Teaching from the Middle

I Am a Liaison Librarian

Liaison librarianship is one of the overarching structures under which libraries interface with disciplinary departments on campus. At the College of Wooster—and our model is similar to those in other liberal arts college libraries in the United States—each liaison librarian has a handful of duties including (though not limited to) developing and managing collections for a department or program, communicating and interfacing with departmental constituents, engaging in course-based library instruction, and conducting subject-specific research consultations. These nontrivial obligations multiply as each librarian is responsible for a number of departments or programs. In our library, we strive for some semblance of equity in the distribution of these areas, but because my workload includes both my directorship of the CoRE and the teaching of my digital humanities course, I have fewer liaison areas, the result of which is that some colleagues have more. While my generous colleagues would never frame it this way—because we all know that an equitable distribution of liaison areas takes a holistic view of our responsibilities—I perceive that there is a debt to be paid: What value does my course (for example) bring to the libraries that offsets the time spent on it? Put another way, because I am teaching my course, I feel as though I am not pulling my weight as a librarian.

These concerns have less to do with my actual relationships with my colleagues and my work than they do with my own insecurities as an uncredentialed—or, rather, differently credentialed—librarian. My doctorate is in early modern drama as literature with a subspecialization in book history, so I am trained to study and teach about William Shakespeare and friends, with the material book as a side hustle. Anything I know about librarianship I have learned through a few courses and mostly on the job, by the grace of my colleagues. It is not that I feel unqualified to do the work; rather, it is that my efforts to become my best librarian are diluted by the effort required to teach my class, and vice versa. Indeed, teaching from the middle, in my case, compounds various undertones of general inadequacy; it has created a kind of double imposter syndrome. I am an uncredentialed librarian, but I am also an uncredentialed digital humanist. (“Credentialing” means much less for DH; I simply mean that I have not studied DH as such. Again: only Shakespeare and friends and books.) Who am I to claim the mantle of “librarian”? Who am I to profess digital humanities?

The pressure, then, that my role as a liaison librarian exerts on my digital humanities course is only perceived, but it nonetheless amplifies self-doubt while perversely intensifying the value that the course must return. These are not real pressures in that they do not logistically or functionally limit what I am able to do with my class; no one is actually standing over my shoulder in judgment. Still, these pressures intensify the already taxing emotional labor required for one to teach in higher education, and the next sections will deal more explicitly in these pressures’—real or imagined—effects on my teaching from the middle.

I Am Library Faculty

At the college, librarians are faculty rather than staff, but distinguishing “library faculty” is necessary because our positions are defined by elements of both “staff” and “faculty” categories. On the one hand, librarians participate in faculty governance, are eligible for periodic research or study leaves, and are evaluated by our Teaching Staff and Tenure committee (TS&T) on a schedule that parallels that of tenure-track faculty (at two, four, and six years, then every seven years thereafter). On the other hand, librarians can look a little like staff as well: though salaried, we punch a clock (as it were); the librarian of the college functions more like a manager and supervisor than a department chair might; and it is assumed that we and the services we offer will be present and available during break periods. Librarians’ hybridity here is a necessary function of the libraries’ role as, among many things, a collection of service points that students, staff, and nonlibrary faculty rely on for their work. The library is too big to fail, so there is substantial structure mapped onto its operations for the sake of predictability and continuity.

The distinction of “library faculty” is most palpable in librarians’ criteria for review, which is also where my unique flavor of “library faculty” has the most impact on my digital humanities course. Sparing the details of the review process, suffice it to say that one’s teaching is integral to a successful review. Of course, this is true in many other liberal arts colleges as well, and it is a relatively straightforward metric for both library and nonlibrary faculty: Is the teacher under review effective, as determined through course evaluations, their reflections thereon, and by TS&T’s observations of class meetings? For nonlibrary faculty, professors might be observed in any one of their class meetings, of which there are, let’s say, between six and twelve each week. For library faculty, this means that TS&T will observe one of the ten or twenty library instruction sessions held over the course of a semester. There may be many more if one has particularly active liaison departments, or many fewer if, like me, one has fewer or less active constituents.

