PART II | Chapter 11
After Autonomy
Digital Humanities Practices in Small Liberal Arts Colleges and Higher Education as Collaboration
Elizabeth Rodrigues and Rachel Schnepper
Once the province of elite research universities, institutions from regional comprehensive universities to small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) are investing in the people, spaces, and tools necessary to foster the digital humanities. While William Pannapacker’s 2013 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities’ and Nine Other Strategies to Help Liberal Arts Colleges Join the Movement,” may have been the opening salvo in the public campaign to promote the involvement of liberal arts colleges in digital humanities, he was quickly joined by others such as Rafael Alvarado, who noted how digital humanities in a liberal arts context such as a SLAC looks different and functions differently than it does at larger universities.1 Digital humanities as digital liberal arts “involves more than a cluster of disciplines can encompass; it involves rethinking the curriculum as a whole, the spaces within which education happens, and the careers of students who pass through them both.”2 Digital humanities at a SLAC performs a mutually transformational reorientation: the SLAC’s focus on undergraduate education has the potential to reorient the digital humanities to cross-disciplinary contexts, pedagogical questions, and face-to-face dialogic encounter, whereas the practice of digital humanities, at least potentially, reorients many of the SLAC’s traditional divisions of labor—divisions by department (both disciplinary and administrative) and divisions by status (faculty, staff, and student). This reorientation toward broader recognition of labor is the result of both the inherently collaborative nature of digital projects and a robust critique of academic labor practices emerging from critical digital humanities, exemplified by the #transformdh community. To realize the potential of the digital liberal arts as a cornerstone of critical pedagogy, empowered undergraduate research, and expanded networks of dialogue and discovery, we must grapple with the social infrastructure that makes our labor legible and possible.
As evidence for this argument, we first offer a cautionary tale. In the fall of 2015, a small group of Grinnell College faculty, staff, and students set out to digitize a thematically focused subset of the College libraries’ archives and special collections. Supported by an internal grant, this was a pedagogy-driven project, intended to create research opportunities for the undergraduates working on the project as well as resources for future undergraduates working with newly accessible digital primary sources. By design, the majority of the work was to be done by undergraduates after receiving training from the librarians. In addition to the undergraduates, the team working on the project included staff from the Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative (DLAC, Grinnell’s digital humanities center) and librarians, but the project lead was a professor who also served as the project manager and student supervisor. The grant money, as well as all project management, was dependent on that professor. Although an expert in the relevant subject area, the project lead was, unfortunately yet understandably, unfamiliar with the processes and workflows of digitizing an archive. Furthermore, the students employed on the project were also all enrolled in the project lead’s class, creating an unexpected power dynamic for a pretenure professor who would be called to account for student course evaluations.
What happened over the next fifteen months will probably not surprise most digital humanities practitioners, already familiar with other projects that share commonalities such as dependence on undergraduate labor, coordination of many collaborators from across the institution, and power concentrated in the hands of a faculty primary investigator (PI). Indeed, we encountered pretty much every single one of the disadvantages of doing Little DH listed by Kelsey Corlett-Rivera et al. in their essay in this volume.3 For, despite the cast of many, the institutional infrastructure for the project forced it to hinge on one person alone—the faculty member. This not only created an undue burden on that person but also created a situation in which the expertise of the librarians and staff were unrecognized, underutilized, and uncompensated. Without the leadership of the professionals best positioned to help, the project proceeded in fits and starts and extended periods of dormancy. Workflows were slow to be created, subject matter expertise was not provided at crucial junctures, and tasks assigned to students went uncompleted. The project lead readily admitted that the professor needed help, but did not follow through on any of the help or advice that was offered or address student job performance issues. Finally, just as it appeared that the project was finally gaining some momentum, the project lead announced that the professor was leaving Grinnell to take up a new position at the end of the semester. Without the faculty project lead, it was entirely possible that the internal grant supporting the project would be withdrawn, thereby effectively ending the project.
Luckily this did not happen. Upon notification of the faculty member’s imminent departure, the librarians and staff working on the project quickly submitted a revised project proposal to the internal grant’s committee chair that was accepted, and they then assumed management and supervision of the students. Now, with the ability to make decisions rather than suggestions, they were able to evaluate the scope of the remaining work and set strategic priorities, agree on and implement best practices for digitization and metadata creation, and draw on their experience supervising students.4 Choosing to focus exclusively on three specific subcollections allowed them to fully complete the digitization process for about half of the selected materials, which also tied up loose ends generated from the previous months. It also produced enough content discoverable through Grinnell’s institutional repository to be useful to future students, which was one of the intended goals of the project.
