Introduction

Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier

Our volume’s title, People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center, intends to foreground the human side of digital humanities (DH) infrastructure. For most people, infrastructure calls to mind things including hardware, software, storage capacity, funding, and facilities. But the writers collected in this book ask us to humanize infrastructure—to consider what the sociologist Susan Leigh Star called those “invisible layers of control and access” that undergird any scientific or scholarly work.1 Data visualization tools and content management systems are, after all, designed by people, people in very specific social and economic locations, and they are used by groups of people in still other, often heterogeneous and contradictory social and economic positions. They are deployed, shared, and repaired in a tangle of institutional protocols, disciplinary conventions, and systemic inequalities. It is these everyday, deeply felt, and sometimes disenfranchising practices and relations that most concern the authors featured in this book.

Two other sociologists, Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio, once observed that “institutions are not necessarily the products of conscious design.”2 From its very first volume, the Debates series has taken up some of the often unconscious designs that have characterized the emerging field of digital humanities. Indeed, as DH has become institutionalized, the social and disciplinary relationships that constitute it have arguably come to govern “what has meaning and what actions are possible” within it, as Powell and DiMaggio might say.3 Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, who write about the history and economic promise/dispossession of community colleges—a subject near and dear to Anne McGrail’s heart—put the matter this way: “organizations may make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please,” because the development of institutions takes place “within larger fields of power and social structure.”4 When we drew up our initial call for papers, we wanted to zero in specifically on some of these larger fields of power and social structure. We wanted to gather, under one big tent, some of the scholars, students, and practitioners who have been thinking deeply about and indeed are living with and working around some of the power dynamics and social structures that now seem baked into DH.

In the current crisis in higher education, it is easy to be pessimistic about the ways that institutional power and resources shape and stymie us. However, institutional arrangements are also shaped by participants’ agency, and many of our authors undertake what Thomas B. Lawrence would call “institutional biographies” that complicate that overdetermination. “Good biography,” Lawrence and his colleagues write, “portrays the social structural influences, the opportunities for agency, and the successes and failures of the individual to shape their world.”5 Our ability—our human ability—to reflect on our embeddedness within distinct power structures provides a direction for action in the field, what Pamella Lach and Jessica Pressman in this volume call “infrastructural imaginaries.” On some fundamental level, as Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg have suggested, infrastructure is ultimately “about imagination and connecting deep conceptual ideas with material manifestations.”6

Meanwhile, as we sat down to write this introduction to over twenty outstanding essays about digital humanities and its institutions and infrastructures, we found ourselves interrogating the old English nursery rhyme, “This is the House that Jack Built”:

The rhyme itself is called a cumulative tale or chain tale, a form that depends on reiteration and layering for its effect. The original builder, Jack, and even his house ultimately seem less important in the end than the dizzying chains of relationships they prompt—relationships sometimes productive, sometimes fraught, often marked by differences in social position and resources. “Jack’s house” means different things to different people: the very title of this song has been reset and reinterpreted across a wide range of places and times, from the lyrics in a mournful tune by Aretha Franklin, to the name, more recently, of a creepy Lars von Trier film, and back, somewhat presciently, to “The House that Jack Built,” an episode from the cult British 1960s television show, The Avengers, where the protagonist, Emma Peel, finds herself trapped in a maze-like, digitally controlled sci-fi apparatus, itself secreted within a seemingly traditional country house.

If we think about the enterprise of digital humanities as being a little like Jack’s house, we might observe that it is inflected, practiced, and hosted by an ever-widening circle of constituencies beyond those present solely at its founding. It is embedded within a variety of other structures and institutions, some small and seemingly insignificant (like the cat or rat of the rhyme), others much larger with structures and practices of their own (like civil law or global agriculture). DH likewise accrues its value and complexities chiefly from its situatedness in other institutions, generally in institutions of higher education, although the “global humanities research infrastructure” that James Smithies posits points us far beyond that to government and nongovernment and commercial and noncommercial sectors as well.

