Support, Space, and Strategy

On-ramps to Digital Graduate Studies

One of the biggest challenges facing graduate students interested in the digital humanities is that of efficiently integrating DH training into their course of graduate study. Many students have few training opportunities and may not be able to serve as an “apprentice” on a large-scale digital project, which, as Geoffrey Rockwell notes, often serves as one of the most direct paths into DH (“Inclusion in the Digital Humanities”). Lisa Spiro similarly points out that students may find that there are few faculty in their department who are able (or willing) to support digital projects (“Opening Up Digital Humanities Education”). As a result, digital training and projects often end up being “extra”—extra courses, extra workshops, or an extra digital component on top of a traditional dissertation—and this can make it difficult for students to fit DH into the course of their graduate education in a cohesive, meaningful, and efficient way. Although these barriers are not insurmountable, they do exacerbate the existing challenges of graduate school and make it more difficult for graduate students to engage with digital methods, get digital training, and use digital tools within their scholarship as Olivia Quintanilla and Jeanelle Horcasitas demonstrate in chapter 15 of this volume. Given the potential power of the tools that DH offers and its ability to cultivate valuable digital skills, all graduate students who wish to should have an opportunity to integrate DH into their courses of study. The ability to understand and leverage these tools will prepare students not only to advance their own scholarship but also, as Cathy Davidson and Bethany Nowviskie both argue, to more effectively participate in and shape the humanities as they evolve in response to the advent of digital technologies (Davidson, “Humanities 2.0”; Nowviskie, “Graduate Training”).

Another set of barriers to graduate DH training includes the lack of representation within the digital humanities and the degree to which it prevents DH from being more accessible but also inclusive. Numerous scholars have commented upon the lack of diversity and inclusivity within DH communities. This has included both a lack of racial and gender diversity (who gets to participate in the digital humanities) and a lack of methodological inclusion (what “counts” as the digital humanities).1 Although efforts are underway to help make DH more inclusive and diverse, including the #TransformDH movement, the lack of inclusion and accessibility within the field is an ongoing challenge at all levels.2

One strategy for addressing these shortcomings and making DH training more integrative and accessible is critically examining the experience of graduate students and the way that the traditional structures of graduate education—as well as the particular nature of DH and how it is (or is not) situated within departments, disciplines, and universities—create barriers for graduate students wishing to engage with digital methods and scholarship as the essays in this volume by Sethunya Mokoko, Hoyeol Kim, Sean Weidman, and Sara Mohr and E. L. Mezsaros all attest. In “Cultural Politics, Critique and the Digital Humanities,” Higgin argues that “without a robust critical apparatus, DH has and will continue to unwittingly remake the world in its old image. (You know, the one that has a whole bunch of white guys sitting around a highly polished oak table comparing business cards).” Beyond the development of this critical apparatus, changes in policy and practice, including those at the graduate level, can help to reimagine the DH community and ensure that all students are able and welcome to integrate digital scholarship into their graduate experience.

One potential pitfall in the efforts to ensure that all graduate students have the opportunity to pursue DH is what Moya Z. Bailey refers to as the “‘add and stir’ model of diversity, a practice of sprinkling in more women, people of color, disabled folks and assuming that is enough to change current paradigms” (“All the Digital Humanists Are White”). A more productive alternative is to approach graduate training in DH with a mindset of radical accessibility, focusing on removing barriers and creating opportunities for integration, exploration, and experimentation with digital tools. In other words, in continuing to build academic digital research and teaching infrastructures, it is important to include as many “on-ramps” as possible for graduate students and to make sure they are well marked and (mostly) free of potholes. To that end, I outline three general guiding principles—creating space, providing support, and strategic planning—for restructuring graduate education to more fully serve the needs of graduate students, especially those interested in integrating digital methods into their work. These principles are borne out of my experience in the U.S. academy though they can likely be translated to other contexts as well. I connect these principles with specific practices that can be implemented by individual faculty, programs and departments, or at the collegiate or university level. These concrete strategies are a starting point and can be implemented with a range of resources to ensure that the pursuit of DH training does not, in itself, become a barrier to the timely and successful completion of a graduate program.

