Digital Humanities in (Other) Contexts

The vast majority of colleges and universities in the United States operate in other contexts, and the majority of students are not educated at these elite institutions. That digital humanities at R1 institutions is taken as the model of digital humanities in the United States poses a challenge for universities and colleges in other contexts in which digital humanities is practiced, such as small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, regional comprehensives, and other non-flagship public universities. Within this group, digital humanities has gained the most traction at elite small liberal arts colleges, which have produced models for digital humanities at these institutions. For example, Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative has developed a model for collaborative research and teaching that engages undergraduate students in digital humanities. Another excellent example is Bard College’s Experimental Humanities, which offers an intervention in liberal arts–focused digital humanities that is interdisciplinary and multimedia. More recently, digital humanities has begun flourishing at community colleges, due to the work of Anne McGrail and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. What these initiatives have made clear is that the types of institutions in which digital humanities is practiced merits attention. The practices that are effective at small liberal arts college are not easily translatable to community colleges, and the needs of community college students are different from those at residential, elite liberal arts colleges.

However, another type of institution is largely ignored: the regional comprehensive university. Regional comprehensive universities are neither research universities nor liberal arts colleges. They are typically Carnegie-classified as Master’s Colleges and Universities, although some do offer applied PhD programs in health and human services areas (education, nursing, social work, and occupational therapy). In these contexts, the value of arts and sciences degrees is endangered, as university resources and student enrollments favor “professional” degrees that lead students toward more obvious career trajectories. This is a reflection of the student populations that regional comprehensive universities serve: their immediate, local, geographical communities. More specifically, these are neighboring middle- and working-class communities. Consequently, regional comprehensive universities have populations that include significant numbers of students on Pell Grants, veterans on the GI Bill, and first-generation college students.

Regional comprehensives in proximity to urban areas often have significant populations of students of color. These universities also accept significant numbers of transfer students from community colleges, in-state and out-of-state public universities, and small liberal arts colleges. Often, students at regional comprehensive universities come from underserved public school districts and are working their way through college. These are, in many ways, some of the most vulnerable students in higher education: the ones less likely to have advantages, such as financial or emotional family support; more likely to be in need of remedial education, which increases the time to and cost of receiving a degree; and less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree (the average Massachusetts state university graduation rate is 53 percent). For many of these students, these institutions, which are often open access or nearly open access, are their only feasible option for receiving a bachelor’s degree. Despite the high need of this student population, regional comprehensive universities are short-changed financially in competition with state research universities and flagships. They receive less funding than the flagship systems, relying on enrollments and endowments that are already small because they are educating an underserved student population, primarily in professions like nursing, social work, and education that tend to not generate a wealthy alumni base.

These institutional constraints create significant challenges for the development of digital humanities programs. Foundations like Mellon are not especially interested in funding initiatives for these universities, which fall between the cracks of available funding. While there are a number of great initiatives that intend to bring together digital humanities practitioners across types of institutions, like the Institute for Digital Liberal Arts Scholarship (Illiads) or the Digital Liberal Arts Exchange (DLAx), they do not include regional comprehensive universities. Thus, they fail to take into account the unique characteristics and needs of these institutions.

With funding heavily invested in student success initiatives, there is little left to fund digital humanities research. Faculty and librarian time is at a premium as well. Because the mission of these universities is teaching rather than research, faculty have high teaching loads (typically 4/4), while librarian roles are primarily instructional. Service demands on faculty and librarians are significant as well, with rising research expectations. However, these demands are not offset by increased research support, such as course releases, adjusted job descriptions, or research budgets, which poses a logistical and financial barrier for starting digital humanities initiatives. Because evaluating digital humanities projects for tenure and promotion remains a challenge, faculty and librarians are less likely to invest their rare research time in digital humanities projects when their value in evaluation is unclear. Even the idea of using digital humanities to incorporate students into faculty and librarian research is a daunting one because of time constraints and lack of funds.

