The 2012 convention of the Modern Language Association saw two deeply thoughtful #alt-ac roundtables — one on jobs in the digital humanities and another on systemic, corporate, and institutional responses to a broader “future of alternative academic careers.” I moderated the second panel and participated in the first. Both, in their ways, spoke to a remarkably changed environment: to altered employment conditions in the academy, to the humanities as they have entered the digital age, and to a moment in which hybrid scholar-practitioners and non-traditional academics are becoming more visible, and more desperately needed. This is a rough blending of remarks I made in the two sessions.

By “alt-ac,” a growing community speaks not of “alternatives to academic employment,” but rather of “alternative academics” – “alt-academics,” that is, in the way that alt-country music has a bit of rockabilly and folk mixed in – or old Usenet discussion groups would signal a fringe twist on their subject-matter with an “alt.” preface. I chose #Alt-Academy as the title for a recent MediaCommons publication — a collection of essays and personal narratives on the subject — because, taken together, our 32 authors were really gesturing at “an alternative academia” in the way that writers create speculative fiction or works of alternative history.

The term “alt-ac” primarily is itself meant to provide an alternative – an alternative to the prevailing notion that, for graduate students, there is one straight and narrow career path to fulfillment and return on the investment of their humanities educations and meaningful contribution to the profession – and that is to follow the tenure track. Too much of the discourse suggested that, beyond tenure-eligible employment, you may either be an adjunct in Limbo (presumed to be seeking a “real” academic job) or someone who has moved beyond the Pale, to a “non-academic” career. “Academic-as-fulltime-faculty” or a “non-academic” everything-else. That was it, that was the message we were giving our grad students. But my own experience was very different — first as a member of UVa’s research faculty (my final title in that role was Senior Research Scientist – perhaps the only one ever with an English PhD) and later in leadership roles in a library, a digital humanities lab, a university-based think-tank, and a number of professional societies – all of which certainly felt to me like academic employment. So, a couple of years ago, I began to see a clear need for a banner (a temporary one, I’ll emphasize) under which to host conversations about the special challenges and opportunities facing humanities scholars who choose to keep their talents within the academy but who work outside the narrow zone for which grad school prepared them.

And then, last July, UVa’s Scholarly Communication Institute ended with a convocation of Lunaticks.

One of my hats is as associate director of SCI, which is a Mellon-funded think-tank and project incubator that tries to take a broad view of conditions, opportunities, and helpful players on the scene of 21st-century scholarly communication. This summer, we succeeded at something our eight previous institutes had not – and that was to amplify next-generation voices, count on them not to be too timid, and really let them set the agenda for further action. We succeeded — in part, I think — because for the first time we were truly agnostic about where this next generation was to be found. And therefore most of the people plotting out the future of humanities scholarship on our final panel were not tenure-track scholars. They were working in digital humanities, on the #alt-ac track.

Now, the rhetoric you might expect me to employ (as somebody who helped coin the term and raise the flag for “alternative academics”) probably goes something like this: SCI found its emerging leaders among the DH #alt-ac crowd and the scholars working most collaboratively with them, because these people are the pathfinders of our era. They’re innovators, entrepreneurs. They’re unbound by convention — that is, brave enough to say no-thanks to certain aspects of a system that too much of graduate education is bound up in perpetuating – and yet still in love with a humanities they’re ready to help shape anew. They’re iconoclasts, explorers.

Only some of that, as I see it, is true. The #alt-ac track is not exactly filled with a Romantic brand of lunatic-as-solitary-genius. We are not the individualists our faculty mentors trained us to be. If this generation is possessed of a vision and an energy, it’s for the most pragmatic and collective kinds of reform. Strong and unconventional ideals underlie the #alt-ac project, but we are also a community that likes to ship. We get things done, collaboratively, and in the real world.

The alternative academy is comprised of scholars with hard-won experience in creating new-model publishing and research workflows and platforms, often from scratch and of necessity. We are the systems-builders, and that’s true whether those systems involve software, humanities data and metadata, or social groups – or all three in complex interrelation. We know what it means to fashion the tools and networks we require to do the scholarly work we want to do — but, much more importantly, we’re inclined to feel the pain, to document it all, and to share outcomes and services freely in order provide a leg up to the people coming behind us. This, too, is an impulse not nurtured in graduate school and on the tenure track. I’m struck again and again in talking with scholar-practitioners of the digital humanities and with their allies among the faculty – that, for us, “service” was never a dirty word. In fact, many of us have been at it long enough to realize that we gravitated toward #alt-ac through something like a vocation – a calling.

These ideas crystalized for me when my colleague Tom Scheinfeldt made an offhand comment in the final session of last summer’s SCI, and when I saw how much it resonated with the group we had assembled. Tom is an historian of science, working as managing director of the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. His observation had to do with the history of 18th-century physics, in which, by some definitions — nothing very exciting happened. Newton came earlier. Faraday came later. Tom’s comment was that the people in the middle worked at “a moment of discipline building.” Some of them were involved with the monthly-meeting Lunar Society of Birmingham, described, if you’re interested, in Jenny Uglow’s great book, The Lunar Men.

Those 18th-century Lunaticks weren’t about the really big theories and breakthroughs – instead, their heroic work was to codify knowledge, found professional societies and journals, and build all the enabling infrastructure that benefited a succeeding generation of scholars and scientists. “Would I rather be a Newton?” Tom asked. “Maybe, but that’s not the time I find myself in. Maybe the big intellectual breakthroughs will happen in the next generation.” The remarkable thing about this, for me, was in watching a whole panel of traditionally-trained humanities PhDs – now librarians, publishers, administrators, and various sorts of scholar-practitioners, including post-docs and junior faculty in hybrid roles — up on the stage saying, “Yep. That’s us. That feels right. That feels A-OK.”

Maybe the next major task for us (begun admirably by contributors to this #Alt-Academy cluster) should be to dissect the labor implications of what I’ve said here. Maybe we should look at the difference between offering expert, discretionary, game-changing services and being a member of a denigrated service personnel. #Alt-ac, as a movement, has been about exposing all the complexities and contradictions in academic labor. But if you agree with me that there’s something remarkable about a generation of trained scholars ready to subsume themselves in collaborative endeavors, to do the grunt work, and to step back from the podium into roles only they can play – that is, to become systems-builders for the humanities — then we might also just pause to appreciate and celebrate, and to use “#alt-ac” as a safe place for people to say, “I’m a Lunatick, too.”