Embracing the Digital Village: Toward a Culture of Multiple Mentoring

Mentors really matter in graduate training. Though the role and influence of graduate mentors has received little scholarly attention relative to mentorship in the undergraduate context, both Barbara Lovitts and Chris M. Golde have found ample evidence that mentors have a major impact on graduate student persistence, timeliness (toward degree), and success (Lovitts, Leaving the Ivory Tower; Golde, “The Role of the Department and Discipline”). Mentoring is especially important within DH for, as Anderson et al. argue, “Mentoring is perhaps the single most important and sustainable form of training in DH, as students who benefit from these activities will be more likely to share their own expertise in a similar way” (“Student Labour and Training”). Mentoring is thus hugely important in considering the openness and accessibility of DH at the graduate level, but the data suggest that mentoring within doctoral programs in the humanities is inconsistent at best. In a 2006 study by Michael T. Nettles and Catherine M. Millett, 25 percent of humanities graduate students reported that they did not have a mentor, and only 52 percent of students reported that their mentor and their advisor were the same person. The data also point to significant racial disparities in graduate student mentoring relationships, with 76 percent of white graduate students across STEM disciplines (the only ones for which data are listed) reporting having a mentor as compared with only 57 percent of African American students (Nettles and Millett, Three Magic Letters, 99). Given the importance of mentoring in the development and retention of graduate students, these statistics suggest that much work remains to be done in developing effective and inclusive mentoring systems, not just within DH or even within the humanities, but across graduate education more generally.

Mentoring deficits can present major challenges to graduate students interested in integrating DH into their training, in large part because of how departments and disciplines tend to be structured. Golde points out that many humanities departments are organized around subfields rather than around methods (“Role of the Department,” 679). Spiro has identified the potential for significant misalignment between subfield and methodological expertise of faculty relative to the interests and needs of students that may result from this organizational structure (“Opening Up Digital Humanities Education”). The DH infrastructures on many campuses exist separately from departments with many—like the University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab—situated in libraries; others, such as Indiana University Bloomington’s Institute for Digital Art & Humanities, function as centralized research centers, and still others operate as their own departments, as in the case of the Emergent Digital Practices program at the University of Denver.3 Because graduate education tends to be profoundly department-focused, some graduate students may easily find themselves in a department without strong ties to existing DH opportunities. This can lead to situations where students are forced to choose between the subjects and the methods that interest them, unable to find faculty members with expertise in both areas.

One way to address the particular challenges of mentoring graduate students within the digital humanities is to encourage students to work with multiple mentors, connecting them with a range of people who can provide advice and guidance regarding their personal, scholarly, and professional goals. Given the range of mentoring roles, expertise, and time commitments necessary to effectively support graduate digital humanists, it is unrealistic to expect any one faculty member to provide all the mentoring necessary for a graduate student, particularly when that student may be interested in a multiplicity of methodologies, topics, and career pathways. Engaging with multiple mentors allows graduate students to draw upon the expertise of a greater number of people and distributes the labor of mentoring. Many graduate students already connect with multiple mentors, at least informally. In a 2008 study, Walker et al. found that around 80 percent of students in the English and history departments they surveyed reported having two or more mentors, significantly surpassing their colleagues in STEM fields (Formation of Scholars, 95). The key changes in practice, then, are consistency and intentionality—helping more students connect with mentoring and connecting students with the appropriate set of mentors. Rather than limiting mentorship to the faculty in a student’s home department, mentors can and in many cases should include people outside the department, the faculty, or even the university. Kathleen A. Langan and Ilse Schweitzer VanDonkelaar argue that DH subject librarians are increasingly playing such a role, providing not just technical and methodological support but also academic and professional mentorship to supplement that provided by faculty advisors (“Moderating a Meaningful DH Conversation”). In her study of doctoral mentoring in Library and Information Science programs, Cassidy Sugimoto found that it was common for dissertation committees to have a “methods” person who brings methodological expertise to the committee (“Are You My Mentor?,” 8). Amy J. Lueck and Beth Boehm advocate for going further in rethinking the committee approach common in the United States to “reconfigure the dissertation committee as a structure capable of supporting a wide range of future careers both inside and outside of the academy for degree recipients,” allowing and even encouraging diverse dissertation committees that would include, where appropriate, members from outside academia (“Beginning at the End,” 138). Explicitly guiding students through the process of assembling a committee built around their own needs, methods, and goals can help maximize the scholarly and professional preparation that a student receives during the dissertation process.

