Identifying Institutional Culture

By institutional culture, we mean what Williams et al. define as “the entrenched behaviors of individuals working within organizations as well as the common ‘values, assumptions, beliefs or ideologies that members have about their organization or its work.’”6 Our suggestion to take advantage of institutional culture in starting a new initiative is not itself radical, but we have found that this approach can have surprisingly revolutionary outcomes when creatively used as a guiding principle for structuring a DH-style program from the ground up. In her useful piece “Here and There: Creating DH Community,” Miriam Posner emphasizes the importance of working with an institution’s existing culture when attempting to “spark DH activity.” She offers practical examples of how one might do this, such as taking advantage of standing meetings to present material or working with course development grant opportunities to incentivize DH pedagogy.7 We suggest stepping back even further to consider an institution’s fundamental self-identity before forging ahead with designing and implementing a DH initiative. What is your institution proud of? Whom does it serve? Is it focused more on pedagogy or research? What are its unique commitments? (To the arts? To its sports teams? To first-generation college students? To a regional area?) What does it identify as key elements in an ethical and well-informed study of the humanities? Although not always stated explicitly, these factors are as much a part of institutional culture as when meetings are held and how departments are structured.

In our case, Bard has a reputation for progressivism, fierce advocacy for the arts and humanities, and a faculty devoted to teaching. Even though Bard has long run on a restricted budget, it allots more to student financial aid than many wealthier institutions, and spends liberally to bring its vision of social justice, liberal education for all, and the arts to life in the world. Bard supports credit-bearing liberal arts programs in inner-city public high schools, state prisons, underserved communities across the United States, and maintains an enduring commitment to international undergraduate education in countries including Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Palestine, and is a key part of the Open Society University Network.8 It also runs a conservatory, a world-class summer festival of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, several major exhibition spaces, and competitive graduate programs in curatorial studies, the fine arts, and decorative arts / design history / material culture. Faculty in all of Bard’s educational programs are encouraged to think boldly and creatively about classroom pedagogy and are offered an array of opportunities to develop their skills. So, although Bard undergraduates are as likely as anyone else to feel anxious about practical concerns such as postgraduation job prospects, they have chosen to attend an institution that privileges the arts and humanities and that sees access to a rigorous liberal arts education as a social justice issue.

Given this climate, it would have been impossible to shape a successful DH-style initiative at Bard that did not begin with pedagogy, meaningfully include artistic experimentation, and engage with the history and theory of technological change. And in keeping with our community’s emphasis on social justice, the projects that have grown out of Experimental Humanities have tended toward civic engagement and advocacy. Roopika Risam has written about framing different approaches to DH in terms of a DH accent, drawing on postcolonial theory to decentralize what we consider to be “good” DH and to recontextualize this in terms of a DH center or initiative’s local circumstances.9 To borrow this concept for the intensely local circumstances of Bard College, our DH accent ended up taking the shape of Experimental Humanities, a curricular initiative and hub for faculty research that is as interested in the experimentation of the artist’s studio as in the experiments of a scientific lab and that places as much value on pedagogical experiments as on research projects. When we use and think about technologies, we necessarily build critical analysis and creative reimaginings of tech’s uses into what we do; as our mission states, “We are committed to the notion that embracing experimental approaches is essential to fostering practices that are inclusive for all learners and transformative for the societies in which we live.”

In their essay about whether or how small liberal arts colleges might “do” DH, Bryan Alexander and Rebecca Frost Davis outline several challenges to establishing DH programs and centers at institutions like Bard.10 They note a lack of infrastructure to support major research projects, the difficulty of pulling together the human resources to do work that requires a wide range of skills, our limited access to graduate students that can sustain long-term research, and the pedagogical focus at SLACs. However, they argue that models that include curricular elements and partner with existing campus resources like library/IT can still be successful, developing proficiency in select project areas and sending students on to DH graduate programs. Experimental Humanities does work closely with library/IT and encourages faculty projects through training opportunities, the guidance of a digital projects coordinator with a PhD in the humanities, and the support of a student media corps. However, while several successful DH initiatives at other small liberal arts colleges have grown out of the library, such as Occidental’s Center for Digital Liberal Arts, or out of faculty research, as with Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative, EH was from its first imaginings a primarily curricular initiative, built on the three pillars of history, theory, and practice.11

