Introduction

What Is Digital Humanities Graduate Training, and Where Does It Happen?

In this volume, we use the term “graduate study” to denote the training that occurs after the first university degree and before the first academic appointment: what are called “graduate students” in the United States are “postgraduate students” in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the former British Commonwealth. Digital graduate study in the humanities occurs through a wide range of institutions and settings, both inside and outside formal digital humanities programs, institutes, and certificates. Our contributors work in contexts ranging from library-based institutes to academic training networks to doctoral programs awarding the PhD, MPhil, and MSc.

Graduate training in computational approaches to the humanities is not new, nor are digital humanities degrees novel, as Thaller and others note in this volume. Research centers around what would later be termed humanities computing began to be established from the early 1960s onward.1 The University of Glasgow began offering an MPhil in History and Computing in 1989, more than a decade after the launch of the first quantitative training programs for historians at the University of Chicago and the “cliometrics” controversy that followed them (Spaeth, “Research and Representation,” 120–21).2 In the 1990s, the first degree program in humanities computing was established at the University of Alberta, and other programs followed at University College London, King’s College London, McMaster University, Gröningen, Rome, and Cologne.3 Although graduate and undergraduate programs such as these were gradually coalescing, many who would go on to become active in the field were also learning the tools of their trade outside formal institutional settings. Training institutes including the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, the European Summer University in Leipzig, and the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching Institute, established initially at Maryland, have been crucial in offering a wide range of opportunities to acquire new expertise.

Where does graduate training in the digital humanities happen now? Surveying even formal teaching and research programs is a challenge, and one that the community has addressed through collaborative registries like the Digital Humanities Course Registry, a joint initiative of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) and Digital Research Infrastructure for the Humanities (DARIAH) projects. This registry gives an overview of formal teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in Europe and is designed to help potential students find the optimal course for their needs (Digital Humanities Course Registry).4 The graduate entries in the list are mostly focused on master’s-level teaching courses, with advanced research programs being less common.5 Elizabeth Hopwood and Kyle Roberts give a robust defense of one such master’s program in Brian Croxall and Diane Jakacki’s What We Teach When We Teach DH, a volume compiling essays concerned with DH pedagogy (Hopwood and Roberts, “What’s the Value of a Graduate Digital Humanities Degree?”). In 2017, Chris Alen Sula, S. E. Hackney, and Phillip Cunningham conducted an international survey of digital humanities programs and noted steady growth at both the undergraduate and graduate levels over the preceding decade. Even so, their study identified only three doctoral programs, eight master’s programs, and twelve certificate programs compared to three undergraduate programs and a further ten programs listed under “other.” The majority of digital humanities programs, they concluded, were in the form of certificates, which were much more common at the graduate level and made up nearly one-third of all the programs they uncovered, with minors, specializations, and concentrations in digital humanities also present. They found only a handful of doctoral programs, all located in the United Kingdom and Ireland (Sula et al., “Survey of Digital Humanities Programs”). A more recent compilation titled “Advanced Degrees in the Digital Humanities” lists three additional European PhD programs, one PhD program in the planning stage in India, and several interdisciplinary programs that teach digital humanities approaches, including the Texts and Technology PhD program at the University of Central Florida (Gil et al., “Advanced Degrees in Digital Humanities”). “Digital humanities,” then, is taught quite differently depending on the graduate education structures involved. As UK universities do not commonly offer certificates, for instance, the most common graduate degree in digital humanities offered by institutions is a master’s degree, which usually takes one year of full-time study to complete. Moreover, the language of “major” and “minor” is not in wide usage in European and British institutions, so graduate students proceeding to doctoral study (whether in one of the few doctoral programs that is formally designated as a PhD in digital humanities or one that is not) from undergraduate study in the United Kingdom and Europe are less likely to possess broad skills across subjects like statistics, programming, or data science compared to some of their North American counterparts. Thaller provides a valuable overview of the historical development and recurrent problems of European digital humanities degree programs in his contribution to this volume.

Beyond Europe and the Anglosphere, opportunities for formal graduate study in the digital humanities are less common, but research and community-building activities suggest that pedagogical structures may soon follow. Although there were at the time of writing no graduate programs in digital humanities in African nations, Tunde Opeibi points to “the growing and widespread interest in digital humanities scholarship and research in sub-Saharan Africa,” citing initiatives such as the launch in 2017 of the Lagos Summer School in Digital Humanities, the establishment of the first Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Lagos in Nigeria, and the Corpus of Nigeria New Media Discourse in English project (“Digitizing the Humanities,” 162, 163–64). Taking a still broader view of the African continent, Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi identifies a lopsidedness to some of the digital humanities work, deriving from the way that many of the digital projects involving Africa are initiated or executed in Europe or North America. Even where such projects are affiliated with local institutions—for instance, the Accra Mobile project at Wayne State University, which is linked with Ashesi University Ghana—the absence of digital humanities centers in African countries “tends to create a disconnect between the project and the targeted audience and users, and may reduce accessibility and incorporation into academic research circles” (Aiyegbusi, “Decolonizing Digital Humanities,” 435). Infrastructure and the difficulty of getting online mean that technologies used to teach digital methods are not readily available.