While this project has a relatively happy ending, this history typifies the infrastructural challenges to effective and ethical collaboration on digital projects at a SLAC. The infrastructure of such institutions rarely enables autonomous development of digital humanities projects by digital humanities practitioners outside of tenured/tenure-track faculty roles. Rather, unexamined hierarchies in funding, compensation, and recognition make these efforts practically dependent upon traditional faculty members.5 Typically, only tenured/tenure-track faculty are incentivized and compensated for original research; therefore the financial support for projects often is available only through faculty leadership. Only when a faculty-led project emerges are DH staff members and librarians given the go-ahead to spring into action and then only in a supporting role, with the faculty member alone empowered to make scholarly, technical, and timeline decisions. DH staff members are often in more contingent positions in centers that are relatively new with uneven funding histories and are not seen as a sound investment for grant funding. Alternately, librarians, although often in more stable positions, are often perceived to be so entrenched in a service role that their original project proposals generate more head scratching and consternation over time away from duties than curiosity. Student labor is either contingent on course credit, which only teaching faculty can give, or money, which again often depends on funding restricted to faculty.
Underlying these dynamics is the differing recognition and reward structures for these groups of practitioners. Faculty gain status when awarded a grant and often receive additional compensation during the course of the grant but face uncertain returns on even a successfully completed digital humanities project. Projects may or may not count as publications for tenure and they may or may not generate more typical publications. Put another way, there are often fewer penalties for an abandoned digital humanities project than there are rewards for a completed one.
Although the emphasis on process over product is not inherently wrong and may even be desirable in the digital liberal arts, lost opportunities for student research and growth in institutional capacity for such projects are costly over time. DH staff members and librarians, conversely, are often evaluated primarily as service providers.6 In some cases, this means that it is seen as more important for staff and librarians to retain cordial working relationships than to push for project completion or fulfillment of stated goals.7 This dynamic is only one of the frequent demands for emotional labor that digital projects tend to entail for those in non-PI roles. As Alexis Logsdon, Amy Mars, and Heather Tompkins have elaborated in the context of digital humanities librarianship, these demands can include “appearing enthusiastic about projects that you suspect will be too unwieldy to succeed given the time and human resources available and knowing how to manage the proposer’s expectations without damaging their enthusiasm for the digital project” as well as “maintaining a professional demeanor even when your expertise is marginalized in a given project.”8 In other cases, we are indeed being evaluated on project success and will be seen as ineffective if our tenured/tenurable faculty leaders choose to abandon a project on which we have spent time.
When faculty involvement is the only route to material support and visibility, what can digital humanities practitioners such as librarians and staff members at liberal arts colleges faced with an infrastructurally produced lack of agency, autonomy, and sustained monetary support actually do? How can a digital humanities program with a contingent budget, whose mission is to support pedagogy that it does not teach and to create opportunities for undergraduate research it does not supervise, develop and maintain its own projects while building a program that endeavors not to replicate the most inequitable practices of academia? How can the promise of critical digital humanities approaches for student learning be realized?
Our point here is not to add another lament for circumstances and dynamics that have already been identified in critical DH discussions, to impugn those in faculty positions as a class, or to claim that our institutions are exceptionally inept. There are happy exceptions—faculty members who practice genuine collaboration and are deeply respectful of others’ expertise; library and DH center directors who encourage librarian/staff research and development time and support self-initiated projects; and labor that is fairly compensated. Nor is our point to demand that the types of autonomy and agency built into faculty status be extended to some of us on the basis of a specific credential or institutional position. Rather, by engaging in these issues as infrastructural rather than personal, we aim to reflect on common circumstances that perpetuate poor collaborative practices, abandoned projects, and most importantly a lack of student research opportunities in DH.9 The human infrastructure around digital humanities projects is not just a set of complementary skills but is often a sedimented history of higher education’s hierarchies, reward structures, and expectations. Our reflection on this infrastructural situation seeks to emphasize that reimagining the power structures inherent in our institutions will not be a matter of personal education or enlightenment; it will require rethinking how our institutions recognize labor, design incentives and rewards for that labor, and conceptualize all forms of labor in service to undergraduate learning. From this reflection, we seek to identify a set of affordances for movement within this infrastructure that denaturalize systemic, inequitable labor hierarchies within academe and create learning-centered collaborations. Over time, we hope these may allow the digital liberal arts to foster not only innovative teaching and scholarship but also new campus cultures of collaboration and respect for labor.
