Notes toward the Advantages of an Agile Digital Humanities Graduate Program

Interdisciplinarity

An agile DH curricular program cannot exist in a vacuum. Rather, the program’s overarching institutional contexts, including the kind of direct and indirect support that the program might be able to provide to faculty and students as well as to the institution’s DH community in general, play a key role in enabling its success.4 Within DH, and academia more generally, questions about the tension between teaching students technical skills versus critical thinking persist (e.g., Clement, “Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate”; Hirsch, Digital Humanities Pedagogy; Mahony and Pierazzo, “Teaching Skills”; Sula et al., “Survey of Digital Humanities Programs”). For example, is one skill set more important than the other?5 Does the relevance depend on a student’s future career goals? And, importantly, how can we ideally reach a balance between these two skill sets, that is, between technical skills and critical thinking skills? We contend that to effectively tackle such questions, an agile DH program benefits considerably when it can draw its faculty from a range of disciplines and when it has the support of an interdisciplinary set of departments (Svensson, “Landscape of Digital Humanities”).6 Such widespread support signals to students in the program (and to those in the university community as a whole) that DH practice can address research questions that extend beyond any one discipline or area of academic inquiry. The widespread support underscores the broader value of the program. The chance for students to work with faculty in multiple disciplines also creates opportunities to gain a firsthand understanding of the value of such interdisciplinarity. Students may find that a chance to shape discourse in other fields is invigorating or discover that questions raised from other disciplinary perspectives can reshape their own disciplinary priorities; they may even come to privilege arguments that resonate in multiple fields at once. Ultimately, these diverse opportunities support and extend the fundamental points made by the application of an agile curriculum within the program itself, as both require a dynamic and multifaceted approach to DH practice.7

The Graduate Certificate Program in Digital Humanities at UNL bears out these points. Over the last decade, UNL has used individual and cluster hires to build its strengths in interdisciplinary DH while promoting solid working relationships among DH faculty and between DH faculty and DH-oriented librarians and programmers at the university’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH).8 Graduate certificate courses are offered in anthropology, art history, art theory and practice, classics and religious studies, English, history, and modern languages.9 Graduate students take two required graduate courses—one in DH readings, the other a DH practicum—which provide strong foundations in DH-based critical thinking as well as the opportunity to develop technical skills in a DH project.10 Faculty members from different disciplines rotate teaching these two core courses so students are exposed to readings and projects that typically might be considered outside the students’ disciplines. These strategies and steps have ensured that students in the DH program have a vibrant, overarching environment in which to grow as scholars and multiple opportunities to appreciate, engage in, and benefit from interdisciplinary work in the digital humanities. Such interdisciplinarity goes hand-in-hand with the agile curricular approach and helps extend it in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

Adaptive Development Ethos

Any DH program relies on developing unique skills not necessarily foundational to a given student’s discipline. These skills might include coding, data management, project management, budget building, grant writing, and ethics. However, just as important are more intangible skills: an experimental, creative, and playful attitude; the ability to think critically about and rigorously question digitally inflected worlds; and the potential for successful collaboration with individuals at multiple hierarchical levels. An agile DH curriculum, because it asks students to be flexible and to experiment by its very nature, has the potential to nurture such skills among students in ways more effective than a fixed curricular approach. For example, students majoring in English, journalism and mass communications, modern languages, and other areas often take Digital Heritage Tools, a DH elective. For many, this class is their first exposure to cultural heritage using theoretical and methodological perspectives grounded in anthropology. Students often collaborate on weekly labs and semester projects and bring with them individual interests as well as academic and extracurricular experiences that shape their labs and projects. Some students have strong technical skills, others deeper theoretical training, and as such, labs and projects typically ask students to step outside their comfort zones to experiment not only with new technologies but also with new concepts. Indeed, an agile DH program more readily allows for immediate adaptation to current local and global circumstances because students have the flexibility to experiment in nontraditional arenas and to do so with a broad range of faculty, staff, and students as well as with communities outside of academia. Although some might see the lack of formal structure to a DH program as problematic or at least not geared to help solidify the future of humanities in academia, we contend that such agility is a strength (Pannapacker, “No More Digitally Challenged”; Walzer, “Digital Humanities”).