Another important factor inheres in the structure of the educational systems. In African countries, according to Aiyegbusi, these tend toward conservatism and the enforcement of standardized curricula, such that practicing digital humanities is perceived as learning to use digital tools rather than participating in a discipline. Compared to the relative flexibility of the American educational system, in which students in the humanities and social sciences can switch their major or minor multiple times, or the relative protections and latitude of German graduate study, the educational model in African nations is more rigid and compartmentalized, with students admitted to study specific courses and permitted to take a minor only in selected fields. Specializing earlier on in a student’s undergraduate education has an effect on the options open to them in their graduate careers. Aiyegbusi also points out that interdisciplinary collaboration is uncommon in the African model of research, in which lone scholars are still the norm within the humanities, though efforts are underway to promote collaboration. With Aiyegbusi, we recognize that many of the norms and practices that are taken for granted within much of the North American academy, such as the ease of collaboration and interaction with other scholars, emerge from the way North American educational systems are structured and thus do not necessarily pertain in other national and regional contexts (“Decolonizing Digital Humanities”).

In the 2020 volume Exploring Digital Humanities in India, Nirmala Menon and T. Shanmugapriya describe digital humanities work as situated “in the margins of the Indian academy,” with very few programs and courses exposing students to work in the field (“Digital Humanities in India,” 91). They observe that though digital research has experienced steady growth in areas such as the digitization of print materials, the development of databases, and the use of digital methods for preserving Indian cultural heritage, pedagogy lags; other than at a few institutions, there are only scattered interdisciplinary opportunities at the undergraduate level that bring together disciplines in combination, such as history, economics, and computer science, which offer students at public universities the opportunity to familiarize themselves with digital tools to provide new perspectives on prevailing modes of humanities research (“Digital Humanities in India,” 94–95). In Australasia, a handful of institutions including Sogang University in Korea, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the Australian National University, and the University of Western Sydney in Australia run master’s programs or postgraduate certificates in digital humanities. Much research and teaching in the field is occurring in these locations, but where institutional centers for digital work exist, they tend to be anchored in research. Teaching, especially at the postgraduate level, is something that follows only once research activity and the infrastructure for supporting teaching are well established. Moreover, as many of the contributors to this volume note, digital humanities training often occurs outside formal educational structures, which makes it more difficult to track.6

The difficulty of capturing both formal and informal opportunities for digitally inflected work at the graduate level in institutions beyond the Anglosphere illustrates the point Padmini Ray Murray and Chris Hand make: just as computing resources are unevenly distributed across the developed and developing worlds, so digital humanities needs to be transposed to fit its local exigencies (“Making Culture,” 142–43). Such transpositions, Murray and Hand argue, have the potential to enrich the varieties of digital humanities graduate study on offer: “As the digital humanities grows more visible in South Asia as in other regions, it is necessary to recognize the ways in which disciplinary practices might diverge in these places, owing to the exigencies of language, rate of technological growth and obsolescence, and different institutional and cultural histories, all of which combine to create an alternative definition of what the discipline might offer” (144). In her consideration of the African context, Aiyegbusi argues for the importance of exposing the western-centric roots of what too often passes for the “all-encompassing interdisciplinary practice” of digital humanities. Where digital humanities is understood, whether implicitly or explicitly, as a phenomenon practicable only in places with advanced technological infrastructure, this raises barriers to inclusion and comprehension (“Decolonizing Digital Humanities,” 434). Our contributors work almost entirely within the structures and institutions of the Global North, but even there, resources, training, and infrastructure are unevenly distributed. Aiyegbusi, Menon and Shanmugapriya, and others point to the necessity for a continuing inner critique of the colonial and postcolonial roots of a neocolonial digital economy, society, and educational infrastructure, a critique that digital humanists must engage as part of their disciplinary and infrastructural thinking.

Current Debates in Graduate Education in the United States

Many of our contributors, as well as two of us as editors, are located in American universities and thus respond to the unique challenges and privileges of the U.S. academic system. Although many outside the Global North perceive graduate institutions in the United States as uniquely privileged places to develop digital humanities work, digital humanities conversations internal to North America have been dominated by crisis and scarcity long before the most recent economic and viral catastrophes, like the broader conversation on graduate education and precarity around it. Humanities graduate programs in the United States have long been trapped within contradictory demands for legitimacy, selectivity, and prestige. Three generations of academics have entered into a system still premised on the continuation of the mid-twentieth-century boom in academic positions. Elsewhere, graduate reform has been a live issue in the last two decades, after the beginning of the Bologna graduate standardization process in Europe and the growth of new degree-granting institutions throughout Asia.7

