A Tale of Three Disciplines

English and Digital Humanities

One primary goal of the Mellon Digital Humanities Fellowship at the University of Rochester is to provide graduate students with the tools, training, and time to investigate the potential for incorporating the digital humanities into their dissertations. In addition to discussing a range of DH literature at weekly meetings, fellows participate in ongoing digital projects at the university across different fields: the William Blake Archive in English, for example, or the Digital Elmina initiative in history.3 Mellon fellows are also given funding to attend conferences and workshops, both domestic and international, and are further encouraged to study digital tools and techniques (e.g., TEI, coding skills). Of course, not all fellows will ultimately include a digital element in their final dissertation projects, but the option to do so becomes available through the program’s DH training, in both theory and practice.

Those who choose to produce a DH-influenced dissertation quickly face an obstacle all too familiar to DH scholars: hiring and promotion committees, by and large, simply do not accord digital projects the same gravity as “traditional” scholarly work. Anke Finger argues that a continuing lack of shared assessment standards for digital scholarly work within departments makes the digital dissertation a particularly risky endeavor for students (“Gutenberg Galaxy,” 67). Thus born-digital dissertation projects remain rare, and when they do occur, they are often accompanied by a standard written dissertation. The unfortunate result of this is that adding a digital component to a dissertation generally means undertaking a considerable amount of additional labor on top of a program’s traditional degree requirements.

An example will illustrate. Former Mellon fellow Helen Davies, now an assistant professor of digital humanities at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, was a long-term member of the Lazarus Project, a DH laboratory affiliated with the English department at the University of Rochester.4 This initiative uses digital multispectral imaging and statistical software to recover damaged or illegible cultural heritage objects, one of which—the fourteenth-century Vercelli Mappamundi—became the subject of Davies’s dissertation.5 The map’s poor state of preservation meant that it had seen little scholarly study, and the only critical edition was erroneous in many of its readings. Through countless hours of computer processing, Davies restored the vast majority of the map to legibility and, using the Pelagios platform, built an interactive digital critical edition (Davies and Zawacki, “Collaboration and Annotation”). This was a labor-intensive project, requiring knowledge of digital imaging, various pieces of statistical software, material chemistry, manuscript production methods, and at least one dead language. But this work had to be accompanied by a 187-page literary-historical analysis of the recovered map. The latter alone would be dissertation material at any university; the addition of the digital element effectively added a great deal more labor than is required for many traditional dissertations.

This example is in no way intended as a slight against the University of Rochester or Davies’s dissertation committee. Indeed, Rochester is particularly DH friendly. It plays host to, among others, the abovementioned Lazarus Project, helmed by associate professor of English and textual science, Gregory Heyworth; the Middle English Text Series, a longtime recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities grants for its free digital editions of medieval texts; and the William Blake Archive, one of the first digital humanities projects, which was coedited by former University of Rochester Mellon graduate program director, the late Morris Eaves. The University of Rochester is thus at the forefront, and is particularly supportive, of DH work. Few committees would likely be comfortable with a candidate’s dissertation consisting solely, or even largely, of a born-digital project and rightly so: such a dissertation is liable to harm the newly minted PhDs on the job market. Joseph Raben, writing at the launch of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) some thirteen years ago, outlined a problem that clearly remains with us today: “Appearance in electronic media is not as highly regarded by the gatekeepers of tenure and promotion as the traditional hard-bound book and the article offprint” (“Tenure, Promotion and Digital Publication,” para. 2). The result is a catch-22: born-digital dissertations are likely to negatively stand out owing to their rarity, which in turn will discourage candidates from attempting (and committees from permitting) them, keeping them rare. Although the ensuing success of DHQ and other online journals has ameliorated this situation to some degree, the humanities nevertheless remain saddled with a predilection for traditional publishing models.

The problem here illustrated is one that cuts across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The potential for digital technologies like multispectral imaging to add entirely new texts to the literary and cultural canon is of obvious value to scholars, and yet the “mere” recovery and publication of those texts—as time intensive as such recovery and effort is—is undervalued within the academy. This state of affairs harms the scholars who perform such recovery, of course, but it also harms the humanities as a whole by implicitly disincentivizing the kind of research that might broaden the extant corpus of texts. Surely no one would dispute the value of such work, yet hiring and tenure committees by all accounts remain oriented on a fundamental level toward traditional publications. The scholars behind even groundbreaking efforts like the Archimedes Palimpsest project, which recovered several lost works by Archimedes and the orator Hyperides, did not settle for merely making their work available online but published several books and articles through more traditional channels.6 These projects stand in for the problem of digital endeavors as a whole; as Rachel Mann laments, “While DH projects are increasingly seen as scholarly in their own right, they often do not count as scholarship” but rather as steps toward the inevitable (usually single-authored) article or monograph (“Paid to Do but Not to Think,” 268).