At an administrative level, EH is a concentration (it functions like an interdisciplinary minor), which means that our students pair their course work with a foundation in a major program of study, and that EH faculty also belong to a home program. All EH students take the core courses Introduction to Media and History of Experiment, which were created for our concentration and which faculty in different fields rotate teaching. They cover media theory and the history of different kinds of experimental methods and approaches from the classical period through today, and both aim to integrate hands-on projects into the syllabus. To graduate with an Experimental Humanities concentration, students must also take at least one practice-based course beyond the college arts requirement—this may be computer science or an electronic arts course, but may also be another visual, written, or performing art—and at least two courses from the wide offering of EH-listed courses. These are typically designed by faculty according to their research interests, include a number of interdisciplinary team-taught courses, and are available in a wide range of fields. The following is a sample listing of elective courses:

A Selection of Experimental Humanities Courses at Bard College

All EH faculty are encouraged to include experimental projects and opportunities for student-driven inquiry in their courses, and students present their work to one another at collective Share Events each semester. These vibrant and sometimes raucous events look like a cross between a scientific poster session, a media fair, and an arts exhibition, with lightning presentations to explain the work being done in different courses. Our curricular goals are for students to think about the complex relationships between form and content, to get a sense of the long and varied history of how people have sought to make and share knowledge, and to develop the hands-on skills to test out their own questions in the media of their choice.

The energy for creating Experimental Humanities at Bard came from faculty and staff who put their heads together to imagine how a humanities approach to digital studies and technology could usefully fit into the culture at Bard, amplifying what’s best about our institution and taking advantage of the resources that we have. Kezar, Gallant, and Lester have demonstrated how the concept of grassroots leadership, more commonly studied in the context of social movements, can also be applied to bottom-up approaches to change in academia. In the case of the academy, this means initiatives and cultural shifts driven by faculty and staff rather than passed down from the administration. The findings of their study emphasize the importance of taking institutional culture into account but do so at the level of higher education in general as a profession and environment with its own norms and rules. They have written:

The tactics used by faculty and staff are distinctly shaped by and aligned with the culture and character of the academy. For example, the collegial and shared governance culture of the academy shaped a more tempered approach to community organizing, through tactics such as working with and mentoring students, hiring like-minded social activists, and utilizing existing networks.

The authors go on to note that different kinds of institutions respond better to different grassroots tactics toward change. For instance, they note that “obtaining grants and using data were more effective and pervasive at research universities, curricular changes at the teaching institutions, working with external (alumni and community) groups at the community college and liberal arts campuses.”12 Being embedded in your own college or university, with access to its histories and hopes for the future, positions you to identify the best approaches to creating a DH initiative for your institution.

Beyond identifying institutional category (R1, SLAC, regional comprehensive, community college, etc.), we recommend addressing your local interests, concerns, and points of pride. With Bard’s teaching focus, taking a curricular approach was essential to laying a firm foundation for Experimental Humanities, ensuring that a regular (and rotating) core of faculty could be engaged in developing and continuing the concentration each semester through their courses. This ongoing activity made it easier to encourage and maintain extracurricular elements of the initiative, from lectures and workshops to faculty projects. While a similar curricular model could work for other colleges and universities with a strong teaching mission, not all such institutions would necessarily welcome an initiative like EH. Cecire recalls being asked by a colleague from another institution how she managed to get a program with a name like Experimental Humanities accepted by her Bard peers and administration; “At Bard,” she replied, “it’s a lot easier to get through ‘Experimental Humanities’ than ‘Digital Humanities’!” Bard’s vigorous commitment to the arts and liberal arts meant that there was some significant initial suspicion of any program that could be seen as seeking to displace traditional practices of humanistic inquiry or automate the work of human minds and hands. By framing our engagement with the digital in terms of a much longer tradition of technological change and shifting approaches to knowledge creation and artistic expression, Experimental Humanities was able to take colleagues’ legitimate concerns on board and indeed make them part of what students are required to consider as part of their studies.

Building a Community to Build a Program

In fundamental ways, many of which will be familiar to folks who work at other small liberal arts colleges, Bard is an unlikely candidate for a DH program. When Cecire began thinking about the possibility of developing something DH-related at Bard, we lacked the infrastructure and financial wherewithal to support many, or perhaps even most aspects of a traditional DH initiative. Our colleagues in IT were already consumed with the day-to-day work of the college, so that asking them to take on additional responsibility for a program would be difficult. We would moreover not be given much space on the college server and would not have access to new computing technology unless we could obtain it ourselves. Like many other institutions, Bard experiences constraints on office and classroom space, so we could not plan on having a dedicated place for faculty or students to convene or store equipment. Finally, while Bard does have graduate students, the graduate schools are for the most part not located on the main campus, so any student work would be done by undergraduates.

