Notes
Chapter 20
More Than a Watchword
Sustainability in Digital Humanities Graduate Studies
Maria K. Alberto
From August through December 2019, I was fortunate to be a graduate student fellow at Digital Matters, an emerging digital humanities (DH) initiative at the University of Utah, a large public research university in the American West. The time I spent at Digital Matters impacted my research and thinking in indelible ways, not only boosting my capacity for DH scholarship but also encouraging me to think through what this capacious term actually describes as well as how it relates to my other—arguably more traditional—work, experience, and training as a graduate student in the humanities. Reflecting on this graduate fellowship, which coincided with the third year of my PhD in English and cultural studies (and concluded just months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States), I suggest that sustainability offers several key considerations for graduate work in DH, all gesturing toward the value of ongoing, community-based learning in areas that may otherwise tend to encourage individualistic models of scholarship.
At the same time, “sustainability” itself can run the risk of becoming a simple watchword: that is, summing up purportedly core beliefs without examining or troubling them. With the term sustainability in particular, we can usually tell from its contexts that something of value to the speaker is being described, but what precisely that is and where its value lies are certainly worth interrogating, especially when, as our Digital Matters space initially began, and as I continue in limited scope with this brief chapter, sustainability itself becomes a core belief and concept.
In his thought-provoking essay “After Sustainability,” Steve Mentz correctly contends that sustainability itself is in part a narrative. For Mentz, however, such narratives are those of “stasis, an imaginary world in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow” (586). He continues: “To be sustainable is to persist in time, unchanged in essence if not details” (586), combatting disorder and disruption in both natural and human-made systems (587). However, although Mentz is often focused on the problems of rigidity and fixedness that attend far too many discussions of ecological sustainability, I identify similar questions or issues as one fortunate outcome of my time at Digital Matters.
Sustainability has been both a founding principle and a guiding theme for Digital Matters as a DH initiative since its inception in 2018, as the organization’s website highlights. Unlike Mentz’s discussion of sustainability as a never-was ideal of “pastoral stasis” (“After Sustainability,” 588), Digital Matters and its staff have considered sustainability a lens through which to “challenge ourselves” to reconsider digital production, as well as the ways in which such processes and their outcomes are often assumed to be—or framed as being—stable, accessible, perpetual, and resource friendly. So, although I diverge from Mentz’s comprehensive dismissal of sustainability and others like it, this is not because I dismiss concerns about falsified utopian ideals but more because I have been fortunate to participate in models of academic investigation that utilize sustainability as the framework by which to ask comparable questions.
With each DH project at Digital Matters, including graduate fellowships such as my own, participants are encouraged to remain mindful of the contexts and communities adjacent to their work, as well as the resources that they draw upon and the discourses to which they contribute. For its humanities graduate students in particular, though, Digital Matters moves beyond simply fostering this burgeoning awareness of academic contexts as dynamic spaces that both create and sustain impact. Instead, Digital Matters also represents these values in tangible ways—supporting active or discovery learning, promoting demonstrable outcomes, and working alongside existing communities—that help make DH a vital, dynamic part of graduate work. Here, then, sustainability is no rigid ideal but a productive challenge and a means of reflection on how to “do” DH in ways that resonate especially with those just beginning their work in this area, as many graduate students are.1
Thinking in terms of sustainability can urge graduate students to consider the dynamism and impact of their DH work: that is, the exploring, practicing, applying, and integrating that are so critical in this area. How do we explicate a key need for ongoing learning, or use resources ethically and responsibly, or envision DH learning and labor in the context of home disciplines and departments that may or may not include anything else remotely like it?
From a Graduate Student Perspective: Digital Matters as Sustainable DH Initiative
As detailed on its homepage, Digital Matters is a joint venture among several entities across the University of Utah, including the Marriott Library and the Colleges of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Architecture + Planning. Its mission is a “threefold initiative”: supporting interdisciplinary DH research, providing a space in which interested parties can gather and learn, and ultimately, linking DH concerns with the interests of broader communities, both academic and non-academic. These objectives are served through a wide range of funding and programming opportunities, including a speaker series, reading groups, workshops on tools and methodologies, and drop-in office hours with interdisciplinary staff, such as the fellowship I received.
Digital Matters director David Roh writes about the driving ethos behind this particular DH initiative. Drawing from his own experience in tech startup culture, Roh voices concerns about DH sometimes (whether inadvertently or not) valuing performativity and novelty at the cost of practical, ongoing usability. These concerns, he notes, have guided his work on Digital Matters, a project then still in its inception. Writing of the nascent Digital Matters, Roh outlines several qualities he considers crucial for such an initiative: a mindful focus on “self-sustaining” projects that are grounded in the appropriate discourses and can advance critical conversations, and where any performativity occurs “in the form of services in humanistic training with faculty and students, as well as outreach to local communities” (“DH Bubble,” para. 8). If performativity cannot be avoided entirely, Roh maintains, then at least it should serve some purpose beyond ornamentation.
