In recent weeks, I’ve attended two private events — UVa’s Shape of Things to Come conference, on scholarly editing and matters of sustainability (#uvashape), and the Re:Enlightenment Exchange (#reenx), a set of dialogues hosted by NYU and the New York Public Library. On Wednesday, I’m heading to another invitation-only gathering, Playing with Technology in History (hashtag TBD: #pastplay?), and we’re gearing up at my shop, the Scholars’ Lab, to host a second round of our NEH-funded training program, the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship (#geoinst) — by application only; deadline long passed. I’m also helping to organize the 8th annual meeting of the Mellon-supported Scholarly Communication Institute this summer (#sci8-to-be).

Most likely, you’re not on our guest list.

Invitation-only gatherings are often designed as specific interventions in a certain scene or sub-discipline, and therefore a lot of care goes into identifying and recruiting participants who are either positioned to make a desired intellectual contribution to the immediate proceedings, or to synthesize and take the work of a group forward after the lights go out in the auditorium. Other events are imagined as learning experiences or sites for advanced training, and participants may be identified (and excluded) based on level of need, or on the relative merit of their applications to attend.

Organizers know — and generally regret — that pragmatic concerns and financial constraints result in the exclusion of a multitude of interesting people and perspectives. Closed events are not crafted with the goal of keeping “the wrong people” out, but of bringing enough (or, more accurately, a manageable number) of the right people in. These things need to be worth the investments they require — both of funds (often quite scarce for humanities undertakings) and other “costs of opportunity” — including the work the organizing group is therefore not engaged in, and the invaluable time and energy of all participants.

But goal-oriented, laser-like focus and a predetermined guest list naturally put an event in danger of over-determined (predictable, excessively conservative, even tedious) conversations and outcomes. This is a risk of which good organizers are conscious and against which they press. The most common way to work within attendance constraints and still leave a crack in the door is to think of invited participants as ambassadors of certain communities. Many symposium attendees will adopt a representative stance even without being asked to, as soon as they realize that they are the only [whatever: literary theorist / material culture expert / digital historian / etc.] in the room. And some moderators will make desired personae explicit. (I use that word deliberately, because this kind of representation is necessarily masquerade, and no-one seriously thinks it compensates for absence — however, ritual and performative aspects of academic interaction are often particularly highlighted at smallish events.)

At the same time, there’s room elsewhere to ramble, and ways to include a broader set of voices. Traditional professional society meetings are rarely closed, but typically finance “openness” through membership and conference fees and — often — by sacrificing the degree of attention to product and coherence that can can be paid at a smaller, more carefully crafted gathering. Or you could build your own conference, on the fly. In our DIY U, Edupunk era, we’re experiencing an explosion of “unconferences.” The premier model in the humanities is THATCamp, which originated at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is a do-it-yourself digital humanities conference, at which a hat is passed for donations, only the loosest practicable vetting of attendees is done, and participants collaboratively set the discussion and demonstration agenda at an opening session and “vote with their feet” thereafter. That is to say, they take continual responsibility for their own conference experience by freely floating — at any point — to other scheduled sessions or spontaneously creating new sessions that strike them as more useful. (Some of my most productive and stimulating professional experiences of the past few years have taken place at unconferences.) And many events are now streaming passive audio and video live, or experimenting with venues like Second Life and Google Wave as substitutes for the expense of physical presence and embodied interaction. In the past year, I have even unexpectedly “attended” an event or two that combined live-streaming with the DIY sensibility, when a local participant realized the proceedings would be of interest to a larger group, called out, “Anybody mind if I broadcast this?,” and set up a spontaneous Ustream.