In the United States, by contrast, reform has only recently been taken seriously, often in response to student activism. In the U.S. academy, selectivity and research prestige were the goals of graduate programs formed in the twentieth century on the model of older elite institutions and against demands for democratic access to teaching or career-oriented degrees.8 Those acculturated and employed within those graduate programs naturally envisioned the highest achievement of academic employment to be teaching selectively educated and admitted graduate students oriented toward research, thus recreating while mastering the conditions of their own academic maturation. Against those demands for selective, research-oriented students and programs stand the continuing call for public justifications and the broadening of career outcomes to include alternative, public sector, and nonacademic careers. The mid-twentieth-century boom in college-aged populations temporarily squared the circular contradictions between selectivity, prestige, and democracy, enabling programs to be at the same time highly selective, democratically responsive, and highly productive of new professors and new programs. In the United States in particular, public investment in higher education was tightly linked to the expanding white middle classes that were its primary beneficiaries, a link that has slowly come undone.9 Continued if fitful expansion in higher education over the last three decades, along with a boom in international students in Anglophone university systems, allowed many of these contradictions to go unchallenged. Yet in the wake of the most recent global financial crises, state divestments, and then a global pandemic, the circle has slowly been unsquared without the tensions of the essential contradictions within graduate education undergoing any clear resolution. The collapse has given rise to a literature, inside and outside the digital humanities conversations, on these intersecting crises that we recall briefly below, as it provides an essential context for many of our contributors.

Current discussions about reform in graduate education differently negotiate the tensions between selectivity, research prestige, and democratic justifications. Only relatively recently have other entries in the list—student experiences, outcomes, and pathways—been seriously considered in books on graduate education reform, a fact that is itself an indictment of the present system.10 The contributors to this book continue a vibrant digital humanities conversation about pedagogy and labor, thinking deeply about graduate and postdoctoral student outcomes, identities, and the meanings attached to programs and degrees by those within them.

Katina Rogers is one of our most thoughtful writers on those identities and meanings and one of the best critics of the institutional structures that produce them. Her emphasis, both in chapter 1 in this volume and in her book Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, centers on the close examination of the assumptions and structures of graduate study and how changing these might lead to meaningful careers outside the academy. “One of the most important things that faculty members can do is help students feel more comfortable talking about career pathways from the moment they begin their program,” Rogers argues (78). This open conversation, then, needs to be reaffirmed in a number of ways: meaningful credit for collaborative, public-oriented work; credit for interdisciplinary projects; reinvestment in teaching; and a public list of all work placements for their graduates, not just the familiar tenure-track placement list.11 Rogers joins other recent commentators like Anna Kornbluh, Michael Bérubé, and Jennifer Ruth who enjoin us to “reshape and strengthen” the structures of the academy from within rather than reiterate crisis talk, analysis, and catastrophizing without systematic organizing and action (Rogers, 128; Kornbluh, “Critical Building”; Bérubé and Ruth, Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom).

Graduate education in the digital humanities has often been seen externally and internally as one clear path to multiplying graduate outcomes and thus “usable futures.” We affirm this function of digital humanities graduate education as an essential part of the many pathways our graduates take inside and outside the university. Digital humanities graduates, including the contributors to this volume, have entered into a variety of career paths inside and outside the academy. But it is clear, on the evidence of the essays in this volume and other writings, that not all forms of digital graduate education are equally usable or viable. Outside a few centers of intensive involvement in digital humanities work, students often face the prospect of isolation or outright hostility to their interests, as Sean Weidman’s essay in chapter 16 in this volume notes, and temporary supports like the Mellon program fellowships—addressed by Daniel Gorman Jr., Erin Francisco Opalich, Madeline Ullrich, and Alexander Zawacki in chapter 25 in this volume—are well known for not changing institutional conditions. Even within programs featuring strong digital teaching and research components, graduate students face enormous obstacles to serious engagement with digital methods, from increased time to degree to incomprehension of their projects and interests. Nor are all advisors able to help. Even if advisors wished to take up all of the excellent suggestions of Rogers and Leonard Cassuto, most have neither the training nor the ability to advise students on career paths that look fundamentally different from their own. The internalized disdain for “alternate” or pragmatic careers for graduate students can stand in the way of the most obvious steps, such as including university career services in mandatory graduate introductory sessions (on the model of Stanford or Michigan State), maintaining lists of all alumni with all their career outcomes, and opening an account with the most common professional networking services.12 These moves outside the internal economy of the university do not preclude us from addressing the economics of the university and our place within it, resisting managerialism and the private capture of publicly funded research, and advocating for graduate unions and labor actions.

Few commentators on the “graduate mess” are interested in simply cutting down on graduate programs and enrollments. Rogers’s final recommendation in chapter 1 in this volume, in the context of the massive losses caused by both the pandemic and racialized violence within her former institution (the City University of New York), is simple: stop what we are doing now, and refuse the return to “normal.” Many graduate programs indeed stopped admissions during the crisis, but not all will reconsider what they are doing and why. Both Rogers and Cassuto argue that we should not cut PhD admissions too far, for various reasons: PhDs have a salutary effect on society; cutting admissions will not actually change the precarious conditions of academic labor more generally; and cutting programs will lead to an antidemocratic narrowing of the professoriate to products of only the wealthiest institutions, just like the bad old days. Marc Bousquet and others have noted that most contingent faculty (at community colleges in particular) hold the MA, not the PhD, though this is not so much an argument for new PhDs as for strengthening master’s programs at institutions that take that degree seriously.13 Sidonie Smith reminds us that many applicants who were working-class, first-generation women, or students of color would never have had a chance under the old elites-only doctoral model (Manifesto for the Humanities). All writers agree that doctoral students have a beneficial effect on the world. What remains unclear is how graduate training should be structured to benefit those students in return.