Not coincidentally, the guiding theme of Digital Matters for the first four years of its existence, 2018–2022, was sustainability. Digital Matters articulates its approach to sustainability as “a challenge . . . designed to prompt us to think about aspects of digital scholarship that we might not otherwise consider,” and in particular, how to make DH work accessible beyond the university, how digital objects depend on material components, and what digital works actually “sustain.”
From a graduate student perspective, Digital Matters’ graduate fellowships offer a persuasive example of this sustainability both in theory and in action. These fellowships, which last a single four-month semester, are short-term but fully funded and intended to replace the fellow’s other teaching duties so that they can focus completely on a particular research project. There are also light, DH-focused teaching and service requirements, with fellows being requested to attend Digital Matters events and required to complete two of their own: leading a tool-centered workshop and giving a talk on their project progress. Perhaps most importantly, though, fellows need not have extensive previous experience with DH: instead, the annual application highlights how “applicants should demonstrate interest in OR prior engagement with digital scholarship, broadly conceived.” Taken together, these characteristics of the Digital Matters graduate fellowship foster active exploration of and engagement with DH, encouraging graduate students to think about DH in contextualized, ongoing ways that support sustained interest, learning, and scholarship.
Support for Active Learning
In the United States, the rhetoric of active learning, such as “exploring,” is most often attached to undergraduate learning, where students are required to take general education classes (also GenEd or gen ed) beyond their area of study and encouraged to switch majors if their goals or interests change. Graduate study, though, tends to be more focused. In the humanities, the most successful graduate school applications are those in which applicants can name specific areas, projects, and even faculty with whom they wish to work, and though there are certainly theory seminars and similar coursework, there is no longer a precise corollary to GenEd classes. Although graduate students in the humanities can certainly explore their interests, this exploration takes place within a specific discipline and then proceeds in a much more focused manner than it would have during the undergraduate program. Although active learning is not necessarily absent, then, the focus on it and the rhetoric of it often are.
Digital humanities, though, almost demands a return to a more active, exploratory style of learning. Graduate students coming to DH from the humanities often (though not always) lack a rigorous background in computation, coding, and similar topics, and as Miriam Posner points out, even seasoned DH practitioners do not always have the same access to learning resources (“Think Talk Make Do,” para. 1–2). And although the possession of skills in these areas is not necessarily required to “do” DH, it can certainly help explain how DH tools work, why certain methods yield particular results, and why the foundational concepts of DH often still seem to be in flux. In addition, DH itself is a quicksilver field: texts, methodologies, tools, and scholarship move fast, changing the conversation even as graduate students might still be struggling to acquire their sea legs.
Sustainability thus becomes key in a field that is simultaneously new to many and fast-paced even for those familiar with it. Although necessary and productive, the kinds of active, “discovery” learning that come with exploring new topics or skills as graduate students pursuing DH work should also be balanced to avoid burnout and the sunk cost fallacy.
The Digital Matters graduate fellowship offers a blueprint for this model. During my time there, some of the most beneficial work I did included digging into interdisciplinary scholarship to see whether a game studies approach or a computer science one made more sense for my project and then trying out both types on the gaming bots that I was studying. I also had access to Digital Matters staff who were always happy to share their experience in fields different from mine, offer feedback on my work, and point me in different directions to seek further context. The experience was a combination of the autonomy to try different things and see what worked blended with the time, resources, and support needed to do this.
Demonstrable Outcomes
As mentioned, sustainability in DH entails realizing that even primarily digital work takes place in specific contexts and draws upon resources (often material themselves) that may be scarce, finite, or labor-intensive. This realization in turn necessitates assessing and articulating the value of DH projects: how are they cognizant of the surrounding environment, and how do they make meaningful use of such resources? For graduate students, of course, this may be a particularly complex issue, because the context of their DH work includes home departments and their requirements for earning a degree, but resources may include access to DH tools, other DH practitioners, and the time needed to pursue active, discovery-based learning.
An eye toward outcomes offers one possible way of balancing these questions, but these outcomes do not always have to be fully fledged and finished artifacts. Trevor Owens maintains that “everybody working on a digital humanities project needs to be writing” (“Please Write It Down,” para. 3), whether it is to record or reflect upon the work at hand, and this is certainly a tack that graduate students can take. Documenting the active learning process and formalizing thoughts in academic genres can be a means of tying in explorations of new tools, methods, and even questions with the overall DH project and demonstrating how each part of this process is valuable and productive.