Mellon fellows are released from their normal teaching duties to free up time for them to expand their skill set and assist with various DH projects. But the fact that this is necessary points to a recurring issue in the digital humanities, namely, its time-intensive nature. In addition to the standard and increasingly onerous demands placed upon graduate students (completing coursework, presenting at conferences, learning various languages, and publishing original research), those interested in the digital humanities, or those hoping to make themselves marketable on an increasingly bleak job market, must invest additional time in learning coding languages, digital platforms, and emergent technologies alongside the time required simply to participate in DH projects. And, as noted above and elsewhere, those projects are not granted the same esteem as traditional publications or scholarly endeavors and so must serve as a supplement to (not a replacement for) the latter. Finally, unfinished projects—those that, for whatever reason, do not successfully culminate in a public website or app—are valued even less. Graduate students must thus rely on a combination of discernment and sheer luck in deciding which DH projects to cast their lot with, as many projects do not culminate in the kind of polished products that can be easily evaluated by hiring committees. Despite increasing advocacy and proposed models for evaluation and departmental support for the digital dissertation, as evidenced by the many voices represented in Kuhn and Finger’s recent anthology, many remain hesitant to pursue these projects because they may be viewed as a lesser version of the traditional nondigital dissertation (see Finger and Kuhn, eds.). To put it rather cynically, the ultimate deliverable is the line on one’s curriculum vitae, and despite regular calls for change in academic publications, the general perception remains that tenure and hiring committees have not moved past valuing the single-author publication far above collaborations and born-digital initiatives.

—Alex Zawacki

History and Digital Humanities

When asked to reflect on his Rochester Mellon fellowship, historian Camden Burd emphasized the program’s impact on his research: “Without the digital humanities fellowship[,] I wouldn’t have had the time and resources to really learn data management and GIS mapping. Those two elements helped to organize my research and more convincingly prove the central argument of my dissertation and current manuscript project.”7 Serenity Sutherland notes the fellowship’s positive influence on her career: “The Mellon Fellowship allowed me to transfer my skills earned in the History PhD to be successful as an expert of digital media, thereby broadening my career potential to include jobs in Communication Studies that called for digital media experts. I’m not sure if I would hold a tenure track job now at all if it weren’t for the Mellon Fellowship.”8

Only eight Rochester historians have held Mellon Fellowships since 2014: Burd, Sutherland, James Rankine, Daniel Gorman Jr., Ania Michas, Alice Wynd, Josie Bready, and Marissa Crannell-Ash. By contrast, the Rochester history department has between twenty and thirty graduate students at any given time, producing four to five PhDs per year. The Mellon mid-doc fellowship model siloes digital humanities resources in a small number of trainees. Even if the fellowship’s workshops or training sessions are open to the public, the emphasis remains on the fellows as opposed to the community. As Katina Rogers notes in Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, “Small extracurricular programs . . . can only reach a limited number of people, making it difficult to achieve true institutional or cultural change. For lasting reform, it will be important to incorporate elements of this type of professional and methodological training into the structure of departments themselves” (74).

Integrating digital approaches into graduate programs, so that all students and not only fellows can access digital training, is an equitable solution for the long term. A program like the Mellon fellowship is enormously helpful for an institution in the short term, but it offers a temporary rather than permanent solution for graduate education. In this section, we address the larger disciplinary context for digital history and propose strategies for adding digital history to graduate programs. These strategies are also applicable to other humanities disciplines.

The need for long-term digital history training is a pressing one. The American Historical Association (AHA) has made digital training, broadly defined, a central part of its career diversity initiative, as reflected by the organization’s list of “The Career Diversity Five Skills”: “1. Communication, in a variety of media and to a variety of audiences. 2. Collaboration, especially with people who might not share your worldview. 3. Quantitative literacy: a basic ability to understand and communicate information presented in quantitative form, i.e., understanding that numbers tell a story the same way words, images, and artifacts do. 4. Intellectual self-confidence: the ability to work beyond subject matter expertise, to be nimble and imaginative in projects and plans. 5. Digital literacy: a basic familiarity with digital tools and platforms.”9

By positioning digital literacy and quantitative literacy as essential skills for the 2010s to 2020s, the AHA gave its seal of approval to digital history approaches. Simultaneously, the career diversity initiative acknowledged the reality that PhD students must look beyond the tenure track for employment. As AHA administrator Dylan Ruediger noted in 2020, that year’s AHA jobs report showed the “ongoing sluggishness of academic hiring.” Nonetheless, Ruediger continued, “The academic job market is one among many: It has no monopoly on interesting, remunerative careers that make good use of historical expertise” (“2020 AHA Jobs Report”).