Equally Unequal: Uncertain Footing as Common Ground
We begin our reflection on the human infrastructure of DH projects at a SLAC with an examination of how the roles we occupied were designed and positioned to foster the digital liberal arts at Grinnell. As associate director of academic technology and manager of the Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative (Schnepper) and as humanities and digital scholarship librarian (Rodrigues), both of us and our roles were new to Grinnell. The Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative (DLAC) was created in 2015, and the digital scholarship librarian was a newly reimagined version of a reference and instruction position. In addition to being tasked with performing roughly the same mission in different institutional contexts, we also share a common professional background: Liz has a PhD in English and Rachel a PhD in history.
Despite the overlap of our professional lives before and at Grinnell, our positions are not equal in the College. As a librarian, Liz has faculty status, albeit in a modified form, whereas Rachel was a staff member. This difference brought with it a disparity of power. As a faculty member, Liz can teach and advise students, apply more widely for grants internal and external to the College, and, perhaps most importantly at an institution with a very strong tradition of faculty governance, participate in the governance of the College. These real and tangible avenues to power at the College were not available to Rachel as a staff member. Moreover, the DLAC is institutionally housed in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, not in IT or the libraries. The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment is also a new unit within the College, formed only one year prior to Rachel’s arrival. Its mission was and is still evolving. This organizational isolation from traditional power structures on campus and the lack of a clear hook into the College’s mission further undermined Rachel’s ability to foster a culture of critical digital liberal arts that functioned outside of disciplinary and departmental silos to connect students to educational and research opportunities.
It is important to note that in using the word undermined we do not mean to imply that the institution or individuals within it were actively undermining the work of this role. Far from it. The creation of this role reflected real financial investment and a genuine desire to bring new modes of learning to campus. The passive yet real undermining of structural equality, however, predetermined that this role would be responsive rather than generative and depend on its occupant’s emotional labor as much as her expertise. It predetermined, in other words, that as Amy Collier has lamented, the “essential work of taking critical lenses to our technologies, to our classrooms, to our institution,” of creating a digital scholarship center “that is not neutral, that is activist and critical” would take its leader “down a path of heartache and loss.”10
Although a faculty member, as a librarian Liz also occupied a liminal role within the larger faculty body. Librarians at Grinnell are not eligible for tenure; they are expected to work in their campus office for regular hours, twelve months a year, tracking hours and vacation days; and they are barred from receiving any of the compensatory stipends offered to faculty for taking on additional duties like leading a grant-funded project or teaching a course outside of their job description. There are also differences of culture between library and other faculty that work against a genuine peer relationship—librarians usually have a different terminal degree (although not in this case), publish more practice-oriented scholarship (although not always), and usually teach sessions for others’ classes rather than leading their own semester-long courses. These disciplinary differences, combined with the status signals sent by infrastructural inequities, create an unequal footing for collaborative digital project work.
In spite of the real and practical differences between our positions, we consciously adopted a collaborative approach from the outset of Liz’s arrival. We also very quickly realized that we shared a common approach to digital humanities, an approach that was very strongly influenced by the emphasis on ethical collaboration forwarded by the #transformdh movement and that embraced a critical digital humanities approach in theory and method. Perhaps because of this intellectual framework, we also were both very cognizant of the institutional precarity of our respective positions, of how we were both tasked with building a digital humanities program and yet all too often lacked access to the usual avenues of program building, and of the affective results of one’s professional identity being subject to the approval, supervision, and priorities of others. In the face of these challenges, we chose to see each other as allies and to proceed collaboratively.
As a librarian and a staff member, both of us were expected to successfully build and implement a digital humanities program at Grinnell but neither of us was in a position that facilitated autonomous action toward that goal. As we have described in our project account, Grinnell is far from unique in that its infrastructure does not enable autonomous development of digital humanities projects by all digital humanities professionals. Almost exclusively, the sine qua non of digital humanities projects at a small liberal arts college, from small classroom assignments to large, multiunit collaborations, is traditional faculty involvement, preferably as a principal investigator. The emphasis on the involvement of teaching faculty is integral to digital humanities in a liberal arts context. We do not have graduate students to train or long-term, large-scale projects. The designation of a traditional faculty line to digital humanities is difficult to prioritize in small departments that must cover a critical breadth of their discipline in teaching, and it may not be feasible to recruit a dedicated digital humanities researcher to a teaching-oriented position. Instead, digital humanities professionals are typically hired to support less digitally oriented humanities professionals to do digital humanities work, with the end goal of enhancing student learning in courses now taught by faculty who are more versed in digital methods, more aware of the need to teach digital literacies, and more equipped to integrate digital projects into coursework. Larger projects, including those that are originated in the classroom, are all funded through soft money that is available only for traditional, tenured/tenure-track faculty, in such forms as extra compensation or course releases.