And then there’s the pervasiveness of Twitter. Readers will have noticed that the litany of invitation-only gatherings in my second paragraph was punctuated with Twitter hashtags, which are themselves a public invitation to aggregate perspectives and join in conversation. A hashtag is a small piece of metadata, agreed upon by Twitter users informally (by virtue of collective use!) as an appropriate marker for a particular concept or moment. Some hashtags are jokes, some are prayer beads, some are signifiers for emerging perspectives and nascent online communities (see #alt-ac, a topic taken up at #reenx), and some mark Twitter messages as relevant to the discussion at a conference or other event. Each of the hashtag links above will — depending on the ebb and flow of networked conversation — lead you to current or archived tweets stemming from a referenced gathering, or maybe even indicate to you that no-body has been chatting under a particular rubric lately. I’ve taken a variety of approaches in those links, to demonstrate a few ways of accessing Twitter conversations, and to highlight the degree to which tweets are both ephemeral in that they are part of a fairly volatile landscape of protocols and interfaces, and capturable, as part of our cultural record. Whatever you see when clicking on those links is unlikely to be what I saw when I chose to publish them here — and it’s not unlikely that a link or two will break. However, the Twitter back-channel conversation for at least one of those conferences (#uvashape), is to be published by Rice University Press. And the Library of Congress has just announced an initiative to archive the entire Twitter corpus — an amazing resource for future scholars interested in subjects like: international and local reaction to historical events; the emergence of new tools for communication; language change over time and in communities at a variety of scales; the mediation and construction of personal and national identities; or the texture of everyday life in the 21st century.

Twitter has played an important and occasionally transformative role at every academic gathering I have attended since early 2008. It has provided useful (and sometimes surprising) demonstrations, for conference and meeting participants, of the engagement of broad and under-represented communities with issues under debate. It has brought divergent perspectives helpfully into play, sharpening discussion and leading to proposals with broader reach and impact. In a time of dwindling travel budgets, it has allowed key, already well-networked community members to participate in meetings from afar, with little technical overhead and less disruption to their working lives than formal, virtual participation would require through an interface like Second Life.

That participation can take a number of forms.

It might add something to the conversation in the room. This could be a positive contribution, such as the expression of a view, or sharing of a resource. I was able, at the recent Re:Enlightenment Exchange, to bring in a concept relevant to our in-room discussion of 18th and 21st-century financial markets, because Tom Scheinfeldt, who had to leave the meeting early, had linked to it and mentioned the link on Twitter. These contributions might also be salutary in their criticism: an early, acid comment by a non-participant in the Shape of Things conference was introduced into the in-room conversation by Matt Kirschenbaum, with the desired effect of spurring us out of tired patterns and into new areas of inquiry. I have also seen parallel discussions emerge, in which the majority of interlocutors are not present at the meeting. Steve Ramsay has become famous for provoking these at digital humanities conferences, beginning with a conversation during a critical code studies panel at #dh09. Some friendly jokes I made about the under-representation of women at one invitation-only event resulted in a partnership with Bill Turkel that later brought a soft circuits workshop to a regional THATCamp. Twitter hashtags also permit face-to-face discussions to continue, by providing a coherent and lasting identity for a transitory event (such as #geoinst, the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, which has come to be known by its hashtag). Twitter provides a mechanism for users to refer back to important conversations or to weave threads together from multiple, related gatherings.

Twitter also allows invited conference-goers to spread a wealth of ideas being voiced behind closed doors. These ideas are shared with established but evolving networks, which (at the conferences I attend — but every one is different) largely consist of students and colleagues in higher ed and in the worlds of academic publishing, libraries, museums and archives, information technology, and humanities centers, labs, and institutes. I have seen Twitter use at academic conferences promote valuable exchange among university and k12 educators, and contribute to and demonstrate value in the public humanities in an immediate and tangible way. If Twitter itself — as commonly used by academics — operates as a gift economy, then conference hashtags are little beacons of that generosity.If Twitter operates as a gift economy, hashtags are beacons of generosity.

But it’s not all sunny in closed-conference-open-Twitter-land.

