I have felt troubled, lately, by the number of tenured and — to a much lesser degree, tenure-track — faculty (pardon me, friends, all!) whom I’ve heard whining about the “uncompensated” time they spend on their digital humanities scholarship. They are not talking about the sorts of unpaid service many of us render every day in support of the digital humanities community: time spent planning conferences and other gatherings, serving on advisory and executive boards for various projects and digitally-oriented professional societies, advising graduate students and junior colleagues not our own, inserting scholarly voices into commercially- and institutionally-driven conversations about the transformation of our cultural archive in the electronic age, and offering methodological training or building resources meant to bootstrap other scholars in their ability to engage meaningfully with digital objects and processes.
No. That’s all good work — necessary, important work, and it’s work that I have chosen to undertake, in my non-tenure-track, library-based position on the “administrative and professional faculty” of the University of Virginia, to the detriment of my ability to focus on my own research and writing. I don’t waste time, but time periodically wastes me. To someone who trained as a humanities scholar at a large research institution, a role like mine can feel like a reversal of the natural order of things. I work on “my” scholarship at off hours — stolen weekend mornings in coffee shops, or late at night — and spend most of my energy on service, the consuming category of activity against which graduate students and assistant professors are warned, and which I find — in all regards — richly rewarding.
But that’s not what I’m talking about.
The digital humanities community has, fruitfully, expanded to embrace a wider array of scholarly disciplines and incorporate more fully a broader range of highly-educated professionals employed in alternative academic roles. Part of this expansion has been to draw in established scholars who were not active in the first waves of humanities computing. These people, in some cases, have never felt the joy and terror of Extreme DIY — the do-it-yourself default stance many of us learned to adopt in the early days of the Web, when the only way to engage with humanities tools and resources was, first, to build them. It’s important to stress that “hacking as a way of knowing” remains a strong and vital thread in the digital humanities, even as prêt-à-porter software and digital resources have become predominant. (Some of these tools and archives evolved from early experiments and production activities in scholar- and librarian-led humanities labs or university presses, but others are purely the product of commercial interests.)
Perhaps the attitude toward “work” I find disappointing in some members of this new DH wave comes from a lack of experience in defining a digital humanities problem and then building tools and datasets from scratch to address it. (That’s an activity much like traditional editorial work and bibliographic scholarship — which has also been, in recent decades, though certainly not always, or even in the memory of some of our senior colleagues in English departments, an activity marginalized and denigrated as akin to “service.”) Or perhaps a certain turn of mind kept those people away from our more risky, Wild West days in the first place. It is also entirely possible that the tendency I have noticed in some established scholars new to the digital humanities — a tendency to view what I would consider to be their own, deeply intellectually engaging research and scholarship as “uncompensated work” insofar as it employs digital tools and methods — stems from causes mysterious to me as they exist outside my own experience in the academy, or beyond the quirks of my own work ethic.
Whatever. It’s deeply weird.
Although it’s tempting to draw a comparison to archival research and bibliographic scholarship done at one’s own institution, for which no academic would expect special compensation, it would be disingenuous to elide the aspects of digital humanities scholarship that are mechanical and time-consuming. We’ve come a long way, baby, but a great deal of our work still requires a level of encoding and markup, data entry and digitization, processing and editing, metadata provision, or munging and transformation that demands close attention to detail and a willingness to invest time. But if that is “service” work, it is most often work done in service to one’s own research, and within sight of a community of practice that has defined itself not in terms of angle brackets, but in the relation of algorithm to interpretation. If it is “uncompensated work” in the sense I most often hear that phrase used — for, say, time spent in the summer or around the margins of a faculty member’s teaching duties on collaboration with the staff of a digital center to forward the scholar’s personal project — then I clearly fail to understand the basis on which our colleges and universities compensate their tenured faculty.
More worrying would be if it is time spent in intensive consultation and collaboration with digital humanities “staff” that falls into the mental category of “uncompensated labor.” This collaboration can involve personnel attached to DH labs, centers, and central services (including classified staff, non-tenure-track faculty, librarians, full-time and contract IT professionals, graduate consultants, and post-docs) as well as paid graduate students, hired by departments or through grant funds expressly to work on the faculty member’s project. Digital humanities staff are generally highly trained and often deeply educated in one or more disciplines. They are literate in humanities resources and modes of inquiry, and experienced (to a degree highly uncommon in scholars who have worked primarily within one disciplinary silo) in working across disciplines and with a variety of methods: tools, standards, languages, approaches. The most intellectually-engaging collaborations I’ve had over the course of fifteen years in the digital humanities have been in — shall we say — mixed company, where practitioners brought deeply-invested scholarly and professional perspectives to the work, and yet their experiences in cross-disciplinary collaboration equipped them to appreciate differing assessments of validity and different reward structures. So much for staff. Working closely with students as apprentices and collaborators on DH projects, on the other hand, fits what I consider to be the teaching and research mission of higher education.
A recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education responded to a piece by Thomas H. Benton (William Pannapacker) on the “Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’.” The Benton article frames scholarly work — especially in the academic lifestyle as understood by prospective graduate students from “families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled” — less in terms of disinterested inquiry and celebration of knowledge, and more “about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life.” The response, “Neither a Trap nor a Lie,” by James Mulholland, compares, in some useful ways, the decision to pursue academic work to the level of fearlessness and passion commonly accepted as underlying a decision to pursue a career in the arts. Mulholland’s essay is troublingly condescending, though, to the degree that it pits craft and trade against a definition of “the life of the mind” as “a professional position that has a unique relationship to work.” What is this unique relationship? It’s undefined, but Mulholland shares an anecdote of a summer spent slumming it with the housing and maintenance division of his undergraduate alma mater: “They outlined an alternate life in which I became an electrician, got paid to learn my trade, and, if I was lucky, owned my own business. They made a persuasive argument for a life I had never before imagined. But I didn’t want to be an electrician. I wanted literature to be my work.” Readers of the essay who have not, with Mulholland, succumbed to the flattering refrain of “the life of the mind,” and its implicit assumption that other lives are less mindful, may feel uncertain about the exact terms of the “work” this author embeds in act of professing literature — or even the degree to which “literature” is the object of the work or its praxis.
“Literature” is certainly not a rubric for measurable labor in the way that employers of digital humanities staff must account for it. And even there, we differentiate — necessarily, sometimes reluctantly, and, at our best, ethically — among measurements of time and effort devoted by staff in differing professional categories. (Julia Flanders of Brown University will be taking up the notion of “time worked” in an essay in a forthcoming open access collection on and by humanities scholars employed within the academy, but off the tenure track.)
What’s my point? It’s that adequate “compensation” — the presumed answer to that lament I’m hearing more and more, about “uncompensated time” spent by faculty working on their own digital humanities projects — will remain elusive until we can begin to pin down more precisely the nature of all of our work, and the ways in which we are rewarded for it and it rewards us. I’m not holding my breath, but I would venture to predict that the pressure on faculty to shift for themselves with regard to the digital humanities will only increase as staff salaries are frozen in higher ed (prompting departures among classes of employees whose skills can command real money elsewhere) and as positions go unfilled or supporting workforces are deliberately reduced.
For teaching and research faculty, the question is the same as it ever was: what constitutes valid labor in the academy, deserving of reward, and how much of what we must do as responsible teachers, researchers, and colleagues, will go “unrewarded?” This is, of course, a canard that sheds its feathers in every aspect of our working lives and the institutions that support them. Interestingly, faculty commonly direct frustration on this matter to the offices of deans and provosts, while upper administration maintain that power to change or better exploit the system rests wholly with the faculty. (In the digital humanities realm, the editorial boards of organizations like NINES and Vectors have taken the provostial view to heart and are offering paths to robust peer review, scholarly validation, and publication for a variety of born-digital and digitally-edited content.) But the lament of the un-fellowshipped summer digital humanist is fundamentally most troubling to me because of what it says about the intellectual status of my brand of humanities scholarship — the work I admire, participate in, and promote in my own shop, in my primary professional societies, at formal and informal conferences, and in action-oriented conversation. As much as condescension toward craft and trade labor makes my skin crawl, I recognize that many faculty will draw an inherent distinction between the knowledge work they have traditionally performed and the production or shaping of systems, or of things. But it’s with a sinking sensation that I listen to this talk of “uncompensated time.” We’ve done a poor job of articulating the real work of humanities computing — the foundational work of modelling and knowledge representation; of engagement with theory through method; and of transforming the way we teach, think about, preserve, and make accessible our cultural heritage in the context of technological and societal shifts — when time spent in devoted labor within the digital humanities doesn’t even get a slightly unsavory, complicitly elitist pass under the rubric of “the life of the mind.”
