On the Periphery

Despite the stark economic reality for graduate education in the humanities and social sciences today, curricula and programming for master’s and doctoral studies at research universities in the United States still tend to treat pedagogical, administrative, and technical skills as subordinate to specialized knowledge for disciplinary scholarship. Even if graduate programs increasingly promote interdisciplinary methodologies, they all too often socialize students into a sense of professional success bound by traditional academic career paths. The aspects of doctoral training most pertinent to postgraduate work, meanwhile, are often delegated to peripheral centers beyond the confines of departmental programs.

My postdoctoral experience in one such peripheral center, Temple University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center (now known as the Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio), persuaded me of the potential for libraries and other interdepartmental centers to provide unique types of support for humanities and social science graduate students looking to experiment with new methods and approaches. These peripheral spaces and their often marginal programming, especially when focused on digital methods, can present new opportunities for students to contribute to interdisciplinary projects while learning unfamiliar theories, techniques, and skills. This multifaceted graduate training proves applicable not just to students’ disciplinary research but to a wide range of career paths in library science, education, data engineering, software development, journalism, publishing, marketing, administration, nonprofit activism, and social justice organizing. While working in this “peripheral center” alongside generous and inventive librarians and archivists, professors and instructors, technicians and developers, and undergraduate and graduate students, I have been inspired by recent scholarship on digital pedagogy and design approaches that foreground labor and process to forge inclusive spaces for diverse disciplinary perspectives and methodological approaches.1

In this brief chapter, I reflect on lessons learned during two projects developed out of my postdoctoral research between 2018 and 2020 in a large public university’s main academic library and its evolving spaces for collaborative, process-based, pedagogically-oriented research. The first project involved working with doctoral students in media studies, communication studies, information science, and political science to web scrape YouTube comment threads about broadcast news videos from 2018–20 that spectacularized Trump’s mythic wall on the United States–Mexico border. The second project involved students from fields as different as marketing and art history, focusing on a holistic approach to the data life cycle through the digitization and curation of science fiction books from Temple Libraries’ special collections. Both projects’ openness to students’ process-based output (selecting materials for digitization, curating datasets, testing software, developing code, discussing use cases, running workshops, and publishing tutorials and scholarship) offers models for those seeking to address the fragmented nature of the graduate experience by bridging disparate departments and centers for research and teaching.

Nearly every digital project I have advised or coordinated at Temple and beyond has required supporting faculty and students from wide-ranging disciplines engaged with the problem of transforming real-world phenomena into data that is amenable to computational modeling and visualization. Depending on their disciplinary background and training, students (and faculty) bring different, and often opposing, questions and approaches to this principal challenge. Early in our exploratory discussions for the web scraping YouTube project, the students’ theoretical frameworks and methodological leanings often seemed to conflict, not least because their disciplinary training rarely introduced jargon and theories from foreign fields and frameworks. The participating students came from social science fields with concentrations in new media and communication technologies, but they did not possess a shared theoretical background from foundational perspectives like the Frankfurt School, semiotics and structuralism, or recent work in critical algorithm studies and cultural analytics. Students likewise had received minimal prior exposure or organized training in the digital methods (web scraping and text mining) necessary for robust empirical research bridging qualitative and quantitative modes of analyzing new media.

Many graduate students from across the disciplines came to Temple University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center precisely in search of these unfamiliar theories and methods, often expressing wonder and excitement to discover what is available beyond the parameters of their department. With this in mind, I sought to devise collaborative projects for graduate students to work on without predetermined hypotheses or methodologies. Through the iterative process of exploring the source material and experimenting with software for data harvesting and analysis and through discussion of what interests we shared, what complementary skills we could offer, what time and energy was available to us, and what we wanted to learn by the end of the project, we homed in on the most relevant theoretical frameworks, hermeneutic approaches, and digital methods for exploring our multifaceted research questions.

When students from different disciplines engage in informal working groups and collaborative, exploratory digital projects, the friction between their perspectives can become surprisingly generative, especially for thinking through what is lost in translation when multimodal, participatory platforms like YouTube or mass-market books of the “paperback revolution” are interpreted as data points for statistical analysis. At this early stage of the science fiction digitization project, graduate students had the opportunity to learn hands-on the intricacies of translating scanned images of books into machine-readable text through optical character recognition, testing the affordances of automated and manual methods for correcting errors and improving the quality of digitized texts. The difficulties of transforming such data brought into relief the problems of labor endemic to most digital projects, as students frequently serve as siloed research assistants and are rarely given proper attribution or invited into project management decisions.