Our recognition that we were equally unequal at Grinnell, albeit not in the same ways, allowed us to build our collaboration to take advantage of our different points of access to power. We were incredibly fortunate, however, in how much we shared in common: our mandates meshed, and our stakes meshed. Moreover, we had the intangible but important resources of time and space to build our collaboration and to learn about each other, our positions and their respective affordances, our strengths, and our methods, which ultimately allowed us to envision and strategize the different ways of approaching our shared mission.11 The equality of our collaboration was built on the inequities and the productive ambiguities of our formal status. When we thought about it, we realized that such a collaboration would not have been possible if one of us had had traditional faculty status. This would have had nothing to do with us as individuals but everything about the College’s infrastructure and the ways in which our expectations were articulated and structured. Huculak and Goddard are among the recent observers to note that the collaborative realities of digital project work challenge norms of legible scholarship: “scholars—especially assistant professors on the tenure track—are encouraged to produce work that fits this individual-focused, competitive evaluation mold.”12 We might have delayed integrating digital pedagogies into our courses because we surmised that the safest route to tenure was to teach in the way most legible to senior colleagues. We would have been focused on establishing our disciplinary and subject area bona fides rather than being able to entertain coteaching an interdisciplinary course. In an alternate universe where one of us had a traditional tenure-track teaching job and the motivation to embark on a digital project, the other would have struggled to contribute her expertise in a genuine manner, being structurally delegated to a subordinate, service role. With our heads down in our own career trajectories, we might have never met. As digital humanities practitioners not in traditional faculty positions, however, we could not rely on our own institutional power to accomplish our goals. We had to become attuned to recognizing openings within the spaces we occupied. We had to seek alternate models of autonomy and agency.
Exposing Labor Exposes Hierarchies
As digital humanists on a liberal arts campus, we are academic resources often seen as support for faculty but would be more effective if positioned as intellectual partners in the cocreation of critical digital projects and the pedagogy that grows from them. The infrastructural positions of DH practitioners outside of faculty roles are in many ways analogous to that of the library. The work of librarians is often seen as cut-and-dried custodianship, whereas librarians understand it to be critical and creative. Librarians work to build a dynamic information ecology that takes into account the needs of current and future researchers, to catalyze discovery of the human record, to expand and defend access to information, and to teach students how to navigate traditional and emerging information sources. None of these objectives, however, can actually be met autonomously. Instructional librarians, for example, are trained for and tasked with teaching information literacy, a set of concepts and practices that is complex and contextual, but they do not have courses of their own in which to teach. Instead, they must cultivate the trust and interest of faculty who can then choose to invite them into their classes. This is a process with highs and lows, fruitful collaborations and dispiriting misrecognition. Doing this work successfully requires librarians’ constant relationship building and strategizing new connections between what librarians do and what others do without expecting the others to immediately understand it, value it, or make time for it.
Defining libraries’ and librarians’ relationships to digital humanities on campus can either recapitulate this dynamic or prompt a new visibility for librarians’ labor. DH projects bring librarians’ traditional strengths of deep collection knowledge and long-range preservation planning together with their more recently built capacity for digitization, metadata creation, and web publication and the project management skills necessary for the successful conclusion of digital projects. These areas of expert practice are essential complementary skills for the DH project proposed by a faculty member, recently returned from her first digital humanities boot camp, who is not yet as aware as librarians are that the sustainability and maintenance of her project depends on strategic planning, and that lack of planning guarantees a future of obsolete file formats and dead links. Librarians are prepared to perform types of labor that are not readily duplicated by faculty scholars. They expose, again, that “every hour of faculty work is brought into being by hundreds of hours of time spent maintaining the physical and administrative space within which that work is conducted: libraries, network, payroll, buildings, and all the rest of it.”13 Because they expose the necessity of nonfaculty labor, digital humanities projects necessarily blur the boundary between service, which is being asked to do specific tasks in isolation from larger projects carried out primarily by others, and collaboration, which is being invited to help define the project and determine the methods as well as carry out specific tasks and being invited to do so iteratively as part of an ongoing conversation about what is possible, what is necessary, and what is desired.
Yet the association of librarian with service rather than scholarship can easily persist even as digital humanities work flourishes. Dot Porter trenchantly notes of the 2014 OCLC report, “Does Every Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?,” that multiple terms are used to refer to “faculty who do (or who wish to do) Digital Humanities” including “DH scholars,” “DH researchers,” and “DH academics.” Porter continues, “Although all these terms remain undefined, it’s pretty clear from context that these scholars, researchers, and academics are not librarians—they are something else, another class of people who exist to be served by libraries and, by extension, by librarians.”14 Researcher on one side, and librarian on the other; research on one side, and service on the other.