I’m writing this essay because of two, conflicting tensions, which are commonly expressed by both sets of my interlocutors — sometimes even simultaneously — in online and face-to-face communications during private conferences. The voice from Twitter cries: “Elitism! Hypocrisy! How can you be discussing [pick your poison: the public humanities, the future of scholarly communication, the changing nature of the disciplines] in a cloister? Who are these privileged few? And why weren’t we all invited to attend?” (To be fair: in my experience, messages of thanks to those who have tweeted, for broadcasting the ideas of the gathering to a wider audience, far outweigh any complaints — but a strident complaint or two, often from colleagues from sadly under-funded institutions, is invariably present.) It is to the complaining Twitterati that I have addressed my long preamble on the aims and necessary limitations of smaller gatherings. Sorry, guys — really. It’s usually about the money and the focus, but sometimes it’s even because they couldn’t manage to book a larger room.

And of course my lengthy disquisition on Twitter was meant to level the playing field for those senior colleagues (yes, this divide is largely generational) who have not engaged with Twitter and who have indicated to me how troubling they find its use in academic settings. For it is the anti-Twitter reproach from within the conference room that I most want to address. It is the anti-Twitter reproach from within the conference room that I most want to address.

I suspect conference followers and participants on Twitter — whose presence Margaret Atwood likens to “having fairies at the bottom of your garden” — have no idea how magically disruptive they are.Conference followers on Twitter have no idea how magically disruptive they are. If they sense it, they may still be surprised at the character of that disruption. Several times now, I have heard the technology the Twitter community embraces and explicitly figures as democratizing and personalizing described in terms of alienation, invasion, and exclusion. These face-to-face conversations about Twitter are so fraught that delicacy cannot accord with 140-character limitations, and therefore they do not make it into the online record. Sometimes, indeed, they only come in a private, kindly-meant word over drinks or in shared taxi-cabs after the Twittering has ceased. Other times it gets heated and publicly awkward.

Five problems with Twitter use at closed gatherings have been expressed to me:

The first is dismay that its application was not evident to everyone from the outset of the event. A small group of us deliberately heightened this response at a recent gathering, when we (who had been invited to talk about the patterns of activity common to digital humanists and alternative academics, and the institutional implications of their activity) decided to “pull the curtain” on a hashtagged Twitter conversation that had been going on unnoticed by the majority of the fairly traditional scholarly crowd. The criticism is fair, that Twitter changes a conference dynamic in ways that may be invisible to some participants. The possibility of its presence probably should be addressed at the outset of closed conferences for a little while, in order that any requested ground-rules can be discussed and agreed upon, and to make participants aware of the option to engage. (Some professional societies (#mla09) and membership organizations (#cni10s) have begun promoting Twitter hashtags or even publicizing them well ahead of a conference event.) Regardless, you can basically assume that if people have open laptops or handheld devices at a gathering, and still seem alert, they’re note-taking or tweeting — not reading email or playing games. At least, not much.

The second issue is related: a feeling that Twitter use is exclusionary. At the outset of a closed conference, some people may have access to it and others may not. I have figured Twitter as a democratizing medium; however, participation in it is not universal. For most people in academic settings, this a choice. Because accounts are free and easy to set up, the only reason you can’t rapidly remedy the problem, if you wish to, is that you may lack a laptop or smartphone. When you first set up your account — especially if you do so in the middle of a rapid-fire exchange — you are likely to be a little inept and lost. This is a sinking feeling you might recall from your early days of grad school, or your first academic conference. It passes quickly, as you learn the lingo and cultural codes.

Next comes the concern that Twitter damages one’s ability to engage and converse in the room, or that it lowers the level of discourse. Attentional demands may be a problem for some, as Twitter use is a learned skill. (Personally, I am better at it this year than last.) As to the latter issue, I will address only deliberate rudeness, because I worry that statements about “lowered discourse” are simply code for “discourse with people not like me,” and suspect that no arguments of mine will shake the foundations of that view. A recent essay by danah boyd exposed rudeness in backchannel chatter as a real concern, with immediate and dreadful implications for speakers at popular conferences. But it is important to say that Twitter use does not inherently promote inattention or bad behavior. And I’ve never witnessed a nasty backchannel in an academic setting — where we generally do share notions of fairness and propriety. More frequently, there’s a little lag between the themes expressed in a Twitter conversation and the topics being discussed in the room, which can cause participants to divide their attention, but which can also evolve as an interesting counterpoint to later discussions.

