Power in the Academy

Structural imbalances in the academy are frequently baked into the culture of institutions. While the divides between and among faculty and staff are perhaps most visible, divisions between research and teaching faculty, or between faculty and students, are also frequently inequitable. Further, the increasing “adjunctification” of teaching throughout colleges and universities and reliance on short-term and contingent labor in academic libraries have created a growing underclass of laborers whose security is tenuous at best. Some academic hierarchies rely more on tradition than policy to be perpetuated. For example, the processes of infantilization and hazing that are part and parcel of both graduate education and tenure and promotion resist documentation, since documenting these practices could both expose disparities in the organizational hierarchy and require that the individuals within the organization perpetrating these actions be held accountable. Maintaining the inscrutability of traditional inequities by leaving no paper trail helps naturalize them, giving them a cultural power that is difficult to challenge. Other inequities are encoded in job classification charts and salary bands. When expectations of service, not collaboration, are enshrined in library mission statements and are literally written into librarians’ job descriptions, asymmetry between librarians and research faculty is written into the culture of the library and the institution.

Brian Greenspan argues that digital humanities makes “all too visible the dirty gears that drive the scholarly machine, along with the mechanic’s maintenance bill” and recognizes that student labor is an underfunded element in the DH machine. Greenspan’s argument focuses on “the materiality of archival practices, bibliography, and publishing across media, as well as the platforms and networks we all use to read and write texts in the twenty-first century” and the real costs associated with making this work possible. Here we wish to focus on the people engaged in making Greenspan’s dirty gears turn. For even as digital humanities “scandalously reveal the system’s components,” structural inequities are rendered invisible to those at the top through the language of interdisciplinarity and of the network. Organizing to change the architectures of power within the academy is challenging, since without a proper understanding of the relationships that rely on and reinforce these power relations, the underclass of the academy—staff members, librarians, IT professionals, and indeed, students—can feel powerless to effect change. As Jane McAlevey describes it, “People participate to the degree they understand—but they also understand to the degree they participate” (6). Absent doing the work of power-structure analysis, which McAlevey claims “is the mechanism that enables ordinary people to understand their potential power and participate meaningfully in making strategy,” marginalized laborers within the academy will remain unable to fully participate in effective organization. Documentary practice focusing on revealing the labor of librarians and other collaborators will necessarily require a similar level of analysis and cannot reflect on the positionality of librarians without considering that of others within the DH ecosystem and the efforts of others to gain recognition for their labor.

There have been a variety of efforts over the past decade to help provide language for, and to frame the debate around, the rights of those whose labor is necessary for digital projects. Early considerations of DH labor focused almost exclusively on recognition for tenure and promotion for teaching and research faculty (Modern Language Association; Rockwell). This continues to be important since much DH labor is additive and still not universally recognized for tenure and promotion. Though this is slowly changing, resistance still remains, as we saw in the MLA/Ithaka S+R report. The “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” (CBR), which will be a decade old by the time this chapter appears in print, emerged from a workshop on professionalization in digital humanities centers, “Off the Tracks: Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars,” funded by a 2010 National Endowment for the Humanities DH Level 1 Start-Up Grant. The CBR is part of the discourse of alt-ac, “alternative academic careers,” in this case “hybrid scholar-programmers . . . staffing many DH centers.” The CBR is driven by the acknowledgment that “such staff members are not well accounted for by the normative division between the ‘research’ usually associated with faculty positions and the ‘service’ usually associated with staff.” The report that frames the CBR includes recommendations on collaboration; career paths, assessment, and promotion; institutional support; and “paths for transformation.”