Salem State University is a typical case for universities that fit this profile. One of the Massachusetts state universities—the tier below the flagship University of Massachusetts system—Salem State is a regional comprehensive university in Salem, Massachusetts, a small city 15 miles north of Boston on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Institutions like Salem State primarily serve undergraduate student populations through degree programs that include health and human services as well as arts and sciences. The digital humanities initiatives at Salem State respond to these obstacles. They are structured around the Digital Scholars Program, an undergraduate digital humanities research program that university archivist Susan Edwards and I developed and that we now run along with digital initiatives librarian Justin Snow. Students apply to the program through a competitive process and are mentored through the process of creating small-scale digital humanities projects over the course of a semester. We introduce students to the university’s archives and special collections, teach them how to conduct archival research, guide their inquiry as they identify topics of interest and develop research questions, and mentor them through project development. The program connects students to local history, equips them with digital literacy, strengthens their research skills, and offers them professional development for translating their experiences for employers. Students who wish to do so may submit their small projects for inclusion in Digital Salem, the institution-wide umbrella digital humanities project we have developed to bring together digital humanities projects at the university. Throughout this work, we have drawn on the specific nature and positioning of regional comprehensive universities to identify how to build an infrastructure that allows digital humanities programs to flourish at these types of institutions to serve our students and intervene in the gaps where they have been underserved by public education.

The Regional as Local

The theoretical underpinnings of Salem State’s digital humanities initiatives emerge from my research interest in global digital humanities. In this work, I have made the case for close attention to the local dimensions of global practices. For example, I have suggested that digital humanities practices be framed as a series of “accents.”1 Just as languages share common vocabularies and linguistic structures but are articulated differently depending on context, so too are digital humanities practices diverse and varied. While a common set of distinguishable features unite digital humanities practices, they have developed in their own ways, deeply inflected by the local circumstances that surround their production. This is an idea that has been emphasized through the work of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities and its insistence on the “local self-determination of what constitutes DH work and where its value resides.”2 As such, the attention to the local in global digital humanities provides a way of thinking through the nuances of practice that exist within national contexts, where we can find tremendous variability in access to resources and infrastructures. From the outside, it may appear that because we are undertaking digital humanities in the United States, the large-scale contexts such as digital humanities centers that are more visible in digital humanities practice are the frames in which we operate. However, despite the significant amount of privilege that we have because we are working in the United States, this is simply not the case for our work. Instead, we have had to focus on our local, institutional context to build our programs and identify which practices work for universities like ours.

Initiatives at Salem State have been further influenced by the Minimal Computing Working Group of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities. Jentery Sayers has identified key components of minimal computing, including minimal design, maximum justice, and minimal technical language.3 These principles privilege access and openness for stakeholders across economic and technical barriers, as well as design choices made by necessity. As Gil and Ortega note, “We prefer to (un-)define minimal computing around the question, ‘What do we need?’”4 The question of what we need has been essential to the development of digital humanities at Salem State. So too is the focus on what we have, as we draw on Ernesto Oroza’s “architecture of necessity,” which Gil and Ortega define as, “A cleverness that can make-do with available materials; and a constant care for our social surroundings.”5

Thus, we have attended to both what we do not have and what we have, as we built a model for digital humanities at regional comprehensive universities. We have done this work in spite of our lack of access to resources, adopting Gil’s proposition that, “We need not wait for the affordances of infrastructure.”6 At Salem State and other regional comprehensive universities, if we were to, as Gil writes, “Wait for a grant to hire developers to carry out their visions, others for a fully funded DH center at their universities to ‘support’ them,” we would be waiting forever.7 However, the model we have designed for our digital humanities initiatives is a useful case for how digital humanities can be made accessible to vulnerable student populations with few resources.

We do this work without a center or other institutional entity to support digital humanities work. Digital humanities initiatives, often in the form of centers, at R1 institutions in the United States are driven by interests that are less relevant to regional comprehensive universities. As Neil Fraistat suggests, these institutions are research focused, emphasize faculty and graduate student collaboration, and emerge from bottom-up research initiatives.8 Naturally, there are exceptions and variations, such as centers that focus on pedagogy. Yet, as Mark Sample notes:

Most of us working in the digital humanities will never have the opportunity to collaborate with a dedicated center or institute. We’ll never have the chance to work with programmers who speak the language of the humanities as well as Perl, Python, or PH. We’ll never be able to turn to colleagues who routinely navigate grant applications and budget deadlines, who are paid to know about the latest digital tools and trends–but who’d know about them and share their knowledge even if they weren’t paid a dime. We’ll never have an institutional advocate on campus who can speak with a single voice to administrators, to students, to donors, to publishers, to communities about the value of digital humanities.9

This is the condition of digital humanities at Salem State, where we do not—and will not—have digital humanities infrastructure of this nature because it is largely irrelevant to the conditions under which we work. Despite a lack of institutionally supported infrastructure that resembles models, such as centers, that are not feasible in our institutional context, we have envisioned a digital humanities infrastructure based on our undergraduate research program, supported by a working group of interested faculty and librarians to foster collaborative conversations about digital humanities.

Additionally, we do not have students who come to us well prepared to undertake digital humanities work. Rather, we have an underserved student population that struggles with digital literacy and undertakes coursework with woefully insufficient computing access. In Massachusetts public schools, like others around the country, computer classes have been eliminated due to budget cuts and the presumption that students are “digital natives” and thus do not need instruction. This is a troubling assumption because, as instructors find, students struggle with basic computer use. Only recently, in 2016, Massachusetts unveiled new digital literacy standards, although they have only begun to be implemented in school districts because the roll-out has not been accompanied by professional development opportunities for teachers. Salem State eliminated its own computer competency requirement in 2015 because the test was outdated, and yet there has been no initiative to replace it or integrate digital literacy into the curriculum. Despite ramifications for students in all majors, this is particularly important for students in the humanities, where they are unlikely to receive discipline-specific training in technologies. Without facility with technology, they are at a disadvantage in the employment market. Consequently, we specifically use these gaps to make the case for the value of our digital humanities initiatives for our student population.

The circumstances of our students’ lives factor prominently, as well. Because they are working to support themselves (and often, their families) and are predominantly commuter students, their time on campus is constrained and they must use it efficiently to complete their degrees. They also do not have the disposable time or income to devote to multiple extracurricular activities, unpaid internships, or other uncompensated opportunities that their peers with more means can pursue more easily. The majority who live off campus tend to be disconnected from campus culture, institutional histories, and even the local community. These students, however, benefit from access to experience with digital humanities. At Salem State, we have leveraged these particularities of institutional life and student experience to design a digital humanities program that suits their needs and have tapped into our institutional strategic plan priority for student success to gain departmental and administrative support for the program.

In spite of what we do not have, we do have students who know what they want and need, and designing digital humanities initiatives to meet these requests underscores the role of social justice in our work. In surveys undertaken by Salem State’s English department, students report the need for more opportunities for internships and cocurricular experiences to complement their bachelor’s degrees. They also seek career preparation and advice, which they want to receive as part of their English majors. Because they tend to lack forms of cultural capital that are rewarded in job searches, they have difficulty imagining career options or translating marketable skills from humanities majors into employment. These students are also not convinced that they can be creators of knowledge; rather, they see themselves as consumers only. This is, in large part, due to the nature of public education in the underserved Massachusetts communities from which Salem State draws. In those districts, emphasis on the MCAS, the state’s high-stakes testing apparatus, has sacrificed curiosity, inquiry, and instructional time to success on standardized tests. The Digital Scholars Program has provided one such option for remediating these challenges. As a result, we have drawn on our knowledge of our student population and our institution with a growth mindset that emphasizes what we do have. We situated the focus of our work in our university’s archives and special collections, a diverse and free but untapped source of material that we have at the university.

This also led us to think about the role of digital humanities at regional comprehensive universities like ours in relation to the American State Colleges and Universities’ mission that universities like ours be stewards of place, given our strong connections to our local regions and commitment to civic engagement.10 We have positioned our work as a digital stewarding of place, with the goal of shedding light on the unheard stories of Salem, Massachusetts. Salem is perhaps best known for the Witch Trials of 1692 and the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, Salem State’s archives do not hold material on those subjects. We also share a sense of frustration that these narratives have become the defining ones for Salem. This is a result of the strategic way Salem as a city has revived itself from decades of economic depression through a tourist industry that focuses on witches and Hawthorne. What has happened, as a result, is that other, rich histories of Salem have been obscured, such as the city’s history of immigration and activism. Because we do have material on these subjects in Salem State’s archives, we have positioned the work of students in the Digital Scholars Program as diversifying the digital cultural record by giving voice to the ordinary and everyday, shedding light on the hidden histories that shape Salem today.