The culture of mentoring in the humanities often, as Zhao, Golde, and McCormick argue, constructs the doctoral advisor as the most important person in a graduate student’s career; the decision about who that person should be is similarly often described as the most important decision that one makes in graduate school (“More than a Signature”). The choices regarding mentors are indeed important ones; in her study of graduate student mentoring relationships, Lovitts found that graduate students fare better when their mentors are chosen rather than assigned, but encouraging students to connect with multiple mentors can provide them with a broader range of support and guidance (Leaving the Ivory Tower, 132–33). Simple changes in practice can help communicate to students that connecting with multiple mentors is not only acceptable but actively encouraged. Building opportunities to connect with mentors into orientation and introduction to graduate studies courses, revising graduate handbooks to encourage students to build multiple mentoring relationships—including with people outside of the department—and hosting informal colloquia or networking events with presentations involving a variety of digital humanities practitioners from across different disciplines all help create opportunities for students to connect with multiple people with a range of DH and professional expertise.

Changes in policy and practice may also help shift graduate training mentalities toward a culture of collaborative mentoring. In line with the suggestions of Lueck and Boehm, working within departments or colleges to change committee composition requirements and allow for dissertation committee members from outside of the faculty or outside of academia can help spur change. This is especially important in the digital humanities where faculty may not be well equipped to mentor graduate students in DH methods, having actively been discouraged from pursuing the “risky” work that would prepare them to do so, but where staff members often have considerable expertise and experience (Nowviskie, “Graduate Training”). Digital humanities librarians can bring especially valuable expertise as they may well have significantly more project management experience than many faculty members and can contribute unique perspectives on goal setting and time management as Alex Wermer-Colan’s essay in chapter 22 of this volume attests. L. R. Roberts, Christa M. Tinari, and Raymond Bandlow similarly identify support in these areas as essential components of doctoral mentoring and, depending on the campus and the department, DH subject librarians may be able to provide important additional support in these areas (Roberts et al., “Effective Doctoral Student Mentor”). Even in university contexts where a DH subject librarian is unavailable, seeking out other faculty or staff members, or even those with expertise from other universities, can help round out the dissertation committee and ensure that it is not only able to evaluate the student’s work but also support their research and professional goals.

Departments can ensure that students have mentors and are connecting with them by checking in periodically. Zhao, Golde, and McCormick report that it is common practice, in many humanities departments in the United States, to assign students a preliminary faculty advisor with the expectation that they will choose a permanent advisor as they move through their program (“More than a Signature,” 264). This approach can foster productive advising and mentoring relationships, particularly as Lovitts has found that assigned permanent advisors are associated both with lower rates of satisfaction and higher rates of attrition among graduate students (Leaving the Ivory Tower, 132–33). Small interventions like communicating expectations to students and faculty and checking in with all students in a program (or at least those who are beyond coursework) to ensure they have had a mentoring and advising conversation, in the last year and with at least one faculty member, that touched on their goals and progress toward the degree can go a long way toward ensuring that students do not fall through the cracks of a graduate program.

Although there exist many challenges to both learning digital methods and effectively integrating them into one’s graduate training, collaborative and responsive mentoring represents an important first step in making this possible for many students. Embracing the concept of multiple mentoring and drawing widely from the DH community, whether within a program or beyond the bounds of a campus, can help students cultivate what Vicki (Baker) Sweitzer refers to as developmental networks (“Towards a Theory”). This “constellation” of mentors, as Monica C. Higgins and David A Thomas refer to it, can help guide students through the various challenges, including the technical, scholarly, bureaucratic, and cultural challenges, that they face in meaningfully integrating DH into their training (“Constellations and Careers”).

Creating Space: Strategies to Support DH Development

Mentors can help provide essential guidance and support for graduate students in the digital humanities, but many students still face significant challenges in carving out space within their degree program to learn to use and implement digital tools. This is a particularly significant obstacle for students who may not have had any prior experience with digital tools and who may need to devote significant time to mastering them. With the exception of a few programs that focus solely on DH or that offer a large number of DH-related classes, DH training for graduate students all too often takes the form of what Nowviskie calls “stop-gap, renegade, extramural, and tacked-on models for methodological training” (“Graduate Training,” 127). Such training can involve taking additional courses that may not count toward a student’s primary graduate degree or may involve workshops or training sessions that students attend on top of the coursework that they are already completing. At its best, this training may involve working collaboratively on a DH project in a course or as part of an assistantship or additional employment. At its worst, graduate DH training may involve working one’s way piecemeal through a series of Coursera or LinkedIn learning courses in the few spare moments a student can steal from their teaching and research (not to mention personal) responsibilities. Such haphazard, jury-rigged training can ultimately prove helpful, but it creates major hurdles for student engagement with DH, piling more work on top of already overworked students and potentially extending their time to degree.4