“Library Faculty” is one of the recommended career paths for digital humanists, though the CBR authors acknowledge that “‘library faculty’ is a slippery term. About a third of library faculty are tenure-track faculty (as recommended by the Association of College and Research Libraries); others are on faculty equivalency continuous appointments based on a step system for promotion; others are not considered faculty at all.” Libraries, along with universities, museums, and archives, are acknowledged as “locations of creativity and innovation” (point 3 of the CBR), and as such, “intellectual property policies should be equally applied to all employees regardless of employment status. Credit for collaborative work should be portable and legible.” While the report has been widely discussed, its impact is unclear largely because the principles it describes are aspirational and unenforceable and largely do not engage with the systemic issues that created the need for this advocacy in the first place. The same problem confronts other efforts to advocate for undergraduate students (Di Pressi et al.; Keralis), graduate student workers (Mann), and postdoctoral workers (Alpert-Abrams et al.). These efforts, while sometimes polemical, are generally what Keralis describes as “soft solutions” that have no teeth in terms of enforcing just and ethical division or recognition of labor for these vulnerable populations or holding faculty abusers accountable. These efforts are also further complicated by the ways in which contributors, including library staff as well as students and postdoctoral workers, are expected to engage in the reproductive labor of the academy (Shirazi). This labor is necessary for a successful DH project, and indeed for the perpetuation of the academy, but it is often illegible within academic hierarchies. When it is seen, it is perceived to be service rather than more prestigious research (Alpert-Abrams et al.; Di Pressi et al.; Shirazi). As Jen Guiliano points out about some senior faculty, “These are people looking for labor to get them to where they want to go; not collaborators who are seeking true partnerships where all members of the team are elevated to be better researchers, teachers, and scholars.” What we hope to do here is to demonstrate how incorporating documentation into the development of digital projects can render the invisible visible and provide clear, enforceable boundaries that protect the interests of all parties involved, whether researcher, collaborator, or service provider. If work is not recognized as scholarship when it is perceived as service, it should at least be recognized as labor. As Shirazi points out, “perhaps the problem isn’t service itself, but exploitation.”

DH Labor in the Library

We now move to considering the positionality of librarians within both DH projects as well as within the broader academic hierarchies in which those projects are carried out. In a 2016 Digital Library Federation (DLF) presentation, “The Expansion and Development of DH/DS Librarian Roles: A Preliminary Look at the Data,” Paige Morgan and Helene Williams analyzed digital humanities/scholarship job postings in libraries. They found that postings had increased from 2010 to 2016 and noted that while the most heavily sought-after skills changed from year to year, postings overall focused on specific technologies (e.g., DSpace), specific abilities (e.g., visualization), specific knowledge (e.g., copyright), and project management. Morgan and Williams did not find “soft skills” specifically in their analysis, perhaps because they are associated with less identifiable language or encapsulated in the term “project management.” DH positions in libraries generally are described in terms of managing projects or technology rather than people (Posner 2014). The tension between requiring highly specific technical skills and broad domain knowledge of fields such as scholarly communication reflects uncertainty around what forms of labor constitute DH labor as well as an acknowledgment that myriad forms of labor are necessary and critical for sustainable DH projects. The growth and shape of DH positions within libraries during this time period is, in our experience, as much connected to what the libraries of aspirational peer institutions are doing in regard to hiring and academic libraries’ tendencies to create “messianic unicorn” positions as to anything else (Smiley).

DH projects, then, often entail very specific demands on the labor, time, and skills of library workers, but it is not always clear what the payoff is for those workers. As DH scholars and practitioners Miriam Posner and Trevor Muñoz have argued, the biggest obstacles to DH, whether within or outside the library, are often connected to working with people of varying positions and statuses across institutional boundaries. DH projects also often rely on multiple technological infrastructures, created and maintained by a variety of units and divisions, both within the library and across the broader institution. In “What Are the Challenges to Doing DH in the Library?,” Posner identifies the lack of authority and overcautiousness that often result from working across institutional boundaries and suggests they can be solved with more time dedicated to DH tasks and a higher status for DH workers. In contrast, Trevor Muñoz, in “Digital Humanities in the Library Isn’t a Service,” seeks to solve the problem of institutional and administrative barriers by working outside of those barriers, in a “space outside existing commitments.” Within this space, outside of existing academic hierarchies that primarily position library workers as service providers rather than scholars, library workers and other non-research faculty collaborators on DH projects could become legible as scholars within those same academic hierarchies (Sample). As Bobby Smiley points out, although the dominant discourse around DH emphasizes collaboration and flat, networked structures, both academic libraries and DH are “arenas overly concerned with monitoring boundaries for who is in or who is out.” This observation resonates with the experiences of the authors, who would extend Smiley’s observation to academia writ large and would indeed identify academic hierarchies (and, as always, limited resources) as the source of much boundary policing within both fields.

