Chapter 22
From Precedents to Collective Action: Realities and Recommendations for Digital Dissertations in History
Zoe LeBlanc, Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, and Jeri Wieringa
What is digital history? As historians and scholarly organizations wrestle with digital sources, tools, and methods, this central question remains. Efforts to address it have involved the development of guidelines for tenure and promotion in the field of digital history, the push to include digital scholarship in established history journals or create new digital history journals outright, and a range of discussions about the role of argumentation in digital history as well as its overall scholarly impact.1 While these discussions carry profound implications for the entire field, there is a pressing need to consider the ramifications of the digital turn in graduate education and, in particular, in the idea and practice of the digital dissertation.
We are three recent graduates of doctoral programs in history who each authored a digital dissertation: Sharpe and Wieringa in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, and LeBlanc in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. In this piece, we describe our experiences creating our dissertations to show how the challenges that we encountered, and the questions that our projects prompted, expose the significant disconnects between the high-level conversations about the definition of digital history and the practicalities of creating digital scholarship at the doctoral level. As Virginia Kuhn argued in 2013, “While we need precedents [for digital dissertations], no real change will occur without collective action.” Thus, we detail our experiences as part of this continued call to action. We further propose two interventions. First, for graduate students undertaking this work, we identify and offer some practical suggestions for navigating the material constraints that limit the current practice of digital history. Second, for faculty advising graduate students and overseeing graduate programs, we offer recommendations for rethinking the curricular and institutional structures required to support digital dissertations.
We acknowledge that implementing some of these recommendations would require changes at the level of the discipline, including within professional organizations and scholarly presses. Even still, we believe that the problems we highlight here have broader relevance, both with respect to other subfields within digital humanities (DH) and to other institutional and national contexts in which questions remain about how best to train, support, and evaluate graduate students who undertake digital dissertations. We offer our experiences, gained mainly through trial and error, as case studies for what is currently possible. By drawing attention to the issues we encountered, we aim to pave the way for the structural changes that are needed for digital scholarship in history to thrive—at the dissertation level and across the whole range of digital scholarly production.
What Is a Digital Dissertation in History?
It is important to clarify what we mean by a “digital dissertation.” In some respects, all modern dissertations are “digital” in that the final format is an electronic PDF file. For our argument here, however, we use the phrase “digital dissertation” to refer to dissertation projects that self-reflectively experiment with digital affordances in terms of their format, their modes of analysis, or both. For these projects, digital technologies shape the very questions asked, the possibilities of interpretation, and the resulting form of the scholarship.
We also argue for a distinction between the work of digital records management and the creation of a digital dissertation. Digital records management is increasingly ubiquitous as more sources and data are being digitized and made available online. The work of categorizing, organizing, cleaning, and managing data and digital materials is vital to historical scholarship and should be acknowledged as intellectual work.2 A digital dissertation, however, is a work of scholarship that goes beyond data management by integrating and interrogating digital theories, methods, and materials in the creation of a sustained research project.
Even within this constrained definition, there exists a multitude of examples of digital dissertations from across the humanities. Some of the most notable include Amanda Visconti’s critical digital edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses; Nick Sousanis’s comic book dissertation to study perception; Lisa Rhody’s use of topic modeling to explore contemporary ekphrastic poems; and Matthew Lincoln’s network analysis of Dutch and Flemish art print productions. Scholarly attention to digital dissertations themselves has been the focus of Virginia Kuhn, herself the author of an early digital dissertation in English. She identifies the earliest example of a digital dissertation as Christine Boese’s The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse from 1998.3 Within the field of history, Erin Bartram and Lincoln Mullen explore database design in capturing and organizing conversion narratives in the United States; Jean Bauer uses database construction to model correspondence networks in the early American republic; Micki Kaufman explores the application of topic modeling to Henry Kissinger’s “memcons” and “telcons”; and Jason Heppler and Cameron Blevins apply mapping technologies to explore the role of place in the history of Silicon Valley and the U.S. Postal System, respectively.4
This range of work represents an abundance of effort and creative thinking on the part of the scholars behind them. However, we caution against the impulse to use these projects as evidence to claim that a digital dissertation is an established option for junior scholars in the humanities. We are particularly concerned that this collection of successful projects might make it seem that there are structures in place to support digital dissertations across the board, when in reality this is not the case.
The Many Paths to a Digital Dissertation in History
Our argument is informed by our successful completion of three digital dissertations in history: Sharpe’s They Need You! Disability, Visual Culture, and the Poster Child, 1945–1980, uses the multilinear mode of presentation built into the Scalar scholarly publishing platform to present an argument about how the visual rhetoric of poster-child campaigns in the post–World War II United States shaped contemporaneous understandings of physical disability. Wieringa’s A Gospel of Health and Salvation: Modeling the Religious Culture of Seventh-day Adventism, 1843–1920, uses topic modeling to explore cycles of millennial expectation in the development of Seventh-day Adventism, while concurrently evaluating methods for using computation as part of historical analysis. LeBlanc’s Circulating Anti-Colonial Cairo: Decolonizing Information and Constructing the Third World in Egypt, 1952–1966, uses a range of digital methods to explore how anti-colonial information circulated in the 1950s and 1960s and, specifically, how local perspectives shaped the internationalism of the Third World.