We also faced more Bard-specific barriers to a DH program. Bard has a reputation for being cutting edge, but that reputation is driven primarily by Bard’s strong arts programs and belief in risk taking and creativity. Bard’s curriculum is in most ways very traditional—it has a strong set of core requirements, for example, including extensive general education requirements and a set of rigorous distribution requirements—and the faculty and administration are in general careful about adopting new programs, particularly those that seem of the moment. The attitude “new is not necessarily better” is pervasive. Additionally, faculty commonly associate DH with big data, and many had the presumption that working with a DH program would mean somehow diminishing one of the most important aspects of the liberal arts college classroom: work in small groups with a teacher. Our faculty were also initially disinclined to use or explore the use of technology in the classroom beyond learning management systems or PowerPoint. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), which were widely discussed in higher education at the time of EH’s founding, or anything similar ran directly counter to Bard’s pedagogical ethos and brand. Finally, while a small percentage of the Bard student body was deeply interested in technology, a much larger percentage were not particularly technologically adept or poised to think rigorously about the way technology shapes their experience.

More positively, Bard faculty were and are close knit and have an entrepreneurial spirit. Because the administration encourages faculty (at every level and type of contract) and students to explore ways that they can contribute to the college, it is not unusual for junior faculty or visitors to take initiative and pilot something new. Characteristic of Bard’s culture, for instance, is that an undergraduate founded the Bard Prison Initiative, one of the largest degree-granting college in prison programs in the country. The faculty are also given a great deal of power in shaping the curriculum, and as professors we take pride in our focus on undergraduate teaching and advising. Teaching is often interdisciplinary, so faculty welcome and are comfortable working outside their fields. Finally, we have resources—the graduate and international schools, a vibrant Center for Civic Engagement, a distinguished arts faculty, knowledgeable and flexible staff—that might prove valuable in developing a program.

Given Bard’s profile, it was clear that a typical DH program would not be financially feasible or desirable to the faculty. Cecire and other members of the early EH planning team reasoned that Bard’s strengths, particularly the faculty investment in the curriculum and teaching, as well as Bard’s focus on liberal inquiry pointed toward developing a curricular-driven program. We imagined that Experimental Humanities would initially be framed as a liberal arts–driven answer to the digital humanities: it could use a network of courses and faculty-identified research clusters to variously interrogate how technology mediates what it means to be human. While DH scholarship at its most visible typically creates and employs digital tools to pursue project-based humanities research, EH emphasizes reconsidering the methods and subjects of humanistic study in the light of changing material conditions. This often means coming up with projects and pedagogies that engage the digital, but it can also result in totally analog work that pushes at the boundaries of disciplinary norms. The EH frame also created room for studying and experimenting with the kind of multimodal work that artists, scholars, and students—especially those from minoritized communities—were doing both in and outside the academy. These were often not being treated as “DH” at the time, but we found them to be compelling and important to integrate into our approach.13

In the course of thinking about starting a DH program, and as a new visiting professor, Cecire was advised by a senior mentor to simply talk to as many people as possible. At a college where the entire faculty can fit into one multipurpose room for faculty meetings, talking to colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds (faculty from different disciplines, librarians, and staff who work in areas from student life to civic engagement) was eminently possible. She ate lunch in the faculty dining room, set up coffee dates, joined committees that were open to visitors, and over her first year embarked on the kind of “listening tour” that Posner suggests.

Cecire’s listening tour helped shape some of her initial ideas about the program. Next, she held a one-day faculty and staff retreat in the early fall of her second year, to which she invited people that had expressed interest and/or had an important perspective to contribute. In keeping with the offbeat, countercultural ethos that she had identified as a source of pride for Bardians, she found a cost-effective but productive environment for the retreat: a quirky local inn on the Hudson River. Its eclectic indoor and outdoor spaces helped the group maintain energy and encouraged thinking “outside the box” of usual campus procedure as they ate, discussed, and outlined throughout the day. Cecire presented a sketch of curricular and extracurricular activities for the proposed initiative based on the conversations she had been having over the previous year, and together the group rearranged and fleshed out this plan into the foundations of the Experimental Humanities concentration and initiative. This day-long workshop advanced the program because it helped faculty identify like-minded colleagues and concretize some of their own ideas about EH, and its emphasis on listening and collaboration underlined the humanistic nature of the initiative. Building on this consensus, we outlined the core courses and put together teams to develop and teach them, identified existing courses that were already appropriate to cross-list under EH, and established recommendations for retooling existing courses for EH.