In recent years, we have seen the values and complexities of DH dramatically shift with explosions of new funding opportunities (and their attendant reporting and deliverables requirements), new job advertisements (and the redesign of old tenure lines to include digital foci), and new publications that reflect new understandings of DH, its institutions, and its infrastructures. Like Jack’s house, DH is now a contact zone where phenomena such as humanistic deliberation, aesthetic inquiry, and aspirations for institutional and social justice collide with the star system, the supplanting of tenured labor forces with contingent ones, neoliberal management and market ideologies, and the sheer acceleration of digital technologies themselves. Infrastructure, in its most rudimentary definition, comprises the facilities and structures that a house or a university or a society require to maintain basic operations. It costs, indisputably: money, labor, and human capital. However, it is also profoundly relational. Seeing digital humanities infrastructure in this way—as a set of evolving relations and dependencies and not merely static resources—supports a critical digital humanities practice that acknowledges institutional constraints and engages in purposeful, reflexive action.

In our academic institutions, we find ourselves increasingly unable to talk about even the smallest daily tasks without running up against institutional and infrastructural challenges and inequities. This is perhaps especially true of DH precisely because it presents today as so resource- and infrastructure-intensive. Many of our colleagues and students fail to imagine some of the tools, teams, and time that DH seems to require, even as digital literacy becomes the sine qua non of professional and civic life. And even those in the most privileged and amply funded spaces know that infrastructure is always vulnerable. Storage is often insufficient. Platforms require continual maintenance and updating. Things break—and as Steven J. Jackson has suggested in an earlier essay, “Rethinking Repair,” the repair involved requires additional and perhaps even more expensive outlays than all the shiny innovations in our path. Overriding all our work, administrators at higher and ever more remote levels are making major decisions about digital infrastructure that affect our research and pedagogy in ways of which we are unaware or unable to determine.

When we think about infrastructure in this context, we are thinking of the inescapable infrastructural dependencies: shifting and unstable labor requirements, grant-funding exigencies, spatial and other physical requirements, and version control and lapse. The authors in this volume see infrastructures beyond the technical, hardware, and financial needs of their own institutions, programs, and centers. They are keenly interested in political, social, and economic factors including promotion and tenure processes, student research support, pedagogical development, and even extra-institutional instruments such as project charters and memoranda of understanding. These authors call attention to the ineluctably human side of DH infrastructure, and insist on rethinking infrastructure in human terms, which is perhaps one of the more radical things that DH can do.

We hope that our volume builds on the installed base of the textual infrastructure established by the Debates in the Digital Humanities series. Earlier volumes have tracked conversations and controversies around DH’s big tent metaphor, and how (and whether) DH can be fruitfully practiced outside the digital humanities center (DHC) and large institutions with their considerable resources. Echoed in this volume are Amy Earhart’s earlier call for mechanisms to welcome DIY digital projects into the institutional canon; Moya Bailey, Anne Cong-Huyen, Alexis Lothian, and Amanda Phillips’s insistence on the essential role of “nontraditional output” such as activist social justice work to create a transformed field that extends beyond the academy; and Anne McGrail’s ongoing advocacy for meaningful digital humanities work for students in open-access community colleges. More recently, the themes organizing Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh’s Debates volume, Bodies of Information (2018)—materiality, values, embodiment, affect, labor, and situatedness—anticipate the relational quality of DH infrastructural dimensions with which our authors engage here.

A great deal, if not the vast majority, of DH work today is actually being conducted outside of dedicated DHCs. It is happening in a variety of institutions that might never before have imagined conducting digital research and teaching, including small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, teaching-intensive institutions, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). We accept the decentralization and diffusion of DH as a welcome development and intend to fill a gap in the literature available to practitioners who, at DHCs and at underresourced institutions alike, are now confronting and dealing with unexpected infrastructural challenges. Such issues as contingent labor, soft money funding, academic hierarchies, and state politics at a variety of institutions (from the underresourced to the generously endowed) require practical response and theoretical guidance on how and whether to proceed with digital initiatives.