We each took a different path to our decision to pursue a digital history dissertation. For example, when LeBlanc arrived at Vanderbilt in 2011, there was no established digital humanities center or curriculum on campus. It was only at the 2012 conference of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) that LeBlanc first learned of multimodal and digital dissertations. Through subsequent DH-related fellowships and summer workshops, she began to experiment with digital research and pedagogy. When LeBlanc’s in-person research in Egypt became increasingly difficult, especially after the murder of Giulio Regeni, a Cambridge University doctoral student, in Cairo in January 2016, LeBlanc decided to pivot her dissertation toward the history of information and anti-colonialism, fully integrating digital history methods into her scholarship. Thus, LeBlanc’s motivation for undertaking a digital history dissertation was in part one of timing and in part a reflection of how her scholarly interests had transformed. Whereas she first saw the contributions of digital history as primarily pedagogical or utilitarian, she later recognized how digital methods could reshape both her archival research practices and how she produced historical knowledge.
By contrast, Sharpe and Wieringa, who both entered the history doctoral program at George Mason in 2011, were required to take a two-course digital history sequence: one in digital theory and methods, and one in digital tools for historical scholarship. The resources of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) and the general interest in digital scholarship in the department created opportunities that both Sharpe and Wieringa used to pursue fully digital dissertation projects. For instance, Sharpe entered the PhD program curious about the possibilities of digital history, but with few technical skills and little idea how to pursue a digital project. The required digital theory class provided a valuable foundation in digital theory, methods, and practical applications that she used to look for examples of digital work and projects that could inform the shape of her dissertation.
Wieringa, on the other hand, entered the program with the goal of pursuing a digital project, having previously experimented with digitization and website development. As part of a minor field in history and new media, she took a third digital history course on programming that solidified her interest in computational text analysis and the epistemological implications of interweaving computation and historical analysis. The history of Seventh-day Adventism and the centrality of print in the development of the movement, as well as the denomination’s investment in the digitization of historical materials, provided a unique opportunity for her to bring together this methodological interest in computation and topical interests in religion, gender, and millenarianism in American culture. As we discuss below, the resources available within our respective programs shaped how we went about gaining the required technical skills and the extent to which our digital scholarship was considered part of the final dissertation.
Learning the Hard Way
While our approaches and paths to our digital dissertations varied, we all experienced similar challenges in the process of pursuing our projects. Now, to some degree, every dissertation is plagued by unexpected complications, such as not finding expected materials in the archives or discovering certain relevant scholarship late into the research process. But graduate students undertaking digital dissertations experience these complications as well as others far beyond the established expectations about the degree of difficulty and uncertainty surrounding dissertation-level research.
Given the limits in available training, each of us had to decide on our own how we would acquire the digital expertise that was required for us to complete our projects. We all had on-campus support for our projects, to varying degrees. At George Mason, formal and informal training was available through coursework and assistantships with RRCHNM. Additionally, because of George Mason’s reputation for digital history, the community of graduate students provided a peer support network as well as access to the broader DH community through events such as THATCamp and introductions to the DH community on Twitter. At Vanderbilt, LeBlanc had a similarly loose network of supporters, including other graduate students, digital scholarship librarians, directors of humanities and digital humanities centers, and faculty both within and outside her department. While these networks were essential, there quickly emerged gaps between the generalized knowledge that was available in these spaces and the specific knowledge that each of our dissertation projects required. For example, LeBlanc learned the basics of coding in Ruby and databases in DH summer workshops, but at Vanderbilt she was unable to enroll in additional courses to help build on these introductory courses. And even at George Mason, the specialized technical skills that were required for the digitization of sources, computational text analysis, or advanced website creation were beyond what could be accomplished within the formal coursework of the degree program. Both Sharpe and Wieringa relied on external opportunities, such as coding workshops and online resources, to gain the skills necessary to understand and solve the technical problems that arose while creating their digital projects.
We want to stress that these decisions were ones that we all continually negotiated over the course of our dissertations as we experimented with digital platforms and methods. In each of our cases, we started with common off-the-shelf tools that helped us think about what was possible. But these tools often proved to have limited direct applications for our specific research questions. For example, at the inaugural THATCamp College Art Association (CAA) gathering held in 2013, Sharpe was exposed to ImagePlot, as presented by Lev Manovich, as well as John Resig’s early work on ukiyo-e (Software Studies Initiative; Resig). While she spent significant time learning these tools, she eventually came to the conclusion that neither would suit her project: ImagePlot was a dead-end because of the variation in size, color, and reproduction quality of her images; and Resig’s work built off a partnership with TinEye, with significant custom coding requirements that would be impossible to emulate. In assessing the benefit of these tools for her project, Sharpe had to decide, with almost no guidance, if either was a good fit—and more generally, how much investment in personal time, energy, and resources was worth spending for her dissertation goals.
LeBlanc also came up against the limitations of off-the-shelf tools as she first tried the then-available tools for text analysis, including Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell’s Voyant Tools, David McClure’s textplot, and Andrew McCallum and David Mimno’s Mallet. She struggled to interpret the results, however. Drawing from her previous experience of intensive Arabic language study, LeBlanc decided to adopt a similar approach and enrolled in a coding boot camp at the Nashville Software School. While the nine-month part-time course provided technical depth, it was also in many ways a poor fit for what LeBlanc needed to learn; it was focused primarily on web development and professionalization for developers rather than academic research involving computational methods. LeBlanc ultimately used this knowledge in her dissertation when she built a custom web application to transform periodicals from Cairo and other anti-colonial capitals into datasets. But she was still required to teach herself the text analysis methods and foundational statistics that she used to explore how discourses transformed in the pages of these magazines. This self-guided approach also led to several dead-ends—from trying to use unsupervised computer vision algorithms on her sources to attempting to create word embedding models of datasets that were too small. At one point, this frustration led her to turn to Twitter to ask if it was even possible for one person to do “meaningful #dhist [digital history] work” (@Zoe_LeBlanc).
