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Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023: Chapter 2

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023
Chapter 2
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Introduction: The Digital Humanities, Moment to Moment by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein
  6. Part I. Openings and Interventions
    1. 1. Toward a Political Economy of Digital Humanities by Matthew N. Hannah
    2. 2. All the Work You Do Not See: Labor, Digitizers, and the Foundations of Digital Humanities by Astrid J. Smith and Bridget Whearty
    3. 3. Right-to-Left (RTL) Text: Digital Humanists Plus Half a Billion Users by Masoud Ghorbaninejad, Nathan P. Gibson, and David Joseph Wrisley
    4. 4. Relation-Oriented AI: Why Indigenous Protocols Matter for the Digital Humanities by Michelle Lee Brown, Hēmi Whaanga, and Jason Edward Lewis
    5. 5. A U.S. Latinx Digital Humanities Manifesto by Gabriela Baeza Ventura, María Eugenia Cotera, Linda García Merchant, Lorena Gauthereau, and Carolina Villarroel
  7. Part II. Theories and Approaches
    1. 6. The Body Is Not (Only) a Metaphor: Rethinking Embodiment in DH by Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit
    2. 7. The Queer Gap in Cultural Analytics by Kent K. Chang
    3. 8. The Feminist Data Manifest-NO: An Introduction and Four Reflections by Tonia Sutherland, Marika Cifor, T. L. Cowan, Jas Rault, and Patricia Garcia
    4. 9. Black Is Not the Absence of Light: Restoring Black Visibility and Liberation to Digital Humanities by Nishani Frazier, Christy Hyman, and Hilary N. Green
    5. 10. Digital Humanities in the Deepfake Era by Abraham Gibson
    6. 11. Operationalizing Surveillance Studies in the Digital Humanities by Christina Boyles, Andrew Boyles Petersen, and Arun Jacob
  8. Part III. Disciplines and Institutions
    1. 12. A Voice Interrupts: Digital Humanities as a Tool to Hear Black Life by Alison Martin
    2. 13. Addressing an Emergency: The “Pragmatic Tilt” Required of Scholarship, Data, and Design by the Climate Crisis by Jo Guldi
    3. 14. Digital Art History as Disciplinary Practice by Emily Pugh
    4. 15. Building and Sustaining Africana Digital Humanities at HBCUs by Rico Devara Chapman
    5. 16. A Call to Research Action: Transnational Solidarity for Digital Humanists by Olivia Quintanilla and Jeanelle Horcasitas
    6. 17. Game Studies, Endgame? by Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill
  9. Part IV. Pedagogies and Practices
    1. 18. The Challenges and Possibilities of Social Media Data: New Directions in Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities by Melanie Walsh
    2. 19. Language Is Not a Default Setting: Countering DH’s English Problem by Quinn Dombrowski and Patrick J. Burns
    3. 20. Librarians’ Illegible Labor: Toward a Documentary Practice of Digital Humanities by Spencer D. C. Keralis, Rafia Mirza, and Maura Seale
    4. 21. Reframing the Conversation: Digital Humanists, Disabilities, and Accessibility by Megan R. Brett, Jessica Marie Otis, and Mills Kelly
    5. 22. From Precedents to Collective Action: Realities and Recommendations for Digital Dissertations in History by Zoe LeBlanc, Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, and Jeri Wieringa
    6. 23. Critique Is the Steam: Reorienting Critical Digital Humanities across Disciplines by James Malazita
  10. Part V. Forum: #UnsilencedPast by Kaiama L. Glover
    1. 24. Being Undisciplined: Black Womanhood in Digital Spaces, a conversation with Marlene L. Daut and Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
    2. 25. How This Helps Us Get Free: Telling Black Stories through Technology, a conversation with Kim Gallon and Marisa Parham
    3. 26. “Blackness” in France: Taking Up Mediatized Space, a conversation with Maboula Soumahoro and Mame-Fatou Niang
    4. 27. The Power to Create: Building Alternative (Digital) Worlds, a conversation with Martha S. Jones and Jessica Marie Johnson
  11. Acknowledgments
  12. Figure Descriptions
  13. Contributors

Chapter 2

All the Work You Do Not See: Labor, Digitizers, and the Foundations of Digital Humanities

Astrid J. Smith and Bridget Whearty

Before the Stanford Literary Lab could perform large-scale quantitative analysis on thousands of nineteenth-century novels, someone had to do the work of digitizing those volumes. Before the William Blake Archive could “provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility,” teams of specialists had to do the hands-on labor of creating stable digital images of those works (“About the Archive”). As a field, digital humanities is fueled by the labor of many individuals who are largely absent from the conversations about the research that their labor yields. Digitization, Melissa Terras argues, is “the bedrock of both digital library holdings and digital humanities research”—and therein may lie the problem (“Digitisation and Digital Resources,” 47). Bedrock is the foundation on which everything stands, but it is generally hidden from view. Unless you are traveling at the edges of cliffs, or deliberately observing the terrain, it can be easy to overlook—until you take the opportunity to explore it face-to-face.