Digital humanities practitioners have long advocated for a reassessment of the ways in which digital scholarship is evaluated and “counted” for the purposes of promotion and tenure.5 This issue extends to the graduate level, as well as to whether and how digital components of dissertations are evaluated and counted and to how DH courses fit within degree programs. Although, as Ted Underwood argues in his essay in chapter 29 of this volume, most digital humanists thrive on engagement with other departments or units, courses that students take outside of their own program may not always count toward their degree completion. This can represent a major barrier to students getting the training and developing the skills necessary to successfully utilize digital methods. Having to take another course or courses on top of their existing coursework and obligations is likely not practicable for many students. Some students are even advised to hold off on taking these courses until after they have completed all of their coursework and qualifying exams, only to be told that they then need to focus all of their time and energy on the dissertation. In these situations, it is far too easy for DH training simply to get squeezed out of a student’s degree path, perpetually deferred until some future point when they will have the time and space to undertake it. Mentors can help counter this by advising students how and when they might ideally integrate these courses into their degree plan. A more systematic approach would be for programs to reassess how DH coursework counts toward degree completion. In the absence of specific policy changes, however, many departments allow students to petition for courses in other humanities departments to fulfill part of their requirements (e.g., a gender studies class to count toward an English degree). Ensuring that this option is not only available but also clearly communicated to students interested in pursuing DH training can go a long way toward ensuring that its very real contributions toward a graduate student’s professional and scholarly development are formally recognized as such.

At the pedagogical level, it is important to recognize that DH training of all kinds involves a degree of risk, as both Katherine D. Harris and Nowviskie have observed.6 For students with little or no previous experience with digital tools, learning them often necessitates accepting not just the frustrations that go along with learning a new tool but also the possibility of failure. There is a learning curve with any new tool and although quietly cussing at one’s laptop after receiving an error message for the fifty-eighth time is arguably an unavoidable part of the learning process, risking a failing grade in a course because of a lack of familiarity with Python should not be. The idea that in taking a DH class a student might be assessed on their mastery of ArcGIS to the same extent that they would be assessed on their knowledge of, say, critical theory or historical methods, and thus that it might involve risking one’s academic standing or funding, represents a major obstacle to engaging with DH scholarship.

A key part of facilitating engagement with digital tools and scholarship within the classroom is creating low-risk environments for students to learn, explore, and fail productively. One possible strategy for facilitating these environments is to create project-based courses—or to integrate projects into existing courses—that focus on helping students learn and explore the tools that they are using. For examples of this, see Cecily Raynor’s essay in chapter 11 of this volume. This pedagogical approach can, as Malte Rehbein and Christiane Fritze note, be particularly effective in classes where many students may have little or no experience with digital tools and much less experience with the specific tools being used in the course (“Hands-On Teaching Digital Humanities”). Other options include opening up the kinds of assignments and work that students can complete and grading the students’ work wholly or partly based on their research and exploration process rather than on the degree of development of the final product. Such approaches create spaces for students to experiment within the classroom, allowing them to, as Harris suggests (borrowing from Stephen Ramsay), productively “screw around” or playfully tinker (Harris, “Play, Collaborate, Break, Build, Share,” 6). These spaces are, according to Anita Say Chan and Harriett Green, “particularly valuable for humanities instruction, where curricular structure, facilities, and pedagogy are oriented less toward tinkering and lab-like practices than those in science, engineering, and technology” (“Practicing Collaborative Digital Pedagogy”). Exploratory approaches, implemented within some individual classrooms, can help students explore and learn to productively deploy digital tools and help revitalize graduate seminars in line with the recommendations of Peter H. Khost, Debra Rudder Lohe, and Chuck Sweetman, integrating intentional pedagogy that will benefit all students in the course, not just those who are interested in pursuing DH (“Rethinking and Unthinking”).