The AHA Five Skills project began after Rochester launched its Mellon program, however. In a 2020 email to the author, Sutherland noted, “The Mellon Fellowship helped me because it focused on diversifying my skills as an interdisciplinary scholar—rather than simply making me a better scholar in the specific field of history. In my case, the AHA has nothing to do with it, as their guidelines came out well after the Mellon grant at UR started, and so I obviously did not pursue the grant because the AHA suggested I should seek digital literacy in my professional development.” Lest we read too much into the Mellon Foundation funding digital humanities fellowships before the AHA launched its career diversity salvo, it does echo Zawacki’s observation that academic disciplines change more slowly than individual practitioners. If history organizations and departments are intentional about introducing digital history to graduate students, then they will position students to pursue a range of careers while also expanding their skill sets.

Entirely separate from the career-oriented defense of digital history, historians are making the case that digital history is here to stay as a legitimate field of study that students and faculty should consider relevant to graduate education. Notably, “Digital History and Argument,” a collaborative white paper from 2017 crafted by the Arguing with Digital History Working Group of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, endorsed the full inclusion of digital projects within historiographic discourse.10 Like specialists in other historical fields, digital historians should explicate their methodologies, “elaborat[ing] how they found their sources, and cit[ing] the digital version of a source if that is what they read, elaborat[ing] how they analyzed those sources, and highlight[ing] any ethical issues associated with the digital source” (13). The same group noted with concern that “the incorporation of this [new digital] work into historiographic conversations produced in books and journals has been limited” (2). In other words, mastering technology alone is insufficient to make digital history part of the academic history profession. Rather, historians must treat digital projects comparably to articles and monographs: “Digital public history should be brought into the historiographical conversation by having it reviewed in scholarly journals. This would be more visible as contributions to specific historical fields by not putting those reviews in a separate digital history or public history section” (9).11

The shift toward normalizing digital history as simply history, instead of its own special category, moves slowly, with the implementation of this goal uneven and equivocal. The Journal of American History began to review history websites in 2001, but these reviews remain in a distinct section, formally labeled “Digital History Reviews” since 2013.12 The AHA created its own digital history working group and released peer review recommendations in 2015, but the American Historical Review, the organization’s flagship journal, still has limited digital history content.13 Special coverage of digital history in issues from 2016 onward, along with the recurring Digital Resources/Digital Primary Sources section, has continued the pattern of cordoning off digital history from the regular article and book review sections.14 At the level of undergraduate and graduate education, history professors can help further this shift by assigning digital history projects alongside monographs and articles as course readings. Additionally, when students write sample reviews as a course assignment, professors can give students options such as reviewing digital projects on their own or in conjunction with history publications in other media.

As organizational support for digital history grows and scholarly rationales for the field multiply, the next step is institutionalization—the integration of digital history into college history departments’ research and strategic planning as well as teaching. The University of Rochester history department has created substantial digital history resources separate from the Mellon fellowship. Multiple graduate-level digital history courses have run in the past decade.15 Graduate students contribute to the department’s ongoing DH projects such as the Seward Family Digital Archive, Digital Elmina, Virtual St. George’s, and Hear UR.16 Additionally, Michael Jarvis has begun to offer digital history as a PhD major field.17 Digital history is there for Rochester graduate students to explore, regardless of Mellon participation. It is our hope that this model of departmental training proliferates instead of universities relying on externally funded fellowships to finance digital humanities training.

Mandatory digital history training for graduate students does not seem advisable. If career flexibility for historians is the goal, then students should have more, not less, flexibility in planning their courses of study. An undergraduate headed to law school and a graduate student seeking a consulting or government career may not see the relevance of digital history practices to their future work. It is worth saying, “That is okay.” Yet the importance of digital fluency in the current job market is clear. The Covid-19 pandemic rendered us dependent on cloud storage, teleconferencing, and learning management systems. The path forward, in our view, is for digital history to become a standard, fully supported, but not required, concentration in graduate programs. Instead of classifying digital history as an elective or hobby, teach digital history as an academic specialty and accept digital historiography as genuine scholarship. Dedicate equal resources to digital history as to venerable subfields like public history and documentary text editing. Convey to students that digital history is a legitimate pursuit and a potential springboard for future employment while giving students freedom to shape their academic paths.