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Chris Forster
on Mar 13th, 2010
@ 3:11pm:
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. I have never encountered folks whining about uncompensated time working on DH projects, so I probably am not qualified to say much here. The suggestion that the work involved in DH projects is “uncompensated,” in a way that other forms of routine academic labor are not, seems bizarre to me. As you say: “If it is ‘uncompensated work’. . . then I clearly fail to understand the basis on which our colleges and universities compensate their tenured faculty.” To which I can only say “Indeed.”
I start here only b/c I think our different responses to Mulholland’s essay may stem from these different positions. As a (still) dissertating grad student, I find Mulholland’s account of the motivations underlying attending grad school more measured than than those in Benton’s essay (i.e. I came b/c I wanted to spend more time studying a subject I care about, not for the putative royal road to middle-class comfort). I’d like, therefore, to mount a modest defense of Mulholland’s essay by resituating it as a response to Benton (rather than how it reflects a larger tension between DH and ideas of “compensated” work).
I find the phrase “life of the mind” as annoying and vacuous as anyone else. But I think Mulholland takes it up simply by way of responding to Benton’s original essay. Perhaps I’m being overgenerous in seeing its use as very-nearly in scare quotes. But if you replace the phrase “life of the mind” with “being a professor” in Mulholland’s essay, I think much of what people find ideologically galling evaporates. (In the interests of full-disclosure: I would like a job as an English professor).
And if that gall does evaporate, I am not sure that Mulholland’s reference to his summer work is as condescending as it might otherwise appear. Indeed, Benton’s contrast between the an ivy-educated adjunct and “her brother [who] makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-proft school near the interstate” (it is this comment which inspires Mulholland’s own anecdote) seems far more condescending. Surely that whole run of qualifiers (“six-month certificate”, “for-profit school”, “near the interstate” all meant to contrast with the aforementioned ivy graduate degree–acquired, I assume, a healthy distance away from multilane thoroughfares) is not meant to celebrate craft or trade. So I’m not convinced that Mulholland merits being described as “slumming” or “condescending.” Mulholland may not give a full and complete description of the intellectual satisfactions available outside academe or “knowledge work” more broadly, but that is not the same thing as denigrating all non-academic work.
In short: I’m just not sure that Mulholland warrants being painted (tarred?) with the elitist brush. Now, with my pronouncement made, please avert your gaze as I ascend my crystal staircase (can you believe that this clip from The Simpsons, ep.EABF10 from March 2003, is not on YouTube?) to enjoy some arugula.
Bethany Nowviskie
on Mar 13th, 2010
@ 4:00pm:
Hi, Chris — Yes, I’ll readily admit I give Mulholland an inordinately hard time and have but small reason to assume that his experiences with other modes of work and kinds of workers are restricted to a summer’s maintenance gig at the University of Virginia. He’s really, in some ways, beside the point of my larger essay, except insofar as a naivete I sensed in his op-ed — about all of the brands of work he treats, including the “arts” comparison that forms the basis of his argument and his own “work” of “literature” — prompted me to situate some frustrated comments I’ve been hearing recently from tenured faculty into a larger consideration of what constitutes (digital) humanities work.
I’m glad you provided the helpful “Shop Class as Soulcraft” link. I toyed with adding it, but was afraid of derailing things too far in that direction. My short take on Mulholland (and not so much Benton, who I believe uses the “down by the Interstate” trope in a wry and projecting way) is not that he consciously denigrates all paths but his and the ennobling arts, but rather that he’s writing (like you are!) from a place of aspiration. Maybe when he achieves tenure he can pause to consider the practices and habits of mind that can be refined in other professions. (My sense is, however, that people from all walks of life rarely can or do.)
I just hope he doesn’t take up DH and become a whiner.
Arno Bosse
on Mar 13th, 2010
@ 5:31pm:
I think all of us working in digital humanities / humanities computing departments at academic institutions have come across this whining.. often (always?) hand in hand with a request for us to please, unburden them of all of it. As if they would cede this ground if we were (but that’s the thing, we hardly ever do) writing an article or a monograph together! Ponder on that.
There was a time when I used to acquiesce to these requests, either because I found the technology around the project interesting or more often (and perversely) because this attitude made the project even more challenging (i.e. interesting) for me and allowed me more freedom in determining its direction. Tempting but fatal. Now I simply refuse to engage with our faculty in such circumstances and I thank my institution for granting me the trust and leeway to make those decisions on my own (it helps, of course, that we’re so understaffed that I need to turn down even well deserving projects..).