We, the coauthors of this chapter, work on either side of the hierarchical divide that separates digitizer from digital humanist. Astrid J. Smith has worked as a digitization specialist for over a decade, performing image capture on rare and fragile archival materials at Stanford University Libraries. Bridget Whearty is a professor of English, working at the intersections of medieval, literary, and information studies. We met in 2013 when Bridget was a postdoctoral fellow in the library department where Astrid works. Fascinated by the ways that medieval writers’ concerns about textual transformation reemerge in digitization labs, Bridget asked to follow a manuscript through the digitization workflow. Astrid agreed to take Bridget on as one of two lab assistants involved in the digitization of a fifteenth-century book of hours, a type of late-medieval prayer book.1 Working together, we observed how combining our perspectives—digitization specialist and artist, medievalist and book historian—created a more holistic approach to the digital object we were making, changing how we both thought about the work that went into its creation.

Others have noted the importance of bridging this gap between perspectives. For instance, Ashley Reed, one of the project managers for the Blake Archive between 2007 and 2013, argues, “To create a truly critical digital humanities we should acknowledge and foreground the interdependencies between different kinds of labor and recognize the ecologies of creativity that make both art and scholarship possible” (38). Inspired by her call and by our own collaborations, we seek to foster more open communication between humanities researchers and digitizers. We argue that a more critically engaged digital humanities (DH) must reach into the dark rooms in which the digitization teams work—too often out of sight and out of mind. We begin by analyzing how DH has vacillated between erasing and valuing digitizers’ labor. Next, we give an overview of a digitization workflow, highlighting the wide variety of skills and labor needed to produce high-quality outputs. Finally, we suggest some solutions to the erasure of digitizers in DH. Ultimately, we argue that digitizers’ invisible labor is the foundation on which DH has been built—and that a more rigorous, more just digital humanities should take seriously the labor, and laborers, on which DH depends.

Digitization and DH: The 1950s to 2000s

Digitization takes place in a wide range of settings, and there are many names for the digitization process. Most involve some combination of keywords like “digital,” “imaging,” “capture,” “preservation,” “reformatting,” “high-resolution,” “cultural heritage,” and “photography.” The media addressed through these processes include bound and unbound texts, photographs, charters, paintings and cartographic objects, film, video, piano rolls, and artifacts. There are numerous names for the people who perform this work: “digitization specialist,” “imaging technician,” “lab assistant,” and “scanning operator” to offer just a few examples. For our purposes, we use “digitizer” as a shorthand for the workers who, in many different roles, remediate analog materials into digitally accessible formats.

As a term, “digitization” maintains a fairly stable definition across disciplines. In DH, Melissa Terras defines it as “the conversion of an analogue signal or code into a digital signal or code” (“Digitisation and Digital Resources,” 47). The Society for American Archivists and the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) define it similarly as “the process of transforming analog material into binary electronic (digital) form, especially for storage and use in a computer,” and “the process of translating analog signal data emanating from an object (light or sound) into a digitally encoded format” (Pearce-Moses, 120; FADGI). Many different kinds of media and labor fit under this umbrella: photography, microfilm scanning, 3D scanning, multispectral imaging, sound and video reformatting, and more (Terras, “Digitisation and Digital Resources,” 47–48). The word digitization thus covers many types of tools, tasks, and specializations. Given this diversity of inputs and outputs, one important takeaway is that having some experience using a flatbed scanner or personal camera does not mean that you understand the complexities of formal digitization workflows—any more than filing family documents makes one a trained archivist. The key point here is that digitization is complex work, and many digital humanists may only have very basic knowledge of what it entails and encompasses.