We noted above the importance of digital training as career preparation and the need to teach digital projects as historical scholarship. To follow are further steps we recommend for history and other humanities departments: first, although hiring faculty members with digital history or humanities training is important, expecting professors to be adept at every form of digital humanities—coding, mapping, virtual reality, and web design—is unrealistic. An early-career professor juggling courses, administrative work, and research (not to mention family responsibilities) cannot be expected to learn, much less be an expert in, every technology. Nor is it equitable to hire a single professor to be “the DH person” for the whole department. A better approach is to hire multiple professors who have shown a consistent commitment in their work to at least one form of digital technology. Newly minted PhDs who have interned on long-term digital projects or produced dissertations with strong digital components fall into this category. By offering positions to such PhD graduates, departments will help to solve the catch-22 Zawacki described in this chapter. Digital history is integral to the future of the historical profession, but it must be integrated into a department’s labor force without putting burdensome expectations on any single employee.

Second, institutions must support current professors who wish to train in digital history or digital humanities and integrate new approaches into their courses. Given the explosion of in-house workshops about online and hybrid teaching since the Covid-19 pandemic began, one could argue that this is happening already. Our hope is that universities post-Covid will put workshops on digital humanities technology into the rotation of teaching workshops alongside the standard sessions on MyCourses, Zoom, and so on. History and other humanities faculty should petition their institutions’ deans and teaching support offices to offer such training.

Finally, if the discipline of history is serious about envisioning itself as a digital one, departments should offer students a range of academic options for digital history education, including seminars, for-credit internships, and independent studies or capstone projects with tutorial-style training; in chapter 24 in this volume, Heather Richards-Rissetto and Adrian S. Wisnicki endorse this approach for humanities programs of all kinds. At the University of Rochester, these options have taken the form of graduate seminars that build on the Seward and Virtual St. George’s projects, PhD reading courses in digital and public history, and the recently created internship option that allows students to work on digital or public history projects instead of teaching.18 By offering students digital history training and the freedom to explore it as much (or little) as they wish, departments can maximize students’ choices while revamping the graduate curriculum.

—Daniel Gorman Jr.

Visual and Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities

Unlike the neighboring humanities departments of English and history, the graduate program in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester (VCS) has faced larger issues integrating the digital humanities into graduate study. This is not due to a lack of enthusiasm toward the Mellon fellowship on the part of VCS students. Like the graduate students in history, VCS students also struggle with integrating digital humanities into dissertation projects due to an institutional lack of training from the outset, an issue that could be remedied by providing introductory coursework in digital humanities (an effective strategy for this graduate program specifically, as students in VCS often do not settle on a topic or field of study until coursework is completed). Like their humanities student counterparts, VCS students share the awareness that born-digital projects are, as mentioned by Zawacki in this chapter, still considered inadequate for the academic job market, in which traditional publishing models remain the basic criteria for securing a tenure-track position. However, the biggest deterrent for VCS students seems to lie not necessarily in a dearth of institutional support for digital humanities or anxiety toward a dwindling job market, though these obviously remain key issues. Rather, the study of visual culture, at least at the University of Rochester, seems to be at odds with the digital humanities, despite the disciplines’ shared dissatisfaction with traditional humanities approaches.

When the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies was founded in 1989, it was largely with the intent of troubling the traditional study of visual objects in more established fields such as art history, film studies, and anthropology. Though the program is housed in the Department of Art and Art History, VCS is simultaneously indebted to and in conflict with the very field of art history. The ambivalent nature of the program’s foundation is perhaps best described in the words of VCS professor, the late Douglas Crimp, who described visual culture as “a certain intellectual formation within postmodernism [that] fractures the discipline of art history in such a way that we get a new formation of knowledge to which we give the name visual studies. This is a formation that is not a logical development of art history but rather a deconstruction of art history, or a replacement of art history with an intellectual formation that is broader, has different purposes, and has different methodological approaches” (Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture, 133). W. J. T. Mitchell posits a similar definition of visual culture, defining it as an active practice that “commits one at the outset to a set of hypotheses that need to be tested—for example, that vision is (as we say) a cultural construction, that it is learned and cultivated, not simply given by nature” (“Showing, Seeing,” 166). In other words, “visual culture” is embedded with the understanding of expanding visual fields beyond disciplinary boundaries; it is less a field or discipline than a methodological approach to visual objects. Calling it a discipline or field, in fact, seems to undo much of its mission, which aims to remain open in theory and practice to a variety of potential objects, approaches, and methods.