Further compounding the problem of training is the fact that many of the digital dissertations and digital history projects that are often highlighted as exemplars in the field elide the real division of labor in the project and how those involved in the project acquired the requisite knowledge. These omissions, while often unintentional, muddle any future assessment about how much work one person can reasonably undertake in creating a digital project. While more transparency in the acknowledgments sections of these projects would help graduate students who hope to emulate them be more realistic in their expectations, fundamentally there remains a haziness surrounding the expectations for what an individual graduate student can and should realistically produce as a digital dissertation project.
In our case, the lack of transparency, on the one hand, and the lack of relevant training opportunities, on the other hand, left us not only teaching ourselves new skills but also determining how much time and effort would be required to implement this new knowledge in our projects. Because the contributions of digital history are so often framed as methodological, discussions about the digital components of digital dissertations often frame this required knowledge as “skills.” But this framing obscures how much concentrated effort is required to actually translate these skills into making historical arguments. While this problem exists for all digital humanists, it is particularly acute for graduate students in history because of the small cohort of digital historians available to train students, as well as the disciplinary skepticism toward methodology. While the three of us found ways to teach ourselves what we needed to know, it required a significant amount of work and time to synthesize this knowledge into our historical scholarship. This, in turn, held profound implications for our time to completion as well as the final shape of our dissertations. Ultimately, relying on self-teaching rather than institutional training and support will continue to exacerbate graduate students’ frustrations with digital history. What’s more, it will remain one of the biggest barriers to diversifying the field.5
The Dangers of Digitization
Resolving the issue of training in digital methods requires changes at both the disciplinary and institutional levels. But there are additional issues related to the availability of sources for doing digital history that lack clear solutions. This might seem surprising, given the vast number of digital collections that already exist, from the collections of HathiTrust and the Library of Congress to the digital holdings of small archives and historical societies. But the fact remains that the types of historical research that are encouraged for the dissertation are at odds with the types of content that have been prioritized in most digitization efforts (Milligan).
To be sure, most dissertations rely on sources that the researcher must digitally capture for themselves, and there is substantive intellectual work in digital source and data management as discussed above. However, to capture images of these sources at a quality level suitable for presentation and analysis, rather than merely reference, requires a much more substantial outlay of work. Working with private, partially cataloged archives meant that Sharpe had to digitize all the materials used in her project before she could even begin to analyze them, forcing her to significantly extend her time in the archives. In addition, she had to contend with how to normalize image quality across her materials. Many of her sources were already reproductions, whether photocopies or reprints of originals, which resulted in a variety of resolutions. A lack of access to professional digitizing equipment compounded the challenge of creating a corpus for computational image analysis. In the end, Sharpe chose to forgo computational methods altogether because of the complications posed by the source base.
LeBlanc similarly struggled with transforming her digital photos of archival sources into digitized datasets that could be used in her dissertation. LeBlanc first attempted to scan and digitize her archival sources through ABBYY FineReader, but at the time, the individual-license version was ill suited to processing multiple sources with variable formats and languages—the enterprise version was likely better but far beyond LeBlanc’s price range. Instead, LeBlanc undertook what was initially intended to be a small project to build a tool to annotate and extract data from periodicals, newspapers, and diplomatic cables. Yet very quickly, questions about how best to account for metadata from many different archival sources, and how to best implement optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms, presented significant challenges.
Even when digital sources are available, there is significant work required to prepare those texts for different forms of computational analysis. In the example of Wieringa’s dissertation, the periodical literature of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination had been digitized, but because of a lack of information about OCR accuracy and errors in both text and layout recognition, Wieringa devoted a large percentage of her time evaluating and correcting the available textual data.6 Even with those efforts, problems with data remained. Combined with the time and resource constraints of the dissertation, those issues shaped which computational methods could be reliably applied to the data, which in turn shaped the interpretive possibilities of the dissertation itself.7
Digital scholarship in history requires machine-readable data, and yet the intellectual work of identifying the appropriate source material, creating and verifying the digital versions of those materials, and then matching the computational methods to both theoretical frameworks and data is often disregarded. This is especially detrimental to dissertation-level research, where time to completion, opportunities for collaboration, and external resources are severely constrained. For scholars who take on digital projects, the creation and management of sources constitutes a significant intellectual and scholarly contribution and should be recognized as part of the dissertation project.
Defending and Submitting Digital Dissertations
Even as we were each able to navigate the challenges associated with the lack of training in digital methods and the lack of access to digitized sources, we faced additional constraints when it came time to defend and submit our dissertation projects. Both legal restrictions on our digitized sources and a lack of familiarity on the part of our departments with the range of intellectual work required of digital scholarship resulted in final submissions that did not fully reflect the work we had put in or that did not fully reach the audiences that we had initially envisioned for our projects.