With the emergence of digital humanities as a library-connected endeavor has come a series of calls for libraries and librarians to decouple themselves from a service mentality.15 Trevor Muñoz, for example, has argued “Digital humanities in libraries isn’t a service and libraries will be more successful at generating engagement with digital humanities if they focus on helping librarians lead their own DH initiatives and projects.” Bethany Nowviskie pushes further, asking “What if . . . part of the operational service libraries provided to the digital humanities world—were: to experiment; to iterate; to assert our own intellectual agendas as part of the DH research landscape; to be just as ‘bad’ at service (conventionally conceived) as some of our scholarly partners are at being served?”16
There is a great deal of liberatory fresh air in these declarations: an affirmation that digital projects can occasion a new recognition of librarians’ technical expertise as well as scholarly creativity, and a permission, even an exhortation to stop the self-deprecatory downplaying of knowledge in order to reproduce a comfortable and familiar academic hierarchy.17 Some of us could indeed empower ourselves to do these things within the realm of the library. But would this be the best outcome for digital humanities on our campuses? Would this be the best outcome for libraries? We do not want to mischaracterize or write off Muñoz’s and others’ reflections on this issue. We agree that librarians should take advantage of their own institutional affordances to pursue digital humanities projects connected to the library’s goals. However, we also want to underscore what Roxanne Shirazi has observed: “when we call for librarians to approach collaborative digital work as partners and not service providers, I would like to see some acknowledgement of the fact that there are different power relations at play in these collaborative relationships.” These power relations have affective consequences but they are not the product of our personalities. They “are embedded in the hierarchies that make up academia, in both the social stratification of varying job ranks and the hierarchical classification of service and scholarship.”18 The perception of our labor and our potential is determined by our status. A service role is a byproduct of lack of autonomy. Lack of autonomy is a byproduct of lack of security, lack of incentive, lack of reward, and lack of resources.
Yet, the solution to this lack of autonomy is not, we have found, simply more autonomy granted to different people. On a practical level, no one can pursue DH alone, and on a philosophical level, the field is in many ways an ongoing critique of autonomy. Transformation is not accomplished by fiat. It is not service that is the problem; it’s what goals are being served and, more deeply, the process through which those goals are determined and how recognition, compensation, and agency are incorporated into the process. A critical approach to scholarship and pedagogy perhaps even requires incorporating selected elements of a service orientation in that it requires deep relationality—listening, communal goal setting, and a fairer distribution of recognition and reward. Therefore, it is not the simple rejection of service or bolstering of autonomy that is going to move us forward. It is a reclaiming of shared goals and an active scouting for openings in which collaboration is required to meet those goals. Digital project work on our liberal arts campus has made visible a set of openings into which we can move in order to reclaim and recast service as learner-centering collaboration.
Digital Liberal Arts as New Culture of Collaboration
The liberal arts college is essentially student centered in mission, although not always in practice. Although its faculty are valued scholars in their fields whose research is vital to their growth as teachers, it is not primarily measuring itself by its research output. Its mission, however it might be specifically articulated at each institution, is to provide its students with a strong grounding in critical thinking and communication via exposure to multiple disciplines and (usually) intensive work in one or two, often accompanied by close faculty–student relationships, small classrooms, and the opportunity to pursue mentored research projects. To this basic mission each institution brings its own history and values. Grinnell in particular among its peer institutions is recognized for its commitment to social justice and social responsibility. These missions provide a rubric for goal setting and a common vocabulary for defining value. What our effort to build a critical digital humanities program evidenced was that our institution lacked a space for putting this vocabulary into practice, a space for conversation across departments, and roles for setting these shared goals.