Our undergraduate students and our local archives, therefore, are driving the practices of our digital humanities program. Therefore, we have reframed the limitations of a regional comprehensive university—student profile, unique untapped resources, and emphasis on student success—as affordances for our local approach to digital humanities. We approach design from this perspective, recognizing that there would not be need for digital humanities at the university if not for its value to our students. There is simply not enough time or money available to invest in projects based on faculty research alone, and digital humanities experiences are especially valuable to our students. Moreover, we are bringing attention to our underused archives and leveraging them to challenge foregoing narratives of Salem. In doing so, we engage our students in the digital stewarding of place.

The Salem State Playbook

This model has been a successful one and is replicable for those working at other regional comprehensive universities. What follows is a list of suggestions for those who wish to adopt or adapt our model in their institutions.

Our first recommendation is to find existing resources to repurpose toward assembling a digital humanities community. We considered existing structures and professional development opportunities that could be used to develop digital humanities programs. We began with creating a faculty learning community, which I ran during 2014–15. The intention of starting a faculty learning community on digital humanities was to find faculty and librarians who were engaged in or interested in digital humanities. At Salem State, faculty can apply to facilitate a learning community on a topic of their choice related to pedagogy. The communities meet every other week over the course of an academic year to read and discuss the topic and to plan, implement, and assess an activity, assignment, or project based on the topic.

The digital humanities learning community that I proposed yielded a group of nine participants from the English and history departments and the library. From this experience, I recognized that the only way we could effectively make the case for digital humanities and take advantage of existing resources would be to appeal to its use for student success, a mandate of our strategic plan. This included supporting retention by mentoring student research; cultivating students’ connections to Salem and to the university by immersing them in our archives; helping humanities students understand applications of humanities knowledge outside the classroom; and exposing students to career opportunities with which they were unfamiliar, such as in libraries, archives, and museums. The faculty learning community proved to be an effective way of taking advantage of existing resources to build the digital humanities presence at the university by bringing together colleagues most inclined to be advocates for it. We subsequently ran another faculty learning community, during 2016–17, to build shared expectations around digital humanities pedagogy and labor practices.

We also suggest thinking outside of departments and units to leverage expertise across the university. This can be difficult at teaching institutions, where faculty are siloed in teaching areas and instructional librarians are responsible for particular departments. Through our first faculty learning community, however, I began collaborating with university archivist Susan Edwards, who had experience with our institutional repository and had experience with digitizing materials from our archives and special collections. Edwards and I recognized that we shared similar interests and had complementary knowledge that would be valuable for building digital humanities initiatives at the university.

Our initiatives have also been successful because we have tailored them to our university’s strategic plan and to the funding attached to the strategic plan. Underfunded universities are often under pressure to improve retention and graduation rates, as well as employment outcomes. Quite often, there are funds attached to these initiatives. In the case of Salem State, an annual Strategic Innovation Grants competition supports cross-unit collaboration and creative approaches to strategic plan goals. Based on our experience in the 2014–15 faculty learning community, Edwards and I recognized that we had to position our digital humanities initiative as pedagogical, interdisciplinary, and directly engaged in meeting the needs of our student population. By receiving one of these grants, we were able to pilot the Digital Scholars Program that we developed.

With pedagogically oriented digital humanities initiatives, it is also important to attend to the ethics of using student labor for digital humanities. Students in the Digital Scholars Program receive course credit for their participation, so we designed the program to be research based instead of an internship. As a result, students set their own research agendas based on the library’s collections. This has had the added benefit of allowing them to gain appreciation and love for the process of inquiry in research, to find materials that strike a chord for them, make them curious, and help them develop their own research questions and create their own projects.