As Sharpe began to complete her dissertation, for example, she discovered that the private organizations that she studied were largely concerned with reputation management and took restrictive positions on copyright and image permissions. When she turned to her institution for guidance, she found limited support. Both the library and the history department saw issues of copyright, fair use, and intellectual property as the responsibility of the individual researcher.8 Furthermore, none of Sharpe’s committee members had firsthand experience negotiating copyright and image permissions on their own; they relied on their publishers to navigate that process. Thus, when the copyright holders of the images included in Sharpe’s dissertation asserted limits on which images she could include, she had no support to effectively negotiate. Ultimately, Sharpe agreed to password-protect the final dissertation project and manage access to the site, which went against her initial vision for making her project public (Sharpe, “Precarity and Promise”).9
Whereas the final form of Sharpe’s dissertation was affected by issues of copyright, LeBlanc and Wieringa were shaped by disciplinary and departmental norms in their work. LeBlanc had ongoing discussions with her committee about how her technical work would be included in the final dissertation, but she was consistently counseled to adhere to traditional dissertation norms. This advice was intended to help LeBlanc avoid timing out of her degree program, but it also resulted in significant aspects of her dissertation work not being included in the final product. The custom web application that she built was seen as equivalent to archival research, and as such, she was advised to move her discussion of that process to an appendix. Her interactive data visualizations became another obstacle when she had to rework them for the print format that her committee and department required. Ultimately, LeBlanc decided not to pursue a publicly accessible web-based version of her dissertation, in part because it would have involved additional unrecognized work and in part because, as Sharpe learned, an online version would raise copyright issues that she had little guidance on how to address.
For Wieringa, her department’s commitment to digital scholarship and its guidelines for digital dissertations created the space for her to include her technical work within the dissertation project. The flexibility of the web-based format that she chose let her include an interactive visualization of the project’s core topic model as well as the code she created to process, analyze, and interpret the data, even though her committee primarily engaged with that work through the written chapters on methods. The process of negotiating a balance between her desire to focus on methodology and her committee’s insistence that she produce a historical narrative strengthened the final result but added to the work required to complete the project. As such, her experience offers a model of how departmental support, coupled with clear guidelines for digital dissertations, can ease many of the conversations and negotiations that are required of innovative digital work.
For Wieringa, although the web-based project was accepted by the department, the formal submission process at George Mason is managed by the university libraries, where the dissertation is expected to be a single PDF document, formatted according to standards set by the university. Rather than attempt to negotiate new standards for digital projects, Wieringa pursued a workaround, albeit one that increased the work required. At George Mason, dissertations could include “supplemental files” that could be anything from media files to the related source code. Wieringa submitted source files and web-archive files of the digital project as “supplemental” materials while creating a stand-alone PDF document for the formal dissertation submission. This document included the abstract, a summary of the dissertation “modules,” and a process statement required by the department to provide an overview of the digital project. This additional step let her fulfill the official requirements while maintaining the digital format of the dissertation project, though with the side effect that the official “dissertation” on record is merely a description of the project she defended.
Recommendations for Graduate Students
While our experiences might seem unique, we believe that they allow us to articulate some of the major considerations that face graduate students who might want to pursue a digital dissertation. The first is how both project and time management differ substantially from more traditional dissertations. As we highlighted above, whether or not you are enrolled in a digital history program, you will find that getting relevant training for a digital project is a significant obstacle and one that will likely extend your timeline. One question you should consider as early as possible is whether your program offers digital history courses, and if not, whether you can enroll in courses in other departments or workshops beyond your campus. Another consideration is how much time you will spend on data work—that is, the work of collecting, digitizing, cleaning, and curating your data. We all found that some of the most time-consuming but also crucial work was this “preprocessing” step. Furthermore, applying computational tools to your data is not straightforward. Many tools require data to be organized in particular ways, necessitating significant data manipulation, or the tools have a steep learning curve in order to use them effectively. In addition, technology changes quickly and tools are often abandoned. Carefully reading the documentation and determining whether there is an active community of users can help you choose tools that are compatible with your data and research questions and also have long-term support. Planning for this additional work and communicating regularly with your committee to set and update expectations for the final version are vital. You may also need to prompt your committee for feedback on early prototypes or questions around technical matters, since they may not fully understand the implications for the final shape of your project.
Furthermore, you should also plan for additional work around the formal submission of the dissertation project, as the digital components may not fit within the existing institutional structures for the dissertation. For Wieringa and Sharpe, it was most effective to create a separate PDF document so that it could be submitted to the institutional repository and to ProQuest. But the actual digital projects were archived by the library separately and linked in the metadata records. Even gaining support for this solution, both from the dissertation committees and from the libraries, added time to the process. Until there is university-level support for digital scholarship, particularly in terms of the infrastructure for submitting digital projects as dissertations, it will require more time for students to submit digital dissertations. In general, program funding and time restrictions are critical considerations when deciding whether to embark on a digital dissertation.
Another major recommendation is to identify and build relationships with the people and departments that will support your project at your institution and beyond. While this recommendation can be applied to all dissertators, those pursuing digital dissertations will undertake additional conversations to manage technical details at each stage of the project. We recommend identifying the key figures who will be involved at each stage of the project and initiating conversations early and often about any requirements. They may include (although titles may vary) department administrators, copyright librarians, digital publishing or digital scholarship librarians, thesis and dissertation coordinators, data librarians, archivists, preservation librarians, and research centers with DH experts. If you are unsure where to start, your subject librarian and director of graduate studies can help you begin to identify whom to work with at your institution.