We agree that the value of graduate study in the humanities must be actively defended, especially in the face of blunt external attacks on the teaching of critical race theory, academic freedom, and the histories of race and colonialism. Digital humanities training contributes to a variety of public goods, from public history projects to a critical understanding of digital culture and society. Simply reducing and defunding graduate programs eliminates a central pillar of our work and our disciplines and concedes, in advance, the battle over public legitimacy; moreover, a reduction of internal programs fails to address the larger structural questions of university privatization, precarity, administrative capture, and public defunding. The question remains how to restructure and strengthen programs in a way that supports both the value of the humanities and the value of our students.

Programmatic suggestions for doctoral reform are legion, in this volume and elsewhere: move to a six-year PhD, as recommended in 2014 by the Modern Language Association’s Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature; imagine what it would mean to create a three-year “professional” PhD (Menand, “How to Make a PhD Matter”); envision a “20-Year Dissertation” in which one student’s work would be placed within the context of a much larger ongoing project (Presner, “Welcome to the 20-Year Dissertation”). Less common are attempts to follow through on those reforms, though significant funds have been spent by the Mellon Foundation and others in the attempt.14 In the midst of the pandemic, many programs did take the position advocated by Rogers and others and paused graduate admissions. That opens the space to think about what should come next.

Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch have called for a “public-facing PhD” that would turn outward rather than inward: toward career diversity for graduate students, toward public humanities, toward the public and private sectors, and toward what they conceive as a “liberal-arts” graduate degree (New PhD, 13). They propose an ambitious agenda, from expanding the outcomes of graduate education to changing degree requirements and advising norms. Less clear is how to accomplish their ambitious agenda or why graduate students would need a second such liberal arts degree. Crucially, Cassuto and Weisbuch provide a detailed examination of why previous moments of PhD reform largely failed. Learning from mistakes is a key component of the movement toward usable futures, one that Donna Bussell, Tena Helton, Thaller, and others take up in this volume. Many of our contributors implicitly or explicitly support a main contention of Cassuto, Weisbuch, and Rogers: that career diversity and planning must be addressed explicitly by faculty at the beginning of a graduate career and then reaffirmed by faculty advising. Finally, there is value in departments and advisers showcasing and affirming the diversity of actual routes taken by their students.

Cassuto and Weisbuch approach the question of graduate futures primarily from the “administrative reformer” point of view rather than as a question of academic labor. Yet the question of academic labor presents itself urgently when considering the crisis from the bottom up rather than the reverse. Certainly, working to open new outcomes for graduate students in our programs, including those in the enormous public-sector and academic-adjacent or “alt-ac” labor markets with which humanities programs have some overlap, has the potential to bring many benefits. However, as Natalia Cecire cautions, rather than being content with alt-ac jobs as “shovel-ready projects just waiting to put our PhDs back to work,” we need to think carefully about what order of jobs we are imagining. For Cecire, those in digital humanities are well positioned to understand how such jobs form part of the postindustrial precaritization of academic labor, seen for instance in “the rise of contingent and modular work, interstitiality, the hegemony of immaterial labor, the monetization of affect” and more, and have a responsibility to critique and change, rather than reproduce, such practices (“Introduction”). In their discussion of whiteness and labor in academic libraries, Anne Cong-Huyen and Kush Patel offer one such critique, flagging the “silences, absences, erasures, and quiet traumas” that have accompanied their journeys from PhDs in English and architecture and subsequent postdoctoral fellowships to “Brown digital humanities–adjacent librarians” (“Precarious Labor,” 265, 264). They note how exclusionary politics and practices have hampered efforts to diversify digital humanities, with diversity initiatives too often grounded in precarious labor practices. The temporary nature of posts such as resident librarians, fellowships, and postdocs means that postholders do not have the opportunity to make sustained changes, and precarious jobs are largely limited to U.S. citizens and permanent residents (Cong-Huyen and Patel, “Precarious Labor,” 264). The rise of a new precarious class of academic workers must be openly addressed and redressed, not only by faculty with permanent positions but in solidarity with members of the precarious faculty majority themselves. Here the growing field of critical university studies is important as is the practical experience of renewed academic labor activism for graduate student unions and adjunct faculty in recent years.15

Graduate student workers are educating themselves in a system that also employs and frequently exploits their labor. At the same time, that education has real individual and systemic benefits we must defend. The futures of graduate education arise out of these constitutive contradictions of “student labor” itself. Our volume hopes to contribute to the discussion of student labor practices along with the central problems of digital humanities education confronted by recent volumes in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series. Many of our contributors think through the problem of the emotional, affective, and self-organizational work that goes into academic self-presentation: this kind of (largely) immaterial labor both converges with and diverges from the forms of self-branding and self-presentation required by the neoliberal economies of precarity more generally. Such labor is of course also gendered, classed, localized, and raced, as Sethunya Mokoko’s essay in chapter 18 in this volume on self-policing in digital rhetoric demonstrates. We invite our readers and writers to think through the forms, structures, and solidarities that mediate digital graduate education within broader social and economic transformations while not losing sight of the particular positions from which our contributors speak.