As we surveyed the infrastructural landscape before us, we began to recognize that the practice of the digital liberal arts at Grinnell could provide us with an occasion to begin building such a space by modeling a culture of digital humanities at Grinnell in which labor and innovation were equally valued and rewarded, whether they originated from faculty, staff, or student. We merged the libraries’ academic status with the DLAC’s entrepreneurial mandate. We deployed Liz’s quasi-faculty status with Rachel’s hustle to form strategic alliances with units, programs, and centers that enabled us to open pots of funding and doors to opportunities. Despite not being traditional teaching faculty, we found affordances within our relative positions of power to advance a critical digital humanities program by centering the needs of students.19 Like the Student Innovation Fellowships that Brennan Collins and Dylan Ruediger describe at Georgia State, our positions in the library and the DLAC allowed us to keep the pedagogical mission at the core.20
By strategically focusing on creating opportunities for the students, we were able to explicitly align critical digital humanities with the mission of the College and create space for practice and conversation. This is not to say that the opportunities that we, Rachel and Liz, were particularly involved in creating were the only digital liberal arts projects taking place on campus, nor that any of the opportunities we detail here could have been created without material support from people and units beyond ourselves. The we here is less a reference to ourselves as individuals and more a recognition that it took conscious and strategic alliance to create the spaces into which DLA could grow. It is also a we of shifting boundaries, as each endeavor required outreach, collaboration, and participation of other individuals and/or units on campus. Specifically, we sought opportunities to connect digital humanities with a campus mandate that every department provide the opportunity for a significant mentored student research experience. Creating research opportunities for students in digital humanities is unique for undergraduates focused in the humanities and/or humanistic social sciences, where collaborative research opportunities are less frequent than they are for their peers in STEM fields. These digital humanities research opportunities are valuable and exciting for undergraduates, for they also create a space in which failure is expected, play is part of practice, and collaboration is more than a matter of dividing up paper sections. Focusing on student research created a space for us to lay the foundations for a digital humanities program that would allow faculty and students, researchers and collaborators, to pursue transformative work that had the potential to challenge the status quo. We were able to augment this work by focusing on providing opportunities for students to engage with critical digital humanities intellectual frameworks and methods by drawing attention to Grinnell’s commitment to social justice.
Our focus on the students has yielded three sites of opportunity: a program for faculty–student collaborations, a digital humanities class, and an undergraduate fellowship program.
DH-focused faculty–student summer collaborations built on the successes of a program that pre-dated the creation of the DLAC. In 2014, the College received an alumnus donation to support faculty’s infusing technology into their courses. Over the course of the summer, faculty received a stipend for summer course development, and each faculty recruited a student assistant who worked forty hours a week for eight weeks over the summer. This program ran in the summers of 2014 and 2015. Upon reflection, it was clear that this model pinpointed a sweet spot between faculty need and student opportunity. The following year, the Mellon-funded Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry created a faculty–student summer grant explicitly based on this model and funded DLA projects during the summers of 2016 and 2017. Through this program, students have had the opportunity to work on a range of digital humanities projects, from analyzing “big data” to track trends in the public discourse surrounding bullying since the Columbine Massacre, to using GIS in the scholarship of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, to using Omeka to create online scholarly exhibits or research databases. It was particularly successful because it encouraged realistic goal-setting and allowed a greater immersion into the work for students due to the short summer time frame. In addition, these projects are fully supported by the staff of the DLAC and the librarians, who have worked very closely with the faculty and students in developing and implementing these projects. Particularly in the later iteration of these collaborations, these relationships are encouraged from the outset, as Rachel and the Digital Bridges co-PI meet with faculty–student pairs before they begin their summer work, consulting not only on goals and methods but also on identifying potential collaborators at the College. Accordingly, the faculty and students have come to recognize these digital humanities practitioners as necessary and valued intellectual partners and collaborators, without whom these projects would not exist.
The second site of opportunity has been the development of a digital humanities short course. Originally created as a vehicle for visiting scholars and alumni to be able to teach for credit while on campus, it is also the only type of course that we, outside of teaching departments, were eligible to run. It was important to us that while the class provides students with a foundation in digital humanities tools and methods such as digital mapping, data visualizations, and digital archives, it also would teach students how to approach these emerging digital practices with a critical awareness of race, gender, class, power, and marginalization. Accordingly, the class focused on how the digital environments and tools of digital humanists could be used to promote a social justice agenda. For example, in exploring libraries and archives, students read Angel David Nieves and Siobhan Senier’s essay on creating subaltern archives. We paid close attention to the ways in which the digital humanities can perpetuate systems of inequality through labor practices, creation of metadata, and accessibility and what they as practitioners can do to challenge these systems. For their final projects, students were asked to craft an original digital narrative that interrogated Grinnell’s past and present as a site of social justice movements. We scaffolded this project by introducing the students to the College’s Special Collections and Archives very early in the class. In a session led by the College’s archivist, Christopher Jones, students were presented with archival materials selected for their connection to social justice movements at the College and asked to create metadata for three of them. Final projects included mapping harassment at Grinnell, a timeline of early divestment movements at the College, a video archive of Vietnam War protests, and an archive for the Concerned Black Students student group. This last group is currently working with the Office of Student Affairs to secure funding to more fully realize their vision for their project, which could serve as a digital resource/archive of the Black student experience at Grinnell.