Although we did not necessarily intend to include essays in what is now called critical infrastructure studies, many of the pieces resonate with issues raised in this emerging field. Alan Liu, as a member of the Critical Infrastructure Studies Collective, defines infrastructure as “the social-cum-technological milieu that at once enables the fulfillment of human experience and enforces constraints on that experience.”7 In this definition, infrastructure comprises more than just the transportation, electrical grids, internet, and other media and hardware through which and upon which culture happens: it is culture, or at least it operationalizes our experience of it. To Liu, “the word ‘infrastructure’ can now give us the same kind of general purchase on social complexity that Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and others sought when they reached for their all-purpose word, ‘culture’” . . . and critics will need to attend to “that cyborg being whose making, working, disciplining, performance, gender formation, and hybridity are increasingly part of the core identity of late modern culture.”8

If Liu is right (and he is), then humans can no longer leave discussions of infrastructure to the technocrats. We witness this truth daily around the globe with evidence including water supply contamination, pipeline explosions, and structural failures. In the face of extreme weather and the resulting evacuations and population dispersals, we are starting to look more closely at the physical materials and engineering systems that are failing us. We inevitably begin to pose questions involving the human, and regarding power. Who decided, for instance, to divert Flint, Michigan’s drinking water? Why did National Grid lock out its union laborers before its gas lines began exploding across northeastern Massachusetts? Who benefits from the privatization of Puerto Rico’s electricity authority? In academic institutions that are witnessing (and too often replicating) similarly grievous inequalities, the questions are no less urgent. Which students are afforded the opportunity to practice digital humanities? Under what labor conditions and power differentials do adjunct, library, and technical staff create digital projects? How do underfunded groups sustain their collaborative projects over the long haul—or can they? With these kinds of vulnerabilities and precarities in mind, to think about infrastructure and about human struggles to build communities of care that can respond to these dilemmas is to bring a social justice orientation to bear on our humanities disciplinary practice.

We believe that many of our authors respond, at least implicitly, to the call to consider infrastructure much as we used to think about culture. In the first section of this volume, “Beyond the Digital Humanities Center: Historical Perspectives and New Models,” our essays respond explicitly to the call. James Malazita, who teaches DH at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, describes what he calls an “epistemic infrastructure” in the form of technological instrumentalism. This epistemic infrastructure, he determines, seeks to cordon off technical expertise from critical inquiry. This practice does not occur only in STEM disciplines; it threatens to take over our universities wholesale, he warns, if DH does not bring its humanistic tools to challenge it. By exploring the tensions among multiple epistemic regimes, DH scholars can subvert this subversion. In a similar vein, Erin Glass issues a clarion call for digital humanists to question academic institutions’ wholesale and passive adoption of capitalist digital technologies in an educational technology market with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. Focusing on what she calls the “invisible discipline” of pervasive campus digital technologies, she surveys early twenty-first-century classroom instances of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” as they operate in the digital classroom.

Elsewhere in “Beyond the Digital Humanities Center,” several essays reexamine the very premise of large-scale, collaborative DH projects dependent on a lab or center. Weighing in on the DH lab definitionally, Lauren Tilton and Taylor Arnold maintain that it is not so much a question of whether or not labs or DHCs are preferred infrastructures for DH work; instead, it is how labs are described and situated that best informs how DH work is sustained in our distinct, institutional contexts. They describe how resources prove a double bind for the social symbolic work of digital humanities: the lab—a new space in humanities—offers great opportunities for digital scholarship but can also paradoxically foreclose some possibilities. With its differentiated spaces, roles, and staffing hierarchies and its growth in infrastructure, Tilton and Arnold suggest that the lab simultaneously enables and limits the “experimentation, collaboration, and access” that are hallmarks of the field’s development.

Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, writing from Aalto University in Finland, similarly considers the idea of the laboratory, arguing that from her standpoint DH has pivoted from an “isolated, discipline-based center, to an interdisciplinary laboratory,” to a series of dispersed, virtual practices and collaborations occurring in various platforms such as Slack and DH Commons. Pawlicka-Deger’s history traces the lab’s institutionalization from scientific to social space and evolving function as a support for humanities research, as well as physical space to host equipment and people, a service and display space, and a platform for global networking and experimentation.

Laura Braunstein and Michelle Warren theorize DH’s infrastructural and discursive formations as stacks. Which uncanny categories, they ask, lie beneath disciplinary declarations of openness, collaboration, and innovation? They direct us to three versions of the stack as metaphor and offer an intervention in the two-dimensional agon of hack and yack, making visible the social-symbolic disciplinary labor of engaging with past, present, and future. The authors help us to comprehend the infrastructure that tracks our own achievements, whether through built archives, shared method and pedagogies, or digital translations on the web.

