Rethinking the PhD Exam for the Study of Digital Humanities

Hacking the PhD Exam

Our decision to study DH was prompted by intellectual curiosities about digital culture and a desire to diversify our professional capabilities. The PhD exam presented the perfect opportunity to learn about a little-known field due to its prolonged engagement with a subject area.1 Given the content-fluid nature of exams, which accommodate numerous areas of study, we envisioned a DH study program that was to replace one of the four traditional fields in the art history curriculum. However, the process of developing, obtaining approval for, and implementing a new subject area, never tested in the department, required us to navigate multiple institutional roadblocks, leading us to hack the PhD exam.

Considered outside its illegal connotations, “hacking” is an apt metaphor to describe our pursuit of a DH education. Hacking is broadly understood as the act of breaching a system and obtaining information that was previously denied or obstructed. DH has reclaimed this term, employing a positive perspective of hackers’ creativity in rethinking a system and the success of tinkering, or what Stephen Ramsay calls “the hermeneutics of screwing around.”2 In debates about digital humanities, scholars associate this experimental approach with a DIY ethos wherein the DH community sets to unlearn the individualistic nature of the academy in favor of a more pluralistic approach to knowledge development among multiple contributors.3 The embrace of tinkering and self-pedagogy sets DH apart. The field’s flexibility to engage with new subject areas is one of its greatest attributes, but one that often challenges the formalized structures of graduate education. Our approach in designing a PhD exam for the study of DH was informed by long-rooted DIY traditions in the field, in which practitioners teach themselves numerous skills with little institutional support. For us, tinkering with the PhD exam meant repurposing the institutional educational structure to make space for the study of DH where there was no precedent.

The initiative required two major interventions. First, we needed to transgress long-standing traditions that dictate the type of knowledge that is tested in doctoral exams. Second, we needed to create a program of study where none existed. In the spirit of DIY culture, we scoured the internet for DH exam programs only to find a multiplicity of textual studies approaches that reflected little of our art historical interests.4 Without a skill-sharing community that provided adequate models or tutorials, our DIY exam was highly experimental.

Through debates with our adviser, Beatriz Balanta, who supported and guided our initiative, it became clear that before we could develop our idea into a doctoral examination, we first needed to understand the functions and structures of this academic exercise. Humanities PhD exams are rooted in a monastic tradition of reading canonical texts that narrate the history of a set of ideas and its key thinkers. The centerpiece of the exercise is a comprehensive bibliography, often designed by faculty and revised from previous exams in the department. Ultimately, PhD exams intend to test students’ mastery of selected fields before their transition into candidacy, acting as a passageway into professionalization. Thus, to develop a new, untested, and personalized area of study for the exams is fairly uncommon and for some programs unprecedented and restricted.

Traditional art history exams evaluate students within three main parameters: (1) the comprehension of a selected bibliography consisting mainly of secondary texts; (2) a proficiency in recognizing artistic languages and styles that derived from particular peoples, cultural traditions, or academic schools of art; (3) the ability to memorize canonical works of art, their producers, and their social conditions. An adviser and their student select exam fields according to the latter’s research and teaching interests. These fields broaden the student’s scope of knowledge and pedagogical capabilities and are often used to establish teaching proficiencies. Thus, the specialization in DH would afford us an opportunity to teach this subject area in the future.

In theory, digital humanities, whether as a specialization or a broader teaching field, could be easily adapted to the already content-fluid nature of the PhD exam. Despite their rigid pedagogical structure, which dictates the reading of influential texts and memorization of key artworks as the only viable format for the study of a subject matter, art history doctoral exams are inherently open to a multiplicity of fields. They are meant to accommodate vastly different subjects that range anywhere from Classic Maya to contemporary art. However, upon detailed consideration, several questions arose: Can the traditional exam format, which centers on the reading of a bibliography, accommodate the study of DH? How do we find the balance between theoretical and practical knowledge? Can the study of programming languages contribute to the production of knowledge in the discipline of art history and thus merit inclusion in the exam program? And lastly, how were faculty not trained in DH going to assess our work? In debating these questions, a broader inquiry emerged regarding the objective of the exam as a pedagogical tool and how we would design it to satisfy institutional requirements and our desire for professional competency.

To Code or Not to Code

The initial phase of our exam was marked by a key question: To code or not to code? That is, does the study of DH prioritize training in programming languages or reading and discussing seminal texts and ideas? Often referred to as the “hack versus yack” opposition, this binary underlines debates about what DH is, or what it should be. Those familiar with the field might find the opposition counterproductive given that, as Bethany Nowviskie reminds us, “humanities disciplines and methods themselves are not either/or affairs. The humanities is both/and.”5 Despite this framework, newcomers will likely encounter the “to code or not to code” question early in their studies. We believe that the answer should be determined by the student’s intellectual and professional interests. Indeed, it does not have to be “either/or,” since practical and philosophical or discursive knowledge will be of use in future engagements and career opportunities. As we suggest in the conclusion, an ideal program will include elements of both.