We believe that terms that are conventionally used in humanities scholarship obfuscate digitization and what it produces. Thus, throughout this chapter, we refrain from using terms like “digital surrogate,” as we feel that they allude to a kind of Indiana Jones idol-swap that misrepresents the core purpose that motivates cultural heritage imaging professionals. While a digitized object may stand in for, in some respects, a physical one that is absent or inaccessible, digital objects accrue value distinct from their analog exemplars, derived from their own external references, makers, supporting infrastructure, functionality, and the things that we are able to do with them. Ultimately, we wish to emphasize that digital objects are distinct from physical ones—and that how, why, and by whom they are made necessarily affects the research that they enable.

While the makers of the original objects generally are credited for their labor in bibliographic attribution, the creators of those objects’ digital counterparts are generally not. They are invisible to end-users. “Invisible labor” is the focus of a rich tradition of scholarship and activism. Initially, the term referred to unpaid—gendered—domestic labor, including cooking, cleaning, and caring for dependents, but it was expanded to include overlooked and undervalued classed and raced labor, occurring within and outside domestic spaces (D’Ignazio and Klein, 178). In Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, the term is used to explore how invisibility affects retail workers, hypersexualized waitstaff, unpaid interns, engineers, computer workers, and virtual receptionists. It is argued that “work that is not seen is not valued, either symbolically or materially,” and furthermore, “when their work is erased, the workers themselves are sometimes rendered invisible as well” (Crain, Poster, and Cherry, 5, 3). But virtual work, as the scholars and activists we build on have demonstrated, is still work. Within the academy, labor performed by librarians and archivists has also, often, been unseen and undervalued, and librarians and archivists have produced significant scholarship recording and challenging these disturbing institutional practices.2

Like these other forms of invisible labor, both outside and within academia, digitization largely takes place out of sight, and it has until recently gone unseen in the early histories of humanities computing. Roberto Busa’s Index Thomisticus, for instance, is an important genesis for DH (Busa and associates). But it is a genesis story in which many of the hands-on workers have remained unseen, their invisibility enforced by the project’s design, supported by numerous founding father/lone genius narratives, and aided by rhetorical flourishes in which the labor of the many belongs to the project’s principal investigator (PI) alone. Reminiscing about the Index, Busa uses the first-person singular to both describe work that he himself did and to claim ownership of the work done by a much larger team:

In 1954 I started my own punching and verifying department; two years later I established my own processing department, but employing large computers always in IBM premises. That year I started a training school for keypunch operators. . . . Their training was in punching and verifying our texts. . . . This school continued until 1967, when I completed the punching of all my texts. (Busa, 85, emphasis added)

In fact, the keypunch operators did the hands-on labor of turning more than 15,600,000 words in eight languages and five alphabets into standardized computer-readable form (Busa, 85). But they are invisible in this project history and in the description of Busa’s Index in the 1974 report “Computers and the Medievalist” (Bullough, Lusignan, and Ohlgren, 393–95). Indeed, until Julianne Nyhan and Melissa Terras began their project of recovery in the 2010s, the contributions of these women to the early history of digital humanities were overlooked (Terras and Nyhan). Their names had been lost.

Not all those involved in early digitization were equally invisible. Although Busa’s typically young and female keypunch operators were elided, other digitizers on other projects received attention—even acclaim—for bringing digitization into humanities research. In 1972, researchers at the California Institute of Technology and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab began collaborating, using what they called “a new technology derived from computer-processing of spacecraft pictures” to photograph and read previously illegible writing in a fifteenth-century manuscript (Benton, Gillespie, and Soha, 40, 47–48). Those experiments are credited with being partially responsible for John F. Benton’s 1985 MacArthur Award (MacArthur Fellows Program). Arguably, this is the work of digitization made visible and honored as cutting-edge scholarship. But the distribution of credit and rewards remains imbalanced. Who did the work of object handling, camera configuration, image capture, and post-processing? Was it John Benton, Alan Gillespie, James Soha, some unnamed technician(s)? Benton alone won the “genius grant”; but what of his collaborators?