Here’s a modest proposal for reforming higher education in the humanities and creating a generation of knowledge workers prepared not only to teach, research, and communicate in 21st-century modes, but to govern 21st-century institutions.

First, kill all the grad-level methods courses.

Kill them, that is, to clear room for something more highly evolved — or simply more fruitful — to take their place. Think: asteroids clobbering dinosaurs. Choking weeds ripped from vegetable gardens. The fuzzy little nothings and spindly cultivars in this scenario, squinting cautious eyes or uncurling new leaves into the light, are:

• those research methodologies and corpora (often but not exclusively gathered under the banner of the “digital humanities”) that address hitherto unanswerable questions about history, the arts, and the human condition;
• and the new-model scholarly communications platforms we can already recognize as promising replacements to our slow and moribund systems for credentialing and publishing humanities scholarship and archiving the cultural record on which it is based.

What do these critters need to grow up? The same thing our colleges and universities so desperately need: a generation of faculty and alternative-academic scholar-practitioners who have been trained to work in interdisciplinary contexts and who can not only take advantage of computational approaches to their own research, but who have been instilled with enough of a can-do, maker’s ethos that they feel empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.

Although a small number of extra-curricular experiments (like the Praxis Program) and curricular interventions (like Michigan State’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool) offer new and concrete models for emulation, there’s little hope for wholesale, bottom-up, grass-roots reform of methodological training in the humanities. With vanishingly few exceptions, required first-year graduate methods courses are dinosaurs and weeds. Some are an abbreviated introduction to journals databases and the mysteries of inter-library loan. Others have little to do with research and production “methodologies” at all, and are instead a crash course in the jargon and en-vogue theories of a given discipline. The intra-institutional level of coordination in developing and teaching these courses, even among closely-allied humanities departments, hovers around zero. Within single departments, they are catch-as-catch-can, shaped almost wholly by the individual faculty who teach them (often as they themselves were taught a generation or two before) and sometimes vacillating wildly in content from year to year as instructors rotate to make more equitable the “burden” of a course generally construed as service. Is it any wonder they’re a mess?

And is it any wonder that we continue to produce graduate students unready to engage with new technologies and opportunities for interdisciplinary and computational work — baffled and frustrated at the conditions of the academic job market and its underpinnings in a dying scholarly publishing industry — and under-prepared for or uneducated about hybrid and non-traditional academic careers?

Here comes the asteroid we require. (And in offering a trajectory for it, I want to acknowledge my debt to conversations with participants in the Scholarly Communication Institutes held at UVa Library, with Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, and with our Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities and Praxis Program students.)

Funding agencies, both private and public — like Mellon, Sloan, and (in the US) the NEH and NSF — should be approached by a respected humanities organization that itself possesses a mandate for and a track record of inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. I think here of groups like CHCI, the international Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes — especially in partnership with centerNet, its digital counterpart — or the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The organization should offer, with sufficient funding, to serve as a broker for a prestigious and competitive RFP (request for proposals). The RFP would be issued to universities with core strengths in the humanities, adequate support for digital scholarship, and a desire — able to be expressed at the institutional level — to create broad-scale curricular change in the way graduate students are inducted into and trained for 21st-century humanities. Probably no more than 3 or 4 schools would win funding, which would be contingent on this:

• the planned, top-down, apocalyptic wiping-out — one academic year from delivery of the award — of existing graduate methods courses in (say) four to six core humanities departments;
• the formation of a small but representative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary team charged with creating the year-long common methods course that will replace them;
• a commitment by participating academic departments, in the light of the new common course, to re-think the training that they consider to be absolutely unique to their disciplines and to offer an avenue (1-credit classes? discussion groups? new approaches to departmental teaching or to comps and orals requirements?) for students to acquire it;
• and a rigorous program proposed for assessing and publicizing the successes, failures, and overall impact of the experiment, so that lessons may be learned and new programs inspired.

The common methods course would be required of all incoming graduate students in participating departments. Grant funding could support staffing of curriculum design and assessment phases, offer incentives (including course release or professional development) for faculty participation, or pay for teaching assistants. The program would be designed and team-taught by its planning group, which should include faculty from relevant departments, representatives of the offices of deans and provosts, and — importantly — local #alt-ac professionals, trained in the humanities, but working as scholar-practitioners in R&D or academic support roles in libraries, labs, publishing units, and centers. It should also engage faculty from departments like CS and Architecture, whose students may not participate directly in the program, but who would have important lessons to share about research methods and collaborative practices.

As its primary focus, the course must cover current humanities research skills, corpora, and trends — both digital and archival or material. But it should also address issues like: intellectual property and open access; the intersection of scholarship with the public humanities; publishing, preservation, and scholarly communication; funding and material support for research and teaching; interdisciplinary collaboration; matters of credentialing and assessment (peer review, tenure and promotion), faculty self-governance; and the under-interrogated policies that cover and shape the humanities in the modern college and university.

This is a tall order — but we can no longer afford to produce humanities PhDs who have only a foggy notion of how universities work, and how they are impacted by external technological and social forces. The first time a humanities scholar encounters a budget spreadsheet or performs a calculation should not be when he or she becomes department chair. And no new member of the professoriate should feel utterly out of depth in decision-making processes that impact the teaching, research, and service mission of his or her institution. Likewise, the health of the humanities depends on our production of graduate students who do not simply replicate the faculty of yesteryear, but who are prepared to take uncharted paths in and around the academy, working together to ask new research questions and to fashion new systems or adapt the ones we treasure to altered conditions.

Graduate training in the humanities starts anew every year, on Day One. How, at a moment when we feel so much is at stake, can we allow it to remain so purposeless?

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. 

* WHAT IS #ALT-AC? *

#Alt-Academy was created by and for people with deep training and experience in the humanities, working or seeking employment — generally off the tenure track, but within the academic orbit — in universities and colleges, or allied knowledge and cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, historical societies, and governmental humanities organizations.