Like the web scraping project, the science fiction digitization project was devised so that each student could work on each part of the project, learning every aspect of both the data life cycle and the cultural import of these underrepresented literary works. Each student received opportunities and encouragement to pursue their own research born out of the collaborative project, with history students studying digital mapping of alternate history narratives, art students exploring machine learning and augmented reality for remediating old book covers, and marketing and law students thinking through the curation of proprietary data for researchers. By foregrounding the labor involved in wrangling data for analysis, students were put in a position to take agency in the design and scope of the collaborative project and make decisions to sacrifice scan quality for the sake of developing a representative corpus at scale. Along the way, students gained the confidence to critique large-scale studies that hid the labor behind their data.

The challenges provoked by these digital projects consistently went beyond the discipline-specific demands of the students’ graduate programs in ways that benefited their dissertation research, their growth as scholars, teachers, and technical practitioners, and their hopes and plans for their professional futures. The pedagogical approach integral to such collaborative, cross-disciplinary research involves more than just allowing students to take an active role in establishing the project’s research goals and methodological approaches. Such pedagogical strategies also require teaching digital literacy by foregrounding the unlearning of mastery and the importance of being open to making mistakes and having patience for troubleshooting.

For graduate students trained in scholarly research through reading secondary sources, mining archives, and conducting fieldwork, there is something almost uncanny about learning the necessary practice in digital scholarship of debugging technological issues. The process of finding appropriate software for solving problems, searching online for the solutions to error messages, perusing insular discussion forums, and fixing infrastructure that seems irrelevant to the task at hand can prove frustrating for students burdened by imposter syndrome and a fear of failure. A collaborative, playful approach to solving these granular problems, along with the support net of technicians and instructors found in peripheral centers for digital pedagogy and research, can prove crucial to guiding students toward a suitable mindset and workflow for innovative work in the humanities and social sciences today.

At peripheral centers for interdisciplinary research with emerging technologies, collaborative digital projects also offer valuable opportunities for graduate students to make tangible contributions to wider social problems beyond the scope of their graduate programs’ explicit demands and implicit leanings. Such peripheral centers, especially in libraries and related digital scholarship centers, are positioned to leverage disciplinary approaches and technological innovation for responding to pressing crises, be it disaster relief through projects like the “mapathon” for Puerto Rico organized at over one hundred digital scholarship centers after Hurricane Maria in 2017, or media studies projects that can analyze, as we sought to do, the spectacle of Trump’s wall on YouTube. Collaborative projects such as the Nimble Tents Toolkit and SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online) that deploy peripheral institutional resources and emerging methods for rapid-response relief offer an underexplored model for decentering the traditional goals of academic work toward practical purposes. Peripheral infrastructures, and the faculty, staff, and students who build and run their services, can open spaces in higher education for students to critique technologies’ embedded biases and reverse engineer hardware and software toward the analytical task of ideology critique and the restorative work of remedying social inequality in its myriad forms.

It remains difficult to generalize about the problems facing higher education in the coming years, but the failure of colleges and universities to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic is not unrelated to the resistance within departmental structures to ensuring graduate training remains relevant to the changing nature of the job market. In the twenty-first century, peripheral, extradepartmental centers for research and teaching, especially those focused on integrating emerging technologies into academic work, have offered uniquely fertile soil for developing alternative scholarly and pedagogical approaches. These varied centers and labs can prove relatively agile at pivoting in the face of constant flux, attuned to the demands of nonacademic industries and careers and suited to nourishing graduate students seeking interdisciplinary, collaborative, and multifaceted learning opportunities.

Now more than ever, academic administrators, directors, and professors in traditional departments have an opportunity to take stock and learn from these institutions and initiatives. Doing so, however, may require changing funding priorities and organizational models, bringing lessons from the periphery into the center, and decentering what has been taken for granted in graduate training for too long. Such change will likewise necessitate that academic departments, especially in their expectations for tenure and promotion, call into question the inexorable dichotomy between teaching and research, and find ways to make the two sides of academic work synergistic: researching through the process of teaching and teaching through the research process.

As it becomes increasingly necessary for education professionals to rethink what counts as essential in a new economic reality, academia’s hope lies in pedagogical models too long neglected as marginal, exemplified by alt-ac forms of mentorship and by active-learning, project-based initiatives outside traditional curricula. Graduate programs can no longer afford to hold onto apprenticeship models for outdated career paths; teachers cannot succeed by adopting pedagogical strategies that too often replicate students in their own images. Process-based, pedagogically oriented research, geared toward social justice issues and coordinated at the institutional periphery, offers a promising way forward. These models uniquely foster the kinds of collaborative knowledge production that can justify the humanities to the public, orient students toward a collective vision of alternate futures, and contribute to an academic system that treats its workers equitably while offering its students a diversity of rewarding and sustainable career paths.