UNL nurtures an adaptive development ethos among students by leveraging the total curricular experience at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The long duration of this curricular experience enables students to evolve their DH skills over time while tackling important research questions at different levels of sophistication. Additionally, the fact that UNL offers both an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate, each with a wide range of course options, allows for greater flexibility with regard to tailoring the curricular path based on students’ interests while balancing requirements that provide a solid DH foundation in technical and project skills alongside critical thinking.11 UNL also offers split undergrad-grad courses that bring together students who might otherwise not normally interact in the classroom. These courses emphasize discussion and teamwork-led development with collaborators (i.e., other students) at different stages in their educational careers.12 Together, these curricular contexts compel students to work in multiple registers and to apply—in critically-inflected ways—the kind of intellectual agility that is also foundational to the layout of the curriculum as a whole.

Community Embedding

Finally, an agile DH curriculum has the potential to best capitalize upon its embeddedness within the given institutional DH community. In fact, the program’s agility itself plays a central role in this process by creating opportunities for students, faculty, and staff working in DH to come together, while evolving their shared interests through various activities and initiatives. These might include regular meetings, focused learning initiatives, or public events; students will have recurrent chances to contribute to faculty-led research, pursue research in guided extra-curricular contexts, and/or take part in major national and international DH conferences. The collective quality of such efforts, in turn, provides the occasion for and, indeed, justifies wider institutional investment. The given institution may set aside dedicated funds or create awards to recognize the accomplishments of DH practitioners. Likewise, units on campus, such as departments or centers, might sponsor relevant DH events or other activities. As a whole, the activities in their diversity extend and support the notions of agility that are foundational to the curriculum.

At UNL, the DH community has organized numerous initiatives and events. These include “DH Afternoons,” where faculty and students present their research to the local DH community; an annual DH Forum that brings together junior and senior interdisciplinary scholars from outside and within UNL to present on and discuss a common theme; an annual “Digital Scholarship Incubator” fellowship program (now discontinued) that promoted student-led digital research; and the recent “Uncommon DH Critic” series, which brings leading critics to campus for a combination of public lectures and smaller faculty-student gatherings. These initiatives have ensured that the DH community remains highly visible on campus and beyond and, over time, have both drawn and repeatedly rewarded ongoing institutional investment in DH at UNL.13 These events and initiatives, moreover, introduce students to DH practice in a diverse range of contexts, thereby underscoring the wide applicability of DH and demonstrating the many different ways in which their skills, as learned through the program, might be deployed professionally.14 In other words, the diverse range of activities makes an implicit argument for the wider professional value of the agility that simultaneously serves as the core of the program.

An agile DH curriculum has the potential to benefit its students considerably more than a fixed curriculum, a point especially valid when factors such as interdisciplinarity, an adaptive development ethos, and integration into the university community work to reinforce the core components of the program itself (Spiro, “Opening up Digital Humanities Education”). In doing so, the agile digital humanities curriculum, such as that in place at UNL, underscores the value of DH research strategies for addressing new and existing questions in one’s own discipline and in other disciplines. The program educates students in critical modes of thinking associated with DH practice, especially by highlighting the opportunities for collaboration and intellectual growth created in working across various hierarchical divides. Finally, the program both draws DH practitioners together and creates a focal point for wider institutional interest and investment. Ultimately, therefore, the agile DH program, especially when supported and reinforced along the lines of interdisciplinarity, adaptive development ethos, and community embeddedness, most effectively professionalizes students because the program places student endeavors in wider interdisciplinary contexts, highlights the value of cross-hierarchical collaboration, and transforms “textbook” learning into knowledge that can have a meaningful impact in shaping the wider world.15

Notes

1. 1. In using the term “agile,” we have in mind a concept different than that usually associated with the term in the context of software development (e.g., Beck et al.). As elaborated further in this chapter, we use the term “agile” to describe a type of curriculum that centers on the concept of flexibility in terms of the courses that are offered, when the given courses are offered, fewer core course requirements, and the parameters of the coursework foundation that students build through the curriculum as a whole. In this model, courses tend to be defined in more abstract terms (e.g., Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities), so that instructors are free to design course content within a set of minimal guidelines, and students can take courses not only to meet their needs and interests but also in a way that responds to the priorities of their professional development in graduate school over time.