The challenges, then, in teaching my digital humanities course from the middle—between, in this case, “library faculty” and nonlibrary faculty—are both logistical and substantive. Logistically speaking, I have fewer opportunities to teach. As noted, I have fewer liaison areas and, therefore, fewer opportunities to be observed offering library instruction. Further, because I only teach one section of my DH class each spring, I have one set of evaluations (which must always be submitted, as I do not have others from which to choose) and only two dozen class meetings in a semester. I note these logistical complications because they are nontrivial, but I am much less concerned about others’ opportunities to observe my teaching than I am about my own opportunities to practice teaching. Thankfully, my workload has been thoughtfully balanced; for many in similar positions, the labor of one kind of teaching is merely added atop the other, compounding the workload. However, just because we have sought some semblance of balance between my library instruction and my digital humanities course does not mean that they will develop at the pace of expectations. Indeed, because of this balance, my efforts are divided between these two kinds of teaching. In other words, I am evaluated on my facility with (at least) two different pedagogies and I have (at least) half as many opportunities to practice teaching them. I should say that my reviews by TS&T have gone just fine, but each time I found myself defending my teaching in one domain or the other. I wish that I could have known to expect this particular challenge with teaching in the middle, not least so that I could have had a clearer sense of what to expect of myself.

I Am an Entry-Level Administrator

The forces exerted on my digital humanities course by my position as the director of the Collaborative Research Environment (CoRE) in the college’s Andrews Library are less about the administrative mechanisms required of the role than they are about the ethos I bring to it. As the CoRE’s director, I am the steward of two small collaboration spaces; a larger open, technology-infused collaboration space; an open lab space that includes a dozen or so machines; a technology-rich meeting, presentation, and collaboration space with room for seventy-five; and our Digital Studio, which includes a sound studio, a “one-button studio” for video creation, and a small computer lab for editing and production. Keeping the lights on, so to speak, certainly requires administrative work including (but not limited to) mapping computer replacement cycles, managing circulating digital media equipment, collaborating with colocated stakeholders, and recruiting, hiring, and managing student employees. To facilitate this administrative work, I informally manage a very small corner of the library’s operating budget (there are funds earmarked for technology in my spaces) as well as a modest endowment that is centered on the Digital Studio spaces. All of this I list in the interest of context; the responsibilities are not really the point, per se, so much as the ideas that they serve.

My directorship puts some pressure on my digital humanities course to be of a piece with the spirit of experimentation, process, and play that I want to cultivate in the CoRE. Ideally, aspirationally, there is a sort of symbiosis that moves students from the formal, curricular manifestation of DH curiosity—my class—through the CoRE spaces for workshops and self-structured, guided exploration. To be sure, this pressure benefits both spaces, the classroom and the CoRE, and it is the kind of experiential learning that would inform my DH pedagogy even if there were no CoRE. Still, the pressure is pressure nonetheless: it is a force acting on my course that keeps the course from being simply “my course”; when designing course components, I always have one eye on my learning goals and the other on the degree to which I am nurturing a DH culture.

One example of the ways in which I build opportunities for cross-pollination into my DH course is in the PoemBot project that we create each March to prepare for National Poetry Month in April. Based largely on the work of Evan Williamson and Devin Becker in their “Vandal Poem of the Day” project, we build a poem-printing apparatus from a RaspberryPi and thermal printer kit, curate a dataset of poems, and then install our PoemBot in the CoRE for National Poetry Month.6 The project presents a variety of learning opportunities: we explore a scripting language (Python) to see how structured data (.csv file input) interacts with the program, and we think about physical computing as we install the input and throughput onto a microcomputer so that we might output poems on receipt paper. It is this material manifestation of these pedagogical components that is also an opportunity to bring my students into the CoRE, to have them encourage their friends and family to visit the CoRE, and to have the general student population learn a little about physical computing (we have, in the past, even created an exhibit to go with it). Put another way, the students in my DH class create programming for the CoRE that embodies the ideals I want the space to represent—namely, a spirit of experimentation, play, and interdisciplinarity. The result is a kind of two-way advertisement: it shows my students that the CoRE is their kind of space, and it introduces other students to my digital humanities class.

