, especially to shifts within their own self-definition, and a willingness to embrace their transition from novice to an expert who can mentor others. Finally, participants are most likely to engage with the learning tasks and acquire expertise if they themselves shape the learning goals and define the desired outcomes.44

Nearly all of the faculty and graduate student participants in these early initiatives have been open to change but simply have not known how to go about it. The DH team offers various programs and activities to help them define the changes they would like to make in their own research, writing, publication, and instruction and then charts a course to those transformations. Again, beginning with volunteers makes this an easier objective to meet. However, the library confronts a slightly different scenario with librarians and staff who were required to attend the introductory five-week course on digital humanities. While some were excited about the new landscape of scholarship and teaching, others have been hesitant or resistant for many of the same reasons that a number of professors have been as well. It is frightening to feel less-than-knowledgeable when one’s job requires expertise. Some see little reason to change their practices; others simply have too many other commitments. Being empathetic, listening to concerns, understanding underlying fears, and addressing them is incredibly important for creating an environment that invites and encourages evolution.

In a large institution or a consortium of contiguously located smaller institutions, a centralized digital humanities program is one of the most efficient organizational models to cultivate the social and economic structures that enable and empower effective communities of practice. The library provides institutionally neutral, centrally located shared spaces and resources. Consequently, it is well-positioned to serve as a locus for developing technical skills, creating new digitally enabled research projects, and supporting digitally infused classes, thereby building capacity and community in the digital humanities. The library also offers a space that fosters an environment of play, experimentation, and missteps, through which the DH program builds trust and confidence among its members. Much of Claremont’s success hinges on the expertise and experience of a DH specialist, the location of the DH program within the library, and the willingness of librarians, faculty, students, staff, and administrators to participate in the communities of practice. The broader DH community is generous, and leadership may be found within or outside the institution to facilitate learning communities that can launch a new DH program or bolster existing ones. A diverse leadership team drawn from invested stakeholders and champions that span the institution(s) is essential. Additionally, libraries make powerful partners when addressing the inequitable distribution of power, resources, knowledge, and expertise. Early projects, however modest they may be, can serve as illustrations of the kinds of scholarship that these tools and approaches enable. As such, they can lead to further collaborations within, and beyond, the library.

One of the main challenges that DH programs face is related to hard infrastructure: funding for technology and expertise. However, campuses and their libraries have proven that creativity yields dividends. Claremont drew upon professional development funds to send librarians, faculty, and staff to workshops and bring trainers to campus. Student employee budgets support skilled student workers who can provide technical support. Given that Claremont has multiple campuses and campus cultures, different campuses offer internal grants for course development or research that can be used for digital projects that bring together librarians, IT professionals, faculty, and students. Cultivating a sustainable program often requires the identification and integration of multiple funding sources.

In Claremont, the Mellon grant served as a catalyst, but the digital humanities program cultivated strong relationships among all members of the campus, including librarians, to form an inclusive, sustainable, and equitable support system for digital research, instruction, and scholarship. The “soft” social structures rooted in these communities of practice fostered the technological systems and processes that support digital humanities work. A centralized program radiating from the library provides equitable access to the information, resources, expertise, and the infrastructure necessary to build and maintain a strong learning community in the digital humanities. It is the soft infrastructure of community-building that informs a long-term organizational culture and, together with the hard infrastructure, can allow a DH program to survive and adapt to the inevitable future challenges it will face.

Notes

1. This idea of “hard” and “soft” infrastructure was inspired by Miriam Posner’s use of the terms to describe the hard and soft skills needed by digital humanists. She emphasizes that these skills are “best learned through participation in actual DH projects,” which is at the heart of the DH training program for librarians at the Claremont Colleges. Posner, “No Half Measures.”

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2. Posner, “No Half Measures”; Sula, “Digital Humanities and Libraries”; Vandergrift and Varner, “Evolving in Common”; and Cox, “Communicating New Library Roles.”

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3. Muñoz, “Digital Humanities in the Library.”

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4. Posner, “No Half Measures”; Sula, “Digital Humanities and Libraries”; Vandergrift and Varner, “Evolving in Common”; and Cox, “Communicating New Library Roles.”

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5. Schaffner and Erway describe many ways in which libraries support DH, including packaging services as a “virtual DH center”; coordinating support across the institution; consulting on preservation, copyright, and open access; configuring the institutional repository to accommodate DH objects and projects; consulting scholars at the beginning of digitization projects; and committing to a DH center. Schaffner and Erway, “Does Every Research Library Need?”

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6. Anne et al., “Building Capacity.”

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7. Lippincott, “Libraries and the Digital University,” 289.

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8. Posner, “Here and There.”

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9. Muñoz, “Digital Humanities in the Library.”

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10. Constructivism is a theory of learning that suggests that “individuals create new knowledge through the interaction of what they already know or believe with new ideas.” Richardson, Constructivist Teacher Education, 3. Compare Bevevino, Dengel, and Adams, “Constructivist Theory in the Classroom,” 275–78.

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11. For additional surveys, reports, and guidance on creating a DH center, see Nowviskie, “Too Small to Fail”; Vinopal and McCormick, “Scalability and Sustainability”; Lippincott and Goldenberg-Hart, Digital Scholarship Centers; Maron and Pickle, “Sustaining the Digital Humanities”; and Keener, “Arrival Fallacy.”