The work of such institutions is enriched and enabled by capable “alternative academics.” Although they are rarely conventionally-employed as faculty members, the people contributing to #Alt-Academy maintain a research (or R&D) and publication profiles and bring their methodological and theoretical training to bear every day on problem sets of great importance to higher education. For some, keeping their considerable talents within the academy can be more difficult than making a switch to private-sector careers. Class divisions among faculty and staff are profound, and the suspicion or (worse) condescension with which so-called “failed academics” are met can be disheartening. For all that, these authors love their work. Many on the #alt-ac track describe the satisfaction of making teams (and systems, and programs) work, of solving problems and  making or enabling breakthroughs in research and scholarship in their disciplines, and of contributing to and experiencing the life of the mind in ways they did not imagine when they entered grad school.

The #Alt-Academy site is for them, for their academic partners and institutional leaders, and for the next generation of hybrid humanities scholars — people who are building skills and experience in precisely those areas of the academy that are most in flux, and most in need of guidance and attention by sensitive, capable, imaginative, and well-informed scholar-practitioners.

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.

Where Credit Is Due: Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship

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.

In 2006, the MLA’s task force on evaluating scholarship issued an important report. It asserts the value of collaboration even in an institutional situation where “solitary scholarship, the paradigm of one-author–one-work, is deeply embedded in the practices of humanities scholarship, including the processes of evaluation for tenure and promotion.”

The task force sets a kind of charge for us, and I’ll read it to you. [SLIDE] (I’m not distracting you with citations on the slides, because you’ll find all of these passages in the article.)

The MLA task force reports that

opportunities to collaborate should be welcomed rather than treated with suspicion because of traditional prejudices or the difficulty of assigning credit. After all, academic disciplines in the sciences and social sciences have worked out rigorous systems for evaluating articles with multiple authors and research projects with multiple collaborators. We need to devise a system of evaluation for collaborative work that is appropriate to research in the humanities and that resolves questions of credit in our discipline as in others. The guiding rule, once again, should be to evaluate the quality of the results.

I see this is a clear and unequivocal endorsement of the work for which a set of preconditions I’ll offer you in a little bit intends to clear ground. But I want to pick at that last sentence a little, and encourage some wariness about the teleological thrust of the phrase, “quality of results.”

The danger here — and, you confirmed last night that you see this happening — is that committees will instigate a search for print equivalencies — aiming to map every DH project that is presented to them, to some other completed, unary and generally privately-created object (like an article, an edition, or a monograph).  That mapping would be hard enough in cases where it is actually appropriate — and this week I expect we’ll be exploring ways to identify those and make it easier to draw parallells.  But I am certain, if you look only for finished products and independent lines of responsibility, you will meet with frustration in examining the more interesting sorts of digital constructions.  In examining, in other words, precisely the sort of innovative work you want to be presented with.  To make a match-up attempt across the board, in every case, is to avoid a much harder activity, an activity that I want to argue is actually the new responsibility of tenure and promotion committees.   This is the responsibility to assess quality in digital humanities work — not in terms of product or output — but quality that is embodied in an evolving and continuous series of transformative processes.

When we were devising an encoding scheme for the Rossetti Archive many years ago, two of our primary sites for inquiry and knowledge representation were the production history and the reception history of the Victorian texts and images we were collecting.  I find I still locate scholarly and artistic work along these two axes.  In conversations about assessment, however, we are far too apt to lose that particular plot.  This is because production and reception have been in some ways made new in new media (or at least a bit unfamiliar), and also because they’ve never been adequately embedded — again, as activities, not outcomes — in our institutional methods for quality control.

We have to start taking seriously the systems of production and of reception in which digital scholarly objects and networks are continuously made and remade.  If we fail to do this, we’ll shortchange the work of faculty who experiment consciously with such fluidity — but worse: we will find ourselves in the dubious moral position of overlooking other people, including many non-tenure-track scholars, who make up those systems.  [SLIDE: Scholars' Lab folks]

Digital scholarship happens within complex networks of human production. In some cases, these networks are simply heightened versions of the relationships and codependencies which characterized the book-and-journal trade; and in some cases they are truly incommensurate with what came before.  However you want to look at them, it’s plain that systems of digital production require close and meaningful human partnerships.  These are partnerships that individual scholars forge with programmers, sysadmins, students and postdocs, creators and owners of content, designers, publishers, archivists, digital preservationists, and other cultural heritage professionals.  In many cases, the institutional players have been there for a long time, but collaboration, now, has been made personal again (by virtue of the diversifying of skillsets) and is amplified in degree through the experimental nature of much DH work.  (This is an interesting observation to make, perhaps, about our scholarly machine in the digital age.  Despite all the focus on cyberinfrastructure and scholarly workflows, we’re fashioning ever closer, homier, more personalized systems of production.)

To offer just one small example: compare the amount of conversation about layout and jacket design a scholar typically has with the publisher of a printed book — to the level of collaborative work and intellectual partnership between a faculty member and a Web design professional who (if they’re both doing their jobs well) work together to embed and embody acts of scholarly interpretation in closely-crafted, pitch-perfect, and utterly unique online user experiences.

But it’s not just that we (we evaluators, we tenure committees) fail to appreciate collaboration on the production side. [SLIDE: volunteered geo-data map] We neglect, too, to consider the systems of reception in which digital archives and interpretive works are situated. In many cases, the “products” of digital scholarship are continually re-factored, remade, and extended by what we call expert communities (sometimes reaching far beyond the academy) which help to generate them and take them up.  Audiences become meaningful co-creators.  And more: an understanding of reception now has to include the manner in which digital work can be placed simultaneously in multiple overlapping development and publication contexts.  Sometimes, “perpetual beta” is the point!  Digital scholarship is rarely if ever “singular” or “done,” and that complicates immensely our notions of responsibility and authorship and readiness for assessment.

So my contention is that the multivalent conditions in which we encounter and create digital work demonstrate just how much we are impoverishing our tenure and promotion conversations when we center them on objects that have been falsely divorced from their networks of cooperative production and reception. Now, okay: certainly, committees can and do confront situations in which individual scholars have created works without explicit assistance or with minimal collaborative action.  But those may well be the edge cases of the digital humanities — so why should our evaluative practices assume that they’re the rule and not the exception?

But there’s something deeper to this, and it has to do with the academy’s taking, collectively, what I think is in effect a closed-down and defensive stance toward the notion of authorship.  Do we really want to assert the value and uniqueness of a scholar’s output by protecting an outmoded and often patently incorrect vision of the solitary author?  Is that the best way to build and protect what we do, together?  What kind of favor do we think we’re doing the humanities, when we “stylize ourselves into insignificance” in this particular way?