Privacy concerns related to Twitter use at closed gatherings are a real issue. Often the greatest virtue of an invitation-only event, for participants who represent administrative units or high-profile organizations, is the opportunity to speak a little more candidly than they can in public. In my experience, Twitter users are sensitive to these moments and either moderate their observations and reportage accordingly or refrain from tweeting at all. If, as it seems, we are moving into a period in which always-on, networked communication becomes the norm, even at private academic events, it is the responsibility of participants to remain sensitive to desires for confidentiality or discretion — and, in the moment, speakers may need to make these desires a little more plain.

One manifestation of this lack of control is the acknowledged “telephone game” of Twitter — the degree to which repetition with a difference can lead to partial or missed understandings. And sometimes offhand, minor points that slip right past the sanctioned, face-to-face conversation can make it big online. That’s human interaction, for you. The Twittering fingers tweet, and having tweeted, twitter on. Or live-blog, or take notes in wikis, et cetera. And although it can be helpful when speakers are plugged in enough to be able to influence conversation in both offline and online streams (not even necessarily simultaneously), it is simply folly to think that we can control what’s being said about us on the Internet. That was never what scholarly communication was about, anyway.

I’d offer three strategies to address concerns about the immediacy of Web publishing of conference proceedings via Twitter:

The first is something we’re always doing anyway: simply working to express our ideas as clearly as possible in the room, and to listen actively for feedback that may suggest misunderstanding or lack of conveyed nuance. Good luck with that (sincerely!).

Perhaps a more implementable suggestion for speakers and conference participants concerned about these matters is that they publicly request their names not be attached to tweets or blog posts. This strikes me as most valid when it touches on issues of privacy and confidentiality — but be aware that when your name is used on Twitter, it is likely done in an innocent spirit of attribution. If your ideas are cited, chances are good that the writer approves of them and wishes to lend you a microphone, or at least that he or she thought your statements interesting and worthy of further discussion. If, on the other hand, your perspective is represented in a critical way and you are cited as its source, it’s probably because you are known to be on Twitter and presumed to be as able to defend yourself there as elsewhere. In other words, I have heard some anxiety expressed about personal attack, but — while contentious conversations have been opened up on Twitter in a familiar spirit of academic debate — I cannot recall ever seeing a specific (much less ad hominem) hostile response to a colleague who lacks a presence on Twitter or might be thought defenseless in that medium. There’s not a lot of passive aggression in an environment that trades on professional identity, necessarily precise language, clear attribution, and open exchange.There’s not a lot of passive aggression in an environment that trades on professional identity, precise language, clear attribution, & open exchange.

Most of what I’ve said is relevant to public as well as invitation-only academic events — but the turmoil around conference use of Twitter over the past year has seemed most acute at private gatherings. It clearly relates to the ethos of the academic Twitter demographic — mostly consisting of tech-savvy, early-career scholars or #alt-ac professionals — and the expectations and longstanding traditions that inhere in private events. Invitation-only meetings often involve more established scholars and administrators who have put in their dues under a very different set of academic protocols and for whom networked communication is important, but not necessarily ever-present.

These groups need to find ways to move forward together within the new norms of scholarly communication, and in a way that enhances shared work and promotes meaningful interconnectedness. Which brings me to the final strategy I’d suggest we all adopt: simply to (continue to) participate.

My own blog posts and pictures are here, at the somewhat ominously named “Day of Bethany Nowviskie“. Some other folks from the Scholars’ Lab contributed, too: Kelly Johnston, Joe Gilbert, and Wayne Graham.

I’ve been peeking in on the RSS feeds, and am looking forward to reading day-in-the-life posts from many, many friends and not a few strangers all over the world. You can also get a snippet-y sense of the activity by watching the #dayofDH hashtag on Twitter.

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.”