Without access to resources to develop a large digital humanities project, we have also had to think modularly about how projects can be built. To navigate this challenge, Edwards and I created the university’s digital humanities umbrella project Digital Salem, which we envisioned as a portal that would aggregate the small digital humanities projects our students created. Even though the projects within Digital Salem are small, together they add up to a vibrant collection of material on the untold stories of Salem. Students are fully credited for their projects, which become part of their portfolio, while we provide ongoing maintenance for the projects on our server.

We also learned that we had to be flexible in response to student needs. The first year of the Digital Scholars Program was a process of trial and error. We had not realized our students were so ill-equipped for research, but we realized that they were approaching archival materials with preconceived ideas about what they would find and arguments that they wanted to make. The experience also demonstrated that our students needed significantly more structure for their research than we had anticipated. Consequently, we redesigned the process to provide more formal constraints on the students, which improved their experience significantly.

Building a digital humanities program that puts an underserved student population at its center also meant having to sacrifice our own vision to put our students’ needs first. By choosing to focus on the untold stories of Salem, we have designed a program that fits our shared interests in storytelling and community engagement. Beyond that, however, we let go and let students engage with the particular topics and narratives that interest them and use the digital research methods that are most intriguing for them. We have also drawn on existing student support services to emphasize the cocurricular nature of our initiatives. For example, we have facilitated workshops for Digital Scholars Program participants with Career Services. Through these workshops, students have learned how to talk about their experiences for cover letters, resumes, and job searches. We are exploring partnerships with relevant initiatives on campus, such as the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs and the Center for Civic Engagement, as well. In doing so, we have discovered the resources that exist within the broader underresourced environment of the university.

Through our experience, we have come to realize that we have valuable skill sets for digital humanities precisely because of the institutional context in which we work. We are able to build programs with few resources, involve with underprepared undergraduate students, and work with local archives and communities. Our work with the Digital Scholars Program and Digital Salem has been the basis of our NEH grant, Networking the Regional Comprehensives, an initiative intended to bring together other digital humanities practitioners at regional comprehensive universities. Those of us at these types of universities face the same challenges—the lack of funding, a focus on teaching over research, and the imperative to provide experiential learning for student success initiatives.

The initiatives that I have outlined offer a model for developing digital humanities at scales appropriate for regional comprehensive university institutional contexts and strategic planning. Perhaps more importantly, they offer a vision of digital humanities with learning curves and barriers to entry that do not require affiliation with centers, access to expensive technologies, or resources beyond what we have available to us. This approach is essential to the development of an inclusive digital humanities community that includes teaching-intensive public universities.

Notes

1. Risam, “Other Worlds, Other DHs,” 377.

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2. Gil and Ortega, “Global Outlooks in Digital Humanities,” 27.

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3. Sayers, “Minimal Definitions.”

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4. Gil and Ortega, “Global Outlooks in Digital Humanities,” 27.

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5. Gil and Ortega, “Global Outlooks in Digital Humanities,” 29.

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6. Gil, “Interview with Ernesto Oroza,” 184.

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7. Gil, “Interview with Ernesto Oroza,” 184.

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8. Fraistat, “The Function of Digital Humanities Centers at the Present Time,” 281.

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9. Sample, “On the Death of the Digital Humanities Center.”

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10. American Association of State Colleges and Universities, “Stepping Forward as Stewards of Place.”

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Bibliography

1. American Association of State Colleges and Universities. “Stepping Forward as Stewards of Place.” American Association of State Colleges and Universities, 2002.

2. Fraistat, Neil. “The Function of Digital Humanities Centers at the Present Time.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 281–91. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

3. Gil, Alex. “Interview with Ernesto Oroza.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein, 184–93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

4. Gil, Alex, and Élika Ortega. “Global Outlooks in Digital Humanities: Multilingual Practices and Minimal Computing.” In Doing Digital Humanities, edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens, 22–34. London: Routledge, 2016.

5. Risam, Roopika. “Other Worlds, Other DHs: Notes towards a DH Accent.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32, no. 2 (2017): 377–84.

6. Sample, Mark. “On the Death of the Digital Humanities Center.” @samplereality (blog), March 26, 2010.

7. Sayers, Jentery. “Minimal Definitions.” Minimal Computing, October 2, 2016.