To get back to people, here’s my fear: that we’re driving junior scholars, [SLIDE: junior scholars] who lack good models and are made conservative by complex anxieties, toward two poor options. These are 1) dishonesty to self, and 2) dishonesty toward others: that is, putting them in a position where they may choose to de-emphasize their own innovative but collaborative work because they fear it will not fit the preconceived notion of valid or significant scholarly contribution by a sole academic. That’s dishonesty to self.  The even nastier flip side would be eliding, in project descriptions, the instrumental role played by others — by technical partners and so-called “non-academic” co-creators.

You might expect me to go straight for a mushy and obvious first step — to argue today that we should work to increase our appreciation for collaborative development practices in the digital humanities.  It makes sense that fostering an appreciation — that clarifying what collaboration means in DH — could lead to a formal recognition of the collective modes of authorship that collaborative work very often implies.  Unfortunately, we have to roll things back a bit — and this is why I used the word “Preconditions” in the title of my Profession essay.

In too many cases (this is disheartening, but true) scholars and scholarly teams need reminders that they must negotiate the expression of shared credit at all — much less credit that is articulated in legible and regularized forms.  By that I mean forms acceptable within the differing professions and communities of practice from which close collaborators on a DH project may be drawn.

We evaluate digital scholarship through a bootstrapped chain of responsibilities. [SLIDE: Little Mother up the Moerderberg] Professional societies and scholarly organizations set a tone.  Institutional policy-making groups define the local rules of engagement.  Tenure committees are plainly responsible for educating themselves (they forget this) about the nature of collaborative work in the digital humanities, so that they may adequately counsel candidates and fairly assess them. Scholars who offer their work for evaluation are, in turn, responsible for making an honest presentation of their unique contributions and of the relationship they bear to the intellectual labor of others.

And digital humanities practitioners working outside the ranks of the tenured and tenure-track faculty have a role to play in these conversations as well. [SLIDE: Arty the Smarty] We’re talking here about people like me and many of my colleagues in the DH world, like the people I imagine partner with you back home, and like some of the folks who built NINES and 18th-Connect. We are professionals generally subject to alternate, but equally consequential (and often less protected) mechanisms of assessment. We need you, the tenured and tenure-track faculty, to support us when we assert that credit be given where it is due. I’ll talk in a little bit about an event — also organized with NEH support — that took on exactly this issue, and how making those assertions might hasten the regularization of fair and productive evaluative practice among tenure-track and non-tenure-track DH practitioners alike.

But I have to stop to acknowledge that people on my side of that fence (that is, humanities PhDs working as “alternative academics” off the straight and narrow path to tenure) are frequently seen rolling their eyes and wondering aloud why you guys are still all so hung up on defining your individual (rather than your collective) self-worth. [SLIDE: I'm Gonna Eat Some Worms] There’s often a little countdown that happens at any panel on digital work at a “straight” humanities conference: can we go ten whole minutes into the Q&A without eating those particular worms?  My suspicion is that many folks on the “alt-ac track” are where they are, not only because of a congenital lack of patience, but because they are temperamentally inclined to reject certain concepts that other humanities scholars are still tangled up in. [SLIDE: zero-sum] And one of the most invidious of these is a tacit notion of scholarly credit as a zero-sum game, which functions as an underlying inhibitor to generous sharing.

Let’s talk about this week.  Wouldn’t it be brilliant if this group, with all the energy of NINES and the attention it has come to command, and under the auspices of an NEH Institute — what if this group could offer, loudly, a primary motivator or two to counter the inhibiting notion that there’s only so much credit to go around?  I’ll give you one. 

Please consider that the report that comes from this NINES workshop might assert very clearly [SLIDE: Lisa Congdon heart] that healthier scholarship will result from generous and full acknowledgment of the contributions of collaborators — that this kind of acknowledgment must be made and respected in tenure and promotion cases — and that we should begin considering seriously (as the MLA task force suggested years ago) the highly legible and articulated modes of acknowledgment that are common in laboratory partnerships within the sciences.

Why do I say “healthier” scholarship will result?  Take it from somebody who trained as a humanities scholar but has worked as a peer, for her entire career, among librarians, programmers, professional society representatives, and digital publishers of various sorts.  I am convinced that the mere listing of multiple collaborators contributes to what I’ll call the Three Essential P’s. [SLIDE: the 3ps] (Once this gets out on Twitter, DHists and librarians will cheer and somebody’ll call it Nowviskie’s Rule. They’re an easy crowd.)  The Three Ps.  Giving fair and even generous credit to your digital humanities collaborators from all quarters of the academy will make imaginative production, enthusiastic promotion, and committed preservation of DH work a shared and personal enterprise.  It’ll make your scholarly work an enterprise in which, in the most granular sense, named librarians, technologists, administrators, and researchers will feel a private as well as professional stake.  You just do a better job, now and into the future, with things that have your name on them.

Maybe part of the reason the issue of proper credit for diverse collaborators is so hard to latch onto is that those collaborators are represented by so many different professional societies and advocacy groups.  Let’s check in with just a few.  I’ve found the most instructive examples in the field of public (which is often to say digital) history.  My favorite is a statement issued by a “Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship,” commissioned jointly by the AHA, the National Council on Public History, and the OAH.  In 2010, they put out something called “Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian.”  This piece starts in same key I did today, on the matter of process. It strongly endorses the AHA’s Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct, which defines scholarship as “a process, not a product, an understanding [they say] now common in the profession.”  And it goes on: [SLIDE]

The scholarly work of public historians involves the advancement, integration, application, and transformation of knowledge. It differs from “traditional” historical research not in method or in rigor but in the venues in which it is presented and in the collaborative nature of its creation. Public history scholarship, like all good historical scholarship, is peer reviewed, but that review includes a broader and more diverse group of peers, many from outside traditional academic departments, working in museums, historic sites, and other sites of mediation between scholars and the public.