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12. Eugene M. Tobin, cover letter for grant proposal to Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, July 29, 2014: “Digital Humanities at the Claremont Colleges: Developing Capacity and Community.”

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13. This position evolved several times within the library. The positions of digital scholarship librarian (January–November 2015) and digital scholarship coordinator (November 2015–November 2016), both filled by Sanders Garcia, were located in the library. When Sanders Garcia accepted a new position managing the Mellon DH grant as the Digital Research Studio director, the library used the available funding line to create a CLIR postdoc position and hired a two-year postdoc to serve as a data services librarian.

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14. Each year, a fall DH Showcase is held to highlight recent Claremont DH projects. Project links and syllabi for DH courses can be found at http://claremontdh.omeka.net.

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15. Lippincott, “Libraries and the Digital University”; and Sinclair, “University Library as Incubator.”

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16. Muñoz, “Digital Humanities in the Library.”

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17. This team has been funded by the Mellon DH grant. In the future, to continue this level of support the DH@CC team has partnered with librarians and academic technologists to train them to support specific technologies, such as Omeka and Voyant Tools. Additional funding will be needed for at least one person to lead these initiatives.

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18. Gibson, Ladd, and Presnell, “Traversing the Gap.”

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19. Gibson, Ladd, and Presnell, “Traversing the Gap.”

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20. The summer institute at the Claremont Colleges costs $4,000 to $5,000 to run. This covers stipends for guest instructors and lodging for out-of-town instructors, and supplies. The Colleges offer classroom spaces free of charge, and the institute has been run by the Mellon DH project manager and the Digital Research Studio director or the Mellon DH faculty director. As a consequence, some additional money may need to be set aside to pay someone to plan and manage the institute if the director position is no longer funded after the grant ends.

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21. For short descriptions of the course development grant recipient’s proposed courses, see bit.ly/2015dhccCourses; bit.ly/2016dhccCourses; and bit.ly/2017dhccCourses.

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22. Sanders Garcia’s previous position within the library was repurposed to support a two-year CLIR postdoc to address emerging needs in data services.

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23. For a description of the Digital Tool Shed and its design process, see http://ashleyrsanders.com/tag/digital-tool-shed/.

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24. Nichols, Melo, and Dewland, “Unifying Space and Service,” 363.

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25. Miriam Posner has written on these challenges and more, and we have found her observations to be true in the Claremont Colleges setting as well. Posner, “No Half Measures.”

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26. For a graphic version of Claremont DH’s vision statement and its mission statement, see http://dh.libraries.claremont.edu/.

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27. Muñoz, “Digital Humanities in the Library.”

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28. Svensson, “Beyond the Big Tent”; and Terras, “Peering Inside.”

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29. Drucker, “Data as Capta”; and Drucker, “HTML and Structured Data.”

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30. Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning.

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31. Smith, “Reconceptualizing Faculty Mentoring.” There are two main forms of constructivism stemming from two leading learning theorists. One version is radical constructivism, which is based on Piaget’s model of the little scientist. The students are faced with an idea or situation that conflicts with previously held beliefs, which forces them to reexamine and reconstruct their worldview. The role of the teacher is to promote analytic or scientific thinking by presenting conflict-creating situations. In this model, students are actively constructing their own knowledge, but they generally work by themselves to do so. In another version, known as social constructivism (based on Vygotsky’s social learning theory), the social context of learning is at least as important as what happens in the individual’s mind. Groups of students along with their teacher construct knowledge and must come to an agreement about what is correct and incorrect. Compare Powell and Kalina, “Cognitive and Social Constructivism.”

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32. Bazeley, Waller, and Resnis, “Engaging Faculty.”

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33. Collections Analysis Project, http://madelynndickerson.wixsite.com/dh4collections; The King’s Theater Fan Scalar Book, http://claremontdh.net/scalar/fan/index; WiFi mapping project, library’s annual report, 2015–16, p. 19, http://libraries.claremont.edu/site/downloads/_annual-report/VITAL_Annual_Report_2015-2016.pdf. Graduate student project created from critical maps of biblical passages and a multimedia timeline that highlights events related to the composition history of 1 Enoch.

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34. Ramsay, “On Building.”

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35. Coble, Potvin and Shiraz, “Process as Product.”

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36. Vanhoutte and Terras, Defining Digital Humanities.

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37. Rockwell, “Inclusion in the Digital Humanities.”

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38. Smith, “Reconceptualizing Faculty Mentoring”; Maritz, Visagie, and Johnson, “External Group Coaching”; Nixon and Brown, “Community of Practice in Action”; and Posner, “Here and There.”

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39. Cooke, “Becoming an Andragogical Librarian.”

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40. Cannady, King, and Blendinger, “Proactive Outreach”; Ismail, “Getting Personal”; Knowles, Adult Learner; Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, Adult Learner; and Ruthven, “Training Needs and Preferences.”

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41. Cowan, “Strategies for Developing a Community of Practice.”

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42. Blanton and Stylianou, “Interpreting a Community of Practice Perspective.”

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43. Smith, “Reconceptualizing Faculty Mentoring.”

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44. Blanton and Stylianou, “Interpreting a Community of Practice Perspective,” 88.

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