While Muñoz’s assertion that DH in libraries is not a service is well intentioned and may reflect the reality at his institution, “DH-as-a-service” is fundamentally the reality for many, perhaps most, librarians working in academic libraries. Even when librarians are themselves tenure-track faculty, in some cases 50 percent or more of their duties must conform to some definition of “librarianship.” As Roxanne Shirazi exhorts us, “when we call for librarians to approach collaborative digital work as partners and not service providers,” we must acknowledge “the fact that there are different power relations at play in these collaborative relationships. Power relations that are embedded in the hierarchies that make up academia, in both the social stratification of varying job ranks and the hierarchical classification of service and scholarship.” Smiley echoes her analysis, pointing out that by beginning to “discern those power relations and structural inequities in greater relief,” DH librarians can “reposition themselves as collaborators and intellectual peers.” There are, however, structural obstacles to this repositioning. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), as just one example, librarians are tenure-track faculty and generally governed by the same provost-level policies as other faculty (UIUC Office of the Provost). However, librarians have a separate section in their promotional dossiers that defines librarianship explicitly in terms of services provided to students and research/teaching faculty, along with collection development, outreach, and “educating library users” (UIUC Illinois Library). More tellingly, reviewers in the tenure process “are drawn from among a pool of people the candidate serves” (emphasis added), making service, not collaboration, central to the professional identity of these faculty. This creates an asymmetric relationship between research faculty and faculty librarians that is not merely perceptual but structural and that can be exploited by those faculty who demand service as described in these policy documents. This effectively disempowers librarians from asserting their rights as faculty. Despite their rank on paper, librarians can be compelled to participate in projects that may be exploitative if their faculty “peers” deem such participation to be necessary. No protections, boundaries, or expectations for credit are implied in the model expressed in these documents. And in a library and university culture in which librarians have to fight to be believed in order to receive disability accommodations that are federally mandated (Pionke), no untenured librarian wants to be the test case for what the real cost is for standing up for themselves on the basis of things as nebulous as ethics, or boundaries, or equity. This dramatically underscores Shirazi’s point “that some of us might need to embrace the label of service—or, perhaps, might not be able to escape it.”

Negotiating these hierarchies, and effectively coordinating, collaborating, and working across these myriad administrative and institutional inequities, is a significant element of DH labor in the library, one that goes unnamed in job postings. This work is fundamentally interpersonal and emotional in orientation—consider having to anticipate, manage, and respond to the work, feelings, and expectations of everyone working on a DH project—and as such, it is often not recognized or compensated as work. It is care work that contributes to the reproduction of the academy (Shirazi). DH labor in the library is also often accountable to multiple stakeholders with varying expectations: more grant money, more favorable comparisons to aspirational peers, new positions, but also fear of losing positions or resources. DH labor is susceptible to coordinator syndrome: Coordinators lack authority, resources, and infrastructure to actually implement a service but at the same time are responsible to multiple institutional stakeholders for the success or failure of that service (Library Loon; Douglas and Gadsby). Moreover, coordinators occupy an unstable position within both academic and library hierarchies as they might lack an organizational home and their work occurs across institutional structures. Dorothea Salo astutely satirizes these conflicting demands in relation to scholarly communication initiatives, which are similar in that they require multidirectional coordination. In her article, “How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative,” Salo indicts administrators’ magical thinking in “calling staff ‘change agents’ while insisting that they ‘not rock the boat.’” Gabriele Griffin and Matt Hayler point to broader systems that produce instability—namely, workplace hierarchies, interpersonal relationships, and the “neoliberal research landscape.”