Reading Quinn Dombrowski’s excursion through a brief history of digital directories reminds us all why taxes on infrastructure are necessary—and often resented. Because infrastructure is visible only upon breakdown, supporting its ongoing function while it is still working can appear to be supporting nothing at all.9 What might a tax on directory infrastructure, and all common goods in DH infrastructure, look like? Dombrowski’s history fits well within what Steven J. Jackson calls “broken world thinking” with its emphasis on an ethos of care and sustainability.10 Her history illuminates the paradox of a “successful failure” in the digital research tools (DiRT) directory: “the fact that grant funding is available for development, but institutions may or may not step in to provide ongoing support for operations” explains the infrastructural gap for projects such as DiRT. Institutional commitment and affiliation (as Geoffrey Rockwell of the University of Alberta has for TAPoR and Liu has for the DH Toychest) are ultimately essential to the long-term survival of digital projects (even if they are stewarded mainly by one person) but they are elusive.

In another case study, Maria Sachiko Cecire and Susan Merriam describe how a local and specific institutional culture can shape DH projects. They call for a flexible, “one size does not fit all” approach, which “can develop original programming, maximize existing resources, and have institution-wide positive effects.” Cecire and Merriam’s account of work at Bard College’s Center for Experimental Humanities resonates with the theme of naming as infrastructural element. While in some circles the name digital humanities has become as welcome and understood as an aging teenager, Cecire and Merriam optimistically respond by forming their project in alignment with their institutional culture rather than against it. These authors provide a clear example of how, as Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca suggest, “individuals actively engage in processes of institutional maintenance, disruption, and change.”11

We close “Beyond the Digital Humanities Center” with a piece by Christina Boyles that foregrounds and reflects on urgent cries to elevate issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other forms of power in our DH work. Boyles surveys early DH projects that responded to the need, as Roopika Risam has put it elsewhere, to “carefully privilege diversity, multiplicity, and plurality.”12 Boyles notes that a robust intersectional infrastructure is still necessary to stem the loss of important sites that have disappeared from the internet through neglect and insecure funding. She offers strategies that resist the marginalizing of difference that scholars such as Risam, Amy Earhart, and Dorothy Kim have shown persists in reproducing narrow canons and inequitable power structures inherited from analog contexts. Lost projects by people of color reveal potholes in the infrastructure of critical digital humanities and demonstrate how the social justice frameworks espoused by the field in theory can be neglected in practice. Because neglect is a distributed phenomenon, it requires institutional and infrastructural response.

Our second cluster of essays is titled “Human Infrastructures: Labor Considerations and Communities of Practice.” This section includes alternatives to the DHC, even for institutions lucky enough to have robust DHCs in place. For instance, Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, Nathan Dize, Abby Broughton, and Brittany de Gail have worked outside the purview of the University of Maryland’s MITH (Maryland Institute of Humanities and Technology) to produce the smaller, low-tech but highly important digital primary source reader, A Colony in Crisis, which examines a grain crisis on the eve of the Haitian revolution. The authors recount a deep synergy between the powerful university infrastructure and the “fast prototyping” and incubations possible within their low-tech project housed in their university’s French department. However, a project’s strengths can also demonstrate its weaknesses; issues such as personnel changes and students’ inevitable departure again show that maintenance and continuity are infrastructural necessities without which the show will not go on. While they value some of the basic project management and technical support they gained from proximity to a large DHC, they also find that the DHC model tends to marginalize a smaller-scale, iterative project such as theirs—a project that may be otherwise valuable precisely because of its focus on pedagogy, service, and marginalized histories.

Brennan Collins and Dylan Ruediger explain how Georgia State University has instituted a Student Innovation Fellowship (SIF), which trains graduate students as well as honors undergraduate students in a variety of skills on digital projects. It brings together faculty and students from a range of disciplines with heavy orientation toward computer science and the humanities, and it has progressively become more focused on projects devoted to understanding urban space and experience in and around Atlanta. Collins and Ruediger draw on multiple and contingent resources in labor, space, and funding, in effect “building a network of student specialists capable of playing significant roles in the development of long-term DH projects.” Like many authors in this volume, they emphasize how they exploit extant infrastructures to realize their digital humanities aims. Accessing networks as a means of developing DH projects shows what Corlett-Rivera and her colleagues describe as an “opportunistic willingness” that allowed for their success. Noticing “cracks” in the foundation, these authors are able to provide “cement” in the form of #alt-ac labor and “squatted on resources” to support DH pedagogy.