The digital humanities could be considered one of the many “methodological approaches” that Crimp referred to in his definition of visual culture; for example, if digital works or practices were previously excluded from more traditional art history or film studies programs, perhaps the practice of visual culture would be more open to methods such as data analysis and visualization. Yet VCS students remain wary of using digital humanities tools as such, at least in ways that heavily impact or transform dissertation research and in turn their career goals. Before exploring exactly why this may be the case, it is useful to turn to some concrete examples.

When speaking to alumni from the Mellon program, one VCS student who has since graduated and one in the midst of completing the dissertation, a common denominator stood out: the digital humanities has served less as an influence in theoretical methods and more as a practical tool for complementing dissertation research.19 Mellon and VCS alumnus Christopher Patrello, currently the assistant curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, shared his experience of how the Mellon fellowship shaped his dissertation research:

Digital Humanities shaped my dissertation in modest ways. I used many more graphs and data visualizations than I would have without the Mellon fellowship. The most elaborate of which was created using Gephi, an open-source social network data visualization software. I used it to create a “citational matrix” that traced the intertextual and interpersonal connections between anthropological texts that discuss Northwest Coast ritual performances, known commonly as potlatches. This was mostly influenced by Franco Moretti and his approach to textual analysis. That being said, none of this really transformed the scope of my dissertation, but simply provided an added layer of interpretive tools to demonstrate my argument.20

Another VCS alum, Julia Tulke, currently an assistant teaching professor in the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, noted in 2020 how her training in digital humanities has helped her, especially during times of great constraint related to the recent Covid-19 pandemic:

While my participation in the DH fellowship did not explicitly shape my dissertation research, it provided me with a broad repertoire of tools and practices that have resurfaced in certain aspects of my work, at times in unexpected ways. The present moment is a salient example: I am currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation in the city of Athens, Greece, a process that has been severely disrupted by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the face-to-face methodologies that I would usually rely on, such as interviews and participant observation, have become practically and politically impossible, I have (re)turned to my training in the digital humanities to find innovative ways of gathering and processing data.21

It should be said that when students use digital humanities tools in these ways—ways that assisted with research yet did not shape the overall dissertation—it is still a win, so to speak, and it is, in fact, the most realistic outcome given that the Mellon program does not require that students entering the fellowship have experience with digital humanities training or tools. And yet integration, at least at the level that the Mellon Foundation likely intended, seems to be only marginal; as both VCS participants mentioned, the fellowship did not “shape” or “transform” their dissertations. The question then remains: why is this the case?

Besides the practical reasons strongly emphasized in this chapter’s sections regarding the disciplines of history and English, one could argue that the digital humanities also presents a hermeneutic dilemma to many humanities graduate students, a problem the art historian Claire Bishop has aptly defined as “a reduction of cultural complexity to metrics” (Drucker and Bishop, “Conversation on Digital Art History,” 325). In other words, if the goal of the digital humanities is to bring quantitative modes of analysis to the fore, with the implication that what is quantifiable is somehow more accurate or “better,” would this not seem incompatible with the very discipline of visual culture, a field whose raison d’être is to bypass such modes of interpretation in the first place, as represented by the more traditional field of art history? Certainly. VCS students are not blindly devoted to visual culture, at least not enough to resist new and exciting models of interpretation. Yet the similarity of these graduate students’ experiences (and my own), as well as those VCS students who have more informally shared their experiences with digital humanities, is striking in both their suspicion toward digital humanities and their resulting cursory use of digital humanities in dissertation projects.

The media studies scholar Jason Mittell addresses this very feeling of suspicion in his own exploration of videographic criticism. Like the graduate students quoted above, he likens the process of using digital humanities tools to enhance, not replace, qualitative and interpretative findings as a “critical rhetoric” and a potential “methodology” in and of themselves, where “videographic criticism can loop the extremes of this spectrum between scientific quantification and artistic poeticization together, creating works that transform films and media into new objects that are both data-driven abstractions and aesthetically expressive” (“Videographic Criticism,” 230).

