Articles
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Further thoughts on collectivity
January 27, 2021
On Monday, I was privileged to give a talk as part of the US Latino Digital Humanities speaker series at the University of Houston, titled “Building Collectivity in Digital Humanities Through Working With Data.” You can watch a recording of the talk via the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage YouTube channel. I am very honored to have kicked off their 2021 set of talks, and grateful to everyone who engaged, in the video, or via Twitter.
In the talk, I argue that we’ve tended to see DH from an additive standpoint, focusing heavily on individual achievement, and driven to produce and acquire more and more – and I suggest that there is room to think of DH more collectively. During the talk, and after, I was really lucky to have it tweeted or live-tweeted by Quinn Dombrowski, Amanda Visconti, and Brandon Walsh, and I’m linking to Quinn and Brandon’s Twitter threads as short summaries.
I want to come back to one of the questions that was asked shortly after the talk, and I’m answering it with a blog post because … it might otherwise make for a long Twitter thread. Frederike Neuber wrote:
“In daily work, however, documentation is unfortunately often considered the “least important part” when visible and functional results are expected (under time pressure). In the end, is it then better to publish something without documentation or should we not publish at all?”
This is an excellent question; and I’m delighted that Neuber asked it. There’s a lot in it to unpack, and I think it’s also a good opportunity for me to expand even further on the idea of what I mean by “collective.”
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Reconsidering skunkworks
January 14, 2020
This is a lightly edited version of a talk I gave at MLA 2020, in a panel organized by Dr. Carrie Johnston and Rennie Mapp, titled “Being Human in DH Project Management”. My thanks to Carrie and Rennie for putting it together, and to my fellow panelists for being part of the conversation, and especially to Laura Braunstein and Quinn Dombrowski, who both read early versions of this talk and provided feedback and encouragement. I hope to do more with this subject; this piece is really just a short, 12-minute start at framing a research question.
Reconsidering skunkworks; or, What might a politics of work look like in a digital humanities project management context?
As someone who has worked to build up DH support and programs, and help people who are working to create DH projects, I’m often in a position to hear people talk about the support that they wish existed; the programs that they want to create. More often than not, they invoke the idea of a DH skunkworks, innovation lab, or createspace – there are so many names – something like the UVA Scholars’ Lab – somewhere that they can work on projects unconstrained by academic bureaucracy or the strictures of the tenure track. Though the term skunkworks originates with Lockheed Martin, it became prominent in DH discourse through Bethany Nowviskie’s “Skunks in the Library: A Path to Production for Scholarly R&D,” which began as a talk/blog post in 2011 and then was published in the Journal of Library Administration in 2013.
A “skunkworks” (all one word) describes a small and nimble technical team, deliberately and self-consciously and (yes) quite unfairly freed from much of the surrounding bureaucracy of the larger organization in which it finds itself. This enviable cutting of slack and tolerance of the renegade is offset by placement, on the shoulders of the skunkworks team, of greatly raised expectations of innovation.
As Nowviskie explains, the rationale for having a skunkworks comes from the management principle that “if you want unusual results, you can’t expect that they will come from playing by the usual rules.”
Sometimes I think that when people read the article, they stopped after that sentence, and ran off to set up their innovation spaces, and never came back to read the rest, where Nowviskie explains that for a skunkworks to, well, work, an org needs to avoid distracting the skunks with “everything that constitutes a path to production for the stuff they’re building” – but notes that for the skunkworks to be more than just “innovation for innovation’s sake,” you need a path to production – the good stuff that the skunks build is meant to be applied by others, developed and refined further, maintained and integrated into larger communities and organizations. And this is work that is not meant to be done by the skunks themselves. I’ll pause there for a moment, while I (and several of you, no doubt), think about the job ads we’ve seen that are looking for people who will develop innovative scholarship, and maintain it, coordinate its use within their local organization, and publicize it to the larger national and international communities – to be the skunks and the path to production as well.
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Getting Started - Strategies for DH Professional Development
January 14, 2020
I am very happy to be part of the new collection Doing More Digital Humanities: Open Approaches to Creation, Growth, and Development, published in December 2019 and edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens.
Routledge’s Open Access policy allows me to post the final accepted manuscript version of my essay on a personal website. After an 18-month embargo, I’ll be able to deposit it in the MLA Commons Humanities Core Repository, and in my local institutional repository.
The Doing Digital Humanities series is framed as a series of how-to articles – and mine is about environmental scanning, and conceptualizing Minimum Viable Projects. In truth though, I struggled as I wrote it, and still worry that it’s hard to give good advice that’s applicable to the range of different contexts that scholars face.