Finally, the third and perhaps most fully realized site of opportunity has been the creation and implementation of an undergraduate fellowship program. The Vivero Digital Scholarship Fellows program is a two-year training and mentorship program. The idea for this program emerged after Mirzam Perez, a faculty member of color on our campus attended a nationally known digital scholarship conference and realized she was one of two persons of color in the room (the other being the Grinnell undergrad who accompanied her). What could we do at Grinnell, we asked, to address this? Pooling our time and statuses, Rachel, Liz, and Mirzam submitted a grant proposal for a three-year pilot to create Vivero. In the fall of 2017, our first cohort of students from underrepresented groups and/or with a demonstrated interest in diversifying scholarship, would be partnered with faculty and staff at the College to work on digital humanities projects.
Each of these programs shares a common set of values and opportunities to address compelling needs on campus. Their goals are student focused with explicit reference to core missions of enabling significant mentored undergraduate research and working toward the common good, and this helps them find common ground with faculty agendas. On a professional level, they are born collaborative: conversation, shared planning, listening, and implementing suggestions undertaken from the outset. Moreover, like Pamela Lach and Jessica Pressman from SDSU, “we aspire . . . to build a campus-based, people-focused infrastructure that promotes social justice via DH.”21 We developed a map of experts on campus outside of faculty roles and actively sought their input in course planning and instruction. We developed our short course project, for example, in close consultation with the archivist of the College. We developed Vivero in consultation with the associate dean focusing on diversity and the office of Careers, Life, and Service. This commitment to collaboration extends to students, albeit imperfectly.22 We work with faculty on project conceptualization to ensure that students are positioned as genuine contributors. Initial project recruitment includes discussion of the principles in the Student Collaborator’s Bill of Rights.23 Regular paid training and check-ins support the students to become, relative to their faculty leads, experts in particular domains of the project, such as specific softwares, workflows, and scoping decisions.
From Affordances to Infrastructure: Can We Get There from Here?
These accomplishments are imperfect but real. Our concern, though, is that they are temporary at best. What will happen when external funding for summer collaborations is over, when the two-time limit on running a particular short course is reached, and when we face faculty turnover in project leadership for Vivero? The space we found to move could close on us at any point, which is why the affordances found within these positions can hardly be called advantages. For a SLAC that wants to develop a culture of digital liberal arts, traditional models of funding and recognition place too much emphasis on the role of the faculty member in the project, creating unsustainable demands upon them. Many of the central, important questions of creating a digital humanities project—sustainability, development, even certain forms of content creation—are not necessarily in a faculty’s wheelhouse but rather are why digital humanities projects are necessarily collaborative. Further, the work of conceiving, organizing, and supervising all elements of a project is highly demanding, especially for a project that is most likely conceived of as an addition to other scholarly commitments.
The question of how to make the spaces that our collaboration has opened accessible to future students, staff, and faculty became particularly salient when, in the spring of 2017, Rachel accepted a new position. Our drafting of this essay overlapped with Liz’s preparation for her departure and our reflection made it clear to us that without conscious cultivation, this all could have been otherwise, and worse. Liz could have been seen as a peripheral service provider. Rachel could have seen library involvement as encroachment on already precarious turf. These alternate pasts seem especially salient given that we are now in the midst of recruiting Rachel’s replacement, which without supportive infrastructures in place, offers no guarantee that the collaboration between the libraries and the DLAC will continue. Personality-dependent collaborations are not infrastructure; they are lucky happenstance.
At the same time, we believe it would be a mistake to replicate faculty autonomy in nonfaculty positions and rigidly codify who gets to do digital humanities. One of the transformative potentials of DH work is that it can unsettle our assumptions of expertise and who has it. As Sarah Catherine Stanley has suggested, “DH is a response to an environment where the hierarchical structures of the academy don’t always map onto the actual expertise held by various members of the community.”24 There is a moment for the people in their institutional environments to become visible and to redefine the processes, values, and infrastructure, before they naturalize older hierarchies. We miss this potential when we do not pay attention to the ways in which this moment fails to last or, put another way, the ways in which we are forced to abandon it when we leave the heady space of conversation and experiment and return to our offices, cubicles, or service points; our hourly, twelve-month, or tenured contracts; our statuses as faculty, librarian, staff, and/or student. Attention to labor, like methodological metacognition, is constitutive and not incidental to digital humanities.
While we certainly empathize with Collier’s description of the affective and moral consequences of the institutional precarity that digital scholarship centers face with regards to lack of agency, autonomy, and sustained monetary support, we remain hopeful that the future is not destined to be one of heartache. We believe this, in part, because of our experience reconstituting conceptions of leadership. Labor issues, the tension between service and collaboration, and reward and recognition structures in digital humanities centers at liberal arts colleges have the potential to catalyze a paradigmatic realignment of hierarchical approaches to student learning. Returning to Alvarado’s characterization of the digital liberal arts as “rethinking the curriculum as a whole, the spaces within which education happens, and the careers of students who pass through them both,” we can see that this rethinking is all connected to how labor is divided, leadership is conceptualized, and expertise is recognized. A critical digital humanities approach to scholarship and pedagogy that prioritizes a blending of service orientation with a recognition that strict autonomy is not desired nor even ideal can create a new culture of collaboration in which faculty, staff, and student are all colearners.