2. 2. Of course, courses offered do not always align neatly with student interests. However, an agile curriculum, such as the one sketched here, has the potential to address this concern in different ways. For instance, some degree of misalignment between course offerings and student majors can be a goal of the program, with a general curricular expectation that students should take diverse courses outside their comfort zone (e.g., major) as a way of expanding and diversifying professional horizons. Alternately, as in the case of UNL, students might also have the opportunity to substitute courses from outside the DH curriculum, provided those courses have a substantial and relevant digital component, or even to substitute relevant DH-focused experiences, such as summer internships, in place of courses from the DH curriculum. In such cases, provided that student expectations were set at the outset of the program, students would be able to plan ahead and prepare and, indeed, might even be motivated to pursue opportunities they might not otherwise consider.

3. 3. Details about the DH certificate are found on the UNL dedicated page: https://www.unl.edu/dhcert/.

4. 4. We discuss this point at greater length later in the chapter.

5. 5. We believe that the advantages of agile DH curricula come to the fore in the context of such questions because the agile curriculum, due to its inherent flexibility, will provide students with options to consider this question and others like it from multiple perspectives, none of which is necessarily privileged from the overall curricular standpoint. It is also worth noting that UNL itself does not have a specific, overarching strategy for addressing such questions either at the level of advising or at the course level. Rather UNL’s DH curriculum relies implicitly on the variety of DH courses and opportunities put in front of students during their tenure at the university in order to, de facto, position students to consider such questions from multiple perspectives.

6. 6. At UNL, the DH curriculum at both the graduate and undergraduate levels is not located within a specific department or associated with a specific disciplinary degree or set of degrees; instead, it brings together the course offerings (and faculty and students) of units across the College of Arts and Sciences. As a result, students in the program have multiple options for staging curricular trajectories by, for instance, developing a more general knowledge of DH based on an interdisciplinary set of courses or by becoming more specialized by taking a predominance of courses in a single discipline.

7. 7. The authors of the present article cannot speak with any authority about other university contexts, but at UNL the students that an instructor encounters in any given DH course will—as a general rule—have widely differing levels of DH experience (both technical and critical). This is partly because there is no required sequence in which students need take DH courses and because the wide variety of extracurricular DH experiences available at UNL regularly give different students different degrees and kinds of DH training. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the DH program, students will also not necessarily be grounded in the given instructor’s discipline. As a result, in offering DH courses at UNL faculty must be prepared to accommodate such variety, so courses often seek to begin from a baseline level in terms of content and methodology that thus helps level the playing field and get students on the same page, so to speak. In the case of split undergraduate/graduate DH courses, expectations and assignments for graduate students are more challenging.

8. 8. As has been implied in this chapter up to this point, UNL does not have a dedicated DH department. Rather, faculty from different disciplines are hired into their own departments but also associated with UNL’s DH community and, more specifically, with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) as DH “faculty fellows” and “associates” (terms which, respectively, imply increased and reduced levels of affiliation). Although the nature of this relationship has recently started evolving to a more open and inclusive model that brings together a variety of DH-interested faculty at UNL, the two authors of the present essay were hired at an earlier point, and so their positions as CDRH faculty fellows were formally written into their contracts and defined by an MoU between the authors, their respective departments, and the CDRH. This MoU, inter alia, helped establish the fact that the authors’ DH-oriented research, teaching, and service would be properly acknowledged as part of their tenure and promotion. In terms of the DH presence in UNL classrooms more generally, it is worth noting that DH-oriented faculty will teach courses in DH and in their own disciplines and that these latter courses may or may not include DH components, based on instructor preference. DH faculty often collaborate with DH staff from the CDRH in the context of grant-funded work, where a percentage of the time of DH staff, for instance, may be written into grants and where, at a general level, DH staff may oversee the overall development of funded faculty DH projects both during the time of the grant-funded work and afterward.