Digital Matters emphasizes these sorts of outcomes as an integral part of its graduate fellowship. As visible in the annual application, applicants are asked for a standard CV and cover letter but also for a workshop proposal that successful fellows would lead for the Digital Matters community “on a digital platform, tool, or method.” Accepted fellows are also asked to consider what their time at Digital Matters will produce and with which the larger Marriott Library and University of Utah communities can engage. My peer fellows have produced art installations, conference papers, and websites; I have prepared conference talks, book reviews, and shorter scholarly works such as this chapter, with an eye toward reworking my main Digital Matters project as a full article. Along the way, however, we have all been writing, discussing, and reflecting on these projects and how they have changed as we progressed further into the details of certain DH tools, methodologies, and concepts. Digital Matters also encourages such reflection on an ongoing basis. For instance, in 2021 as socially distanced meetings resumed, Digital Matters staff organized a series of brown-bag lunches in which all former fellowship grantees returned to the space and gave informal presentations on how their work has since proceeded.
These requirements of the Digital Matters graduate fellowship encourage graduate students to be aware of how their DH work is dynamic, ongoing, and in constant conversation with its environment, rather than something interesting but isolated from the rest of their graduate school training and experience.
Working with Other Communities
Community is vitally important to graduate students, whether it comes in the form of peers, mentors, resources for mental health and work-life balance, their larger community of inquiry, or their home departments. Community also becomes an important consideration of sustainability because it describes not only a significant element of the environment in which a work is produced but also the group(s) impacted by either the work itself or by the use of resources that it necessitates. Matthew Kirschenbaum characterizes DH similarly as “a social undertaking” (“What Is Digital Humanities,” para. 2) built on networks of collaborators and communities, and by this token, DH is most sustainable when it considers questions such as who can use the tools it creates, who can access the work it does, who might benefit by the artifacts it sustains, and who is being included or excluded from its benefits.
Sustainability regarding graduate student work in DH brings these two concerns together even more closely. How do humanities departments take graduate students’ move to active, discovery-based learning or react to graduate students taking on different sorts of work than their degrees might traditionally entail? Likewise, how can DH initiatives build interdisciplinary community, and how do they?
Digital Matters models one possible answer to these important concerns through its graduate student fellowships. As mentioned, these short-term fellowships are fully funded and intended to replace the fellow’s other teaching requirements for an entire semester, thus maintaining departmental requirements for work hours and similar administrative concerns. Digital Matters also encourages affiliated graduate students, whether fellows or not, to participate in its own interdisciplinary community through events such as reading groups, workshops, and talks that draw peers and scholars from departments across and beyond the university. Although the initiative itself is a venture from the University of Utah library and specific colleges (Humanities, Fine Arts, and Architecture + Planning), Digital Matters also works closely with programs such as the university’s burgeoning Entertainment Arts Engineering program, which is focused on game development and design, and has led the way toward developing the university’s first Digital Culture Studies Certificate, which offers applied DH praxis to undergraduate students across majors. Taken together, such features encourage graduate students to consider how DH draws from a diverse range of intellectual communities, as well as how it should add to them.
Sustainability: More Than a Watchword
Circling back to Mentz’s concerns about narratives of sustainability and their basis in wistful dreams of safe stasis, I hope that this chapter has offered an alternative option for consideration. As a core value and a central tenet, sustainability need not be either about or founded upon the types of falsified “pastoral nostalgia” that so concern Mentz. Indeed, questioning how sustainability underlies often invisible means of digital production, and in fact, scholarship, can help us build the very practices and systems “to accommodate and even enjoy radical change” that he hopes to see (“After Sustainability,” 587).
Thinking of graduate student DH work in terms of sustainability means considering this scholarship as dynamic practice with both impacts upon and responsibilities to its environment. As the DH initiative Digital Matters demonstrates, supporting active learning, thinking toward fledgling outcomes, and working in tandem with existing communities are just some possible ways in which sustainability can be encouraged, but as DH continues to evolve, so too should our thought process on what sustainability entails and how we can practice it. Core values are not meant to exist in stasis.
Note
1. The specific nature of DH work and how it can or should be “done” are of course fraught and well-trod topics and far beyond the scope of my brief chapter here. Among others, see Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities?” for a useful introduction to some of the debates surrounding this topic and Cecire, “Introduction: Theory and the Virtues.”
Bibliography
- Cecire, Natalia. “Introduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities.” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (2011). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/introduction-theory-and-the-virtues-of-digital-humanities-by-natalia-cecire/.
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Classes?” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/f5640d43-b8eb-4d49-bc4b-eb31a16f3d06#ch01.
- Mentz, Steve. “After Sustainability.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 127, no. 3 (2012): 586–92. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2012.127.3.586.
- Owens, Trevor. “Please Write It Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities.” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (2011). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/please-write-it-down-by-trevor-owens/.
- Posner, Miriam. “Think Talk Make Do: Power and the Digital Humanities.” Journal of the Digital Humanities 1, no. 2 (2012). http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-2/think-talk-make-do-power-and-the-digital-humanities-by-miriam-posner/.
- Roh, David. “The DH Bubble: Startup Logic, Sustainability, Performativity.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/b5b9516b-e736-4d23-bf5c-7426e7a9de2d.