To a certain extent the cross-pollination of these contexts is inevitable; no class exists in a vacuum. In the case of my digital humanities course, though, it feels like it is equal parts curricular and cocurricular; or rather, the curricular and the cocurricular aspects of each are so intermingled as to be indistinguishable from one another. In another place we might discuss the degree to which this is indicative of a larger shift in liberal arts pedagogies; for my purposes here, suffice it to say that the intermingling represents an added set of pedagogical pressures for which one is not trained when one is trained to be a professor of a humanities subject.

I Am a Digital Project Consultant, Manager, and Developer

My digital humanities course is concerned with big ideas about our relationships with technology, but it is also concerned with the details of how one “does” DH. Because I spend substantial time thinking about the design and execution of digital humanities projects, mine and those of others, and because those details are as much a part of DH as the projects themselves, I feel duty-bound to instill in my students a sense of responsibility to best practices in digital humanities. If they are to go on to work on projects outside my class, they will be well served to think about staging, for example, and ethical collaboration.

One way in which I ask students to think about the practice of DH as such is through the Low-Barrier Tools assignment, in which they work in small groups to experiment with and then teach a low-barrier-to-entry digital humanities tool. The assignment provides a great deal of structure: from templates, they create a “Team Charter” and a lesson plan, each of which requires group consensus; they compose two brief reflections on their work and that of their team; and the workshops they lead are broken into discrete sections for discussion, demonstration, and “doing” (i.e., the hands-on workshop). In the process they learn a digital humanities tool and familiarize their classmates with it, but (perhaps more importantly) they are performing some of the key components of collaborative project work in digital humanities. The scaffolding and structure that I impose on the assignment is the script for some of the behaviors in responsible collaboration: planning, delegating tasks, documenting the process, and being mindful of these steps, if only for the reflective piece at the end.

The Low-Barrier Tools assignment is one example of the ways in which the project-based aspects of my professional identity are impressed on the course, but these aspects loom large throughout the course. These are the ways in which I try to be transparent in my pedagogies, assuring students that I am trying to teach them in the way that I have learned: learn a little bit about a lot of things. In my own professional life, at least insofar as digital humanities is concerned, I have sacrificed depth for breadth. In part this has been necessary, as it has allowed me to consult on a wide range of projects. This strategy serves my students similarly, I would argue, by introducing them to the widest swath of digital humanities possible, as one might expect from an Introduction to Digital Humanities course.

We Learn Enough to Be Dangerous

I am very frank about the fact that my students will not be expert in any one thing; I am not training humanist programmers. Instead, my assignments and workshops encourage students to become comfortable with tinkering. In a module on “writing for computers,” for example, we work through the concept of encoded text by creating portfolio websites from HTML5 templates. After instruction on the basics of encoded text in general and HTML/CSS in particular, students work on their websites primarily by identifying features they want to edit in a browser, locating the text or region in the template’s HTML or CSS, then modifying, saving, and refreshing to see what happened. While we will have done some pencil-and-paper wireframing, the templates take the pressure off students to be “web designers,” freeing them to learn more about the ways in which machines interpret encoded text and how they can manipulate both text and markup. Almost as a by-product, they produce a website that they can then use as a portfolio for the rest of our semester’s assignments. They may not be fluent, but they develop a reading knowledge of HTML and CSS. Most importantly, students gain confidence in navigating the angle brackets of text encoding, which, for many, might have been intimidating at the outset. As a first assignment for the semester, this provides a solid foundation for both skill and confidence levels. 

“Good Enough” Is Good Enough

Like many of my students, I am predisposed to seek the “right” way of doing things. When it comes to assembly instructions, for example, some folks take pride in tossing the paperwork aside and puzzling out the process. I am not that kind of folk. I am more gratified by following instructions and assembling my copy. I find comfort in following the path that someone has laid for me. But there is value in jumping in and getting our hands dirty, as it were, as we figure out how things work. This is the method at work in the Writing for Computers module mentioned earlier, and, as we see with that example, I build structure around our experimentation as much for my own benefit as for that of the students. The inevitable discomfort with not knowing is easier to stomach when there is structure to fall back into. Still, I encourage my students and myself to sit with this discomfort: we have built some walls, now let’s poke this thing—an HTML template, say—and see what happens.