We recommend looking for a balance of committee members who can speak to the various fields and methodologies encompassed by the project. While this advice also holds true for all dissertations, it may be more difficult for a digital dissertation given that DH practitioners are usually spread across different units. Even if you have access to a DH center, the affiliated staff or faculty may not have the skills that are most relevant to your project. DH staff are usually some of the most knowledgeable experts on campus, so if you do decide to ask them to be on your committee, be sure to find out early if you need to get special dispensation for their participation. We also recommend reaching out to experts in cognate fields like media studies, digital studies, science and technology studies, and computational social science, who may not identify as part of DH but whose work is often speaking to similar intellectual questions. Finally, keep in mind that DH remains relatively controversial among humanists, and so we recommend ensuring that your non-DH committee members are willing to engage in this space.10
We also recommend selecting committee members who are comfortable with and committed to having conversations about what constitutes “enough” for the dissertation, including its digital components. An openness to a give-and-take approach is critical since you will likely have to assist your committee in navigating the methodological and technical aspects of the project. In addition, all three of us found that committee feedback increased dramatically once we were able to show tangible work-in-progress. Thus, we would encourage working quickly to a proof of concept or prototype that will engage your committee so that you can lay the foundation for how and in what form their feedback will be offered. Lastly, while the dissertation committee is the formal body for advice and feedback on the project, we suggest that you also build your own informal support networks. Fellow graduate students and faculty outside your institution can provide valuable support and mentorship for yourself and also for your committee.
In hindsight, we each made substantial compromises in order to balance innovation, time-to-completion, and institutional sign-off. LeBlanc chose to argue for the inclusion of computational analysis and methods in her finished dissertation; Sharpe chose to argue for an alternate presentation of her historical scholarship; and Wieringa chose to argue for both methods in the creation of the project, but she ended up compromising on what was deposited with the library and ProQuest.11 Existing guidelines for digital dissertations and digital scholarship from other institutions can also be helpful when explaining the process and components of a project in discussions with committees, departments, and libraries. We hope that by sharing the ups and downs of our dissertation processes, we have underscored our basic takeaways: be strategic in your choice of digital interventions and be mindful of what is possible within existing institutional structures.
Recommendations for Advisers and Institutions
Our experiences demonstrate that while a digital dissertation can be completed in history, additional structural changes are required for digital scholarship at the dissertation level to thrive. In the remainder of this chapter, we identify four key places where curricular and institutional change is needed. We address these recommendations toward prospective digital dissertation committee members, doctoral program directors, department chairs, and university administrators who oversee graduate programs. While we acknowledge that these recommendations might not make sense in all institutional contexts, we propose them to help move campus-specific conversations about supporting graduate students interested in pursuing digital projects toward concrete reforms.
Committees, Programs, and Support Networks
Generally, dissertation committees are ad hoc groups, with the dynamics between members and students emerging over time. However, even within this nebulous space, the prospect of a digital dissertation can exacerbate tensions over how mentorship should operate, as well as how committee members should communicate and share their expertise. Committee members will likely be confronted with the responsibility of adjudicating what “counts” as historical scholarship, legitimizing the dissertation work and outputs of the project, and navigating department and institutional guidelines. It is important that the committee recognize that this additional labor will be required and that it should not fall on the student alone to argue for the legitimacy of their work or the legibility of their methods. At all three of our defenses, the underlying debate among the committee members centered on the question of what constitutes historical scholarship, suggesting that a committee for a digital dissertation should include at least one member versed in the digital humanities who can support the student in their claims.
Even as each of our committees contained scholars with experience in digital history projects, we discovered that the idea of the digital dissertation as a single-authored sustained work sat in tension with our committee members’ understanding and experiences of digital history as collaborative work. Traditional history dissertations are proto-monographs. Professors in history—the people who form the majority of dissertation committees in the field—have cleared the hurdles of the dissertation and the monograph, often before embarking on their digital scholarship. But digital dissertations introduce new pressures on the adviser-advisee relationship. “Develop your voice as an author” or “Just start writing” mean something quite different to someone preparing a manuscript than to someone who is creating interactive data visualizations.
Since digital dissertations in history are still relatively new, guidelines that encompass both faculty effort and student expectations are especially important. Such guidelines should specify what constitutes enough work for a dissertation, what counts as a meaningful scholarly intervention, and how digital scholarship is situated in the discipline at large. These guidelines are needed at both the department and disciplinary levels, and ideally they expand the definition of scholarship to include data creation, analysis, interface design, and so on, as well as help to distinguish the intellectual work that underpins digital records management.12 Expanding dissertation guidelines to account for the advising and evaluation of digital scholarship by committee members, as well as the responsibilities and processes of institutional units, would also have transformative effects for dissertations and for publishing, career paths, and tenure and promotion.13
On a more practical level, committee members, program directors, and department chairs can help establish affinity groups and peer support networks among graduate students and faculty within their departments and across institutional boundaries. To be sure, some of this already happens through conferences and social media, but formalizing these networks can provide needed support and shared information among students and faculty alike. For example, a panel at the American Historical Association (AHA) annual meeting organized by the authors was the first time that Sharpe and Wieringa’s committee members discussed the process of advising digital dissertations, even when both were housed within the same department. During the panel, all three advisers expressed their regret that the conversation had not happened sooner and their enthusiasm for more conversations among faculty advisers about how best to support their students’ projects. Faculty can also draw on their existing networks to connect graduate students with experts in other fields. For example, Wieringa was connected to a computer science professor at George Mason who helped her think through what was possible with topic models and discouraged her from using a database when flat data files would do, saving her significant amounts of work. Ultimately, there are limits to how much top-down organizing can nurture these support networks, but the burden of helping foster these relationships should not fall solely on the shoulders of graduate students.