Mittell’s use of videographic criticism to expand the notion of both the digital humanities and visual culture is a positive example of how the Mellon Fellowship and the VCS program might work in harmony. However, within his analysis, Mittell points to a problematic terrain that seems to haunt the humanities: the battle over quantitative analysis (what might be considered digital humanities) and verbal narrative (more traditional humanities practices). Although the digital humanities, as Mittell rightly points out, does not actually mean an erasure of subjective interpretation, it perhaps appears that way to practitioners of visual culture, and in particular to graduate students who are often still learning their own disciplines and are more subject to being disciplined by their fields of study. Though graduate students are often the greatest and most enthusiastic innovators, this spirit is often stifled by a variety of forces, institutional and otherwise.

This leads to the second and final “why,” and I conclude with a point that is hardly original, yet worth revisiting here: this suspicion elucidated above extends beyond the level of interpretative practices to how the humanities has been instrumentalized within the neoliberalization of the university, a process graduate students are well aware of as they are faced with the crushing weight of neoliberal mindset via professionalization workshops and a dwindling academic job market. Although a number of recent essays point out what the digital humanities and neoliberalism mean for scholarly interpretation, faculty hiring, and institutional funding, few scholars take into account how these forces unevenly affect the graduate students who not only operate within these austerity measures with more precarity and less agency than their faculty counterparts but often do so with more finesse out of a necessity to survive (Greenspan, “Scandal of Digital Humanities”; Allington et al., “Neoliberal Tools”). The weight of neoliberal late capitalism is inextricably linked to how VCS graduate students read, write, and interpret, as humanities students are often asked to make their work “matter” to decision-making entities of the university (a body whose decisions almost solely rely on the cost-benefit model of the corporate capitalist world) and if not the university, then in industry. The visual theorist Johanna Drucker makes this connection, noting, “The familiar line of criticism against digital humanities is that computational processing is reductive because it performs statistical analyses on complex artifacts (by contrast to the good or neutral availability of digitized materials in online repositories) and that because it is statistical it is necessarily an instrument of neoliberalism” (Drucker and Bishop, “Conversation on Digital Art History,” 321). Drucker’s argument is that this need not be the case, but when students of visual culture are asked to justify their work with criteria dictated not by their own field’s standards and practices but by capitalist standards—and when DH is often provided as the salve to make humanities research more “interesting,” “edgy,” and “marketable”—then the association of the digital humanities with neoliberalism by many visual culturalists, especially in a field that has built itself upon the critique of capitalism, is unsurprising.

Moving forward, the question becomes not how the digital humanities might be useful to the VCS student but how, as Mittell suggests, the digital humanities might complement the questions visual culture graduate students are already asking, as well as how it might allow these early career scholars, often responsible for bringing new methodologies into the fold, to ask new questions. There are a number of practical ways to implement this strategy, the first being earlier, hands-on training with tools and technologies that might help ask new questions. At the moment, Mellon fellows are given a broad sense of the different tools available to digital humanists, yet if the program really wants to see the university’s students produce digital humanities dissertations, the training must be targeted toward specific research questions and goals, and room must be made for such training to be more intensive and sustainable. Opportunities such as the University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute are an example of such extensive training that Mellon might emulate, yet the question of their lasting impact on PhD students, faced with ever-growing responsibilities during the academic year, should be noted.

Additionally, although a mid-doc fellowship of this kind is a unique opportunity afforded to very few, part of the limitation in such an opportunity seems to lie in the fact that the fellowship is ill-timed, at least if it is expected to make a noticeable impact on a given dissertation. In other words, the fellowship seemingly provides too little, too late in the game for many PhD students. Because of the restrictions caused by limited stipends across the board for humanities students, not to mention administrative pressures placed upon students to complete the dissertation as quickly as possible (known as time to degree), most students are forced to sacrifice learning new digital humanities technologies and methods to complete the dissertation requirements put forth not only by their departments and programs but also by the standards set on the academic job market. In short, though the digital humanities pose many benefits and the potential to transform a humanities PhD student’s research, methodologies, and academic practices, it first must transform the broken system inherent to the neoliberal university. All the data in the world could not accomplish that task.

—Madeline Ullrich

Although the digital humanities signals a wealth of opportunities for graduate students—from tools to enhance research and more clearly elaborate upon and articulate arguments, to diversifying their skill sets amid a dire job market—the promises of DH are only as significant and practical as academic culture at large allows them to be. The Mellon graduate program has fostered a great deal of important collaborative and interdisciplinary work; however, the neoliberal university largely encourages this type of work without equal access to supporting resources or equal recognition for the labor contained therein. If DH is to retain a role in graduate-level training and work, and if it is to be fully recognized for the intellectual labor it requires, then feedback from alumni of programs like Mellon is essential to determining the future of DH in universities’ graduate programs.