Specific positions and institutional arrangements matter here, as does clarity about the changes underway, so this volume advocates for arguments about the actual systems of graduate education that exist, not their imagined others. Despite the common wisdom that tenure and permanent contracts are withering away, for example, in the United States, the number of degree-granting institutions with a tenure system actually increased in the decade from 2007 to 2017, especially in public systems; this occurred even as the total numbers of contingent faculty increase and the conditions of tenure have come under attack.16 Fixed-term contracts are on the rise everywhere, yet the terms of those contracts can be challenged by collective actions. Graduate systems vary dramatically across national and linguistic contexts, and they interact unevenly and occasionally: even as the European PhD system has moved closer to the Anglo-American model (as Thaller notes in chapter 6 in this volume), Cassuto and Weisbuch advocate for a move to small-group tutorials for graduate students, like those employed at undergraduate level at Oxford and Cambridge, in response to diminishing class sizes and cohorts. By putting inhabitants of widely different academic worlds and disciplines in conversation, this volume hopes to deprovincialize the discussions of digital graduate education, on the one hand, while on the other hand emphasizing the local situations and positionalities of its contributors and arguments. We echo Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, the editors of The Digital Black Atlantic, in acknowledging that assumptions anchored in the white and predominantly Anglophone cultures of the Global North have had an overwhelming and undue influence in shaping the epistemologies of the field (Josephs and Risam, “Introduction,” xiii), and if this is true of the research out of which an at times hegemonic vision of digital humanities has emerged, it also holds for the institutions, policies, and practices that have shaped the way digital humanities is taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Both digital futures and graduate study should be understood here as always in the plural; as a set of institutionalized practices and beliefs located within particular disciplines, practices, and identities; as racialized, classed, and gendered; and as differently structured by dominance in the Global South and North. Nonetheless, and as a result of that history of domination, graduate study in the humanities shares a surprisingly solid core of habits and practices across identities, national boundaries, and political orientations.17 One of the aspirations of this volume is to think about, and not just within, such habits and practices.

The Structure of This Book

This volume is organized into six sections. Part 1, “Positions and Provocations,” offers a set of concrete proposals and provocations on shaping the digital futures of graduate studies in the humanities, understood as plural and in a useful set of contradictions and tensions. Rogers notes that power hierarchies in the academy can exacerbate the way care work is rendered invisible and uncompensated, thus erasing a burden that often falls disproportionately on women, especially women of color. She advocates for shifting from a system that is oriented toward prestige to one that is instead rooted in generosity, a shift that requires not only a significant change in values but a change in the structures that underlie and have proceeded from those values. Alison Booth, the director of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, argues for an expansive vision of graduate studies in the humanities, but one in which practical difficulties and false binaries are addressed head-on rather than being ignored so as to offer a “Digital-AND-Humanities” model with the potential to reinvent and reimagine the way universities organize graduate education. Brandon Walsh, the head of student programs at the Scholars’ Lab, makes the case for a digital humanities practice that flattens power hierarchies in the academy by understanding administrative interventions as pedagogical acts and finding ways to connect student projects with community action and activism. In the final essay of this section, Travis Bartley advocates for a vision of the public university as public infrastructure and a version of graduate study that would refuse the privatization of public education in the neoliberal academy, instead affirming its role as an infrastructural resource for the common good.

The authors featured in Part 2, “Histories and Forms,” offer a reconsideration of the past and the present of graduate education to examine institutional and curricular variations within digital humanities programs and certificates. The first two essays explore the reasons why digital humanities programs may fail and offer guidance as to how their long-term sustainability can be ensured. Bussell and Helton share their experiences at the University of Illinois Springfield, exploring how a combination of institutional, geographical, and curricular challenges were arrayed against the dedication and energy of faculty members tasked with setting up a digital humanities program. Offering a longue durée perspective on a similar set of issues in the European context, Thaller looks back at the recurring cycles of hype and deflation in humanities computing degrees. He argues that unless newly established digital humanities programs can maintain the long-term institutional support that makes them more than a means of learning a series of tools that happen to be popular in the moment, they risk suffering the same fate as their predecessors and disappearing. Local context emerges as a key factor in Maria José Afanador-Llach and Camilo Martínez’s account of establishing the first graduate program in digital humanities in Latin America; they describe building a program from the ground up without an established departmental home while initiating student projects that reach across other domains, such as law and activism, to address concerns specific to local and regional communities. In the final essays in this section, Stuart Dunn explores how the rapid pivot to online teaching required by the pandemic has the potential to transform our conceptualization of the use of technology in the classroom, and Stephen Robertson evaluates the differences between teaching a certificate in digital public humanities in person and offering the same content in an online setting.