Unequal distribution of credit notwithstanding, there was a time during the 1980s and the 1990s when digitization was considered scholarly research in and of itself. In 1997, for example, the journal Computers and the Humanities published an article on the digitization of the Aberdeen Bestiary (Beavan, Arnott, and McLaren). But around the turn of the millennium, the place of digitization within humanities computing changed. Melissa Terras pinpoints the late 1990s and early 2000s as the period when digitization became perceived as “less a scholarly endeavor within itself, and more of a standard means to provide information to a wider audience” (“The Rise of Digitization,” 14). This reframing of what counts as scholarship put digitizers in an uncomfortable position with regards to digital humanities. On the one hand, digitizers’ work was invaluable, as it remains today. Writing in 2004 in A Companion to Digital Humanities, Marilyn Deegan and Simon Tanner argue, “Understanding the capture processes for primary source materials is essential for humanists intending to engage in digital projects” (Deegan and Tanner). On the other hand, the volume containing Deegan and Tanner’s essay coined a new name for the discipline that enforced a boundary between DH and digitization. According to the field’s origin stories, the name “digital humanities” was invented “to shift the emphasis away” from what one version calls “simple digitization” and another calls “mere digitization” (Kirschenbaum, 5; Fitzpatrick, 12–13). We do not believe these adjectives were selected as a deliberate slight to digitizers. Rather, we suspect that this separation instinct grows from the fact that, at around the same time that digitization was being reclassified from scholarly activity to information service, digital humanists were working to prove that DH itself was scholarship, not service (Warwick). At the time, separating DH from digitization likely felt like a matter of prestige—and survival. But, as Patrik Svensson writes, “What seems uncontroversial from an internal perspective can be exclusionary from an outside perspective” (Svensson). There is tremendous technological expertise and intellectual and artistic work involved in digitization, and it is insulting to digitizers to reduce that labor to “mere digitization” or “digital photocopying.” As Natalia Cecire argues, “gestures that consolidate professional legitimacy also name those actors who are and are not to be regarded as legitimate” (Cecire). Whether or not it was their deliberate intent, these stories of the genesis of “digital humanities” are exclusionary, keeping digitizers beyond the edges of the field, even as that field benefits substantially from their uncredited labor.

Digitization and DH: The 2010s

It is on this foundation of devaluing of digitizers’ labor that the edifice of twenty-first-century digital humanities stands. To be sure, powerful arguments are occasionally made about the importance of digitization and the intellectual and physical labor it entails. In the 2012 book Digital_Humanities, the authors classify digitization among “the basic building blocks of digital activity” and argue that “designing and building digital projects depend on knowledge of these fundamentals” (Burdick, Drucker, Lunenfeld, and Schnapp, 17). But in general, these calls for revaluation were overshadowed by more-heated arguments about coding, making, hacking, and yacking that rocked DH in the mid-2010s (Ramsay; Nowviskie 2016). Digitization was largely excluded from these arguments about and examples of valuable, intellectual digital labor.

Also in the 2010s, ethical and transparent labor grew as areas of DH research and practice. In addition to Terras and Nyhan’s studies of the punch card workers contributing to the Index Thomisticus, Alan Galey offered a corrective to DH “founding father” narratives, praising Teena Rochfort Smith as “the Ada Lovelace of the digital humanities” (effectively claiming Rochfort Smith as kin to the nineteenth-century mathematician now celebrated as a foremother of modern computing), and naming Rochfort Smith’s experimental visualization of textual variation in Hamlet as “a kind of late Victorian paper computer” (Galey 2015; Galey 2014, 26). Gabrielle Dean highlighted Henriette Avram, the mid-twentieth-century autodidact computer programmer behind the revolutionary data standardization initiative MARC (MA-chine Readable Cataloging). Lisa Nakamura analyzed gendered and racialized labor performed by Navajo women in early electronics manufacture. Katrina Anderson, Pamela Andrews, Spencer Keralis, and the coauthors of “A Student Collaborator’s Bill of Rights” and “Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights” critiqued DH labor practices exploiting students and early career researchers (Anderson et al.; Di Pressi et al.; Keralis; Keralis and Andrews; Alpert-Abrams et al.). And an impressive community of scholars including Roopika Risam and Safiya Umoja Noble foregrounded DH’s connections to exploitative labor conditions, particularly in the Global South. Within this efflorescence of scholarship, digitizers have begun to be somewhat visible, largely through studies on the digitizers—often women of color—of Google Books (Zeffiro; Thylstrup; Hoffmann and Bloom; Losh). This is an important step forward. But Google Books is not the only (or even the main) digital resource for humanities research. Digitizers working in academic libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions still receive little attention from the colleagues whose research builds on their labors.