However, writing this article allowed me to discuss some of the realities of the situations that current and would-be grad students and junior scholars interested in DH/DS face, to wit:
In the context of digital humanities and digital scholarship, differing
perspectives about success and achievement are often the result of individuals coming from very different roles, and thus having contrasting or even conflicting priorities. Someone working in libraries may prioritize sustainability and scalability, while someone on a search committee in a humanities department may prioritize innovation or the likelihood of winning major grants, qualities related to the tenure process. I mention these contrasts because anyone pursuing professional development as a digital humanist will find themselves navigating these contrasting priorities. The skills and experience that you pursue are likely to align more naturally with some areas than with others. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are excluding yourself from jobs, but it will be up to you to articulate how and why your experience has prepared you for particular roles.There isn’t advice that can avoid this hurdle; only luck and privilege. But frequently when I talk with folks who are newer to the community and finding their way, dealing with the different perspectives in departments, libraries, centers, etc., is disorienting. I know that I found it so when I was getting started; but I also worried that I would be seen as ungrateful or whiny if I even tried to articulate it. And I am extremely grateful to Connie, Richard, and Ray, for letting me articulate it in print.
Huge thanks as well to Paige Maskell, who was responsible for managing communication, copy edits, proof checks, etc., throughout the process. That work plays a significant role in giving this volume credibility in its publication.
You can find the essay in PDF format here, at this link.
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Humanities majors and tech training
December 28, 2017
I know that a couple of Google studies (Project Aristotle and Project Oxygen) have prompted excitement among humanities advocates about the value of humanities majors on the job market
I respect the people who are excited, but at the same time, I feel like I need to push back, a bit. [Read full post]
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Please don't call me a miracle worker.
December 17, 2017
Last week, a new Digital Libraries Federation working group was announced for “miracle workers,” Thanks to Alex Gil and Leigh Bonds for their work in getting the group started and off the ground and running; and their willingness to accept feedback from members on the name. The iterative nature of DH is likewise something that I value. And to be clear: using the label jokingly is one thing; formalizing it in any sort of institutional context has different effects. i.e. digital humanities and digital scholarship librarians who are often tasked with accomplishing monumental goals with minimal support. The miracle worker label emerged (as I understand it — others may have experienced it differently) during the start of the current wave of DH, around 2007-2010. As universities (administrators, deans, chairs, professors, etc.) became more aware of digital humanities and interested being able to say that they were “doing it,” people made some monumental requests of folks (often folks in libraries) to make DH happen — and various people stepped up, and broke new ground — and in doing so, helped to lay the ground for the community of practice that constitutes digital humanities and digital scholarship today. The community of library-based people doing DH that emerged during those years has always been alert to labor issues, As evidenced by still-relevant pieces like the Collaborators’ Bill of Rights and Miriam Posner’s commentary on the ‘make DH happen postdoc’ role, among too many other pieces to name, and more ephemeral commentary in social media spheres. and indeed, my own career has been shaped by their work in positive ways, and for that, I am immensely grateful.
While I understand the tongue-in-cheek use of the “miracle workers” label and Alex and Leigh’s intentions in invoking it, and while I fully support the creation of a DLF working group in order to have more formal discussions of the labor and support for library people doing DH I feel strongly enough about it that I think it’s worth explaining my discomfort publicly. Setting aside the name of the group entirely, my reasons for resisting the term are fairly central to my practice as a librarian and as someone working to build and support digital humanities & scholarship infrastructure. The situations I describe below recur in mentoring conversations, consultations, and informational interviews, and it seems useful to articulate them here because I continue to think through them in the course of my work, and expect to continue discussing them with my colleagues. [Read full post]
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This talk doesn't have a name.
July 21, 2017
This is a lightly edited version of a talk that I gave to junior and senior high school students who were attending the University of Miami’s Center for Computational Sciences Data Scholars Summer Immersion Program on July 20th. My goals for the talk were to give them a bit of an intro to textual data — but also to touch on the stakes of data work, and on the fact that there are significant ways to participate in data work that aren’t just about programming. I wanted to say more than just ‘working with textual data is cool, y’all!’ Many thanks to Athena Hadjixenofontos for giving me the opportunity.
The title of this talk isn’t actually an error, or just a placeholder that I forgot to get rid of when I was making my slides. We’ll come back to the reason for it near the end of this talk.
Hi, I’m Paige, and I work in Richter Library, in an area called Digital Humanities. That area often involves working with various sorts of data. As a librarian, sometimes I do my own research, but a lot of the time, I’m helping other people with their research; helping them figure out what kind of data they have, or can create, and what to do with it. Several months ago, someone asked me if I was a data scientist, and I was completely caught off guard. And they said “well, you work with data, right?” And I replied “yeah, but…” I really didn’t know what to say. And that, too, is something that we’ll come back to later. [Read full post]
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A new blogging space.
July 20, 2017
I started playing around with the idea of moving to a Jekyll blog in spring 2016, and I’ve finally settled on this one. I’ve opted not to move over the posts from my older WordPress blog, though, because reformatting them for this particular Jekyll theme and its capabilities was more work than was worthwhile (as was dealing with the URL redirects.)