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]

I held no illusions about my role in the process SCI had facilitated. SCI (from the insider’s point of view) is about listening, helping, and nudging. In the conference room at the Hotel Palomar, I was Note-taker-in-Chief, pausing only a few times to add my own perspective — as a recent humanities PhD, a person who had held one of those rare digital post-docs we were discussing, as a member of the research faculty at an R-1 institution, and (now) as someone who had exercised the “expanded employment options” that are often brought up in conversations about improving methodological training in graduate education. My day job is as Director of Digital Research & Scholarship for the University of Virginia Library. This is a department that includes the Scholars’ Lab, a growing digital center which offers fellowships to grad students, runs a vibrant speaker series, undertakes its own research-and-development work, and partners with humanities and social-science faculty on projects in text-based digital humanities and geospatial and statistical computing.

I have a pretty sweet gig.

But, as will have been obvious to anybody who heard my recent MLA convention talk on matters of intellectual property and institutional status in collaborative scholarship (or who found it through the Chronicle), that whole grad-school detox/deprogramming phase that the #alt-ac crowd must work through takes a while to leave one’s system. I can personally attest that this is true even if you’re one of the people who opted out of the tenure-track teleology very early on. (I never undertook an academic job search, and I politely declined the campus visits I was offered as an ABD grad student. Friends, the market was better then.)

#Alt-ac is our Twitter-hashtag neologism for “alternate academic careers” — particularly for positions within or around the academy but outside of the ranks of the tenure-track teaching faculty. These positions are nonetheless taken up by capable humanities scholars who maintain a research and publication profile, or who bring their (often doctoral-level) methodological and theoretical training to bear on problem sets in the orbit of the academy. Keeping our talents within (or around) the academy is often more psychologically difficult than examining the color of our parachutes and gliding off to fabulous private-sector careers. Class divisions among faculty and staff in the academy are profound, and the suspicion and (worse) condescension with which “failed academics” are sometimes met can be disheartening. As “Natalie Henderson,” an administrator who writes pseudonymously for the Chronicle of Higher Education, asks:

“In an arena where people spend so much time trying to think in nuanced ways and where we ostensibly celebrate the wide dispersal of sophisticated ideas, why is so much energy expended in maintaining fixed categories and squelching the intellectual contributions of those on the wrong side of the fence?

In an environment dominated by research agendas that often seek to right historic wrongs, question power, undermine hierarchy, and give voice to the voiceless, why are intellectual status and respect given so grudgingly to smart and engaged people who have jumped off the tenure track?”
(“A ‘Non-Academic’ Career in Academe,” 20 June 2005)

For all that, we love our work. Many of us on the #alt-ac track will tell you about the satisfaction of making teams (and systems, and programs) work, of solving problems and personally making or enabling breakthroughs in research and scholarship in our disciplines, and of contributing to and experiencing the life of the mind in ways we did not imagine when we entered grad school. Among us are: administrators with varied levels of responsibility for supporting the academic enterprise; instructional technologists and software developers who collaborate on scholarly projects; journalists, editors, and publishers; cultural heritage workers in a variety of roles and institutions; librarians, archivists, and other information professionals; entrepreneurs who partner on projects of value to scholars, program officers for funding agencies and humanities centers, and many more.

My flippant, self-satisfied tweet (“how many junior faculty sit in on discussions like this?”) brought representatives from all of these groups flocking. Clearly, I hit a nerve, and before I knew it I was editing a book. This is largely thanks to the encouragement of the first respondents, including CHNM’s Tom Scheinfeldt (of the “third way”), and other valued colleagues — as well as Brian Croxall, who, frustrated with the adjunct lifestyle in which so many humanities scholars feel trapped, demanded “signposts” for following the kind of path we’ve taken. I offered to oblige. Within two hours, ten amazing contributors had volunteered to share their perspectives. The number (without my making any kind of formal call) is now at 18 — and this does not include a set of CLIR post-doctoral fellows who will be contributing a dialogue about their shared and divergent experiences in academic research libraries. I do plan to issue special invitations to a few more people who could help round out the discussion, and am open to further ideas and expressions of interest.