Elizabeth Rodrigues and Rachel Schnepper consider DH infrastructure issues within the small liberal arts college (SLAC), offering a thought-provoking set of findings that demonstrate how DH librarians and staff can leverage faculty content expertise and initiative while also breaking down some of the institutional hierarchies and caste systems that ultimately mitigate against successful and sustainable collaborations. The authors focus on the “sedimented history of higher education’s hierarchies, reward structures, and expectations.” They ask whether the division of labor that comes with reduced/constrained resources at SLACs can coexist with collaboration. Like many other authors in the field, they show that digital humanities sometimes does what textbook publishing and brick-and-mortar archives could not do: expose the labor hierarchies in humanities work. The deep interdependence and emotional labor that may have been occluded in less collaborative and resource-intensive settings are everywhere visible in the collaboration required of digital projects. Noting the “affective consequences . . . embedded in hierarchy,” the authors reframe service as learner-centered collaboration.

Eduard Arriaga writes about DH in community organizations and service-oriented universities, arguing that even as DH has become more capacious epistemologically and conceptually, infrastructure continues to be understood as “digital devices and institutional resources.” Without discounting the real need for material resources, Arriaga points the reader to examples of vibrant grassroots DH activities that “do not aim to study the impact of digital culture or to implement a technique to preserve cultural heritage as a practice that extends an exclusive world order,” but rather “use tools to pursue social justice agendas that question conceptions of humanity, development and inclusion.” Resonating perhaps with Alex Gil’s powerful notion of “minimal computing,” Arriaga calls for a “humane digital” infrastructure that is positive and productive and includes community relationships and nonnetworked technology such as computers and electricity itself. This can be compared to the persistent challenges the academy is finding in trying to leverage predigital economies of value—, that is, unrecognized contributions and hierarchies.

Similarly, Pamella Lach and Jessica Pressman, writing from San Diego State University, an HSI, determine that DH in a service institution requires working with people at the local level with a focus on pedagogy and social justice. Lach and Pressman claim collaboration as feminist practice and offer their initiative SD/DH as a model for interinstitutional collaboration. As with other authors in this collection (Cecire and Merriam, Rodrigues and Schnepper and others), Lach and Pressman’s work makes visible the emotional and affective infrastructures required of digital humanities in ways that traditional humanities practices could never do. The authors recount their process of creating an initiative driven by local, situated practices they liken to Lisa Parks’s “infrastructural imaginaries”—those “ways of thinking about what infrastructures are, where they are located, who controls them, and what they do.”13 By creating an “area of excellence” within their university context, these authors also demonstrate the importance of leveraging the infrastructure of resources, including cultural capital of prestige, in the larger institutional context.

Ashley Sanders Garcia, Lydia Bello, Madelynn Dickerson, and Margaret Hogarth describe their efforts at the Claremont Colleges to build a transdisciplinary, transrank community of practice centered in the library, in which librarians are genuine project partners rather than simply facilitators. One of the key debates constituting the Debates series is around access—who needs it, who has it, what are the obstacles to it, and even what is meant by it. By looking at what they call “hard” and “soft” infrastructure, Sanders Garcia and her colleagues show how the constraints imposed by large conventional funders such as Mellon can have downstream impacts on collaboration at institutions. They call for major funders and other influential institutions to work for inclusion of multiple recognized roles and professionals within DH projects, including librarians and #alt-ac professionals. While they stress the importance of reaching across disciplines, positions, and ranks when creating their communities of practice, they caution that emphasizing the “digital” at the expense of the “humanities” can dilute the prominence of humanistic values and critical method.

All these writers are theorizing infrastructure as communities of practice, with all the attendant relationship building (and relationship care) that such communities require. In the 2012 Debates volume, Tara MacPherson identified a “lenticular” organizational principle that governed both computational design principles and racist power dynamics in mid-twentieth-century America. Lenticular logic provides an indispensable critical tool for examining interstitial, infrastructural effects that isolate and render invisible the interdependent functions of power and oppression. One could fruitfully extend the isolating logic of the lenticular view to the separation in higher education of issues of quality in research and teaching from those of labor and precarious faculty conditions. The two final essays in our section on human infrastructures, by Jana Remy and by Kathi Inman Berens, reflect on the human risks and costs of DH work by considering the need for protecting DH work in the promotion and tenure process, and on the need for protecting adjunct laborers, respectively.

