Rewriting Graduate Digital Futures through Mentorship and Multi-institutional Support

As two first-generation university graduates and women of color, we knew navigating our doctoral programs meant using the self-starter mentality we had ever since we stepped into the academy. As we moved from two-year public community colleges (CC) to the four-year California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) public university systems, we recognized the importance of creating our mentor networks and pursuing and creating opportunities to help us develop digital humanities (DH) skills. We also knew that student success is more likely when multi-institutional support is at play. We reimagined success as graduate students by reformulating the personal and professional growth we sought to achieve beyond the dissertation. As graduate students at UC San Diego, a large public research university, our departments prioritized research-related productivity and discouraged outside interests such as DH in favor of completing the degree by university-required timelines. The pressure to graduate, combined with our alternative plan to gain as much additional training and professional development as possible while part of the UC network, sparked a fire within us to work creatively, critically, and collectively to redesign the (graduate) futures we envisioned for ourselves.

This chapter argues that mentorship and multi-institutional support are necessary for rewriting the graduate digital futures we hope to see. We draw from our experiences developing alternative curricula in addition to our research, teaching, and other job duties; these activities provided us with the tools to learn DH, network with other digital humanists, and share these skills as scholars, educators, and professionals. We discuss how we established an inclusive environment to learn DH skills through multi-institutional support, which we define as collaborations across research universities, state universities, community colleges, and educational organizations. In our case, we worked at the intersections of UC-wide partnerships: UC San Diego, the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD), and San Diego State University.

The future of graduate education we hope to see looks like the recent Integrated Internship Initiative, a partnership with SDCCD and the UC San Diego Division of Arts and Humanities that funds three PhD humanities fellows’ professional development through SDCCD and UC San Diego mentorship to support CC and academic administration career exploration. The Division of Arts and Humanities, in partnership with SDCCD, also created the Digital Technology for Collaborative Innovation workshop series, an example of educational institutions working together to promote digital humanities skill development as professional development for UC and CC students, faculty, and staff. These programs effectively inspire underrepresented students to integrate DH and multi-institutional collaborations into their academic journey.

Although the Integrated Internship Initiative is an excellent model for how educational institutions can facilitate funded professional development for graduate students to diversify career options, this initiative only recently launched in 2019 and was unavailable when we were graduate students. We had to act as liaisons across different UC programs and multiple institutions to gain a similar experience to the one the Division of Arts and Humanities is now offering. We worked hard to acquire DH training and establish strong relationships with mentors to pursue diversified career options and CC employment to supplement our department’s doctoral program. Still, our DH journey was under the radar and underfunded. The extra work we did to incorporate DH into our graduate training was integral to our development as students, scholars, mentors, and professionals. In hindsight, we wish the opportunities we secured had been formalized options available to all students and supported by our departments, both with funding and encouragement. To follow is a discussion of the professionalization programs and mentoring opportunities we created or sought out to develop a foundation in DH that enhanced our work as researchers, scholars, and instructors, with a particular focus on how our experiences as first-generation women of color in the academy intersected with how we navigated both learning and practicing DH across multiple institutions.

Our approach to DH is intersectional; it often challenges the digital tools themselves and the dominant groups using and writing about them while paying particular attention to who does or does not have access to such resources. Moya Bailey’s seminal essay “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave” urged a burgeoning digital humanities field to inform its theory and practice by addressing and including intersectional identities. As Bailey explains, “By centering the lives of women, people of color, and disabled folks, the types of possible conversations in digital humanities shift” (9).