Graduate education has been an intermittent concern of the field’s often boisterous conversations around pedagogy, as Croxall and Jakacki note, yet the goals and rationales of graduate pedagogy often remain implicit in those debates.18 The essays in Part 3, “Pedagogical Implications,” consider these goals and rationales alongside the ways in which graduate students are introduced to a wide range of digital methodologies and theories and the implications of different learning and teaching approaches. In many programs, the graduate research methods seminar is a critical building block in teaching students how to think, research, and write as scholars. Laura Estill argues that as more of the resources that humanities researchers encounter are digital in form, these classes must be adapted to equip students with the skills they need to critically engage with digital materials in the same way a researcher might when faced with any other unfamiliar resource. Another argument frequently made by proponents of digital humanities programs is that their benefits include transferable technical skills and experience creating digital forms that make students more marketable for academic and nonacademic jobs, a claim taken up by authors elsewhere in this volume. One such form that boasts increasing popularity is project-based learning, in which students demonstrate their mastery of digital methods by creating their own digital projects. Cecily Raynor evaluates the effectiveness of these projects in achieving this mastery and proposes ways of assessing the quality of project work being done at the graduate level. Brady Krien proposes a series of best practices aimed at strengthening the developmental infrastructures that institutions need to effectively integrate digital methods training into graduate education, as opposed to an approach in which such training is “jerry-rigged.” Mentoring is central to Krien’s vision of a more equitable, more diverse, and more collaborative vision of graduate education. Laura Crossley, Amanda Regan, and Joshua Casmir Catalano similarly posit that there exists an inherent tension between such digital methodological training and the requirements of a degree program, a tension that is often resolved by prioritizing the needs of the project. Drawing on their own experiences at George Mason University, Crossley, Regan, and Catalano suggest a series of best practices that can be adopted by program and project directors to ensure that their relationship with students is mutually beneficial and nonexploitative. Finally, Kayla Shipp argues that framing project-based pedagogies as sites for skill building puts students at risk for inefficiency in their careers, given that this work prioritizes invisible and isolated labor. Instead, she suggests, digital humanities training should emphasize creative scholarship that conveys to students that what should be valued is not simply their technical prowess but the objects that they create.

Part 4, “Forum on Graduate Pathways,” centers the experiences of graduate students themselves, with the contributors to this forum bringing with them a range of positions, disciplines, and concerns across geographic and institutional boundaries. They give a vivid sense of what it is like to work on doctoral projects both within and outside institutional structures for supporting digital work, providing concrete examples of the difficulties encountered as well as glimpses of how these problems might be addressed as different pathways through the field are taken. Such challenges range from the practical—seen in the difficulties encountered by Hoyeol Kim in accessing the kind of funding and technical infrastructure that are more prevalent in computer science than humanities departments and which facilitate research collaborations—to the ideological. This latter is seen, for example, in the opposition born of disciplinary entrenchment articulated in Weidman’s account of working on a digital humanities PhD from within an English department and in the structural racism repeatedly encountered by Mokoko on the way to, and within, the academic institutions that helped him to equip himself to use digital media for activist work with communities in Lesotho. As with Kim, Weidman, and Mokoko, Maria Alberto’s account of working at the intersection of the digital and the humanities reinforces the way that graduate-level research in the humanities is often based on a model of the lone scholar, though her essay illustrates that even a modest level of support in the form of a fellowship for several months can go a long way in fostering sustainability for digital humanities research undertaken by individuals who are not part of preexisting projects or well-established communities or collaborations. The remaining four essays in this section move from personal and individual experiences to incorporate reflections on structural and systemic relationships. Olivia Quintanilla and Jeanelle Horcasitas chart several barriers to graduate success that, though increasingly and widely acknowledged, remain unsolved, including the effects of financial pressures and precarious employment conditions on graduate students and the struggle to build a community of digitally minded fellow humanists in institutional contexts such as community colleges where data-rich research may not be a high priority. Quintanilla and Horcasitas’s account is also a testament to what can be achieved through student-led initiatives, something that is also explored by Sara Mohr and E. L. Meszaros in their account of using a digital publication to both carry out and train others in public humanities work. These essays are “where the rubber hits the road” in terms of the oft-proclaimed need for digital humanists to do interdisciplinary work, learn skills in project management and collaborative working, and connect their work to the communities and publics beyond the academy in a world in which economic forces and institutional cultures do not necessarily support or reward this kind of work. Agnieszka Backman, Quinn Dombrowski, Sabrina Grimberg, and Melissa Hosek acknowledge the difficulty of balancing these many obligations when involved in digital projects, and their use of a role-playing game as a device for interrogating what is at stake in this balancing act connects back to Rogers’s argument about taking seriously the need to acknowledge the importance of care and understanding one’s own time and energy as a limited resource. Their account also supports the arguments advanced by Alex Wermer-Colan to demonstrate the importance of structures like libraries and digital humanities centers in providing crucial support for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars doing interdisciplinary digital work.