The interpersonal care and coordination of library DH work relies on the creation and, perhaps more importantly, the maintenance of relationships. The organizational home of DH plays a crucial role in creating and cultivating relationships across campus. If, as in one author’s experience, the library is perceived to be incompetent by tenure-line faculty, those faculty will be reluctant to collaborate with those who work in and for the library. In this way, DH labor in the library, even if performed by recently hired library workers, often relies on already existing relationships with faculty, staff, and students and is inflected by the library’s existing credibility or lack thereof. These relationships and perceptions may be connected to non-DH library labor—purchasing decisions, library instruction, work on faculty committees—but it is up to the DH librarian to negotiate this interpersonal infrastructure. Technical infrastructures matter as well; DH projects are contiguous with and directly engage earlier forms of scholarship. The maintenance and reproduction of the scholarly knowledge production and communication system, the more traditional work of academic libraries, and the information technology and labor infrastructures that make these systems possible might therefore also be understood as a crucial element of DH library labor. These forms of labor are often invisible to those with institutional power. Interpersonal and emotional work is invisible; the need for maintenance only becomes apparent when infrastructures break. Library services are ideally frictionless, and it is generally difficult to account for the diverse forms of labor and knowledge that contribute to DH projects (Douglas and Gadsby; Mirza and Seale; Ettarh). Dominant understandings of DH library labor are very different from what we perceive as actual DH library labor. This lack of understanding or silence around collaboration as a learned skill allows magical thinking around the process of DH projects to grow; they are perceived as inadvertent, minor, and unimportant, rather than critical processes that we have agency over (Griffin and Hayler). To paraphrase Bethany Nowviskie, this results in the eternal September for collaborative knowledge production.

Rafia Mirza and Maura Seale (two of this chapter’s authors) have argued elsewhere (see “Who Killed the World?”; “Empty Presence”) that the interpersonal and maintenance work performed within libraries is gendered and racialized, both within the library and within academia, and consequently it is devalued (see also Douglas and Gadsby; Leon; Shirazi; Harris). Within academic libraries, these forms of labor are more likely to be performed by staff rather than librarians, and those staff members are more likely to be people of color than librarians (Seale and Mirza, “Empty Presence”). As Smiley notes, academic library workers are invested in specific notions of prestige, which are often connected to questions of which library workers are “professionals” and which are not. The investment in hierarchy within the library is, we suggest, a result of the status of the library as a service provider within academia, a feminized, low-status role. Library workers (both librarians and staff) are often subject to exploitation by those with more status within academia: namely, tenure-line faculty and university administrators.

The low status of the library within academia is reinforced by a pervasive incomprehension around the work of the library, by both faculty and university administrators, and by library administrators’ commitment to always be doing more with less in the name of service rather than pushing back against increased demands and decreased resources (Seale and Mirza; Ettarh). At the same time, academic library administrators continually seek out external markers of prestige in order to improve the status of the library within academic hierarchies, continually attempting to do something university administrators might value and looking toward aspirational peers to decide what to do next. Mirza and Seale argue that these external markers of prestige have recently taken the form of various sorts of technological innovation within the library. DH, as a recent and innovative form of scholarship that uses information technology, arguably functions as a marker of external prestige for academic libraries both within academia and in comparison to other academic libraries. It appeals to administrators of the neoliberal university in its development of technological “products” and “marketable skills.” But because DH is valued for its prestige, academic library administrators at libraries of all sizes tend to look toward well-funded and well-staffed institutions, often libraries that belong to the Association of Research Libraries, and expect the same results with fewer staff and resources. DH work that takes place in less prestigious libraries or at a smaller scale is, at the same time, ignored.