Issues of intersectionality continue to be discussed, such as in the collection of essays in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. This work reveals that despite the growing interest and scholarship in digital humanities, representation from women, people of color, and historically underrepresented people is still severely lacking. In the introduction, the editors Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh reflect upon the 2016 Los Angeles Review of Books critique of digital humanities initiatives as neoliberal tools used as a “means for serving the ends of cultural conservatism and political reaction within increasingly corporatized universities and colleges” (2). This critique suggests a “techno-utopianism of digital humanities” that focuses primarily on the “repeating different versions of the solo white male inventor” and excludes “women and people of color as digital humanities innovators” (3). In Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein “insist on intersectionality” because, as they argue, “Feminism has always been multivocal and multiracial, but the movements’ diverse voices have not always been valued equally” (215). The authors attribute their intersectional framing to the work of activists and scholars, particularly Black feminists, who over the past forty years have insisted “on a feminism that is intersectional, meaning it looks to issues of social power related not just to gender, but also to race, class, ability, sexuality, immigrant status and more” (216). These critiques and considerations deeply resonated with us throughout our academic journey. Applying an intersectional feminist lens has shaped the creative ways we pursue digital humanities scholarship and projects that engage our wider communities.

As ethnic studies and literary scholars, we were intrigued by DH as a resource for empowering ourselves and our students to tell their stories in multifaceted ways that contributed new perspectives to the traditional curriculum we studied. Inspired by speculative fiction, world-making, and design-thinking, we perceive DH as providing what we call “speculative tools of knowledge” that serve historically underrepresented communities, especially people of color, with alternative ways of learning, being active knowledge creators, and transforming the society through activism and social justice with digital media. Practicing speculative tools of knowledge in the classroom insists on teaching students how to consider context, a process that D’Ignazio and Klein describe as “understanding the provenance and environment from which the data was collected, as well as working hard to reframe context in data communication”; practicing speculative tools of knowledge in the classroom also engages questions like “whose knowledge about an issue has been subjugated, and how might we begin to recuperate it?” (Data Feminism, 172). We argue that these speculative tools of knowledge are best used in practice, particularly in ways that speak to marginalized communities’ lived experiences, histories, stories, and socioeconomic conditions.

Digital humanities as a speculative tool of knowledge has encouraged us to center our histories and stories within the dominant narratives of academia. As educators, our work to bring these tools and ideas into the classroom empowers our students to envision themselves as future scholars, world makers, and changemakers. Arguing for the importance of intersectionality in such endeavors, Roopika Risam proposes that it provides “a viable approach to cultural criticism in digital humanities, enabling us to write alternate histories of the field that transcend simplistic ‘hack’ vs. ‘yack’ binaries” (“Beyond the Margins,” 16). Thus, rewriting these digital futures, histories, and stories is only possible when intersectionality is accepted in the broader academic conversation and field.1 Moreover, scholars such as Amy E. Earhart explain that it is essential to “center the human experience” and specifically “rethink our working partnership with historically marginalized communities.” Earhart further states it is important to recognize historically marginalized communities “stripped of control of their materials over centuries, sometimes by the very institutions that are our employers.” The reality is, according to Earhart, that “structures of academia are built on the exploitation of particular groups” (“Can We Trust the University?,” para. 12, 18). Because we are part of the small percentage of women of color in the university, we hope to rewrite and reclaim the narrative for ourselves and other historically underrepresented communities. Thus, our positionality as CC alumni and adjunct professors constantly reaffirms our commitment to implementing an intersectional feminism lens into the DH work and pedagogy we use in the classroom, and CC classrooms in particular, as a way to revitalize hidden histories and rethink possibilities for the future.

In one example, we implemented DH in our CC courses by teaching students how to build a digital companion to their final essays on the platform Scalar, a free and open-source authoring platform that allows for multimodal formats such as text video, images, and annotation. This assignment aimed to give students the tools for undertaking basic web design, curating each page with the most impactful and concise information, and complementing the text with relevant media. This example is a compelling illustration of how DH as a speculative tool of knowledge empowered students to be intentional about the narratives they wanted to tell and allowed them to engage creatively with others in an interactive digital space.

Unfortunately, for adjunct professors to integrate this Scalar assignment into the course required additional unpaid labor, resources, and time. Teaching a new platform to students meant making space during class and during and beyond office hours to troubleshoot technical questions. Even though this initiative was fruitful, it often left us feeling burnt out to ensure everyone received the mentoring and training needed. Our expertise in DH and Scalar in particular resulted from our active engagement in online tutorials and occasional DH workshops on campus at UC San Diego, voluntary commitments we made that took away from our doctoral research.