Outside of the classroom, there are larger-scale opportunities that can significantly advance students’ DH training and skills. Students might work in an assistantship as part of a team on what Davidson refers to as a “Big Humanities” project, learning from and collaborating with other team members as Laura Crossley, Amanda Regan, and Joshua Casmir Catalano describe in their essay in chapter 13 of this volume (Davidson, “Humanities 2.0,” 714). Alternatively, they may hold a DH fellowship and work in a directed way on a collaborative project or in a more open way to pursue their own research and training with the support of DH experts as in the Praxis Program and Digital Humanities Fellowship Program at the University of Virginia Scholar’s Lab.7 My own experience with a DH fellowship at the University of Iowa Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio provided me with time and the support of a DH librarian to work with tools that I ultimately learned were not the right ones for completing my dissertation project, long before I had to submit and defend my proposal. The key elements of such space-creating opportunities, whatever form they may take, are the same as those for creating a productive DH classroom: a high degree of freedom for creativity and experimentation and sufficient support or guidance to work through challenges when they (inevitably) crop up. Even at institutions where limited resources might not allow for the creation of digital humanities fellowships, collaborations with other DH practitioners, research support offices, graduate colleges, and programs at other institutions can help create opportunities for additional training and practice. As an example of this, a number of consortia, including the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, the Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina, and the New England Humanities Consortium-Digital Humanities have formed in recent years to support interuniversity networks of DH scholars and practitioners.8 These and similar efforts can facilitate the creation of spaces for the meaningful learning and experimentation necessary to learn how to effectively utilize digital tools.

Intentional pedagogical practices, internships, and counting courses in other departments can help remove barriers to students’ digital training but, as Donna Bussell and Tena Helton’s essay in chapter 5 and others in this volume attest, not all students may have access to digital humanities opportunities, either in their own departments or others. For graduate students at universities without specific DH offerings, an even greater degree of departmental flexibility and support may be necessary to ensure that students have adequate opportunities to advance their training. Such efforts could include connecting students to DH practitioners on campus or through DH consortia or networks, allowing students to utilize digital methods in their coursework, or providing support for training opportunities beyond the university such as the Digital Humanities Summer Institute or Digital Humanities Forum, where students can connect with the expertise and training necessary to develop their skills. At institutions with few existing spaces for DH training, helping students locate those spaces beyond the bounds of the institution can enable them to effectively navigate the challenges of getting additional DH training and bring their burgeoning expertise back to campus. In all forms of DH training, but especially at campuses without robust DH infrastructures, developing a coherent plan for when this training can occur is especially important to ensuring that students do not “miss their exits” to the on-ramps of the digital humanities.

On Grad Strategy: Pulling It Together with IDPs

As graduate students work to include digital humanities elements in their graduate training, careful planning can ensure that these elements are integrated as efficiently and seamlessly as possible. This is particularly important for students whose goals might diverge somewhat from the traditional ones pursued by others in their department, that is, if they are contemplating undertaking supplemental training in digital tools, applying for DH fellowships, or petitioning for other courses or experiences to be included in their degree requirements. Knowing in advance about these opportunities and plotting them out with an Individual Development Plan (IDP)—identifying their goals and the steps necessary to achieve them—can make balancing the demands of graduate school a bit easier and even ensure that DH training and scholarship are as well integrated into their degree plan as possible. Individual Development Plans are a means of operationalizing and strategically organizing advice from mentors, planning when to take advantage of experimental spaces and opportunities, and setting both long and short-term research and professional goals.

Though they are gaining popularity in the humanities, IDPs are predominantly used by graduate students in the health sciences, and a description of whether and how IDPs are used has been a required component of National Institutes of Health funding involving graduate students since 2014 to help students and postdocs “to participate successfully in a broad-based and evolving research and research-related economy” (National Institutes of Health, “NOT-OD-14–113”). Though IDPs can make use of a variety of different tools, their core components involve students completing self-assessments and reflections, exploring options and opportunities (both at the university and beyond), setting short- and long-term goals, and planning for accomplishing those goals with the input and guidance of their mentor(s).

Importantly, IDPs provide a framework or roadmap for developmental mentoring meetings and can, as Beronda L. Montgomery suggests, help students strategically cultivate multiple forms of expertise and support (“Mapping a Mentoring Roadmap,” 10). Vincent et al. describe a system wherein they hold annual one-on-one meetings between mentor and mentee that accomplish five things: motivate people by celebrating their accomplishments; set short-term and long-term research and career goals; help people make rapid progress by prioritizing projects and identifying barriers; clarify and solidify relationships by giving honest constructive criticism; and clarify expectations in both directions and address any disagreements (“Yearly Planning Meetings,” 718). This approach helps mentors explicitly and periodically check in on their students, their progress, and any support that they might need and provides useful feedback to mentees, which helps them structure and achieve their goals. Within a DH context, a student and their mentor might discuss the student’s long-term research interests and career goals, the best classes or training experiences to help them achieve those goals, and a map of those experiences to chart the time the student is planning to spend in graduate school.9