The contributors to Part 5: Infrastructures and Institutions raise questions about where the responsibility for driving change lies, whether with institutions, funding bodies, research infrastructures, graduate students themselves, or elsewhere. As they do so, these authors articulate shared pathways and experiences that those involved in graduate studies are well advised to learn from, some of which are congruent with the pathways showcased in Part 4. Natalia Ermolaev, Rebecca Munson, and Meredith Martin point to the value of incorporating project management into graduate student programs, not only for allowing students to think critically about process, collaboration, and contingency but also for what can be learned about the intellectual, ethical, and social dimensions of running and sustaining digital research projects. Heather Richards-Rissetto and Adrian S. Wisnicki draw on their experiences of the digital humanities program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to highlight some of the factors necessary to ensure its success and to assess the relative value of an “agile” approach—where students are offered a menu of curricular options that changes each year—versus that of a fixed curriculum. Although the latter has significant benefits, Richards-Rissetto and Wisnicki argue that an agile curriculum can more effectively shift students’ focus from the classroom to real-world applications of digitally informed skills of critical thinking. Opalich, Gorman, Ullrich, and Zawacki explore what it looks like when graduate students themselves take up the work of integrating digital humanities into graduate programs across a range of disciplines, within the different constraints of working at a single institution with the benefit of Mellon funding, institutional legitimacy, and a ready-made community of fellow graduate students also using digital approaches. The importance of incorporating research methodologies from a range of disciplines is similarly the focus of Gabriel Viehhauser, Malte Heckelen, Claus-Michael Schlesinger, and Peggy Bockwinkel’s essay, which uses feedback from students in the master’s program in digital humanities at the University of Stuttgart to argue that transdisciplinary collaborations greatly enrich both digital humanities research and learning. Jennifer Edmond, Vicky Garnett, and Toma Tasovac consider graduate training in the humanities from a position outside the university, framing it in terms of professional “acculturation” and presenting the work of DARIAH in the European context as their example. They consider the role that large research infrastructures like DARIAH play in fostering experiential and student-led learning in a way that goes beyond just skills-based development. In the final essay of this section, Jacob Richter and Hannah Taylor propose that humanities programs embrace what they term hybrid infrastructures to better nurture practices, sensibilities, and orientations enabled by technology rather than focusing primarily on the technologies themselves. Underlying all these essays is a sharp awareness of both the necessity for graduate students to develop the skills needed by the ever-shifting goalposts of the academic job market and the extent to which different institutional configurations are serving, or failing to serve, their students in helping them to meet these expectations.

The essays in Part 6, “Disciplinary Contexts and Translations,” examine how the task of shaping the digital futures of graduate education is inflected differently in distinct disciplinary configurations. Scholars at different career stages assess the challenges and opportunities of undertaking and facilitating graduate study outside established boundaries. They identify interdisciplinary exchange as one of the core strengths and drivers of transformation of graduate study in the digital humanities but assert that the path to successful research, pedagogy, and collaboration across disciplines is far from straightforward. Investigating interdisciplinary possibilities that arise where humanities fields intersect with computer science and information science, Ted Underwood and Benjamin Lee consider the different backgrounds and motivations that graduate students and educators bring to the encounter and the differences in what they take away. Lee gives a graduate student’s perspective on how benefits flow both ways in such collaborations, pointing to the instrumentality of humanities questions and research paradigms for computer scientists in, for instance, alerting them to the ethical implications of their data analysis. Underwood, observing that the value of collaboration within digital humanities has been predominantly articulated by those in the humanities, turns the question around to examine it from the point of view of information science. He puts forward the iSchool model as one example of how these perspectives may be integrated and how robust graduate training can be put in place to serve a range of constituencies. Demonstrating how the exigencies of the local context shaped the development of the United States’s first PhD program in digital history at Clemson University, Catalano, Pamela E. Mack, and Douglas Seefeldt offer a rationale for a dedicated doctoral program instead of the more common model of a certificate program or institute. Finally, Serenity Sutherland argues for the value of media studies as a field that offers access to theoretical and conceptual tools for a better understanding of the relationship between the analog and the digital, an understanding that boasts the potential for wider applicability in other disciplines. The notion of remediation, Sutherland suggests, might serve as a bridge between subfields in the digital humanities, helping to show that rather than displacing some disciplines or rendering them obsolete, interdisciplinary digital work has the power to transform and reenergize them. The volume ends with a reflective Afterword by Ken Price, codirector of the Center for Digital Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Our volume poses a number of questions not fully addressed here but which we hope others will take up in the years ahead. What does it mean to address racism, sexism, class bias, and settler coloniality not only at the level of critical discourse but also in our structures of graduate teaching and training? How should practitioners position themselves in relation to the new paradigms of data science and data and society interdisciplinary programs? What effect will large language models and generative AI have on graduate writing and training? What does sustainability look like in graduate studies, in both human and environmental terms? How do we create the new forms, supports, solidarities, and models of writing in public that are needed as new media forms and platforms evolve? Our contributors raise these questions and many others in the essays that follow. We need to attend to their thinking in order to move beyond familiar habits and into the new pathways ahead.