We are adopting #alt-ac as the rubric for our open-access collection of essays, which will be written from the points of view of well-educated, non-tenure-track humanities professionals, here to tell you that their work in the academy is satisfying, delightful, reasonably stable, deeply intellectually engaging, and — occasionally — a damned hard row to hoe.

Contributions to this Web-accessible publication are due July 1st, 2010. I am currently in conversation with interested University presses about print and print-on-demand options for the book, and will continue to accept proposals from potential contributors by email (accompanied by a one-page abstract, please!) through April 1st. All essays will be licensed, with attribution, under Creative Commons by their authors, and will be made freely available online.

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. This is because of the careless way your disregard reads to the people it damages. These people are: your junior colleagues; your graduate students; academics on the “general,” “administrative,” or “research faculty;” the lost souls euphemistically referred to as “contingent labor;” and the lowest of the low, members of your institution’s staff: those of your collaborators who are classified as service personnel. This latter group includes programmers, sysadmins, instructional technologists, and credentialed librarians and cultural heritage workers.

There is another reason, beyond discomfort, that we don’t really talk about how status factors in collaborative work. The people best positioned to articulate the personal and professional impact of HR and academic research policies either can’t afford to make trouble, or quite rightly fear they’ll lose the little bit of collegiality they’ve earned from you, the faculty, if they publicly align themselves with the wrong side of the equation. You’ll rarely hear them yelling about the violence inherent in the system.

Because they highlight the degree to which new works of scholarship are the work of many hands, the digital humanities bring into focus any failure to acknowledge our collaborators appropriately (by which I do not mean merely “to acknowledge them at all”). And it is in the digital humanities that I believe we will have our first and best opportunity to address inappropriate and counter-productive academic policies relating to intellectual property. These policies are – in my varied experience as a graduate student, a post-doc, a senior member of the research faculty at an R-1 institution, and (now) a higher ed administrator – where the rubber hits the road.

I hail from the University of Virginia. “Monopolies of Invention,” the title of my talk, is from a highly relevant passage of writing by UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Its explication will be left as an exercise to the reader.

Several of my own past projects, including projects in the literary field, have done a delicate dance with our IP policy in Jefferson’s “academical village.” These policies require that we disclose inventions or innovations (including the development of new software or digital humanities methods) to a governing body that will determine whether they should be patented and monetized. As a disclosure incentive, the person designated “inventor” is offered some portion of potential profit, which is owned by the University if the work was done using “significant University resources.” Significant resources are anything that goes much beyond a low-end laptop, electricity in your office, and the brainpower of a teaching faculty member. As a determining factor in the patent process, the “significant resource” designation certainly kicks in when general faculty and staff reporting to me, in my role as director of a digital humanities lab and department within our library system, collaborate with teaching faculty on scholarly projects.

By some interpretations of the policy, I may well owe this governing body conversations about four different collaborations we’ve undertaken with English Department faculty in the past year alone: projects that use technology to teach poetic scansion, analyze 19th-century biographies of women, data mine 18th-century texts for metaphor, and present searchable audio files of William Faulkner lectures. I frankly don’t often talk with faculty about patent policy before we start working with them, because it would scare them all away. Instead, I rely on my sad ability – if called upon — to convince local arbiters that innovations in the digital humanities are fundamentally worthless, and that we should get a pass. I don’t think this is good institutional practice.

The intellectual property system in universities is geared toward big profits from big pharma, not little websites on prosody. My happiest conversations with our Library’s brilliant IP lawyer happen when a project’s grant money comes with strings that absolutely require open source code and open access content, no matter who contributed to its construction. All of the Mellon Foundation’s grants do, now, for instance, and that’s what saved the NINES project some huge headaches. The open-access mandate of the NIH is bringing this approach to federally-funded medical research. What would it take to expand the mandate to the NEH? If you value open access and the liberties it grants to your collaborators, you should explore this issue with the funders of your research.