Education and Training
As discussed above, training in digital methods, analysis, and technical skills largely remains a diffused constellation of formal and informal options that vary widely across disciplines.14 One option would be to provide more coursework in digital methods; however, we caution that this coursework cannot simply be added on top of existing program requirements. An alternative would be to restructure the comprehensive exam or other program milestones. Allowing a student to declare a field in digital methods, for example, might result in a shorter reading list but the expectation that the student would spend more time synthesizing and experimenting with the methods they are studying.15 Both of these solutions would require someone to teach or advise about this content, however. For programs that lack faculty versed in digital methods, another option would be to allow more flexibility for students to enroll in courses in other departments. This option also comes with caveats: Courses designed for computer science students, for example, might result in increased computational literacies, but they would still not address the issue of how to apply those literacies to historical research. Furthermore, these courses are often designed to be part of a larger curriculum, so it can be difficult to assess whether any particular course will cover sufficient or even relevant content.16 Some graduate students may wish to pursue a master’s degree in another department concurrently with their doctorate. But for many history departments, the prospect of their students enrolling in more than one course in another department is often not encouraged.
In addition to these curricular options, there is also room for more creative approaches. One example might be to modularize courses and training to mirror the practical ways that digital humanists experiment and explore new methods and tools. A regularly scheduled “boot camp” or micro-course could address technical fundamentals and lower barriers to entry for students who might not have envisioned themselves as pursuing digital work when they entered the program. Such a model would also ensure that all students develop the same foundational knowledge, rather than implicitly privileging the students who have had previous coding experience.17 More advanced digital courses could use the boot camp as a prerequisite and as a result could move more quickly into the applications for historical inquiry. Smaller courses could also be designated specifically for learning and experimentation, with a goal of building formal spaces for the kind of exploratory work that we each conducted independently. A further benefit of a modular framework would be that the associated faculty could concentrate on their particular areas of expertise rather than being required to teach broad methodological surveys. They could also more easily update courses based on technical developments in the field. Regardless of which solution any particular program decides to implement, the faculty should be committed to scaffolding digital history within the curriculum.
Authorship and Collaboration
Our experiences creating digital dissertations also highlight the tensions between the authorship models operative in digital scholarship and those in the humanities generally, and particularly in graduate education. Projects in the digital humanities are often explicitly collaborative, the work of multiple scholars and practitioners, each of whom contributes their own expertise to the overall project. This aspect of DH work is highly transformative for humanities scholarship. Yet this collaborative model has yet to be adopted within the context of dissertation research, where the single-author model remains dominant. As a result, individual graduate students have to engage with the complexities of digital scholarship at every level of their projects, from source collection and preparation through analysis and presentation, something that is rarely required of faculty working on large-scale digital projects. As long as the single-author paradigm persists, graduate students undertaking digital scholarship will remain limited in terms of what they can accomplish.
The idea of historical scholarship as a solitary enterprise is itself a fiction, after all. All historians rely on the expertise of others for the collection and management of historical materials, for theoretical frameworks to apply to those materials, and for feedback on both interpretation and methods. Reading the acknowledgments of any scholarly work underscores this reality, and while the sole-authored model persists, it is increasingly being challenged, whether by archivists who critique the erasure of their labor or by growing recognition of collaboratively authored work in the field (Theimer).18 In this regard, digital dissertations can be used as a model for how to bring collaboration into the dissertation process across the field.
Collaboration could take many forms, such as peer collaboration between graduate students, projects that build off existing faculty research, or work that takes place within the more formal collaborative research structure of a lab. In many of these areas, graduate students are already leading the way. Projects such as Mapping Gay Guides and Photogrammar began as collaborative work done in parallel with dissertation research. Faculty-led projects such as Viral Texts and the Colored Conventions Project have supported successful dissertation work in both English and history. While more common in Europe, formal DH labs may recruit graduate students to work on specific aspects of broader research projects as their dissertation work.19 The latter two models have the added benefit of making it possible for graduate students to participate in digital scholarship at an earlier career stage. Within these models, the work of data collection, cleaning, analysis, visualization, and presentation is spread across multiple researchers rather than falling to a single doctoral student. These models also allow researchers to build on each other’s scholarship and together create more ambitious projects. This approach has the added benefit of easing some of the infrastructure questions around digital dissertations, since the archiving and preservation of the overall project would not be the sole responsibility of the student.
This is not to say that all digital dissertations should be collaborative. As all three of us have demonstrated, one can successfully complete a digital project as an individual graduate researcher. However, there need to be more realistic expectations about how much work one graduate student can do. For all of us, taking on our projects as individual scholars greatly limited what we could accomplish. Digital humanities is largely collaborative because the work requires it and as such presents an alternative model of knowledge creation. It is important to bring that alternative model to the digital dissertation as well. Departments creating digital history programs and institutions encouraging digital scholarship by students must look to collaborative research models for this scholarship to be sustainable and thrive.
Submission and Preservation
With more robust networks, more formalized training, and a greater recognition of the alternatives to single-authored digital projects, the conditions for digital dissertations would be markedly improved. Yet as we have outlined in earlier sections, there remain a number of infrastructural and institutional issues that also need to be addressed—issues that require the coordination of various administrative units on campus. As such, we recommend that departments, schools, libraries, and other stakeholders, rather than graduate students, take the lead in updating the cultural and technical systems surrounding the dissertation process so that they can support the complexities of digital scholarship.