But to your larger point.. yes – agreed, and I wish I were better at this. Because there is a difference also in articulating (lets re-use your shorthand) “the nature of our work” in the context of a specific project and the division of roles and tasks associated with that and more generally, that is, to one’s deans, provosts and heads of libraries (not to mention development officers and donors et cetera). Those are the discussions, not the tactical ones, where this matters even more. I’m still learning
I’ll say this though in my defense. I now reliably break out with hives when I see the term “cyberinfrastructure” employed in proximity to the words “answer to” and “digital humanities”. So I must be making real progress.
Jason Boyd
on Mar 13th, 2010
@ 9:37pm:
Hi Bethany,
Thanks for this very thoughtful posting. I, too, am in an ‘alternative academic’ role as a Senior Research Associate (contributing — and finding it rewarding to contribute — to the scholarship of a humanities research project and doing my own research work when I can) and very interested in facilitating and doing Digital Humanities work at my institution.
I have been actively promoting DH at my institution, but those who are most invested in trying to get DH going at my institution seem reluctant to engage with me and the DH group I coordinate (which include faculty), because, I think, I am not a faculty member, but one whose ‘official’ job is to do the work (traditional and DH) that is part of a collaborative scholarly endeavor. This is why I found your final paragraph so powerful. Why can’t the work I do in service of a traditional humanities project and towards what I hope will be innovative DH work (yes, involving a lot of foundational work) be seen as intellectually worthwhile as a single-scholar journal article or book? And I always am worried if that that question isn’t just rhetorical for many faculty. The collaborative model that is a necessity in and the blessing of digital humanities seems to be viewed with a very jaundiced eye by advocates of traditional humanities scholarship.
Claire Warwick
on Mar 14th, 2010
@ 10:35am:
Thanks Bethany, for a really interesting post. We have not yet come across such whining because as yet we are too new to have done so at UCL. But thanks for the headsup just in case we do! I think at UCL our mode of DH might be a bit different and help guard against it, in that we are not funded to be a service centre at all, we only do research and will do teaching, and thus if people want to do DH with us, they really have to be ready to do proper research in whatever way needed. But, and perhaps significantly, we are finding that at the moment most of the interest is coming from Computer Scientists and engineers who have all the kit and tech savvy they could ever want, but actually would like to understand new problems and a new field. Who knows what this will produce in practice: we are too new to have found out.
But the other significant thing I think for UK academia is that our new Research Assessment Framework now makes specific provision for digital outputs to be entered and peer reviewed and accorded the same status as more formal published print outputs. That’s already beginning to have an effect nearly 3 years out from the assessment date, in terms of demand for the university to provide stable hosting and maintenance for digital publications, but I think will also have a profound effect on what people consider ‘uncompensated’. In the UK if it’s REFable (or used to be RAEable) it is utterly central to everyone’s existence. Could there be an analogue of this for North America?
JoVE
on Mar 14th, 2010
@ 11:22am:
I am a spectator to this debate but one thing that occurs to me as I read this post and the comments is that part of the problem may be a cultural shift within the humanities.
There is a very strong culture of the autonomous scholar in the humanities, little tradition of joint publication, and modes of collaboration dominated by the seminar and conference where ideas are debated, formulated, and refined but which lead to sole-authored outputs.
The digital humanities, in contrast, seem to involve collaboration in the production of knowledge and outputs in a way that is different enough from this tradition to perhaps be jarring. Those who have been working in and around DH possibly find this culture welcoming, enlivening, and even inspiring. But perhaps the people newly coming in to it are lost in a foreign land, a land whose foreignness is obscured by the fact that people seem to speak something of the same language (though not always) and look similar.
Thus, like the American in Britain (or the Englishman in America), they are not prepared for the foreignness and are irked by the little things that seem “not right” or make them uncomfortable. And sometimes they whine about those differences instead of accepting that this is a foreign land and they might want to learn more about how it works and possibly discover that there are different ways of doing things.
I worry that I’m not articulating this well, but I hope I’m giving at least a hint of what I see in this discussion and that it helps you work with the whiners in more productive ways (or tell them to get lost and come back when they are prepared to learn something about your culture).
René Audet | A Day of DH » Waiting for Day of DH
on Mar 16th, 2010
@ 11:05am:
[...] each of us to look at the workshop of colleagues around the world, to get inspired, to build some legitimity for this [...]
Academic Sandbox (the blog) » Blogging for Ada Lovelace Day: Bethany Nowviskie
on Mar 24th, 2010
@ 3:16pm:
[...] She has a technology named after her—ok fine, so I renamed it, but still…it’s warranted. [...]