Digital humanities at UC San Diego did not gain momentum until 2014. A Digital Humanities Research Group (DHRG) was created through collaborative efforts with library staff and graduate students, with DH-specific workshops, programs, and community-building activities. These efforts, however, were not supported with funding, and much of the labor required to run the group was unpaid. It was not until 2016 that a digital scholarship librarian was hired. The business need was proven to the university that a full-time staff member was necessary to become more formalized and consistent in its DH goals. Our experiences serving as chairs and committee members for the graduate student association and other institutions that supported DH work helped us identify other internal and external funding sources and help grow our group’s membership.

During the first years of the DHRG’s existence, we submitted a monthly funding request to the graduate student association to fund coffee and snacks to engage more people across campus. Once funding was approved, we still had to purchase the snacks and coffee with our funds and then get reimbursed afterward. Additional work also fell to us, such as submitting orders, picking up orders, and transporting items to the meeting, all of which were unpaid labor and required us to personally cover some additional costs. This was not a sustainable model, especially for low-income graduate students like ourselves. On the other hand, we significantly enhanced our DH skills, knowledge, and networks. We also learned valuable budgeting and event-organizing skills and earned project management expertise. Although the experience gained in this role was practical for skill-building and networking, the labor and time were taken away from our research and teaching responsibilities.

Much of the work of sustaining the DHRG fell on the digital scholarship librarian, which was difficult because this person also needed to focus on establishing the academic aspects of DH at our institution. Their labor was not consistently recognized either. As Risam and Susan Edwards explain, DH projects and scholarship produced by librarians and students are not always recognized, primarily because of the perception that librarians are “in service” rather than collaborators with other scholars (“Transforming the Landscape,” 6–7). As a result, librarians may not be considered DH “experts” compared to faculty who work on these projects, even if the librarians are active collaborators. Moreover, Lisa Brundage, Karen Gregory, and Emily Sherwood explain that despite all this expertise, when one provides some sort of “affective and support labor, the more invisible the effort becomes” (“Working Nine to Five,” para. 15). As a result, this perspective becomes the antithesis of the digital humanities to make “scholarship in the humanities more open and public” (“Working Nine to Five,” para. 15). Unfortunately, when we left the DHRG to concentrate on finishing our dissertations, the group became less active. In 2020, the digital scholarship librarian left her position with UC San Diego, and as a result, the group lost much of the momentum and community we tried to build over the years. The DHRG was essential in bringing scattered offices, students, staff, and faculty together in a meaningful way to establish some DH community and presence on campus. This example illustrates the immense loss when DH initiatives such as this one are inadequately resourced or supported and shows that despite the great successes of the group, much of the responsibility and labor (and some of the financial support) fell to the graduate students themselves.

In 2019, we participated in a new UC-comprehensive initiative called Humanities Careers in Science History, Policy, and Communication (H-SCHIP). This year-long career development program was created by a group of graduate students at UC Riverside and funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) to support graduate students interested in developing skills in public pedagogy and DH. Workshops occurred virtually and in person, and when Covid-19 hit, everything was moved online without much disruption. As program organizers, we were in a position to craft our dream DH training program by listening to what the fifteen participants wanted to learn most according to their career aspirations and what they were missing from their home institutions. This model was innovative in that participants did not begin a predesigned program but participated in its cocreation. We reached out to our mentor networks inside and outside academia who could offer DH training to enhance our capacity to tell our dissertation stories in innovative formats and explore DH career possibilities. We created workshops on geographic information systems (GIS) and story maps, coding, text mining, museum exhibition planning through a decolonial lens, open publishing platforms, and more. Additionally, H-SCHIP leveraged our existing UC, CSU, and CC mentor networks to design DH professional development programming for graduate students across the UC system and introduced us to a dozen new mentors who offered their expertise and continued support after the program ended.