Similarly, [SLIDE] here’s something from the MLA’s 1996 report, “Making Faculty Work Visible:”

As institutions develop their own means of assessment, they should consider the wide range of activities that require faculty members’ professional expertise. These would include, in addition to activities more traditionally recognized, inter- and cross-disciplinary projects, teaching that occurs outside the traditional classroom, acquisition of the knowledge and skills required by new information technologies, practical action as a context for analyzing and evaluating intellectual work, and activities that require collective and collaborative knowledge and the dissemination of learning to communities not only inside but also outside the academy.

I want you to see where I think both of these statements are trending.  It’s an important new notion.  As we expand our notions of the kinds of work open to assessment, we also need to recognize that digital scholarly collaboration speaks a different brand of peer review.  It’s a good start, don’t you think? — to assert the validity of “collective and collaborative” knowledge production and to acknowledge that review is beginning to include “a broader and more diverse group of peers.”  But let’s go a little farther.

(And this, I think, you won’t find in any formal statements by a professional society; it might be new to this conversation.) [SLIDE: Tactical Usage of the Phrase, "Oh, Snap."] Digital humanities practitioners don’t often say, but we all know that collaborative work involves a kind of perpetual peer review. What I mean by that is the manner in which continual assessment — often of the most pragmatic kind, and stemming from diverse quarters — becomes a part of day-to-day scholarly practice in the digital humanities.  You don’t get this quite so clearly and regularly, in my experience, in any other kind of scholarly work.   And it boils down to something simple.   Every collaborative action in the development of a digital project asks one big question: Does it work?

Does it work? That is, can this certain theory or intellectual stance, combined with these particular modes of gathering, interpreting, and designing information, result in ongoing production of a reasonably functional and effective digital instantiation, or user experience, or implementation of a collection or a tool? In other words, peer review, in the digital humanities, is not a post-mortem.  Instead, evolving intellectual models and digital content undergo constant review by collaborators who are trying to make everything work together. This is less a review of product, than of process itself.   By implementing aligned systems or project components that make special demands of those models and resources, they are constantly assisting in the refinement of them.  If, in a collaborative project, your code runs and is reasonably usable, and (more importantly) it makes sense in terms of the scholarly argument you and your collaborators are building, jointly — it has gone through some significant layers of systematic quality control already.   You just can’t say the same of a single-author scholarly essay.  So that’s the pragmatic side of things.

Let’s return to the ethical.  This is a dimension that also takes on special significance in the digital humanities. One option always before us, in thinking about collaborative relationships, is to fall back by default to a familiar binary: the division between authors and their publication service providers, including book designers and copyeditors, on the model of the university or commercial press.  Here, we sometimes, slightly obnoxiously, congratulate ourselves on the way that hands-on work in digital scholarship helps us arrive at a deeper appreciation of technologies of text and media production.  [SLIDE] On the screen you’re seeing Purdy and Walker, in last year’s Profession.

Though authorial choices [in design modalities, technologies, and conventions] have traditionally been more limited in print, recognizing how collaboration allows for more informed decisions and production competencies can make us appreciate more its value in print as well as digital forms.

Okay, yeah.  But I want to point out that there’s a weird and unsavory assumption, embedded in this passage, of the single scholar as authorial decision-maker.  The digital humanities resist that.  And I want to remind you, that you might, as you’re writing recommendations this week, want to avoid implying that collaboration in DH is merely a means of enhancing a privileged faculty member’s ability to make informed decisions or more sophisticated authorial and directorial choices. (Oh, snap.)  There will always be a temptation to trend that way in tenure and promotion conversations, because the stakes are so high and (as Joseph Harris gets at in this passage) [SLIDE] every structure we have reifies the notion of the solitary academic’s agency and individual achievement.

Almost all the routine forms of marking an academic career — CVs, annual faculty activity reports, tenure and promotion reviews — militate against [collaboration] by singling out for merit only… moments of individual ‘productivity.’ . . . The structures of academic professionalism, that is, encourage us not to identify with our coworkers but to strive to distinguish ourselves from one another — and, in doing so, to short-circuit attempts to form a sense of our collective interests and identity.

(That rhet-comp article’s called “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss,” by the way.)

All this is why (although as an organization, it has a way to go) I like the way the AHA puts things. [SLIDE] In its primary document on standards of conduct for historians, it encourages its constituents to be “explicit, thorough, and generous in acknowledging… intellectual debts” and promotes what it calls “vigilant self-criticism,” reminding them that “throughout our lives none of us can cease to question the claims to originality that our work makes and the sort of credit it grants to others.”  I went looking, by the way, for something similar on ethics from MLA and could only find a narrower and more operational view. [SLIDE] I won’t read this one aloud, but here’s the most parallel passage from our discipline’s ethics document. It is essentially talking about plagiarism and it zeros in on cases where a clear, printed publication trail for a certain idea is not present.

Now, this is a statement seemingly deeply embedded not only in print culture but in a view of scholarship as the product of solitary, reflective action — something generated by an author, perhaps after discussion. And, you know, it’s not untrue of most of the scholarly work the MLA must address. But the AHA’s encouraging of ceaseless self-questioning and “explicit, thorough, and generous” acknowledgment seems better designed to promote the healthy collaborative relationships that digital scholarship demands.  Anyway, it quickens the heart a little more.

Lest I give the impression that I’ve been cracking on the MLA too hard, [SLIDE: ach] allow me to scold the professional society nearest to my heart, and for which I take responsibility as sitting vice president.  The Association for Computers and the Humanities is the professional organization perhaps best positioned to understand and articulate issues of collaboration and collaborative credit in DH, and we have been conspicuously and entirely silent.  This is beginning to change, but we’re not the only quiet ones.  Professional societies across the disciplines have failed, far and wide, to advise scholars and tenure committees to value a risky and potentially transformative action.  That action, I see now, is the one of clarifying the difference — rather than the scholarly sameness — of public and digital humanities.  One way we could all begin do so is by emphasizing rather than eliding the degree to which scholars function within heterogenous collaborative networks — new networks (and I’m back to this again) of production and reception.

But we also need to make some concrete and pragmatic recommendations.

The MLA advocates one very specific model in its “Advice for Authors, Reviewers, Publishers, and Editors of Literary Scholarship.”  Let’s take a moment to look at it.  [SLIDE]

Only persons who have made significant contributions and who share responsibility and accountability should be listed as coauthors of a publication. Other contributors should be acknowledged in a footnote or mentioned in an acknowledgments section. The author submitting the manuscript for publication should seek from each coauthor approval of the final draft. The following standards are usually applied to coauthored works: when names of coauthors are listed alphabetically, they are considered to be equal contributors; if out of alphabetical order, then the first person listed is considered the lead author. Coauthors should explain their role or describe their contribution in the publication itself or when they submit the publication for evaluation.