Notes

1. 1. For histories of the first decades of digital humanities work, see Nyhan and Flinn, Computation and the Humanities, 1–19.

2. 2. For a brief account of the cliometrics controversy, see Schmidt, “Two Volumes.”

3. 3. For a brief history of humanities computing, see the canonical account by Hockey, “History of Humanities Computing.”

4. 4. See also Wissik et al., “Teaching Digital Humanities Around the World.”

5. 5. At the time of writing, this directory listed eighty-four programs at the bachelor’s level, 164 at the master’s level, eight research master’s courses, and seventeen doctoral programs, as well as stand-alone courses, summer schools, and continuing education programs across nineteen European countries; see Digital Humanities Course Registry, https://dhcr.clarin-dariah.eu/. A second resource is the more informal listing of advanced degrees in digital humanities maintained by Columbia University’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities. At the time of writing, this resource lists only nine PhD programs—eight in Europe and one in the U.S., with a further one in development in India, but the list of master’s programs is much longer; see Gil et al., “Advanced Degrees in Digital Humanities.”

6. 6. Souvik Mukherjee gives the example of the extensive Bichitra project, the online variorum edition of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose project team, led by Sukanta Chaudhuri, was composed almost entirely of “young scholars with good Master’s degrees, nearly always in the humanities but with formal or informal computer training.” See Mukherjee, “Digital Humanities, or What You Will,” 112.

7. 7. See Bitusikova, “Reforming Doctoral Education in Europe” as well as chapter 6 (Thaller) and chapter 27 (Edmond, Garnett, and Tasovac) in this volume. On the enormous growth of doctoral programs in China in particular, see Shin et al., “Challenges for Doctoral Education in East Asia.”

8. 8. Cassuto tells this story in relation to graduate education at Michigan and Berkeley in relation to Harvard in particular; see Cassuto, Graduate School Mess, 33–34.

9. 9. Newfield’s books are the essential point of reference here: see, for example, Newfield, Unmaking the Public University.

10. 10. As Cassuto shows, at no point in the twentieth-century development of U.S. graduate systems were student outcomes seriously considered, and programs that might have a more democratic and practical orientation were usually deprecated; see Cassuto, Graduate School Mess, 44.

11. 11. On the final point, Rogers notes, “It is not uncommon for department websites to unceremoniously drop the names of their graduates who step into jobs outside the familiar ranks of assistant, associate, full—especially since only faculty job placements count toward program rankings. . . . Since graduate students excel at reading between the lines, the silences speak loudly.” See Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, 4.

12. 12. See a description of Michigan State’s PREP (planning, resilience, engagement, professionalism) initiative in Cassuto, Graduate School Mess, 126–27.

13. 13. Bérubé notes that as of 2004, the last year of the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, 57.3 percent of nontenure-track faculty held the MA as their highest degree in four-year institutions and 76.2 percent in two-year institutions; see Bérubé, “Among the Majority.” More recent surveys do not track the terminal degree of faculty at all institutions, but for degree-granting two-year and four-year institutions, the US Digest of Education Statistics 2018 notes that over the previous decade, “the number of full-time staff increased by 11 percent, while the number of part-time staff was 8 percent higher in 2017 than in 2007. Most of the increase in part-time staff was due to increases in the number of part-time faculty (8 percent) and graduate assistants (17 percent) during this time period.” See Snyder et al., Digest of Education Statistics 2018, 209.

14. 14. See Cassuto and Weisbuch’s thorough review of the last decades in doctoral reform in New PhD, 32–90.

15. 15. Here we refer to work such as that by the New Faculty Majority and the Coalition of Academic Labor along with the new graduate student unions at Columbia (GWC-UAW 2210) and elsewhere. On the academic literature, see William, “An Emerging Field Deconstructs Academe.” Critical university studies now has a number of online bibliographies and a series of books under that rubric at both Johns Hopkins Press and Palgrave.

16. 16. “The percent of institutions with tenure systems increased from 49 percent in 2007–08 to 55 percent in 2017–18. The percentage of public institutions with a tenure system increased from 71 percent in 2007–08 to 75 percent in 2017–18.” Snyder et al, Digest of Education Statistics 2018, 210.

17. 17. As Cassuto notes, the rigidity of graduate training extends far beyond the humanities into the social sciences and bench sciences, where particular forms of PhD training, admission, and the “graduate funding package,” innovated by Johns Hopkins University in imitation of the German research university in 1876, still live on largely unquestioned; see Graduate School Mess, 28–29.

18. 18. See the comprehensive discussion of the history of digital humanities pedagogy in Croxall and Jakacki, “Introduction.”

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