Regardless of institutional context, the library workers who support DH are thereby seen as valuable within these hierarchies, but that labor is narrowly defined, as Morgan and Williams observed in their analysis of DH librarian job postings. DH library labor is understood to be primarily technological rather than interpersonal or maintenance work. Interpersonal work and maintenance, Mirza and Seale argue, are devalued not because they are not valuable but because they tend to be performed by white women and people of color; it is the positionality of these workers within a series of hierarchies—academia, libraries, and broader society—that leads to their devaluation and erasure. Technological innovation, by contrast, is associated with Silicon Valley, a site of economic and political power, and is performed in the popular imagination by individual white men. DH projects that incorporate library labor can similarly become the property of a single faculty author, who, to be fair, is also negotiating academic hierarchies and likely attempting to demonstrate their productivity for promotion, but in the process can erase library labor that is already in a fraught position because of those same academic and social hierarchies (Leon). As Griffin and Hayler argue, the “neoliberal imperatives which govern contemporary academe” have resulted in “the simultaneous rise of collective work and individualized accountability in a context of heightened competition.” Predictably, this is “partly supported by the hierarchies within academe which construe certain staff as subsidiary and which continue to instrumentalize both tools and people rather than recognizing them as co-producers of knowledge.” Those tasks perceived as prestigious will go to those higher in the hierarchy; other “service” tasks will belong to care workers, “the feminized servants of the collaboration process who simply facilitate the ‘real’ academic work” (Griffin and Hayler). DH projects that rely on library labor must contend with not just academic hierarchies but also academic library hierarchies that rely on and reproduce in miniature broader social hierarchies in order to accurately account for library labor.

Praxis: Making Labor Legible

If the labor of librarians in digital humanities projects is frequently rendered invisible or is regularly misrecognized and devalued by faculty who do not see librarians as collaborators, we suggest that making that labor legible might lead to more sustainable and ethical practices in the field. We argue for a more intentional DH that focuses on making implicit expectations explicit. One possibility is a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the members of the project team. Other forms of documentation can communicate expectations for librarians’ roles in projects to help preempt assumptions about their potential contributions. Transparent policies, decision trees to help researchers identify contingencies and potential points of collaboration, and even email messages documenting conversations can all contribute to rendering librarians’ labor as collaborators more legible to research faculty. If librarians cannot convince their colleagues to document, or do not have administrative support to do so, we argue it is useful for them to document their own collaborative DH experiences themselves, to see how the choice to do so shapes what is created. Even the simplest forms of documentation can provide clarity to help avoid conflicts and potential exploitation before they begin or, failing that, at the very least can provide a paper trail to determine where a project diverged from otherwise ad hoc agreements.

One of the most critical steps in avoiding exploitative labor practices is to have a discussion about expectations and goals before the project starts and then write down or otherwise document those expectations. It is incumbent on administrators, tenure-line faculty, and others with institutional power to support collaboration that allows for both discussion and documentation. Documentation helps assess shifting responsibilities and allows for tracking how much labor, and whose labor it is, for each project (Currier, Mirza, and Downing). Documentation can be a useful tool and process to ensure transparency, and a culture that consistently engages in debriefing around DH projects also brings in accountability. These debriefings could work through questions around success—whether the project was successful and also how we define success—and around credit, blame, and the positionality of project members. The sharing of documentation and debriefings is key to a culture that values all forms of DH library labor; as Currier and colleagues note, “Without documentation and reference to past projects, an institution runs the risk of burnout or fatigue, since every project is essentially reinventing the (DH) wheel” (Currier, Mirza, and Downing). If the project is unstructured, or if the structure is informal, the rules of the project will only be known to a few, and power is limited to those who know the rules. In order for everyone to be involved and to participate equitably, the structure and rules of the project must be explicit and available to all participants. Collaboration is an active process. Too frequently we want to believe that good intentions and institutional goodwill can “organically” produce ethical collaboration and enable us to do “good work.” But without intentionality, we will merely reproduce the hierarchies of the systems we live in. Process is not just a means to an end but inextricably bound up in what we produce. DH projects will reproduce the inequities of the system they are created within; they will suffer from scope and feature creep, as well as the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman). Or in Sara Ahmed’s framing, “You have to record what you do not want to reproduce” (“Why Complain?”). However, accountability cannot exist from the bottom up without administrative support; all the documents and debriefings in the world will not change an exploitative culture.