Although IDPs can initially seem like an extra bureaucratic barrier, and implementing them can involve some resistance, both Vincent et al. and Julie Gould report that they quickly prove their worth as a career planning and development tool, particularly in the context of research training and planning, which is one of the primary benefits that they bring to graduate students who are interested in DH (Gould, “A Plan for Action”). Faculty members and graduate students alike can advocate for the adoption of IDPs as a required part of graduate advising in their home departments, but they can also get started just by creating them. There is a wide variety of templates available online, and students and faculty can find ones that they like and that fit their needs as Crossley, Regan, and Catalano discuss in their contribution to this volume. Mentors can get started by explaining what an IDP is and why it matters and then asking or requiring their mentees to complete one. Grad students can initiate the process by completing an IDP and setting up a meeting with one or more of their mentors to talk about it. The document, which evolves with the graduate student’s interests, goals, and needs, is important in itself, but more important is the process—planning, exploring, and facilitating discussions between mentors and mentees. In mapping out students’ graduate experiences, IDPs can ensure that students are ready and able to identify and take advantage of the best DH on-ramps for their goals.

As Patrik Svensson argues, DH has become a laboratory for the humanities, one that “is associated with a visionary and forward-looking sentiment and [that] has come to constitute a site for far-reaching discussion about the futures of the field itself as well as the humanities at large” (“Envisioning the Digital Humanities”). As the members of that laboratory imagine the future of both DH and the humanities, it is imperative that they contemplate how best to prepare the humans who will populate that future. There has arguably never been more of a need for digitally literate humanists, scholars who can not only productively utilize digital tools but also critically examine them. Developing methods for ensuring that all humanists have viable pathways into expanding their own digital literacy, whether they are interested in exploring basic tools or mastering Python, is essential to imagining the future of the humanities.

Digital humanities has a major role to play in the future of both the humanities and graduate education, and it requires a correspondingly robust infrastructure. In addition to building new tools and datasets and developing new methods and applications for the range of projects that they work on, the efforts of digital humanists to create additional and more clearly defined onramps to DH can help strengthen the field and make it more accessible and inclusive. The acts of adopting more effective and intentional mentoring practices and policies, implementing pedagogies that create space for experimentation and exploration, and encouraging graduate students to strategically plan a variety of possible futures will not accomplish this on their own. But they are an excellent start.

Notes

1. 1. This is a rich area of scholarship and commentary in the digital humanities. For a discussion of representation within DH communities as it pertains to race see Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White” and McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” On gender inclusivity in DH, see Nowviskie, “Don’t Circle the Wagons.” For questions about what kinds of projects qualify as “digital humanities,” see Barnett, “Brave Side of Digital Humanities,” and on the role of coding in DH practice, see Posner, “Some Things to Think About.”

2. 2. Perez, “Lowriding through the Digital Humanities” offers a discussion of the #TransformDH movement and the need for greater engagement between DH and critical theory, and in “Beyond the Margins,” Risam discusses the need for a more theoretically informed and intersectional digital humanities.

3. 3. For a description of these organizational units, see University of Virginia Scholars’ Lab, “About”; Indiana University Bloomington Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, “Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities” (https://idah.indiana.edu/); University of Denver College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, “Emergent Digital Practices: Creatively Shaping the Future” (https://www.du.edu/ahss/edp/).

4. 4. This last consideration is particularly important when considered in light of financial costs associated with extending time to degree and the potential to run out of funding. The Council of Graduate Schools found that financial support was the leading factor cited by graduate students in degree completion, though humanities students were less likely than their peers in other disciplines to cite this factor (Council of Graduate Schools, Ph.D. Completion and Attrition). Obviously, the magnitude of these financial impacts are likely to be significantly exacerbated by the challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.

5. 5. See, for instance, Purdy and Walker, “Valuing Digital Scholarship”; Nowviskie, “Where Credit Is Due”; and Day et al., “What We Really Value.”

6. 6. Harris and Nowviskie explore the risks inherent to pursuing training in digital methods, which may or may not pan out; see Harris, “Play, Collaborate, Break, Build, Share,” and Nowviskie, “Graduate Training.”

7. 7. A description of the Praxis Program can be found in Nowviskie, “Digital Boot Camp.”

8. 8. For information about these confederations, see Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, “About” (https://www.fldh.org/about); New England Digital Humanities Consortium, “Digital Humanities @ NEHC” (https://nehc.edu/digital-humanities/); Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina, “About Us” (https://dhcnc.org/about-us/).

9. 9. It is important to note that graduate students should not be required to share their entire IDP with any or all of their mentors. Some of their goals are likely to be personal and private, and they may not feel comfortable sharing all goals with all mentors.

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