Previous Debates volumes have noted the persistent marginalization of pedagogy in DH scholarship, and so our third cluster of essays, “Pedagogy: Vulnerability, Collaboration, and Resilience,” turns to that topic. Margaret Simon begins this section with a compelling rumination on the haptic and sensory affordances of digital texts. For her, they raise issues of access, insofar as digital texts invite “both scholarly inquiry and participation in larger conversations about media change.” She wants to attend to “the human infrastructures that underlie even seemingly straightforward digital pedagogies, revealing the institutional hierarchies that can determine how new methodologies enter the classroom.” Simon witnesses students’ development of empathy through the “interpretive potentials of remediation” brought by digitized primary texts. Simon is aware that even the accessibility of the Folger archives to her students relied on the research networks to which she was privy. This kind of upstream access to special collections, which she enjoyed as a scholar in a networked community, reveals hidden “market-driven economies of professional connection and prestige that function as shadow infrastructures in fostering digital learning and research.”

Continuing this attention to access and inequity from a graduate-student perspective, Chelsea Miya, Laura Gerlitz, Kaitlyn Grant, Maryse Ndilu Kiese, Mengchi Sun, and Christina Boyles offer a manifesto calling for alternatives to DH-focused graduate programs that might “better support students and encourage collaboration and experimentation.” If graduate programs are where “the system reproduces itself,” as Louis Menand would have it, attention to the experiences of our graduate students is essential. Like our other essays, this manifesto calls for an ethos of care in programs where the next generation’s digital humanists are apprenticed. The perceived need to “do double duty” as skilled coders and inventive critical thinkers threatens to undermine the health of the discipline’s future. The authors call on their fellow students to self-organize and step into leadership roles, to “reimagine the field from the bottom up.”

Next we have two calls (and two practical agendas) for offering DH to first-generation college students. Jamila Moore Pewu and Anelise Hanson Shrout provide another institutional biography, one that reveals the affective and emotional infrastructure required for successful knowledge transmission in digital humanities. Through the inclusion of culturally relevant curricula, culturally relevant use of tools, and clear pedagogies that build DH skills, these authors intend to “push [the extant DH community] toward a more expansive, and less infrastructurally limited conception of DH.” They examine how first-generation students learn and how their digital fluencies manifest, and they also intentionally revise the exclusionary founding narratives of digital technologies, “(re)inserting . . . living and nonliving role models . . . to increase feelings of self-confidence, belonging, and inclusion within the discipline.”

Roopika Risam demonstrates how digital humanities can intervene in institutional stratification by responding to “immediate, local, geographical” communities in regional comprehensive universities and reframing “limitations . . . as affordances” rather than as deficits. At Salem State, writes Risam, neither students nor the institution itself were prepared for DH. Meeting these students’ needs “underscores the role of social justice in our work.” Risam provides a playbook for colleagues at similar institutions, calling for digital humanists to be “digital stewards of place.”

Our volume concludes with a kind of coda by Matthew Applegate, who makes a salutary pitch for putting DH in greater dialogue with critical university studies (CUS), a field that now attends specifically and fervently to neoliberal discourses of scarcity, abundance, efficiency, productivity, and speed. Applegate argues that we must refuse common organizational models and that a DH/CUS conversation could help us better imagine “infrastructure as autonomous iterations of global and local education.” This is not dissimilar to Liu’s metaphorical call to arms, in his book in progress, Against the Cultural Singularity, where he highlights the tendency of business corporate institutions to monopolize all our other institutions, remaking them in their image. Scholars and students might be forgiven, we suspect, for believing that that particular horse has already bolted from the barn. Applegate encourages us to get past deficit/scarcity thinking and calls for a “coalitional standard for educational infrastructure that foregrounds difference.” He points out Liu’s “antifoundationalist” and tactical interventions as strategies for this coalition, and he sketches a pairing of Risam and Mohanty that encourages tactical linking of struggles across institutional spaces.