The University of Rochester, as part of its Mellon Foundation agreement, pledged to sustain DH training once the original fellowship ended in 2024. The Mellon fellowship was meant to be a bridging program that would end with the University of Rochester supporting its own DH program in perpetuity. So far, the university appears to be making good on its promise by refashioning Mellon into the Meliora Fellowship. We believe the university should honor its agreement with the Mellon Foundation through either a permanent DH certificate or DH tracks within individual humanities departments. Such initiatives would enable all interested humanities graduate students, and not only a running cohort of eight Mellon or Meliora fellows, to integrate DH into their education. In addition to a certificate program or DH tracks, DH frameworks could further shape graduate life via digital or public humanities internships, such as a graduate-level version of Rochester’s Humanities at Work undergraduate internship program (although a funding source equivalent to the Mellon Foundation grant supporting that program needs to be identified).22

What the Mellon Program has taught us is that DH is not a silver bullet for the ailments of contemporary humanities programs, but its role is nevertheless fundamental to the future of academic training. The field of DH connects contemporary audiences to humanities research, and it integrates a humanistic perspective into conversations surrounding how digital frameworks inform research within and beyond our academic disciplines. Former Mellon fellow and historian Jim Rankine puts it this way:

My initial posture going in was that it was imperative to bring the digital into humanities, but after my tenure I found myself equally, if not more convinced that it was essential to bring the humanities into the digital. In many ways the friction that often emerges from attempting to adapt digital tools to humanistic pursuits highlights the extent to which these technologies have emerged without any real humanist input or consideration. Seeing how humanists from across the disciplinary spectrum brought not just their skills and perspectives to bear, but rapidly developed and continue to develop ideas about how digital humanities must embody a set of humanist ideas, ethics, and values has been heartening and inspiring. Where before I might have argued primarily for more injection of digital tools and concepts into humanist disciplines, I find now that we must be promoting more of a genuine exchange and cross-pollination that enhances both sides of the equation.23

As Rankine suggests, the role of digital humanists, whether they are graduate students in training or faculty leading DH programs and projects, is to continuously shape digital landscapes through critique, theory, and practice. Our work in DH may not be the key to transforming the neoliberal university, but it serves as an important example of how academic structures may be defined and redefined by the people working critically and reflectively within them.

Notes

1. 1. The authors wish to thank the following individuals for their contributions and feedback: the late Morris Eaves, Michael Jarvis, James Rankine, Emily Sherwood, Julia Tulke, University of Rochester; Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University; Camden Burd, Eastern Illinois University; Anouk Lang, University of Edinburgh; Simon Appleford, Creighton University; Serenity S. Sutherland, SUNY Oswego; Helen Davies, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Christopher Patrello, Denver Art Museum.

2. 2. For more detailed information, review the University of Rochester Mellon Graduate Program in the Digital Humanities Informational Packet at https://dhfellows.digitalscholar.rochester.edu/about-the-mellon-fellowship/.

3. 3. The Blake Archive is available at www.blakearchive.org. The original Digital Elmina website went offline as of January 2022, but the Internet Archive captured the site on August 10, 2018, at https://web.archive.org/web/20180810104928/https://digitalelmina.org/. The new Digital Elmina website is again located at https://digitalelmina.org/ as of April 7, 2024.

4. 4. As a DH laboratory, the Lazarus Project plays an important pedagogical role. Director Gregory Heyworth, alongside frequent collaborators from the Rochester Institute of Technology such as professor of imaging science Roger Easton, train graduate students, who in turn train and educate other graduate and undergraduate students alike. For a look at how these educational functions can go unseen or undervalued, see Opel and Simeone, “Invisible Work.”

5. 5. Davies’s “Translating Space,” remains unpublished.

6. 6. The multispectral image data is freely available at www.archimedespalimpsest.org. For a critical overview of the project, see Netz et al., The Archimedes Palimpsest. See also Easton and Noel, “Infinite Possibilities,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/20721527, and Easton et al., “Ten Years of Lessons,” https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ten-Years-of-Lessons-from-Imaging-of-the-Archimedes-Easton-Christens-Barry/21886489f896e35b7281c26315b05d21c93649df.

7. 7. Burd expressed this in a personal email to Gorman on June 22, 2020.

