Year: 2011

praxis and prism

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

(Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab blog. I introduce our new Praxis Program here.)

Our goal in the Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program is to address methodological training in the humanities not just through workshops and courses, but by involving graduate students in digital projects from the ground up. This means learning by creating something — together — with all that entails: paying attention both to vision and detail; building facility with new techniques and languages not just as an academic exercise, but of necessity, and in the most pragmatic framework imaginable; acquiring the softer skills of collaboration (sadly, an undiscovered country in humanities graduate education) and of leadership (that is, of credible expertise, self-governance, and effective project management). All this also involves learning to iterate and to compromise — and when to stop and ship.

To do this, our Praxis team needed a project. We wanted it to be a fresh one, something they could own. It was important to us that the project only be in service to the program — that its intellectual agenda was one our students could shape, that they set the tone for the collaboration, and that — as much as possible — it be brand-spanking-new, free from practices and assumptions (technical or social) that might have grown organically in a pre-existing project and which we might no longer recommend.

In this inaugural year of the Praxis Program, the Scholars’ Lab, in consultation with some colleagues from UVa’s College of Arts and Sciences, is providing the central idea for the project. It’s just too much to ask that students new to digital humanities work invent a meaningful project from whole cloth on Day 1 of the program — especially one that, we hope, will make a meaningful intervention in the current scene of DH research and practice. That said, by the end of this year, our current Praxis team plans to have conceptualized a second project (or perhaps an extension of this one) to pass on to next year’s group.

Here endeth the preamble. What are we up to now? Continue reading “praxis and prism”

a skunk in the library

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

[This is the text of an invited talk I gave at the University of Nebraska in April. I’d like to thank my amazing hosts in the UNL Library and CDRH!]

I’m going to back into my talk today, perhaps in part to counter the way I have imagined all of you instinctively backing slowly away from the brilliant and hilarious and slightly horrifying posters I’ve seen advertising it.

My title is “A Skunk in the Library: the Path to Production for Scholarly R&D.” Now, why (oh, why) the skunk? It’s because I’ll be introducing you to the R&D unit within my department, the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library, as a quintessential “skunkworks” operation – and I’ll describe what I mean by that in just a second. It’s also because I am not unconscious of the wrinkled noses that can result from an airing of some of the ideas I want to share with you.

To that end, I plan to save plenty of time this morning for conversation, because above all that’s what my gestures here will call for. And I’ll be asking you to help us think together through something of importance to librarians and software developers and scholars alike – namely, the role of libraries and library-embedded digital humanities centers in helping to beat what we might call a “path to production,” both for innovative scholarship and for its supporting technical and social frameworks.

IT staff in the audience will hear that phrase, “path to production,” and think immediately of a set of well-established Web development and release practices. I’ll rehearse those a little bit here, so that we’re on the same page, before I complicate (or possibly just pervert) them. Continue reading “a skunk in the library”

announcing #Alt-Academy

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

Readers of this blog will know that, for more than a year, I have been working with a group of wonderful people to bring an edited collection collection of essays and a distributed, online community into focus.  (You can see some of my past #alt-ac writing here, or follow the conversation on Twitter.)

Today, I’m very pleased to announce the release of #Alt-Academy, an open-access collection of essays, dialogues, and personal narratives on the subject of alternative academic careers for humanities scholars:

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/

Initial contributors include Willard McCarty, Julia Flanders, Anne Whisnant, Rafael Alvarado, Julie Meloni, Lisa Spiro, Doug Reside, Tanya Clement, Hugh Cayless, Tom Scheinfeldt, Amanda Gailey, Dot Porter, Joe Gilbert, Wayne Graham, Eric Johnson, Dorothea Salo, Sheila Brennan, Jeremy Boggs, Sharon Leon, Brian Croxall, Arno Bosse, Miranda Swanson, Joanne Berens, Amanda Watson, Patricia Hswe, Amanda French, Christa Williford, Suzanne Fischer, Patrick Murray-John, Vika Zafrin, Shana Kimball, and James Cummings.  Gardner Campbell and Tim Powell will provide invited commentary in the coming weeks, and the project’s general editor is Bethany Nowviskie.

As a MediaCommons project, #Alt-Academy takes a grass-roots, bottom-up, “publish-then-filter” approach to community-building and networked scholarly communication around the theme of unconventional or alternative (“#alt-ac”) careers.  24 essays and multimedia contributions are currently available under a Creative Commons license. See our “Welcome” and “How It Works” pages to learn how you can comment, contribute, or volunteer to edit an #Alt-Academy cluster.  Continue reading “announcing #Alt-Academy”

where credit is due

Posted on by Bethany Nowviskie

This is the unedited text of a talk I gave today at the NINES Summer Institute, an NEH-funded workshop on evaluating digital scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion. It references and builds on a (considerably less obnoxious) essay I wrote for a forthcoming issue of Profession, the journal of the MLA, and which was provided to NINES attendees in advance of the Institute. The cluster of articles in which the essay will appear includes work by Jerome McGann, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson, and Geoff Rockwell and was edited by Laura Mandell, Susan Schreibman, and Steve Olsen.

Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due)

So, as you’ll divine from the image on the screen, [SLIDE: awkward family photos] today I’m addressing human factors: framing collaboration (an activity that often happens across class lines in the academy) within our overall picture for the evaluation of digital scholarship.  I’m pulling several examples I’ll share with you from my contribution to the Profession cluster that Laura and Susan made available, and my argument may feel familiar from that piece as well.  But we thought it might be useful to have me lay these problems out in a plain way, in person, near the beginning of our week together.  Collaborative work is a major hallmark of digital humanities practice, and yet it seems to be glossed over, often enough, in conversations about tenure and promotion.

I think we can trace a good deal of that silence to a collective discomfort, which a lot of my recent (“service”) work has been designed to expose — discomfort with the way that our institutional policies, like those that govern ownership over intellectual property, codify status-based divisions among knowledge workers of different sorts in colleges and universities.  These issues divide DH collaborators even in the healthiest of projects, and we’ll have time, I hope, to talk about them.

But I want to offer a different theory now, more specific to the process that scholars on tenure and promotion committees go through in assessing their colleagues’ readiness for advancement.  [SLIDE: skeleton reading Baudelaire] My theory is that the T&P process is a poor fit to good assessment (or even, really, to acknowledgment) of collaborative work, because it has evolved to focus too much on a particular fiction.  That fiction is one of “final outputs” in digital scholarship. Continue reading “where credit is due”