The coding question can also be swayed by one’s early encounters with DH. During our coursework in the Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture Program in Art History (RASC/a), we engaged subjects such as the history of print and media, the management and theorization of arts archives, and the digital arts. Our training also included technical proficiency in digital photography, image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, and PowerPoint. The program’s interest in the new frontiers of art history fostered curiosities about digital culture that eventually led us to DH. However, at the time, we understood DH as something different from our training. For us, DH was primarily about project building.

Our first encounters with what we saw as “proper” DH were through a series of lectures and events organized by SMU’s English and History Departments. The lectures brought renowned scholars and DH makers such as David Eltis to campus. These scholars shared insights about their projects such as processes, results, audience engagement, and future program updates.6 While our training laid the groundwork for thinking about DH, the lecture series defined the field as a project-building endeavor. Armed with this knowledge, we crafted an exam proposal to present to the art history faculty. The document was unique since we are not required to submit written argumentation for exams, and an exam field in DH raised several questions that our faculty wanted us to address.

Our proposed program of study included three parts: a selected bibliography, programming training in SMU’s Creative Computation Department, and a collaborative project in lieu of a written examination. In other words, we understood DH as intrinsically connected to hacking, and thus we sought to learn and express our knowledge in the language of code. The proposal elicited mixed responses from the faculty, who acknowledged the value of DH but were not convinced that our desired PhD exam structure provided an apt format for its study. Some considered DH a type of technical competency, similar to that of a foreign language, which tends to be acquired outside formal graduate training. Others noted that learning code is outside art historical competencies. In addition, there were problems of assessment, addressed later in this chapter. For example, what metrics does the department use to evaluate digital projects? Or how can art historians evaluate the students’ proficiencies in code? In turn, our proposal for a project-based and code-centric exam was replaced with a more conventional exercise that required the reading of a bibliography that included topics in media studies, DH scholarship, and a selection of digital projects. In retrospect, if we had proposed a “thinking” exam program as opposed to a “making” one, the faculty would have been less skeptical; but we needed to study DH and immerse ourselves in its debates to come to that realization.

In a sense, the proposal and the rejection of the coding component were part of the trial-and-error phase characteristic of any DIY experiment. The experience highlighted a conflict between developing one’s own program of study and institutionalized learning criteria. While PhD exams are typically flexible in terms of content, they are not meant for experimentation. Rather, exams seek to test canons of knowledge, long-standing debates, and histories of ideas that shaped a field or discipline. They are pedagogical exercises intended to test old knowledge, not to produce a new one. This posed a challenge requiring us to negotiate between our DIY explorative drive and the formalized structure of university learning.

Developing a Program for Self-Instruction

Upon approval of the exam, we worked closely with our adviser to design a program that satisfied institutional requirements, as well as our intellectual curiosities and professional interests. As previously mentioned, the compromise was to replace the technical training section with a bibliography of seminal texts. We organized our bibliography into five thematic sections: “What is digital humanities?” debates and practices; DH and art history; DH and the history of media; the visualization of information; and DH project evaluation. The projects and case studies section was divided into three conceptual subheadings: thick mapping, databases and archives, and museums and exhibition technologies.

The creation of the bibliography, deciding what to include and what to leave out, was the first step toward developing a pedagogical program that reflected our career goals and objectives. It was also an exercise that prompted us to survey DH websites, blogs, syllabi, and projects. As we compiled texts and references, we began, without knowing it, to define DH for ourselves. This was central to our DIY pedagogy, which prioritized learning through exploration. Because for us DH was undefined, we saw the exam as an opportunity to seek knowledge beyond the traditional library. We approached learning as a collaborative endeavor that prompted discussions about digital culture between ourselves but also with faculty and other students around campus. The “yacking” element of the study program was as important as the readings; it provided a means to test and refine our ideas. This was rather different from the other field exams we took that year, in which the boundaries of knowledge were already in place and our inquiries were limited to the faculty-provided bibliographies.

Over the course of several months, we read the bibliography and held discussions with our adviser to review texts and DH projects. Our adviser assessed our progress through short written responses that summarized the readings and critiqued DH projects, emphasizing DH as both a theory and practice. Similar to Ramsay’s approach detailed in “Programming with Humanists,” we included older texts that commented on the history of media, such as Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), Janet Abbate’ s Inventing the Internet (2000), and Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window (2006).7 These texts allowed us to engage with the politics of the medium, its message, and the role of viewership. Following the introductory readings, our research ventured into the case studies. The value of case study analysis was twofold: they were a new form of secondary sources that used technologically innovative data visualizations, and they allowed us to take a closer look at the hack side of DH.