Can the expression of shared credit be so stark, easy, and uniformly applied as this recommendation implies? [SLIDE: questions] I have some questions and concerns.  How might “responsibility and accountability” be apportioned in contexts where some collaborators provide content, others a digital and intellectual infrastructure for analysis or for publication, and still others are providing design expertise for digital presentation?  All of these are part and parcel of a scholarly argument embodied in a digital project.  All of these require thought, expertise, and conversation as part of a team.  So maybe we should be looking for models in places where teamwork is more a norm.  What about scientific publishing?  Scholarly editing?  Or maybe the most promising: R&D collectives in architecture and the arts?

Apportionment and expression of credit will never be simple or formulaic in digital humanities scholarship, because of the multiple communities and community norms which must be respected and engaged in any collaborative project.  The best example I know in the digital humanities is INKE [SLIDE: octopus inke] — the huge, multi-national, and interdisciplinary project on Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) in the context of the digital transformations of the book.  I spend some time describing INKE and its governing documents in the Profession piece, so I won’t do that very closely now, but I want to encourage you to take a look at it.   This group is notable in the DH community for being self-reflective and regularly conducting analyses of its own processes of collaboration and project management.  I always think of INKE as a laboratory for measuring the effectiveness of mechanisms like project charters in large and heterogenous groups.

The basic idea of the INKE charter was to negotiate thorny issues of credit, authorship, and intellectual property in advance — and to have a way to bring new partners into an ongoing project in a way that gave them a sense of the group’s culture and ethos.  The decisions about authorship and collective credit that INKE lighted on clearly have much in common with the lab model of the sciences. [SLIDE]

According to the charter, collaborators

receive named co-authorship credit on presentations and publications that make direct use of research in which they took an active, as opposed to passive, role (i.e. research to which the individual made a unique and discernible contribution with a substantial effect on the knowledge generated); otherwise, [they] receive indirect credit via the INKE corporate authorship convention.

This “corporate authorship convention” is a neat thing.  Beyond the noticeable fact that INKE papers often have more listed authors than is common to see in the humanities, you’ll often observe “and INKE Research Group” as a formal listing in the byline of articles and conference presentations.  Basically, when the INKE project itself is the topic of a presentation the charter specifies that “all team members should be co-authors.” [SLIDE] Here are some more specifics:

We will adopt the convention of listing the team itself, so that typically the third or fourth author will be listed as INKE Research Group, while the actual named authors will be those most responsible for the paper. The individual names of members of the INKE Research Group should be listed in a footnote, or where that isn’t possible, through a link to a web page. Any member can elect at any time not to be listed, but may not veto publication. For presentations or papers that spin off from this work, only those members directly involved need to be listed as co-authors. The others should be mentioned if possible in the acknowledgments, credits, or article citations.

The INKE group is quick to assert that the symbolic dimension of its crediting guidelines and charter is key to the success of the project, that it “signals the nature of [the INKE] working relationship.”  They call it  “a visible manifestation” of agreed-upon relationships, writing that “any published work and data represent the collaboration of the whole team, past and present, not the work of any sole researcher.”   Clearly, they haven’t solved the problem of shared credit in DH, but what’s important is that they have offered a documented and specific model which, over time, could be assessed for its effectiveness and for its impact both on the work that’s being done and on the careers of the people working — many of whom include postdoctoral researchers.

[SLIDE: phrenology] You don’t write a project charter or a statement of professional ethics unless you’re worried about something.  Strong tensions underlie all of these things I’ve highlighted. Many seem to stem not from uncertainty about our ability to negotiate interpersonal relationships, but from a recognition that our institutional policies (listen up, attending deans and provosts!) codify inequities among collaborators of differing employment status. These are university policies that govern position descriptions, the awarding of research time or sabbaticals, standards for annual review, the definition of intellectual labor vs. mere “work for hire,” and (crucially) the ability of staff to assert ownership over their own intellectual property, including for purposes of releasing it as open access content or open source code.

These were the concerns driving an NEH-funded workshop called [SLIDE: #trx4hx] “Off the Tracks: Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars,” which was held at MITH earlier this year.  The workshop focused on administrative issues relating to equitable treatment and professionalization of “scholar-programmers” and “alternate academics” — those employees most likely to claim shared credit alongside faculty partners in digital research.

I was on a working group asked to look at issues of scholarly collaboration — together with Matt Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, and Tom Scheinfeldt, and we drew on our experience administering MITH, the Scholars’ Lab, and the Center for History and New Media — three centers that are sites for a great deal of collaboration among people who may have similar backgrounds as scholars and technologists, but whose formal institutional status may vary a great deal.  We drafted something we called a “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights,” which was later endorsed by the full workshop assembly and posted for public comment.  Here it is. [SLIDE]

Basically, it’s an appeal for fair, honest, legible, portable (this is important!), and prominently-displayed crediting mechanisms. It also offers a dense expression of underlying requirements for healthy collaboration and adequate assessment from the point of view of practicing digital humanists, with special attention to the vulnerabilities of early-career scholars and staff or non-tenure-track faculty.  You can google this puppy, or ask me and I’ll send you a link.  I think things like this, and the INKE charter, are good demonstrations that the DH community is increasingly prepared to address fundamental matters of collaborative credit leading to fair and accurate assessment of digital scholarship.  This is going to happen at the grassroots level, and in ways that make sense to practicing digital humanists.

But your task is otherwise.  Your audience is different. [SLIDE: adapt x 2]

What is going to resonate in our academic departments and among our disciplinary professional societies?  What might we think of as the chief preconditions for the evaluation of collaborative digital humanities scholarship?  I’ll give you six, maybe something to critique, something get you started:

1. [SLIDE] Committees must consider not only the products of digital work but the processes by which the work was (and perhaps continues to be) co-created;
2. [SLIDE] Scholars (even while they ask to have their critical agency as individuals taken seriously in tenure and promotion cases) are obligated to make the most generous and inclusive statements possible about the contributions of others;
3. [SLIDE] Credit should be expressed richly and descriptively, but also in increasingly standardized forms, legible within a variety of disciplines and communities of practice;
4. [SLIDE] We must negotiate expressions of shared credit at the outset of projects and continually, as projects evolve;
5. [SLIDE] We must promote fair institutional policies and practices in support of shared assertion of credit, such as those which make collective and individual ownership over intellectual property meaningful and actionable;
6. [SLIDE] And, finally, we must accept that collaborators themselves, regardless of rank or status, have the ultimate authority and responsibility for expressing their contributions and the nature of their roles.