8. 8. Sutherland expressed this in a personal email to Gorman on June 22, 2020. Also, see Sutherland’s contribution in chapter 32 in this volume, “Remediating Digital Humanities Graduate Training.”

9. 9. “The Career Diversity Five Skills,” a list of recommended transferrable skills for all historians in the twenty-first-century job market, is part of the American Historical Association’s online career resource guide. “The Career Diversity Five Skills,” edited by Lindsey Martin, American Historical Association, accessed January 19, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220119190658/https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-resources/five-skills.

10. 10. “Digital History and Argument” is a 2017 white paper edited by Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen and available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220119191809/https://rrchnm.org/argument-white-paper/, https://web.archive.org/web/20210820063938/https://rrchnm.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/digital-history-and-argument.RRCHNM.pdf.

11. 11. Cameron Blevins has noted, however, that a risk of comparing digital projects to print historiography is that a historian might “evaluate digital projects in terms of what the reviewer wants them to be (a traditional academic monograph) rather than what they are (an online exhibit, research tool, pedagogical resource, etc.)” (emphasis in original). See Blevins, “The New Wave of Review.”

12. 12. Survey the available digital history reviews in the Journal of American History submissions section here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323015741/https://jah.oah.org/submit/digital-history-reviews/.

13. 13. See Ayers et. al, “Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation,” https://web.archive.org/web/20220119194809/https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/digital-history-resources/evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-in-history/guidelines-for-the-professional-evaluation-of-digital-scholarship-by-historians.

14. 14. The journal’s special digital history features include “AHR Exchange [section]”; Scully, “Thematic Digital History Archives”; and “Doing History in a Digital Age [section].”

15. 15. To view descriptions of Rochester’s graduate (400-level) digital history courses from 2016 to 2020, consult the Course Description/Course Schedule (CDCS) database, Prior Fall 2020 Environment Version 1.5, University of Rochester, last modified 2022, accessed January 19, 2022, https://cdcs204.ur.rochester.edu/Default.aspx. For courses from Fall 2020 onward, consult the CDCS database, Production Environment Version 2.1, University of Rochester, last modified 2022, accessed January 19, 2022, https://cdcs.ur.rochester.edu/.

16. 16. See “Digital Elmina,” University of Rochester and University of Ghana, https://web.archive.org/web/20180810104928/https://digitalelmina.org/; Thomas P. Slaughter et al., “Seward Family Digital Archive,” https://sewardproject.org/; “Virtual St. George’s [Summary],” https://web.archive.org/web/20220119214839/https://dslab.lib.rochester.edu/virtual-st-georges/; Thomas Fleischman et al., “Hear UR,” https://web.archive.org/web/20220119214857/https://hearurpodcast.wixsite.com/hearur.

17. 17. For a profile on Jarvis and his contributions to varied course offerings, visit the University of Rochester Department of History at https://web.archive.org/web/20200616165033/http://www.sas.rochester.edu/his/people/faculty/jarvis_michael/index.html.

18. 18. The revised department handbook reads: “If [students] did not teach or have an internship in the fourth year, they normally teach a one-semester course of their own devising . . . or complete a semester-long or academic-year internship with a digital humanities project, in object-based learning, community-based teaching, or in an archive or museum, in which case they will register for up to five internship credit-hours (HIS 494 or 494P) per semester for the academic year. The internship will include a formal written contract outlining duties, goals, and learning outcomes signed by the student, a resident supervisor in the program or institution where the student will be interning, and the faculty supervisor (a regular member of the UR History Department faculty) who will assign the student a grade.” See “PhD Program Handbook of Policies and Procedures,” University of Rochester Department of History, last modified June 16, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20201121231315/https://www.sas.rochester.edu/his/assets/pdf/graduate-program-handbook.pdf.

19. 19. Students in the VCS program were contacted via email to share their experiences about the Mellon fellowship, including how the fellowship positively or negatively impacted their graduate study experience and their experience on the job market (when applicable).

20. 20. Christopher Patrello related this retrospective in a personal email to Madeline Ullrich on June 23, 2020.

21. 21. Julia Tulke related this perspective in a personal email to Madeline Ullrich on July 7, 2020.

22. 22. For additional detail on the undergraduate internship opportunity labeled Humanities for Life Internship, visit the University of Rochester Humanities Center at https://web.archive.org/web/20200623203118/https://www.sas.rochester.edu/humanities/students/internship.html.

23. 23. James Rankine expressed this in a personal email to Gorman on June 29, 2020.

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