One of the key challenges for stakeholders will be to understand how the digital elements of a dissertation fit within the existing systems for archiving scholarship, as well as how that work fits within the intellectual ecosystem of the university. Digital projects often rely on large collections of digital sources that are owned and maintained by external entities. While such projects require access to these data and sources to run, there are not clear practices around whether these materials should or even can be included within a project’s archived version, as Sharpe’s dissertation experience revealed.20 In fact, the need to capture and preserve the sources used in an individual project, as well as the physical constraints of storage for archiving those sources and the legal and financial aspects of working with copyrighted material, are active research questions in their own right. The practical issues of digital projects need to be addressed through collaboration and conversations between institutional stakeholders, including departments, DH centers, and university libraries, both for dissertations and for digital scholarship generally.
Additionally, clearer guidelines and processes are needed around submitting digital dissertations. At both George Mason and Vanderbilt, the process of submitting a dissertation is managed by the university libraries. At both institutions, the dissertation approval process involved conforming to formatting guidelines for a single PDF document. Even as these guidelines were fairly new, given that university libraries have only recently moved from the submission of printed and bound dissertations to handling electronic files, they have not caught up to the realities of digital research.
Resolving the issues related to the submission of digital dissertations will require an investment of both time and leadership at the institutional level. While there are some workarounds for submitting digital dissertations within existing systems, as described above, these workarounds profoundly limit the potential engagement with and impact of the work itself. For example, Sharpe’s decision to include a JSON export of her Scalar project site as a supplemental file in her submission, in order to adhere to the submission guidelines, has left her uncertain as to whether future researchers will be able to use this file to re-create the site, which itself is not archived in the library. Haziness on digital dissertation submission guidelines also influenced LeBlanc’s decision not to build a digital storytelling interface for her data visualizations, even though the interface would have made them accessible to more people, since she was concerned about having to undertake additional work to translate the interface into the print version required for submission. Wieringa used a combination of web-archive snapshots and zip files of her code and website files as the content she submitted to the library. This content, like Sharpe’s, was not the same as the website she created, and the archived version is not “viewable” within the institutional repository. These ad hoc strategies not only limit the preservation of digital scholarship but also create a bifurcation between “traditional” and “digital” work. Institutional resources need to be put in place so that the scholarship associated with digital dissertations can be captured, archived, and preserved. This is necessary both to legitimate the digital artifacts as scholarship and to provide some semblance of stability so that they can be part of an ongoing scholarly conversation.
Redefining Historical Scholarship
Digital dissertations push at the boundaries of what counts as scholarship. Our three projects present a vision of scholarship that includes, but is also more than, the construction of historical narratives and interpretations. In this way, our work is part of a broader discussion about whether digital history should be considered as scholarship in its own right or whether it should be understood as processing work done in the service of an interpretive narrative ultimately published in article or book form.
This debate is acutely difficult for graduate students to navigate. Graduate students are increasingly encouraged to undertake digital work, often with the implicit assumption that it will make them more competitive in the academic job market and somehow simultaneously prepare them for a range of alt-academic positions. At the same time, well-meaning advisers often privately tell their graduate students that digital work should be something that they pursue on the side until they have the safety of tenure, especially since most departments still require a print book for tenure or promotion. This conflicting advice underscores the profound structural problems surrounding digital dissertations in history.
Counseling graduate students to sideline their digital projects or wait until tenure to undertake them highlights the continued precariousness of digital scholarship. Given the constraints of time, money, and resources involved in the dissertation, the risk in not valuing the technical work involved in creating digital projects is that they become unfeasible altogether. Digital scholarship is not just an add-on; it fundamentally reshapes the very questions asked and the possibilities of interpretation. This underscores the fact that digital scholarship is more than preliminary work on the way to the “real” scholarship of interpretation and narrative building. Indeed, elements such as data selection and preparation, computational modeling, and interface design are all part of research and analysis and as such should be valued (and evaluated) as scholarship.
As more digital dissertations are produced, departments and publishers will need to work through what constitutes revision for digital work, as well as how the infrastructure that supports digital dissertations can translate into digital publications. We would like to see publishers provide more transparency around their digital infrastructure for potential submissions, as well as information about how peer reviewers might evaluate the technical aspects of the project, for example. We would also like to see granting agencies and universities begin to offer fellowships to support graduate students as they build the digital infrastructure required for their dissertation projects. Combined, these changes would help make creating digital projects a sustainable part of the larger dissertation process and post-dissertation career.
Digital dissertations highlight the disconnect between the desire to support digital scholarship, as increasingly expressed by programs and departments, and the realities of the profession. Projects such as ours are difficult for traditional history departments to understand, even those looking to hire a tenure-track “digital historian.” The dangers for the lone digital historian in such a department are strikingly similar to those we encountered with our digital dissertations, in that much of the digital work remains difficult to evaluate and thus tends to be viewed as secondary, as a basis for teaching digital methods while one continues along the established trajectory of writing historical monographs and journal articles. Those in tenure-track positions, who may have comparatively more resources than graduate students, face similar constraints of infrastructure, authorship expectations, and publishing outlets.