The concentration launched in 2012, offering ten to twelve EH-listed courses per semester and providing faculty with new opportunities for teaching and research. Next, armed with a clear mission, Cecire created a steering committee of core faculty and staff to help guide the new program and take part in drafting an application for the Mellon grant. Upon receiving the grant in spring of 2014, EH expanded its reach through several new hires (the digital projects coordinator, a web developer for the arts and humanities, two postdoctoral fellows, and a team of student media corps workers), and gained significant funding to support faculty development and research and pedagogical projects.

While we were thrilled to grow with the grant support, it is important to recognize that many of our key initiatives were already in place and would have moved forward in some form even without Mellon. In its very early stages, EH operated under severe financial constraints, and we had no choice but to develop the program on a shoestring. Instead of being flummoxed or deterred by challenges, we (perhaps somewhat optimistically) developed a series of workarounds. We lacked a designated space, the typical marker of shared programmatic relationship or identity on a campus, so worked doubly hard to establish a sense of cohort to anchor the program instead. We lacked IT infrastructure, so we committed to using expertise and equipment that colleagues on campus were willing to share. We began developing a map of where equipment could be found, for instance, and created a list of people with some expertise who would be willing to run workshops or train individual faculty. We researched and used free software whenever possible. We collaborated with staff such as the educational technologist and the curator of visual resources to find classroom tech solutions that enabled them to pilot programs and platforms that they could eventually roll out college-wide (including Omeka, WordPress, and Amazon server space).

We also created initiatives that could be free or low cost to run. Virtually free and incredibly successful, our topic-based research clusters draw faculty and staff from disciplines as disparate as physics, anthropology, theater, and human rights around subjects like sound and food. Many faculty reported feeling invigorated by their monthly discussions with colleagues, including one associate professor who reported that the experience was like being “in grad school again—in the best way!” because it allowed her to think about her research area from new perspectives with smart, creative people. Thus, at the same time that the clusters are cost effective, they also support Bard faculty in their research and enable their willingness to work interdisciplinarily. With the support of the grant, the clusters have yielded new courses, public symposia involving students and faculty, works of art, and faculty publications. The symposia, in turn, have ignited productive new relationships with other institutions and entities.

Humanities labs, another EH initiative, respond to Bard’s financial and structural limitations in a different way. We left the definition of such humanities labs open to faculty and staff, in order to encourage faculty to work experimentally—to think of new ways that research in the humanities might be undertaken, and new outcomes found and narratives constructed. Our two main labs, the Immersive Media Arts Lab and the Digital History Lab, each take very different approaches to experimenting in arts and humanities, but both engage with undergraduates as meaningful partners in their work.14 Students in these humanities labs are introduced to research by working alongside a faculty member, just as they would be in a biology or chemistry lab. In response to this initiative, Merriam created a Mobile History van (actually whichever faculty member’s car is free) as part of the Digital History lab. Outfitted with technology that includes scanners, a digital camera, and sound equipment, these “vans” go out to record local history in an area that Merriam has researched for many years. Consistent with Bard’s social justice mission, Merriam and students work with underserved or marginalized communities, taking a ground-up approach to developing projects that yield original research and create new college–community relationships. The van’s ethos is fundamentally shaped by a traditional understanding of the humanities, which encourages a spirit of inquiry, experimentation, and openness. Although the van uses equipment purchased with Mellon funds, we could have cobbled together much of the technology by creating a borrowing system, working with programs that were willing to share what they had, and we could have pursued paid student internships through our Center for Civic Engagement. If designed right, the labs can be low-cost to run and at the same time spark new ways of undertaking research, which is always a struggle at liberal arts colleges that place a premium on teaching.

In retrospect, our approach to developing the EH concentration at Bard might be viewed as exploring the productive tension between freedom and constraint. We believe that it is valuable to think about how constraints—financial, infrastructural, and cultural—can enable creative, resourceful thinking. In other words, it is sometimes possible to think of institutional constraints not as limitations or hindrances but as spurs to create alternative, new, or radical solutions to problems.

To-Do List

In the spirit of Posner’s piece on building DH community, we offer this bulleted to-do list for faculty and staff looking to create or rethink a digital humanities–style initiative at their institution on the basis of our experiences at Bard. Specific conditions will shape how each of these points play out, and we found that flexibility, imagination, and a sense of humor are crucial tools for creating and maintaining momentum.