So there are six possible preconditions. But really, underlying them all and maybe the most important thing you could clarify, coming out of the NINES Institute, [SLIDE: bubbles] is that faculty under evaluation for promotion or tenure on the basis of collaborative digital projects must never be penalized for offering a full and fair catalog of contributions made by others — that it’s not a zero-sum game.

If the recommendations of this institute can promote that understanding, and get picked up in the drafting of local, institutional policies, you’ll not only be enabling acts of intellectual generosity.  I think you’re going to do something truly strategically productive for our disciplines. Formal and regular acknowledgment of collaboration as part of the ritual of assessment and faculty self-governance will have an educative function in the humanities, and it’ll be deeply consequential for policy and praxis within allied information and knowledge professions, like cultural heritage, IT, and libraries.   I think we could expect it to lead to strengthened research-and-development partnerships in DH — and you’ve already heard me say that I think (back to the 3 P’s) that promoting a sense of shared ownership of knowledge production will result in better design decisions and more enthusiastic preservation of our cultural and scholarly record.

[SLIDE: sprouting keyboard] We’ve also got to keep fluid production, publication, and reception venues in the digital humanities in mind, and understand that new media offer important opportunities for scholars to engage not only new audiences but new peers, who will help to make and remake our digital scholarship.  By accepting any set of “preconditions,” we’re acknowledging that a great deal of work remains to be done, both by our professional societies in making recommendations and setting standards, and on the local scene in which individual scholars and committees of faculty peers continually enact our shared values.

There’s no reason to be afraid of a bit of work.  And I think the loveliest thing about this Institute, in terms of the problem of evaluating collaborative digital scholarship, is that you’ve signed on to address the issue not just intensively, over the next few days, but collaboratively.  [SLIDE: thank you!] I’ll be watching to see how you’re all credited on the final report!

(Below, you’ll find remarks I contributed to an MLA panel discussion from which a case of pneumonia kept me away. The text was read in my absence by Steve Ramsay. I’d like to thank Steve, not only for that, but for cheering me through my disappointment at missing the conference by providing the earworm I now pass on to you. And here’s a promise: when I stop coughing and get my breath back, I’ll record the talk — and sing like I was a-gonna, at MLA.)

This is a call, in a session on the “history and future of the digital humanities,” for us to take instead a steady look at our present moment. I will offset immediately any concern that the intervention I mean to make in today’s conversation is as grim as we are perpetually reminded Our Present Moment to be, by telling you that these remarks are being published on my blog under the title, “Mambo Italiano,” complete with links to a clarion-cutesy Rosemary Clooney, an offensive clip from The Simpsons, and some French guy dancing with low-rent Muppets.

I’m at home in bed. Your grim reality at present, at the 2011 MLA convention, is that shockingly few of the job-seekers you’ll meet this week in elevators and at cash bars have a prayer of securing the stable faculty positions for which they have trained. Still others have been made to feel ashamed of discovering divergent desires on what was meant to be a straight and narrow path to tenure. A look toward the future of digital humanities requires that we be clear-eyed about the crisis facing our graduate students and the hundreds of unemployed and under-employed academics attending this conference right now — and about the impact their working conditions and career trajectories may have on DH and on the broader humanities.

To these people, and to faculty in a position to shape the graduate curricula that produce more and more of them, I say:

Hey goombah!
I love-a how you dance rumba.
But take-a some advice, paisano,
Learn-a how to mambo.
If you gonna be a square, you ain’t-a gonna go nowhere.

Not long ago, our community of practice called itself “humanities computing” — an adjectival signal of difference in which the humanities were empowered to modify computing, rather than the other way around. Now that we’re DH, academic futurologists (speaking either from a starry-eyed Eternal September or from a place of more administrative engagement) tell us that we’re moving toward sameness — that the present digital humanities will shortly be subsumed into the larger humanities, and that we will drop our new adjective to come back into the fold. The former say this in faith that the humanities themselves will be utterly and irrevocably transformed in a grand “methodological turn” stemming from (mostly other peoples’) development of digital tools. The latter group either find it an easier sell — as there’s already a smallish pigeon-hole labelled “humanities scholarship” — or a more hopeful one, as if a DH vanguard might lead their benighted faculties to a Humanities that is more, shall we say? — fundable. Both groups assume a push toward assimilation and speak as if traditionally-employed teaching-and-research faculty were the primary drivers and benefactors of the shift.

What on earth does this have to do with the Mambo Italiano?

Mambo is a Cuban dance originating in 1940s Havana. When it made its way to the States, dance instructors found it too wild and undisciplined to be marketable, so it was standardized into steps. By 1955, when it had become a somewhat predictable and Americanized craze, it was again ripe for cultural mashup. That’s when Rosemary Clooney hit the top of the charts with Latin rhythms and comedic Italian-American lyrics, singing “all you Calabrese / Do the mambo like-a crazy.”

And hey Mambo! Don’t wanna tarantella,
Hey Mambo! No more a-mozzarella.
Hey Mambo! Mambo Italiano,
Try an enchilada with a fish-a-baccalà.

There’s a methodological Mambo Italiano to be danced in the digital humanities. It resists the push toward sameness, or any too-easy assimilation into either humanities or computing, and into the institutional structures that have separated them. It has its own research agenda, and unexpected audiences. And importantly, in our present moment, it’s not only a great deal of fun, but it’s a living — a realistic and happy-making one, where there are jobs to be had putting doctoral-level humanities experience to work, and joy to be reclaimed. When I think about the folks who mambo this way most, right now, they are the ones we’ve begun calling “alternate academics” — people with deep backgrounds in humanities scholarship whose technical skills and passions drive them to work, generally off the tenure track, and increasingly in DH labs and centers, or in libraries, museums, and archives.