At this stage, each of us gravitated toward areas of interest in our scholarship and career paths. For example, Sepúlveda focused on issues of spatial mapping and rendering in projects such as HyperCities, while Zapata explored efforts in virtual exhibition re-creations in Elizabeth Buhe’s article “Sculpted Glyphs: Egypt and the Musée Charles X.”8 During the second semester of exam prep, our attention gravitated toward digital artworks such as the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab’s The Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007–present), which blur the lines between DH project, digital intervention, new media, and net art.9 Coded as a mobile app, the Transborder Immigrant Tool guides travelers through the U.S.–Mexico border. In theory, the transgressive app serves as a desert guide that provides routes to water, medical information, and instruction using GPS and poetry. Our consideration of this and other transmedia projects allowed us to articulate the interdisciplinary nature of digital strategies in visual culture and expand the definitive qualities of a DH project and a fine artwork.

The theoretical and history-of-media texts allowed us to contextualize and evaluate DH projects as arguments constructed through code and interpreted through visual design instead of solely academic prose. This is particularly pertinent to art history–related projects primarily concerned with visuality. In turn, our critiques paid close attention to the managing of data and its visualization, centering on what Johanna Drucker calls graphesis, or the interface that mediates the relation between content and user.10 Our criticisms centered on such design considerations that informed our interpretations of DH projects’ visual interfaces. We asked, how does the visualization of information affect the presentation of a DH argument? What are the developer’s visual strategies and design heuristics?

After two semesters of deliberations among ourselves and numerous informal DH conversations around campus, it was clear that the next step of DH project assessment—as Miriam Posner puts it, “how they made that”—was beyond our reach.11 To fully understand the makeup of the digital programs we were reviewing, we needed cursory technical comprehension of the tools and software used to organize and manipulate the data. For example, it was only after we audited a workshop-style class led by Jo Guldi, in which she discussed the challenges of programming Paper Machines, that we understood the limitations of text-mining software: the margins of error, the misreadings of a faulty optical character recognition, and the inability to recognize images alongside text, among others.12 We began to ask ourselves, how can we peer review DH projects without an understanding of the technical parameters and limitations of the softwares that organized and reproduced the information? Then we realized the limitations of our program of study. On the one hand, the exam prepared us to ask questions about DH: to see how the field can contribute to the production of new knowledge, to always be skeptical of the “hard-data” convictions that accompany DH projects, and ultimately to better understand ourselves as digital users and consumers. Importantly, we understood digital culture as a product of our humanity that carries on our biases and politics. However, our approved DIY exercise also delineated that which was out of reach, the technical proficiency that allowed one to understand DH from a maker’s point of view.

Faculty Assessment of DIY Curriculum

While the DIY program of study proved successful in developing a cursory understanding of DH, it was not clear how we were to be evaluated by the Department of Art History, particularly since there were no experts on our committee. In order to resolve this, the faculty encouraged us to frame our DH inquiries within the broader field of media studies, a specialty of our adviser. Now framed within a more familiar field, our exam evaluation criteria followed the same parameters as the other subject areas; we took a closed-book exam consisting of essay responses followed by an oral defense.

The testing format undermined the collaborative DIY study program and the intellectual deliberations that occurred throughout. Different from the other fields, the DH exam preparation was a collective conversation between us, our adviser, and many other members of the SMU community. Our DIY exercise generated analysis that extended beyond scholarly publications; these group engagements unto themselves were a form of “reading” for which there was no evaluation criteria. As Matthew G. Kirschenbaum explains, “the digital humanities values collaboration, openness, [and] nonhierarchical relations,” none of which are characteristic of the PhD exam and its testing structure.13 Therefore, our committee was reviewing our DIY methodology using tools of institutional assessment that were diametrically opposed to our program of study.

Our DIY exercise challenged the grading rubric and assessment practices of the traditional PhD exam. Such structure is a closed conversation, wherein a student reflects on knowledge that has been approved by scholarly consensus. Upon successful completion of the exam, the student continues their trajectory to become an official, institutional scholar. DH as a field is an ongoing conversation without a strict linear evolution toward expertise. In the digital world, knowledge rapidly changes and decays. There are practitioners, tinkerers, DIYers but rarely any “experts.” This is why DH is attractive to DIYers like us. Its collaborative diversity and innovative characteristics create an evergreen field that consists of unprecedented inquiries and ideas not entrenched in the academy.