I’ll shift now, not without significant discomfort, to a more specific example from the intellectual property dirty-laundromat: a project from my past. This project was of keen interest to a large community of users, was hugely provocative in the challenges it posed to theory and method in its field, and was ready for implementation, — but it has lain fallow for many years even though most of its team wanted to take it forward. I was one of those people. Why did it die? It died because the professor who served as PI on the project’s grant experienced a waning of interest after we exhausted our first round of funding and hit proof-of-concept.

This kind of thing happens a lot and is, frankly, not a big deal. Waxing and waning of interest among collaborators is just a part of the scene, and the digital humanities community has largely found ways to work around this natural consequence of life beyond the lone-scholar model. (The broad survey Dot Porter and I have conducted of times of transition and decline in digital projects confirms this, and we will share our results this summer.)

So, if losing a key collaborator doesn’t automatically spell doom for a digital humanities project, what was the problem? The problem was this professor’s assertion of a right — granted to lead faculty members on collaborative research projects by our institutional policies — to intellectual property over the whole concept of our shared work.

I do not wish to sound ungrateful for the experience I gained on this project; it was a transformative period in my intellectual and technical growth, and in my growth as a pragmatist, which is to say a higher-ed administrator. Friendships are intact, and in fact – years later – we are amicably poised for a revival of the project with new partners. But my institution failed me in allowing a collaborative digital humanities effort central to my scholarship to be treated like a patent-able widget created by a sole inventor. The contributions of all team members besides the sponsoring faculty member fell under the category of “work for hire,” no matter how intellectually rich and critical to the project these contributions were. Our programmer and designer felt like they had no leverage at all to argue against this system. And what about me, the person who had conceived and designed a software approach to our research problem and had shepherded all aspects of the software’s development? I chickened out and did not press the matter. What grad student facing her dissertation defense would do more?

Now, years later, the patent, copyright, and intellectual property policies that governed this incident are somewhat more refined. Although “work for hire” is still a major factor for determining the right to ownership of software and ideas, our institution also now offers delicate and charming guidelines for when you, as a faculty member, may classify your collaborators as “a pair of hands” or as merely “an information provider.”

We should stop now to remind ourselves that digital projects require serious investments of energy and critical thought by expert collaborators who did not train in the same way we did and emerge (or diverge) from our conventional paths. Faculty collaborators and graduate students are part of our teams, but even they come increasingly from other departments and schools with different norms. Or they’re English Department grads who set out on unforeseen trajectories. And, often, our research and development groups are not only interdepartmental and ad-hoc, but also include undergraduate and professional-school students, designers and programmers both within and beyond higher ed, computer systems administrators, administrators of less holy sorts, and professional librarians or other instructional technology and information specialists.

The scholars I’ve known who are most obviously at school when working with programmers and other digital humanities collaborators invariably break new ground. That is to say, in my experience, the most productive and interesting collaborations are grounded in a kind of intellectual egalitarianism, or openness to the contributions of all team members.

However, this does not mean that the social boundaries inherent in digital project-work can or should be ignored. Policies about intellectual property and open source impinge differently on the rights and responsibilities of teaching faculty, research faculty, students-as-students, students-as-employees, and staff members of all kinds. These groups may have differing career arcs and intellectual agendas, and their participation in projects is often understood and evaluated differently within their professions and disciplines. If you do nothing else after this conversation, I hope you’ll go home and read your local policies with an eye toward how they work for the people with whom you collaborate.

We may worry that acknowledging cultural and administrative distinctions in the academy will reify them – but, in fact, ignoring differences can result in much poorer outcomes for our projects and personnel – particularly for the increasing number of collaborators who fall into hybrid professional categories. What do we do with those people whose training, research, and publication profiles do look exactly like ours, but whose right to claim intellectual property in the work they undertake as an equal partner is curtailed because of their status in the university’s HR system? The “ignore it and it’ll go away” strategy has not been helpful.

The biggest question for you may be how you’ll open potentially awkward conversations about status in a way that strengthens your team, creates – rather than limits – opportunity, and permits the kind of fluidity and professional growth we all want to foster over the course of long-term, collaborative initiatives.

[Note: this presentation and the larger conversation in which it participated at MLA was later described by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education.]