9. 9. In general, DH courses at UNL are not offered through a given department unless that department has at least one DH-oriented faculty member.

10. 10. UNL faculty do not have an overarching way of defining foundational DH skills. Rather, each DH faculty member in each DH course tries to nurture in students the key skills that are deemed most important from a specific perspective or disciplinary grounding. At UNL, students are required to complete four graduate DH courses to receive the DH graduate certificate. Other than the milestones and final outcomes built into individual courses, there is no final milestone for the certificate as a whole and, as a result, student DH work is assessed on a course-by-course basis. Once students complete four required DH courses, they are automatically eligible for the certificate. Defining a meaningful DH graduate education in the context of taking these four courses, therefore, ultimately falls to the participating students. As a result, in selecting courses to take, students will consult their own interests and speak with faculty in relevant disciplines; as needed, they will also speak with the DH program coordinator, though this last named individual—in our experiences of having served in the position—more often takes the role of helping students clear basic administrative hurdles rather than advising on courses to take.

11. 11. In contrast to the graduate certificate (see footnote 10), UNL’s undergraduate DH minor requires students to take six courses. These courses range from entry-level offerings such as Being Human in the Digital Age and Introduction to Digital Humanities to more advanced practical and theoretical courses such as Digital Heritage Tools and Theorizing the Digital. Students can also take the split-level DH courses cited earlier.

12. 12. According to Sula et al.’s survey of DH programs from Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK, and the U.S., most programs are located within English departments, and only 36 percent offer undergraduate options. Furthermore, only 14 percent of those offer both undergraduate and graduate DH programs. We did not investigate whether undergraduates and graduate students have options to take courses together.

13. 13. Over time, institutional investment in DH research has taken a number of forms, much of it centered on the CDRH, which based on the 2016 CDRH self-study (unpublished) and the 2020 CDRH Strategic Plan (https://cdrh.unl.edu/cdrh-strategic-objectives) has impacted campus in a fashion that radiates outward. The most important of such forms of investment include Programs of Excellence (PoE) funds that support the following positions at the CDRH: 1 FTE, associate professor of English; 1 FTE, metadata encoding specialist; 1.75 FTE, programmer/analyst II; 0.4 FTE, digital development manager and designer; and stipends for the co-directors. Additionally, PoE funds “also support the CDRH graduate fellows, large equipment purchases, such as high production and large format scanners, GPS survey equipment, and servers. In addition, PoE funding is used for Center faculty and staff travel to conferences or workshops, printing, and some supplies.” The university libraries, in turn, provide a match to PoE funds via the following salaries: 0.6 FTE digital development manager and designer and 4.5 FTE faculty lines. The libraries also “provide 3200 square feet of space in the Center itself, hourly wages for undergraduate student assistants, supplies, equipment, continuing education funds and travel dollars for Libraries faculty and sometimes staff.” Finally, the College of Arts and Sciences “matches PoE funds with salaries for 9.5 faculty lines and provides some travel support for these individuals,” and departments with DH faculty “fund personal computers and laptops for these individuals.”

14. 14. There is no single, overarching, coordinated way through which DH students learn about how they can apply the skills they gain through their training at UNL in various professional contexts. Rather, the various on-campus DH activities, initiatives, and opportunities implicitly demonstrate this through sheer variety.

15. 15. By “cross-hierarchical collaboration,” the authors of the present essay mean that the nature of UNL’s DH program depends on students at different levels (within and among the undergraduate and graduate levels) working with one another.

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