Claire Warwick argues that it is “worth bearing in mind that the digital humanities developed as part of service departments as well as academic ones, especially in libraries and computing services. In the past as in the present, the profession simply could not manage without these information professionals. But that does not mean they are always held in high regard by those they serve” (Warwick). We contend that a similar dynamic holds between digital humanists and digitizers. When we do honor digitization as foundational labor, we tend to do it only when those workers are retired or dead. But the work of digitization is ongoing. Some of the laborers that DH depends on are indeed retired or deceased. Others are on the same campuses as major digital humanities centers, operating out of sight and out of mind—but also just down the hall.

Behind the Curtain: Workflow, Roles, Craft

Part of making digitization and digitizers more visible involves understanding how materials get from physical to digital form. These materials may seem to “magically appear” on our servers and screens—but it is skilled labor, not magic, that brings them there. Digital humanists can take the initiative to better understand digitization by learning the paths of production.

The work begins with someone having an idea for a digitization project. Those someones can range from a researcher wanting support for a specific project to a curator seeking to digitize an entire analog collection. That request sets off a chain of labor outlays, requiring many workers in many roles (Figure 2.1). Digitizers will need to meet with various stakeholders to clarify the project, repeatedly asking questions such as “What are the goals for this project? What are the deadlines? Are there particularly fragile items you’re concerned about?” The answers help determine what kinds of labor—and therefore, who—will be part of this digitization. Put another way, digitization is never just the work of digitizers. From the first step, it involves skilled workers in a number of institutional roles: conservators, curators, catalogers and metadata specialists, production coordinators, project managers, who all work closely with the digitizers (Figure 2.2).3

The goals of a specific project, balanced with the lab’s own evolving best practices, will shape what gets imaged. For example, if a requester wants a collection of 1940s Turkish movie posters digitized for an online exhibit, the blank backs of the posters might not be photographed. By contrast, if a rare books curator presents a request on behalf of a book history professor for a twelfth-century codex to be digitized for a paleography course, every aspect of the book may be imaged, including binding, fore-edges, and blank flyleaves. Digitizers bring their own goals and expertise into these negotiations, and the finalized digital objects are shaped by both the initial requester’s goals and the values of the digitization department. For instance, the initial digitization request for the Jarndyce Single-Volume Nineteenth-Century Novel Collection specified that only the pages containing text needed to be digitized because the requesters were interested in using the books’ content for textual analysis.4 Digitizers and curators, however, determined that there was added value in digitizing the books’ covers and blank pages. Variations in what end-users see on their screens should not be read as evidence of digitizers’ lack of thought about analog exemplars but as signs of real human labor: negotiations between the immediate researcher needs and the needs of the future, the sweeping desires of requesters and the realities of production.

At any given time, a large lab’s work queue might include a few large, long-term projects that involve digitizing hundreds of objects over many years; some smaller projects that might only take months or weeks of work to finish; and several “one-off” requests, such as a batch of medieval charters for a class project or a Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscript for research. The work is practiced and routinized, but no two projects are exactly alike. Part of the craft of digitizers, thus, is applying collective experiences to emerging needs. Because digitization often involves working with fragile and culturally significant objects, there is always a tension between doing things safely, accurately, and efficiently. Enacting these seemingly contradictory modes, Astrid notes, brings to mind the motto adopted by early Venetian master printer Aldus Manutius: “make haste slowly” (festina lente).

Diagram showing a digitization workflow, including production coordination, people and labor, technical tools, and interdepartmental dependencies.

Figure 2.1. Workflow diagram depicting where the digitization process fits between physical and digital objects, and the elements on which it depends. Image by Astrid J. Smith. Figure description

Composite of images showing some of the contributors to the digitization process. Tasks shown include assessment, handling, and quality assurance.

Figure 2.2. Digitization work, left to right, and top to bottom: Assessment: Rare books curator Benjamin Albritton and Astrid J. Smith discuss an object; digitization coordinator and specialist Linda Lam measures details in an object to determine resolution requirements. Handling and imaging: Astrid turns a page while imaging a rare book; Astrid and head of conservation Kristen St. John handle an object together; Postproduction: Lab staff member Micaela Go reviews image files; Astrid and lab staff member Claire Bonnepart discuss image crops. Photograph credits: 1 by Everardo G. Rodriguez; 2 by Astrid J. Smith; 3 is a still image from the tour video “Stanford University Libraries’ Digitization Labs,” YouTube, 3:48, October 31, 2012, https://youtu.be/RdLcrNeWjIs; 4 by Doris Cheung; 5 by Astrid J. Smith; and 6 by Linda Lam.