Assessing Your Approach to the Humanities to Imagine a DH for Your Institution

Assessing your approach may take place gradually or at an intensive retreat, but however you choose to structure this process, we have found that bringing in voices from across the community and building consensus is key to deciding whether and how to create a digital humanities or DH-friendly initiative at your institution.

Taking Advantage of Existing Infrastructure

Starting a new initiative takes both human and financial resources, but many of our institutions do not have much of either to spare. Therefore, a creative mind and the ability to work with people from other parts of your college or university to find mutually beneficial solutions can really come in handy in this regard. You will likely want to sit down with your administration, meet with your institution’s development office, and at some point start brainstorming possible sources of outside funding because having your own lines of funding, space, and hires dedicated to your initiative can bring crucial freedom and flexibility. Until then, however, it may still be possible to start something new with limited funds, space, and people power.

Notes

1. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101.

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2. Malazita, “Epistemic Infrastructure.”

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3. Pawlicka-Deger, “Laboratory.”

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4. De Certeau’s metaphor is founded on his recognition of an overt power differential between the structures of the city, created by the strategies of institutional bodies, and the tactics of the walkers who must negotiate these structures and carve out their own paths. A full discussion of the power relations between institutions of higher education and the faculty, students, and staff who make up these institutions is beyond the scope of this essay, and we recognize they often look or function differently from one place to another. Nevertheless, the grassroots approach we discuss here acknowledges that such power differentials do exist and that it may still be possible to work from a position of relative weakness to develop a meaningful and useful initiative for your institution.

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5. http://eh.bard.edu.

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6. Williams et al., “The Power of Social Networks,” 51. They here quote Peterson and Spencer.

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7. Posner, “Here and There.”

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8. See Bard Early College, http://www.bard.edu/earlycollege/; Bard Prison Initiative, http://bpi.bard.edu/; Clemente Course in the Humanities, http://clemente.bard.edu/; Bard International Network, http://www.bard.edu/internationalnetwork/; and, as of 2020, the Open Society University Network, https://osun.bard.edu/.

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9. Risam, “Other Worlds, Other DHs.”

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10. Alexander and Davis, “Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities?”

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11. Occidental, https://www.oxy.edu/center-digital-liberal-arts; and Hamilton, http://www.dhinitiative.org/.

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12. Kezar, Gallant, and Lester, “Everyday People Making a Difference,” 137, 149.

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13. See Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White”; and Lothian and Phillips, “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?”

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14. https://eh.bard.edu/projects/immersive-media-art-lab-imal/; https://eh.bard.edu/projects/digital-history-lab-dhl/.

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15. Kezar, Gallant, and Lester, “Everyday People,” 139.

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16. http://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/about/; https://femtechnet.org/docc/; and https://dlaexchange.wordpress.com/.

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Bibliography

1. Alexander, Bryan, and Rebecca Frost Davis. “Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities? Process and Products in the Small College World.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/25.

2. Bailey, Moya Z. “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (Winter 2011). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/all-the-digital-humanists-are-white-all-the-nerds-are-men-but-some-of-us-are-brave-by-moya-z-bailey/.

3. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

4. Kezar, A., T. B. Gallant, and J. Lester. “Everyday People Making a Difference on College Campuses: The Tempered Grassroots Leadership Tactics of Faculty and Staff.” Studies in Higher Education 36, no. 2 (2011): 129–51.

5. Lothian, Alexis, and Amanda Philips. “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?” e-Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2013). https://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/xmlpage/4/article/425.

6. Malazita, James. “Epistemic Infrastructure, the Instrumental Turn, and the Digital Humanities.” In People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center, edited by Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

7. Pawlicka-Deger, Urszula. “Laboratory: A New Space in Digital Humanities.” In People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center, edited by Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

8. Peterson, M., and M. Spencer. “Understanding Academic Culture and Climate.” In ASHE Reader on Organization and Governance, edited by M. Peterson, 140–55. Needham Heights, Mass.: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

9. Posner, Miriam. “Here and There: Creating DH Community.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/73.

10. Risam, Roopika. “Other Worlds, Other DHs: Notes towards a DH Accent.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 377–84. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/32/2/377/2669630.

11. Williams, Andrea L., Roselynn Verwoord, Theresa A. Beery, Helen Dalton, James McKinnon, Karen Strickland, Jessica Pace, and Gary Poole. “The Power of Social Networks: A Model for Weaving the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning into Institutional Culture.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 1, no. 2 (2013): 49–62.