Digital history training is not a seamless fit for alt-academic positions, either. Marketing digital methods as a way of easily transitioning into other professional careers overstates the generalizability of digital history and understates the knowledge needed to work in spaces like DH centers, libraries, museums, or granting agencies. Clear career opportunities for digital historians are currently limited.21
The “digital turn” has changed the methods and processes around archival research, historical analysis, and scholarly publishing in fundamental ways. But undertaking work that makes critically informed use of these new methods and processes will require significant changes to current models of scholarship at all levels, including the dissertation. While a generalized enthusiasm for digital history has successfully supported the first few waves of digital dissertations, a deep investment in digital scholarship is now required for it to truly thrive. Each of us has shared the particularities of our digital dissertations because we believe that the commonalities across them help to make visible the larger structural issues that are often elided in debates over digital scholarship. Without addressing these issues, we believe that digital history will remain in the “perpetual future tense,” as Cameron Blevins has described it, with graduate students bearing the brunt of the unresolved tensions in the field. The potential for digital scholarship in history is vast. The time for action is now.
Notes
For examples of guidelines, see “Digital Dissertation Guidelines” and “Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians.” For journals geared toward digital scholarship, see “Digital History Reviews”; Robertson, Mullen, and Swain; and the Journal of Digital History (https://journalofdigitalhistory.org/). For discussions about argumentation in digital history, see Arguing with Digital History Working Group.
For examples of data management and research methods, see Karl (whose work includes the YouTube series Research/Craft and relevant tweets). Additionally, new tools such as Tropy (https://tropy.org) are being developed to aid in that work. Tropy is jointly developed by RRCHNM, the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), and Digital Scholar.
See Kuhn; also see Kuhn and Finger. In addition, since 2012, there has been an active Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) group dedicated to digital dissertations maintained by Jade E. Davis.
It is important to note that for every successful digital history dissertation, there are many examples of attempted projects that have been abandoned because of the structural and cultural constraints that we discuss in this piece. Often unrecognized because of the ways the academic community relies on successful defenses to mark scholarly work, these projects reveal the work involved in creating digital scholarship in history just as much as, if not more than, the high-profile successful ones.
See Hicks, for example; see also Posner.
Problems such as this are not uncommon for digitized sources, as is outlined in Cordell and Smith (“A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition”), work that was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
One project where the work of text evaluation and preparation is discussed is the Mapping Texts project (Torget et al.).
April Hathcock, director of scholarly communications and information policy for NYU Libraries, and Nancy Sims, copyright program librarian at University of Minnesota Libraries, are two leading examples of trained librarians and lawyers whose work on issues of copyright and intellectual property create supportive environments for researchers navigating these areas. With respect to institution-wide initiatives, see the ongoing efforts of the MIT Open Access Task Force, https://open-access.mit.edu/.
A key point of consideration raised by issues of copyright and public-facing scholarship is the default in digital humanities work toward openness (i.e., public access) and what this means specifically for the dissertation.
See, for example, Fish. For internal criticisms of the origins of digital humanities, see Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia.
Within higher education in the United States, large corporations such as ProQuest serve as both a resource and a gatekeeper for academic work, the dissertation included. Most PhD programs include a requirement for dissertations to be uploaded to ProQuest’s Dissertations & Theses service as part of the final submission process.
Critical engagement throughout the process of digital records management is necessary and should be explicit, for both digital and nondigital work in history. A strong example of the need to critically engage source bases, especially digital ones, is outlined in Spedding; the general issue is discussed in Underwood.
See “Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians”; “Digital Dissertation Guidelines”; Leon. While guidelines exist for evaluating digital projects in tenure and promotion, as well as guidelines for graduate students undertaking digital dissertations, there are none that currently address committees supervising digital dissertations.
The difficulty of teaching both content and methods is well known in DH but remains far from solved. For example, see Goldstone.
At George Mason, graduate students can declare history and new media or digital history as a field in their qualifying exams. For Wieringa, her minor field in history and new media had a strong media studies emphasis, which she relied on to theoretically ground her engagement with computational tools and methods.
For example, an introductory course in computer science is rarely useful for a digital historian since it is usually focused on teaching students foundational programming knowledge. Conversely, an introductory course in critical geography or computational social science or data science might be a good fit, though again, many of these courses use examples and assumptions from the sciences rather than the humanities.
While in the future this may be less of a barrier as students are increasingly introduced to programming in their precollege education, we believe that digital history, and DH generally, could do more to provide opportunities for not only introductory but also intermediary and advanced training in digital methods, specifically for groups that remain underrepresented in computational work.
See also the “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” and “A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” (Clement et al.; Di Pressi et al.).
While DH centers in the United States and Canada offer vital opportunities for graduate students to participate in the work of digital scholarship and to learn technical skills that they can apply to their own work, that scholarly work is generally seen as tangential to, rather than part of, dissertation research.
It is important to note that fair use is not in itself a solution to this problem. Fair use can be used as a legal defense, but it may require a lawyer. That is a bar too high to expect of graduate students. Additionally, libraries are not keen to take on this burden; they often require scholars to certify that they are not archiving copyrighted material at the point of submission. Even when the digital sources are published explicitly for use in research, such as JSTOR’s Data for Research or materials from ProQuest, the availability or organization of these digital files can change over time. While one solution is to duplicate this data and store it with the final project, this approach presumes infinite storage capacity and also legal permission to redistribute copyrighted or proprietary digitized materials.
It is worth noting that while all three of the authors have secured tenure-track jobs, only Sharpe is in a history department, and in her case, because the context is a community college, her path to tenure is primarily defined by her contributions to teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning. LeBlanc is now housed in the information sciences and Wieringa in religious studies.
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