Additional aspects of the unseen labor of digitization involve preparing imaging stations, calibrating equipment, and evaluating image quality. Digitizers frequently invent new techniques, responding to the unique materialities of analog objects. For example, to digitize Septistellium Meditationis (a codex made over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), Astrid designed a tool to safely hold the books’ leaves in place without obscuring any visual information (see Figure 2.3).5 Developing and refining imaging methodology, customizing equipment for physical needs of the object, and tailoring technologies for different capture objectives are all additional unseen labors performed by digitizers.

After image capture, there are many more steps in the digitization workflow, each requiring workers trained in very specific skills. Images might need to be digitally reassembled, cropped, straightened, and aligned. They must undergo quality assurance: Are the images in focus? Is everything that was requested present? Who does this work varies between studios. In some labs, post-processing and quality-control checks are performed by lab assistants working under the supervision of an imaging specialist or project coordinator. In others, the same person who performs image capture does post-processing labor, too. What does not vary is that this work requires unflagging attention to process and detail on the part of the digitizers. Some might be tempted to dismiss this stage of the workflow as particularly tedious, and they are not wrong that it is grueling and difficult. But that just makes the feat of sustained attention all the more impressive. As Daniel Wakelin has argued about medieval scribes, the absence of visible error does not mean the absence of labor. In fact, it means precisely the opposite.

Image showing clear plexiglass tools Astrid created to safely hold down stiff parchment without obscuring visual information during digital imaging.

Figure 2.3. Holding aids placed on the hardcopy manuscript, Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection MSS CODEX 1126, Septistellium Meditationis. Digitization by Astrid J. Smith, with Kirsten St. John, head of conservation, providing handling assistance and lab staff member Micaela Go performing postproduction and quality control, January 2018. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

This is not an exhaustive portrait of the digitization workflow at the studio where Astrid works, nor can it describe the intricacies of every digitization lab. But across significant differences between studios and projects one thing remains constant. The kind of professional digitization on which DH depends is never quick, unthinking labor. From initial requests and object assessment to file delivery and long-term preservation, digitization is a collective craft, a rich collaboration that takes place long before datasets and image galleries appear on end-users’ screens.

Better Practices: Making Digitizers’ Labor Visible

The most obvious solution to the widespread erasure of digitizers at the heart of DH is for digital humanists to actively partner with digitizers. This is how the authors of this chapter met, and we strongly encourage digital humanists to engage in similar collaborations. That said, we understand that partnerships like ours are not always feasible. Not all digital humanists may want to collaborate closely with digitizers or to try the work of digitization. Moreover, not all digitizers will want to meet or work closely with humanities researchers. But some digitizers do wish to, and they should not be excluded from DH’s proverbial big tent.

Here are several ways that digital humanists can include digitizers and foreground their labor:

  • • The lowest bar to clear is to not take credit for digitizers’ work. Unless one is doing all the stages of digitization alone, invented out of whole cloth and without consultation by digital imaging and archiving specialists, one should never write “I digitized X.” (After all, shared standards for academic integrity have a name for passing off another’s work as one’s own—plagiarism.) In essence, don’t be Busa. Be Josephine Miles (Buurma and Heffernan).
  • • When giving a lecture, publishing scholarship, or using a dataset that builds on digitizers’ labor, don’t thank “the miracle of twenty-first century technology” for making your work possible. Thank the real people who did the work. Include statements like “Digitized by workers in X lab.” Or name them outright, if the team members consent to be publicly named.
  • • When you work with digitizers, write to their supervisors to explicitly identify and praise their contributions.
  • • Extend DH’s existing models of collaborative credit-sharing to digitizers. Naming digitization teams in grant applications, extending project responsibility statements to include the digitizers, and adding digitizers to lists of people associated with a DH center’s research are logical extensions of community values already in play. As Spencer Keralis, Rafia Mirza, and Maura Seale assert elsewhere in this volume (see Chapter 20), documentation “makes labor visible. It is a means unto itself and not just a means to an end.”
  • • Social media posts may warrant more abridged acknowledgment. One can even use emoji to represent different kinds of work in digitization—pairing the camera pictograph with the name or the handle of the photographer; the hand with the name of the object handler; a computer with the names of people involved in post-processing and quality assurance.
  • • In published projects, consider creating visualizations that show where your data came from, who made it, and the workflow involved in its production. This is a clever application of traditional DH methods and an extension of principles argued for by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein: “Showing the work is crucial to ensure that undervalued and invisible labor receives the credit it deserves” (201).
  • • Offer end-users guidance for how to include digitizers within citations. This actively dismantles the persistent hierarchy of visible digital humanists versus invisible digitizers. The goal should be to avoid corporate ownership claims—for example, “Digitized by Google”—that erase human digitizers and their labor.6