Conceptually, the DIY curriculum comes in direct conflict with an institutional certification of knowledge because it entails an individualized program of study often at odds with the current formalized structures of testing. The PhD exam is meant to assess a mastery of a field of study, while the self-taught exercise incorporates the seedlings of new knowledge, frontiers of experimentation, and developing projects. One exercise prioritizes the memorization and synthesis of information, while the other emphasizes exploration and a nuanced interpretation of research that extends beyond academic text, as is the case with DH projects.

In short, if we are to rethink the PhD exam for the study of DH, we are to revise the evaluation parameters. While the traditional written and oral exams can test DH theoretical proficiencies, they will do so after establishing a canon to be tested, limiting inquiries to a set of preselected text and projects. Digital culture is always on the move, renewing itself at a pace that makes canons obsolete. Hence there is an inherent value in a DIY exercise that begins with fresh inquiries, with a new bibliography reworked out of old ones, with different projects and inquiries. Deciding on testing parameters that accommodate DIY exercises and their unique methods is an ongoing challenge for faculty invested in DH pedagogy.

Postexam

After successfully completing the exam, we continued our road to candidacy. The knowledge acquired opened a new set of doors. The following year Sepúlveda participated in the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program, in which he developed a digital three-dimensional pilot project for ¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues / En los barrios y las grandes ligas, an exhibition that showcases the role of Latinx players in the history of American baseball. Zapata presented on museums’ metadata methodologies at the Digital Frontiers conference and contributed the essay “Chicanx Art in the Digital Age” to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 2020 exhibition catalog, ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965–Now. Today it is clear that our DIY exercise prepared us with a robust theoretical foundation that has and will continue to facilitate our future engagements with DH.

The exam provided a generalist perspective to DH and allowed us to pursue more specific and technical applications with greater clarity. The approach also facilitated graduate work in DH outside the guild-like model commonly employed in universities and research centers that create DH projects. Graduate students have expressed their frustration with how DH downplays the role of student labor.14 The guild-like model asks students to work on a faculty project that started before they joined the program and will likely continue after they graduate. This is not to say that such experience is not valuable. However, once graduate students enter an already-established faculty project, the questions they may ask of DH are limited to the technological and theoretical choices made by the faculty. In contrast, our DIY approach provided freedom of inquiry and enticed learning through exploration. It also allowed us to be critical of the projects we reviewed without stepping on the toes of a greater authority. Yet our program lacked the technical training one might acquire working in a lab or helping to code a faculty project. Perhaps this comparison too reflects on Nowviskie’s acknowledgment that DH should not be “either/or”—neither should its pedagogy.

As DH is formalized into the humanities’ graduate curriculum, there arises a need to rethink the PhD exam. In our view, a successful exam in DH would allow the student to tinker with different inquiries, approaches, and technologies. A comprehensive exam should also inform the student of the history of DH and its debates, provide an understanding of the tools available to digital humanists, and make clear that those tools carry the inherent biases of those writing the code. In addition, it will provide students with cursory knowledge to assess the amount of labor and funds needed for a future project; and to identify what makes a project succeed or fail. After the exam preparation, the student should recognize that code is not separate from culture and that DH projects are a form of argumentation rather than hard data. Thus, a theoretical program of study outside the code-centric approaches can provide a foundational base on which to build. In a perfect world, such a theoretical exercise will be supplemented with coding literacy. We hope the insights provided in this chapter will help graduate students and faculty in their quest to hack the PhD exam and to create a program of study that reflects the student’s intellectual curiosities and professional interests.

Notes

1. 1. SMU’s art history exams are taken after a year of study.

2. 2. Ramsay, “Hermeneutics of Screwing Around.”

3. 3. For examples of digital humanities scholars discussing hacking, experimentation, and do-it-yourself culture as driving forces within the field, see Spiro “‘This Is Why’”; and Sayers, “Tinker-Centric Pedagogy.”

4. 4. Approaches to the study of DH have been traditionally dominated by the relationships between text and digital technology. During our initial search, we encountered exam programs such as Visconti, “Ph.D. Exams List.”

5. 5. Nowviskie, “On the Origin,” 69.

6. 6. See Slave Voyages Consortium, SlaveVoyages.

7. 7. Ramsay, “Programming with Humanists,” 238.

8. 8. See Presner, Shepard, and Kawano, HyperCities; and Buhe, “Sculpted Glyphs.”

9. 9. For more information regarding the Transborder Immigrant Tool project, see Marino, “Code as Ritualized Poetry.”

10. 10. Drucker, Graphesis.

11. 11. Posner, “How Did They Make That?”

12. 12. Guldi and Johnson-Roberson, Paper Machines.

13. 13. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities?,” 59.

14. 14. See Anderson et al., “Student Labour.”

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