Individuals without institutional power or authority (or the backing of unions) can introduce friction by pushing back on accelerated timelines, pointing out labor or technical challenges, or even just asking questions about the process. However, the danger is that systemic labor issues become individualized and situated ahistorically in the questioner rather than in the sociotechnical system itself. Sara Ahmed argues that institutional processes can frame complaints as negative factors, as slowing things down unnecessarily, but that complaints also function as diversity work because by slowing down and introducing friction, they allow for time to consider and interrogate normative practices that cause harm. Ahmed discusses how complaint can be a feminist queer model to transform an institution and how complaint can open up an institution for those for whom it was not intended. In Chapter 8, “The Feminist Data Manifest-NO,” the authors discuss centering refusal as a “generative praxis of Indigenous survivance,” as a way to avoid “reproduc[ing] systemic patterns of exploitation,” to center consent (actual consent, not the colonial “ruse of consent,” where there is no actual way to refuse participation), and to value and credit all contributors to a project. Our argument (previously made by others) is for a documentation praxis in which “participants are self-reflexive about their positionality in power structures/hierarchy relative to other people, acknowledge historical events that led to current power structures, and then avoid reproducing inequity as much as possible and mitigating inequity” (Currier and Mirza). Transparency doesn’t mean anything if you cannot say no.

We argue for documentation as process and praxis: Documentation manages expectations and makes labor visible. It is a means unto itself and not just a means to an end (Currier and Mirza; DLF 2016). The tools used for documentation, and the end product, whether an MOU or project management product board, are not as important as the process, which begins with reflection and discussion that draws on critical approaches to management, higher education, librarianship, and DH in which normative, often invisible, practices and mindsets are interrogated and their power structures and ideologies are made visible. We follow the authors of “The Feminist Data Manifest-NO” in acknowledging a genealogy of praxis as a term of art grounded in Black and Indigenous feminisms. By recognizing this origin, we hope to restore a discourse of liberation to the term, similar to the work Audrey Watters and Meg Worley did around the co-opted term “disruption” in their contributions to Disrupting the Digital Humanities. In this spirit, Sareeta Amrute discusses how “postcolonial and decolonising feminist theory, moves the discussion of ethics from establishing decontextualised rules to developing practices to train sociotechnical systems . . . to begin with the material and embodied situations in which these systems are entangled, which include from the start histories of race, gender and dehumanisation” (58, emphasis added).

To conclude, we offer a series of assertions in the form of a manifesto. While these assertions are nonprescriptive, we have attempted to frame them as provocations that get at the structural problems other aspirational documents do not. These principles undergird our praxis of documentation, and if applied and taken seriously by all project stakeholders, they have the potential to provide a practical means to make digital scholarship a more just and equitable place for all of its citizens. It is our hope that you can use these principles as tools to refuse, to complain, and to transform praxis within your DH ecosystem.

Librarians’ Labor: A Documentation Manifesto

Before committing to any project, librarians may ask:

• • Why?
  • Why are we doing this project?
  • Why is my personal involvement necessary?
• • How?
  • How are resources allocated?
  • How will I be compensated?
  • How will I receive credit for my work?
• • When?
  • When does the project begin?
  • When will I be allotted time to work on it?
  • When will my role end?
  • When will the project end? (And all projects should end.)
• • For Whom?
  • Who is the audience for the project?
  • Who is the project about?
  • Do these communities have a voice in the project?
• • By Whom?
  • Who gets credit?
  • Is credit (Principal Investigator status, authorship, etc.) really just going to one person?
  • Who gets paid and by whom?

Librarians have a right to document the answers to these questions (and others). These answers should have the weight of a contract for the duration of a project.

• • What is written down may change with the consent of all parties, but any changes must be written down.
• • Revisions that amount to “scope creep” may require new agreements.
• • Project communication should be in writing. Conversations should be followed up in writing.
• • Meeting notes should be shared with everyone on a project team, whether or not they were present in the meeting.
• • No assumptions, no hidden curricula. All contingencies must be made explicit and written down in language that is clear to all parties.

In the absence of documentation, librarians have a right to say “No” to projects in these situations:

• • When expectations are unclear
• • When the project appears to be exploitative
• • When credit is not equitably assigned
• • When there is a conflict with their ethical positions regarding research, student and other labor, and academic integrity

Such a refusal should be without personal or professional consequences and should also be the beginning of a conversation to address these concerns.

Neither library leadership nor individual librarians should make commitments of labor or resources in the absence of documentation.

Bibliography