Although many of our examples are framed for scholars requesting digitization, we believe that they also hold for researchers using materials that have been digitized decades earlier. While the practices we suggest above are about seeing and valuing the living people who do the work, they are also about acknowledging the work in general—whether that work has happened recently or is decades old, as is the case for the digital scans of microfilms of Early English Books Online (EEBO), originally made in the 1940s (Mak, 1517–18). And in cases where the digitization team cannot be identified then your citation can mark that inability to give named credit for work done.

Ultimately, all of these possible interventions can be summarized as give credit where credit is due. Cultivate a sense of humility and respect when it comes to other people and their work. Have awareness about what jobs entail. Understand power and hierarchy. Notice when you have privilege because of your role. Consider how you can use your privilege to promote equity.

Preserving the Record for Foundational Labor: The Case for Digital Scribal Colophons

Across centuries and media, book creators sometimes include paratextual production notes called “colophons,” preserving invaluable data for future users. In modern books, these colophons can include information about printing companies, book designers, typefaces, and paper. In medieval books, they might contain the names of scribes, illuminators, funders, and dates of a manuscript’s creation. Medieval colophons also give scribes space to comment on how they feel about their work—from offering thanks that their labor is done, to complaining about the quality of their tools, to addressing future users—telling us how we can repay their labors by remembering their names, pains, and needs. Bridget argues that these past copying practices offer models for a better future. Making digital scribal colophons standard in digitization could create similar possibilities for digitizers’ voices to be woven into the digital objects they create, helping mitigate the problematic erasure of digitizers.

There are public-facing models of these kinds of digital scribal colophons. For instance, building on the tradition of scientific notebooks, Cultural Heritage Imaging in San Francisco has developed a protocol that makes it possible to log and analyze the steps of a digitizer. This protocol, called the Digital Lab Notebook (DLN), collects and manages data through the life cycle of a digital object, capturing context metadata such as the equipment used, locations, documents, stakeholders, and rights (see Figure 2.4). Importantly, the DLN is flexible. Users can customize input fields, adding specific context metadata about imaging teams, roles, and personnel. It can also be extended to include an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID ID) for individual workers, offering the possibility of linking an individual digitizer’s body of work together, across different projects and institutions. This kind of meticulous public record-keeping acknowledges the fact that imaging specialists might work on different projects at different institutions during their careers and that those projects can gain meaning by being linked together.

Diagram showing one method for preserving or capturing context metadata such as imaging teams, rights, and equipment.

Figure 2.4. Conceptual illustration of the Digital Lab Notebook. Users input information into DLN about imaging projects to produce Linked Open Data. Image courtesy of Cultural Heritage Imaging.

Bridget would also note that maintaining records of who did what work, when—including who worked on what digitization—preserves DH’s own disciplinary history. Writing about the Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT), Beatrix Färber meticulously identifies project workers by role and name. Among CELT’s funded PhD students, Färber names Julianne Nyhan, who went on to make visible previously invisible digitizers in early DH (519 n.9). Similarly, Matthew K. Gold recalls that his “first experience as a DHer was working as a grad student in the digitization lab of the Alderman Library Special Collections Department at the University of Virginia.”7 In a discipline where many early career researchers work in a variety of roles in DH, including scanning and digitization, preserving the contributions of digitizers is not just an issue of ethical labor. It is also about historiography. Who we work with profoundly shapes how we see, think, and the work that we go on to do. Accurately recording who does what for digital projects—including digitization—provides an essential record for understanding the past, present, and future of digital humanities.