We admit that we were profoundly disappointed that, in the end, we were unable to secure submissions from scholars and practitioners at community colleges, HBCUs, and tribal colleges for this collection, despite outreach to colleagues and friends at such institutions. What does the failure to locate this work signal about the impact of the institutional stratifications that our field inherits and deploys? We are reminded of Mary Douglas’s suggestion that institutional classifications say a great deal about how we understand ourselves.14 We are also reminded of Deb Verhoeven’s insistence that omissions from the archive are themselves archived; silences in a field must be critically examined as an inherited affordance of the infrastructure itself.15 However, silence, like absence, is more difficult to examine than active debate. “The more opaque the mode of transmitting inequalities,” write Brint and Karabel, “the more effective it is likely to be in legitimating these inequalities,” and nothing is more opaque than absence.16 DH is a discipline perhaps exceptionally localized in its sites of privilege and disadvantage. Contrast, as all our authors do implicitly, the advantages of a Texas A&M or Northeastern University–style dedicated digital humanities lab against activities in a cash-strapped community college’s adjunct’s classroom. With these seemingly intractable infrastructural chasms in place, how can we continue our work identifying privilege and raising critical awareness of the conditions of the field’s knowledge production?

Community colleges sit between two institutional models—one of the school with its focus on transmitting agreed and accepted knowledge and the other of the university defined by wissenschaft (scholarship). Universities find their justification “always and only” through engagement with “problems and issues yet to be resolved, whether in research or teaching.”17 Community colleges and other colleges whose justification is to serve students and not only abstract knowledge are structurally excluded from some of the most important developments in the humanities today. However, because the field of DH is still evolving, developing, and morphing—in response to technology and in response to its own discoveries and impasses—what is agreed and accepted knowledge and what is wissenschaft are questions still in play. Perhaps this provides an opportunity for community colleges to bridge this gap between agreed and accepted knowledge and wissenschaft.

Along with Paul Edwards, we might ask how we can “enable or generate translation across entrenched practices and institutions.”18 One mechanism could be through curriculum as boundary object. In their edited collection in the Debates series, Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (2018), editors Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh use keywords as “boundary objects” to organize their volume’s intersectional intervention in the field of DH. Developed by Susan Leigh Star and others, the concepts of “boundary objects” and “boundary infrastructure” might help us intervene with respect to the silence of community colleges and other institutions. Boundary objects “both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them.” Able to “travel across borders and maintain some sort of constant identity,” they “can be tailored to meet the needs of one community” and “have common identities across settings.”19 How might we construct boundary objects to “generate translation across entrenched practices and institutions”?20

Digital humanities curricula may provide some trans-institutional mechanisms for building a boundary infrastructure of DH at community colleges, HBCUs, tribal colleges, and other institutions in higher education.21 Responding to this issue is Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models and Experiments, edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers, organized around keywords that articulated a common vocabulary for the community of practice of DH. One idea for DH practitioners is to build on the base of keywords and agree on threshold concepts as a mechanism for engaging institutional subalterns. Jan Meyer and Ray Land describe threshold concepts as the key moments in learning that represent a “transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something.”22 A model of this kind of work is Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle’s edited collection, Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts and Writing Studies, where more than twenty writing studies scholars articulated key understandings of major concepts in that field of English. The classroom edition of the text is itself a boundary object between scholarly and student audiences. As both boundary and portal, thresholds are an ideal infrastructural metaphor. Perhaps future practitioners across the higher education spectrum of institutions would undertake this work and create a boundary infrastructure that would bridge the silences in the field.

Until then, the essays in the volume at hand give us hope that, at least in some places, scholars, librarians, teachers, and students are working together, tactically as Liu might say, to create intelligent, humane projects and paradigms. Sadly, outmoded and even inoperable reward systems continue to demonstrate a lack of consensus about how best to support the intellectual work of DH. Elsewhere, successful and influential projects stand as high-water marks in a young field, while other highly admired and prized projects are abandoned for lack of reliable, systemic support. These examples highlight the lingering tensions between the demands of digital knowledge production and the support that variously positioned institutions are able (or willing) to provide today. Issues such as these are just some of the infrastructural hazards featured in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center that continue to characterize the ongoing project of the house that DH built.