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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.