It is important to me to communicate that I, too, am a learner in these scenarios. I am very rarely an expert in the digital humanities classroom, and one way to tap into the energy of pure discovery is to be a beginner alongside my students. It is not difficult for me to play the novice when, for example, I inevitably need to look up how to remotely access our web hosting or when we explore the Python scripts that run our PoemBot. I am very often more knowledgeable than my students, but admitting the degree to which I am inexpert not only allows student experts to shine but also gives us all permission to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It allows us all to push against our predilections for the “right” way and to find what is useful in the “good enough” way of doing digital humanities. This is another example of teaching digital humanities the way that I learned it: explore, hack, test, break, fix, repeat. These methods acknowledge one’s limits but also demonstrate the value in the process of drawing out the boundaries of abilities.

We Learn with Intention

“Learning with intention” is akin to wearing my own limits on my sleeve; we learn together, and learning with intention is facilitated by teaching with honesty. In my earliest experiences teaching, I would hold onto the “why” for entirely too long, hoarding it like some Truth that I would eventually bestow on my students. This posture of “professor professing” is possible in, for example, the Shakespeare courses I used to teach: I had a favorite reading of this play or these sets of plays (“Titus Andronicus as early modern Pulp Fiction: discuss”), and I revealed it to my students late in the lecture-disguised-as-a-discussion so that they left with their minds blown. Looking back, it is clear that this did not work for me then and it could not possibly work now, because it is a dishonest tactic. By contrast, I now lead with the “why”: we are not hacking HTML templates to become web developers but to understand how machines read encoded text; we are not close reading the Python script that produces our The Red Wheelbarrow mashups, we are learning how machines process information algorithmically.7

I try to be honest and up front about why we are doing any given task so that students can see how the pieces of their course fit together. I aim to teach honestly so that my students might learn intentionally. By this I mean that, if they can see how the pieces of the course fit together, they might be better able to locate themselves in relation to the course material. If it is the case that they are busily curating a professional academic identity, they must be able to tell the story of their education. By focusing the course in this way, I hope that they might more easily be able to tell the story of the class; they will inevitably be asked by friends, family, and my faculty colleagues, “What is digital humanities?” and it is best for all of us if I have helped them to answer that question. Perhaps even better is if they are able to answer the question, “What is digital humanities and what is it doing on your résumé?”

I have long bristled at the suggestion that we digital humanists might sell DH to our administrations by demonstrating how students’ work in our classes makes it onto their résumés. Doing so risks instrumentalizing the digital humanities to the detriment of the critical engagement that we want to cultivate with our research and our teaching. Credentialing like this, however, is about the process and not the credential as such. I hope, herein, to have sketched out how external factors, such as the specter of “credentialing,” say, or the tension inherent in distinguishing “staff” and “faculty,” might affect one’s digital humanities pedagogy. Further, I hope to have suggested how such factors multiply as one navigates several professional identities that have been cultivated through varied professional experiences. And I hope that others might recognize their own experiences in those that I have recounted here.

I am a liaison librarian, a member of the faculty, an entry-level administrator, and a digital project specialist, and each of these identities differently complicates the work of my Introduction to Digital Humanities course. I have found that if I design course components with a soft ceiling that lets us learn just enough, that if I help my students accept their limited expertise by modeling my own limits, and that if I do my part to help students tell the stories of their professional academic identities, then I can honor the challenges presented by a meandering job description while still cultivating students’ critical relationship to technology. None of this is to say that we might fully mitigate the unique pressures of positions, like mine, that grew from a desire to leverage the disparate skill sets and experiences of folks, like me, whose knowledge base is an inch deep and a mile wide. My hope is to encourage folks on similar trajectories to simultaneously see both the expense of jobs predicated on task-switching and the concomitant, commingled value of incorporating the periphery into our teaching from this middle.