Another program we participated in over several years was Humanists@Work (HumWork), a graduate career initiative created by the UCHRI to facilitate graduate student-led initiatives to build the structures and communities necessary to allow PhD students in the humanities and social sciences to feel valued as professionals with diverse career opportunities. HumWork organized biannual workshops that rotated throughout California and fostered a community of doctoral students who shared similar fears and hopes about the transferability of their PhD to nonacademic opportunities, as well as DH-related professional development interests. HumWork paid for travel, food, and accommodations so that we felt treated as professionals rather than students, and the amount was more than for travel grants we typically received from UC San Diego. In our experience as graduate students, when receiving travel grants or funding awards, we had to pay the costs of travel up front (usually on credit cards) and then wait weeks, sometimes even three to eight months, to get repaid. While waiting to be reimbursed, we had to take on additional student loans, accrued interest on our credit cards, and sent weekly emails to administrators to remind them about our repayment. This common reimbursement game created additional stress and feelings of shame stemming from a perception that we were harassing administrators to get repaid on top of managing our regular graduate work.

The HumWork organizers at UCHRI created an important model for supporting graduate student professionalization by creating a budget that prioritized paying stipends for graduate advisory committee members and paying travel grant recipients up front. This approach might not seem like a significant intervention for some, but for us, as low-income, first-generation students and early career researchers, it was a game changer. Without their intentional support model, we would have been unable to attend the workshops and join a community of peers who proved to be so transformational in our journeys. The HumWork workshops brought speakers to teach us about the value of learning digital tools and seeking professionalization training while we completed our degrees. HumWork facilitated our engagement with a peer and professional mentor network that helped us reimagine our potential as scholars and humanists by honoring our interests in pursuing DH training as professional development. We served as graduate advisory members for HumWork and brought our newfound DH empowerment to UC San Diego to support our peers.

One final challenge we faced in our DH journey that we want to share is the difficulty of identifying DH mentors, on top of existing struggles to find supportive faculty mentors to champion our evolving career interests. We struggled with imposter syndrome due to being the first in our families to attend college, combined with our shared determination to learn digital skills and pursue careers outside of academia. We stressed about conversations with our mentors because no one discussed digital humanities training, tools, or benefits; moreover, no one was talking about careers outside of a tenure-track position, and graduation requirements, research, and extracurricular campus activities were squeezed into the six-year normative time-to-degree time frame. Serious conversations about mentorship for underrepresented graduate students focused solely on faculty helping students complete their degrees on time according to the institution’s expected deadlines. As first-generation women of color, we were regularly asked to volunteer for tasks such as sharing our “diversity” experiences and providing first-gen advice on panels for other students, making recommendations to university administrators through focus groups, meeting and recruiting prospective graduate students, and mentoring undergraduates. With our many professional development interests and our investments in supporting students like ourselves, we realized the normative timeline was not made for graduate students of color and certainly not for those taking advantage of professional growth opportunities or invested in supporting the campus community through diversity labor. We realized that seeking out mentors and a community who could affirm the value of our DH interests and our diverse career interests would be vital in completing our degrees “on time.” Our experience suggests that academia, in general, and digital humanities, in particular, do not provide adequate opportunities and pathways for DH mentorship for students of color. The DH programs and mentor networks we became a part of helped us fight through and grow beyond imposter syndrome.

We want our experiences to inform future conversations about graduate programming and budget decisions that will prioritize support for expanded understandings of what graduate student work can be when enhanced by digital tools and digital culture and for ways that graduate work can be transferred outside our programs and beyond the academy. With DH as a speculative tool of knowledge creation and exploration, graduate students from historically underrepresented backgrounds like ours can be empowered to write and share their stories in new ways. They can also serve as the mentors needed to effect actual change in our institutions, especially for those in the most vulnerable categories such as adjuncts who are underpaid and overworked, community college students without access to adequate technological tools or financial support to purchase those tools, and graduate students who are too often forced to choose between focusing solely on their research and exploring other career paths. By committing to multi-institutional partnerships and collaborations that can support existing DH initiatives and programs, as well as those yet to be conceived, graduate digital futures can be rewritten and reimagined in transformative ways that value labor and inclusivity for generations to come.