Notes
Pannapacker, “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities.’”
Alvarado, “Start Calling It Digital Liberal Arts.”
Corlett-Rivera et al., “In Service of Pedagogy.”
As Paige Morgan notes, the distinction between these two actions is a fundamental distinction in labor positionality: “While [a DH librarian] can make strong recommendations, the scholars I work with are the ultimate decision makers; and this is why my work is emotional labor, as opposed to pure technical advice.” Morgan, “Not Your DH Teddy-Bear.”
Traditional is, admittedly, a stand-in term for the idea of a faculty member enshrined in the broad outlines of tenure requirements, incentivizing single- or first-author research publications, professor-led courses, and service on committees with some degree of governance power. As Trevor Muñoz has observed of librarianship, “There is no such thing as ‘traditional library service’” (Muñoz, “In Service?”). There is, we recognize, no such thing as a traditional faculty member across our various institutions.
As Alexander and Davis note in “Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities?,” “This process-over-product focus distinguishes the digital humanities as practiced at small liberal arts colleges from the production focus in much of the digital humanities community.”
We do not intend to fetishize completion as a clear or permanent achievement. We do, however, hold that there is a difference between meeting a set of goals, no matter how revised or provisional, and unintentional, indefinite hiatus.
Logsdon, Mars, and Tompkins, “Claiming Expertise from Betwixt and Between.”
Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” Citing Star, Matthew K. Gold has also recently suggested in respect to scholarly communication, “foregrounding the embeddedness of human relations around infrastructure . . . can ultimately help us mobilize a critically informed resistance to capital and set of building practices that move the scholarly communications infrastructure of the academy away from corporations and towards the faculty, staff, and students who can build, care for, maintain, and use them” (Gold, “Response to Critical Infrastructure Panel”). Our reflection seeks to call attention to the fact that even as such new infrastructures are created, the work of building, caring, maintaining, and using will not be evenly distributed, recognized, or rewarded if the historical roles of faculty, staff, and student remain unexamined.
Collier, “Chapter 3 WMTRBW #HortonFreire #OpenEd16.”
Concretely, what we had was the ability to schedule a weekly two-hour meeting in an office with a door. The literal time and space of conversation is crucial, as Logsdon, Mars, and Tompkins reflect, to “the ability to have frank and nuanced conversations about common successes and struggles is not only crucial for creating capacity and building expertise. . . . By discussing our personal frustrations and successes . . . we were able to puzzle out some of the core issues at stake in our own DH collaborations, including power dynamics and institutional politics, as well as our own individual positionality within these structures and in society more broadly” (Logsdon, Mars, and Tompkins, “Claiming Expertise from Betwixt and Between”).
Huculak and Goddard, “Is Promotion and Tenure Inhibiting DH/Library Collaboration?”
Flanders, “Time, Labor, and ‘Alternate Careers.’”
Porter, “What if We Do, in Fact, Know Best?”
Muñoz, “In Service?”
Nowviskie, “A Skunk in the Library.”
As Julia Flanders has observed, the downplaying of one’s own knowledge is a natural outcome of the hierarchical nature of faculty-staff collaboration, no matter what the two individuals’ actual abilities are: “Precisely because of its potential value (if I were being considered as a colleague), it must be explicitly devalued here to show that I am not so considered: it creates a necessity for gestures of demarcation by which the boundaries of my role can be drawn, with technical knowledge on the inside and subject knowledge on the outside.” Flanders, “Time, Labor, and ‘Alternate Careers.’”
Shirazi, “Reproducing the Academy.”
Relative positions of power as holders of professional positions with PhDs, as well as being white, cis women in a predominantly white institution.
Collins and Ruediger, “A ‘No Tent’ / No Center Model.”
Lach and Pressman, “Digital Infrastructures.”
As Anderson et al. incisively point out in “Student Labour and Training,” the rhetoric of openness and collaboration and a shift to digital modes does not magically transform the hierarchized labor of academia. Our training was structured to incorporate their suggested best practices around making the work of organization transparent and valued and formalizing expectations while leaving room for individual initiative. Still, there is an understandable experience gap that we must find new ways to overcome in order for students to make full use of these opportunities.
Di Pressi et al., “A Student Collaborator’s Bill of Rights.”
Stanley, “Why Is Digital Humanities?”
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