Fostering Community

There are also informal community-building activities that can enrich collaboration between digital humanists and digitizers (although it is also important to be aware that these opportunities might not be possible, or desirable, for some workers). From paleography seminars to brown-bag DH lunches, researchers organizing campus events can invite local digitizers to join them. Instructors can request tours of digitization labs, where possible. Digitizers can be invited to speak at DH centers.8 Researchers can arrange for digitizers to attend and formally present at important conferences. Digitizers can invite researchers using their work to attend end-of-project celebrations or major milestones. For Astrid, these kinds of more collegial, more equal interactions with humanities researchers have profoundly enriched her thinking and her day-to-day work. Ultimately, dialogues between digitizer-maker and humanist-end-user empowered her to pursue graduate work and write a master’s thesis that develops a conceptual framework for evaluating objects, from initial idea through any of their subsequent states, whether mental, physical, or digital.9 For Bridget, studying the labor that goes into digitization has given her a more rigorous understanding of digital objects themselves and launched a new career trajectory. Much of her recent research is dedicated to manuscript digitization.10

In 2011, Bethany Nowviskie called for more generously crediting collaboration in digital scholarship:

Might the listing of multiple collaborators as coauthors of electronic resources, scholarly papers, and digital project reports make imaginative presentation, committed preservation, and enthusiastic promotion of work in the humanities a shared enterprise at the personal level? Can we imagine collaborations in which not only faculty members but also named librarians, administrators, non-tenure-track researchers, and technologists begin to feel a private as well as professional stake? (Nowviskie 2011, 170)

As we believe our collaboration shows, digitizers already do feel personal as well as professional stakes in how the fruits of their labors are used. What we need to develop is more of a stake in each other. The authors of “Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care” put it well:

We care for our fellow maintainers by connecting with them as caring people, and by trying to foster their personal and professional growth. Maintenance work is generally underpaid, devalued, and resistant to easy measures of success and progress. We attempt to demonstrate our care by advocating for the recognition and fair compensation of the labor of information maintainers and the value their work can produce. (Acker et al., 17)

A thank-you, a conversation, an invitation to coffee, a request to collaborate on a talk or paper—these practices can render digitizers less invisible in the digital humanities, raising the potential for richer cross-pollination and transforming and enriching the work that we all do.

Images and datasets do not just appear out of thin air: They are made by people. Digitizers might do this work for only a few months or years, or they might devote their entire careers to cultural heritage imaging. Unlike an ever-growing list of publications and presentations on an academic researcher’s curriculum vitae, digitizers’ labors are often anonymously contributed to vast digital asset management repositories, where they are then made available for browsing, research, investigation, and inspiration. Pressing back on the invisibility, seeing the work that goes unseen, is the beating heart of humanities research.

Notes

Much like digitization, this essay grew from rich collaborations beyond what traditional author credits can show. We thank, in particular, Christine Huhn, head of imaging at UC Berkeley Libraries; Hannah Frost, assistant director for digital services at Stanford University Libraries; Amy Gay, digital scholarship librarian at Binghamton University; and Nancy Um, disciplinary faculty at Binghamton University. Gratitude is also owed to Astrid’s colleagues in the Digital Production Group and Digital Library Systems and Services, including Claire Bonnepart, Tony Calavano, Peter Crandall, Katharine Dimitruk, Micaela Go, Chris Hacker, Dinah Handel, Linda Lam, Alexander Nguyen, Laura Nguyen, Andria Olson, Kazuko Onaga, John Pearson, Tanya Scutelnic, Meagan Trott, and Wayne Vanderkuil.

  1. Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS CODEX M0379. “Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis,” Stanford Digital Repository, accessed January 29, 2020, https://purl.stanford.edu/gp178js1323.

    Return to note reference.

  2. For the classic study, see Harris. See also Drabinski, Geraci, and Shirazi;, eds.; Brown; Caswell; and Shirazi.

    Return to note reference.

  3. In many instances, the digitizer may also be serving as a production coordinator and project manager, as well as performing or overseeing imaging work.

    Return to note reference.

  4. “Jarndyce Single-Volume Nineteenth-Century Novel Collection, 1823–1914,” Stanford University Libraries, accessed January 29, 2020, https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/jt466yc7169. The Jarndyce Collection was accessioned into the Stanford Literary Lab’s corpus in 2016. Mark Algee-Hewitt, email message to Bridget Whearty, January 13, 2020.

    Return to note reference.

  5. Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Manuscript Collection, MSS CODEX 1126. “Septistellium Meditationis,” Stanford Digital Repository, accessed October 31, 2020, https://purl.stanford.edu/zy841zs4569.

    Return to note reference.

  6. For one model, see Aster.

    Return to note reference.

  7. Matthew Gold, personal communication with authors, October 6, 2020.

    Return to note reference.

  8. See, for instance, Smith and Treharne.

    Return to note reference.

  9. See Smith.

    Return to note reference.

  10. See Whearty, Digital Codicology. See also Whearty, “Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace.”

    Return to note reference.

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