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. Read the rest of this entry »

[Not into the background? Skip over to the work-in-progress page for our forthcoming edited, open-access collection.]

About six weeks ago, I left a swanky DC hotel feeling pretty good. The Scholarly Communication Institute, an 8-year old Mellon-funded project for which I serve as associate director, had just concluded a two-day summit with a some of the most interesting institutional thinkers and do-ers in the humanities: leaders from CHCI, the international consortium for humanities centers and institutes, and from centerNet, its energetic digital counterpart. For SCI, this gathering culminated a process that had begun in the summer of 2008, when we hosted an event on humanities centers as sites for innovation in digital scholarship. After a January meeting in Tucson (where grapefruit were ripe in the hotel courtyard) and a series of less paradisiacal conference calls and proposal drafts, the two groups were now poised for meaningful collaborative action. There was a palpable sense in the room that the plans we were hatching could change the way business is done in the humanities, digital and otherwise. In fact, something like a five-year program was emerging, and the two groups had outlined a series of co-sponsored ventures, joint meetings, and big-picture goals.

Happiness makes me obnoxious on Twitter. Before I packed up my laptop, I tapped out two messages:

“SCI-sponsored CHCI/centerNet meeting is winding down. Stay tuned for announcements from the two groups working jointly in the new year.” [X]

“& struck again by dues-paying crap I skipped in deciding against tenure-track jobs. How many junior faculty sit in on discussions like this?” [X]

Read the rest of this entry »

[This is an edited version of a talk I gave today at the 2009 convention of the Modern Language Association. I omit here some of the local details and concrete examples I offered at MLA. At this point, I feel more comfortable voicing these specifics than publishing them online – but I do commit to seeking out further opportunities to open the kind of frank and important conversations I advocate below. This text (like everything posted on my personal website) reflects my opinions only – not those of my colleagues or employers. I welcome comment, including correction and instruction.]

I’ve decided to spend my 10 minutes of introduction on the MLA convention’s “Links and Kinks” panel indecorously – in opening conversation about one of the least genteel, least talked-about aspects of collaborative work in the digital humanities. I’ve been active in this community of practice for 14 years – and can count on one hand the number of interchanges I’ve had about these issues that were both unguarded and productive.

The policy issues related to institutional and academic status that I want to put before the panel are so uncomfortable that they tend to make good-hearted, collaborative folks like all of you behave as if they can be wished away – as if they’ll shrivel up and die if they are studiously ignored. But here, as in other areas of the academy, benign neglect is bad behavior. Consciously ignoring disparities in the institutional status of your collaborators is just as bad as being unthinkingly complicit in the problems these disparities create. Read the rest of this entry »