Asking today’s “history and future” panel to keep one eye on the present moment means asking them — and you — to reflect on how methodological training in the digital humanities can play a role in ensuring that good, early-career scholars keep their important talents in the academic orbit. If we can’t do better by them, this is a generation of humanities experts we will lose.

Doing better means preparing our junior colleagues for #alt-ac jobs and not training them to see non-tenure-track careers in DH as a consolation prize.

And even the least tech-savvy faculty in our academic departments should recognize that the people who study with us in graduate humanities seminars — if they can also acquire the skills to become makers and not just theorizers — are precisely the people we’d want to see engaging with the wholesale digital transformation of our shared cultural heritage, already underway.

Why are we, in the DH community, so bad at making this case — at clearing these paths? I’m sorry that I can’t join the panel today to discuss these things with you — but if I were in the room, there’s essentially one thing I’d say: Kid, you good-a lookin’ but you don’t know what’s-a cookin’ til you — hey! mambo.

[In late August, I wrote this post for the Chronicle of Higher Education's "ProfHacker" column. Because the enlightened Profs Hacker have ensured that all PH content is Creative-Commons licensed and I may, I'm re-posting it here! You can still read the original article, along with the comments it received, on the Chronicle's site.]

By now, avid ProfHacker readers will have encountered the cipher “#alt-ac:” a neologism and Twitter hashtag that marks conversations about “alternate academic” careers for humanities scholars. Here, “alternate” typically denotes neither adjunct teaching positions nor wholly non-academic (what-color-is-your-parachute, maybe-should-have-gotten-an-MBA) jobs — about which, in comparison, advice is easy to find.

Instead, the #alt-ac label speaks to to a broad set of hybrid, humanities-oriented professions centered in and around the academy, in which there are rich opportunities to put deep — often doctoral-level — training in scholarly disciplines to use. Recent #alt-ac conversation online additionally tends to focus on the digital humanities, a community of practice marrying sophisticated understanding of traditional disciplines with new tools and methods. The digital humanities constitute, in my opinion, the best gig in town — attracting scholars who exhibit restless, interdisciplinary curiosity, mastery of relevant research tools and methods (old and new), and uncommon comfort — in a world that defines expertise like this — with a general assumption that practitioners are jacks-of-all-trades.

If they are to serve us well, academic IT, libraries, publishing, humanities labs and centers, funders and foundations, focused research projects, cultural heritage institutions, and higher ed administration require a healthy influx of people who understand scholarship and teaching from the inside. That our culture for many years has labelled these people “failed academics” is a failure of imagination. Those who gravitate toward #alt-ac positions during or after completing graduate study are often driven to set things in motion in the academic environment, and to set things right. Couple the attractive #alt-ac mission of building systems (social, scholarly, administrative, technical) with an exceptionally sorry academic job market, and it becomes clear that more and more graduate students, post-docs, junior faculty, and underemployed lecturers will be stepping off the straight and narrow path to tenure.

Let’s say that’s you. Much could be written about the decision to shift to the #alt-ac sector, and about the process of seeking and interviewing for a job — but let’s elide all of that. Say you’ve successfully interviewed, and are now in a position to negotiate the terms of the #alt-ac employment you’re being offered at a college or university. (There are, of course, other #alt-ac locales and institutions — and I call on ProfHacker readers to add insights about them in the comments field!)

If this is your first #alt-ac job, you’re likely to feel a little rattled. You’re new to the culture, and still shaking off some of the assumptions that colored your past job searches. Or even if, like me, you never went on the traditional academic market, years of grad school may have taught you some no-longer-relevant things: about your own market value and position in the hierarchy (which is to say, your latitude for action); about what constitutes honorable work; and about the relationship of single, blessed career trajectories to success.

You’ll have to overcome the brainwashing on your own time. I’m only here to tell you how to improve the initial terms of your new job offer. However, I bring up these assumptions because I have both felt them personally and have seen my employees, colleagues, and friends sell themselves short at the #alt-ac negotiating table because of them.

Since I’ve clarified that I’m not your shrink, I should also state that I am not your lawyer. But, as an #alt-ac employee myself and as the director of a department full of them, I have a few insights to share:

Salary:

You’re possibly worth more than you think. Job ads often only state that salary will be “commensurate with experience” — and (unlike assistant professorships in humanities disciplines) there’s often no typical starting salary in the varied world of #alt-ac. “Commensurate with experience” puts all the burden on you, to demonstrate that your grasp of the relevant problems and opportunities, and your superior capacity to address them, merit serious money. A research burden is also on your shoulders, because you must not discuss compensation without being informed as to what’s equitable within the institution. Publicly-funded schools and entities typically publish salary figures. If you can’t access that data (but try! search online first, and then call a library reference desk or university-level HR department) — then you must come to the table with information about what people in similar positions are making elsewhere. (This will require some due diligence on geographic variation in cost of living, which can be done with online calculators, so you don’t offer for comparison someone who is making far too much or far too little, relative to your new home town.) And don’t be afraid to ask questions about internal salary equity directly of your HR officer or hiring manager.

Hiring managers are generally motivated to make sure that salaries are internally equitable, so they don’t later have to go through the nightmare process of making adjustments based on grievances. Job searches are also costly endeavors, so it’s in everybody’s interest to make sure you’re accepting a salary that will prevent you from immediately going on the market again. The name of the game here, for you, is getting that initial offer up as high as they’ll push it — because (unlike with teaching faculty appointments) most institutions are bound by internal regulations about allowable annual increases after an initial appointment — or even have established salary “steps” or “bands” — ranges that are hard to break out of, once you’re in one. It could be the case that you are administratively trapped in an inappropriate “pay band,” even if your duties are expanded or you later change positions within the organization. Negotiation leading to your first offer letter with an institution can be your best chance at long-term salary satisfaction.

Most #alt-ac offers are for full-time, 12-month positions, but some — particularly “research assistant professor” gigs, discussed below — can be 9- or 10-month, academic-year offers. Often the ads for jobs like these will stress that summer salary is dependent on teaching and special projects — which is code for: you may be able to pick up an adjunct class or two and, if you help us write successful grants, you might be able to pay yourself in some way from June to August. Think carefully about whether that kind of situation will be possible (and sanity-preserving) for you. You should also look at the description of the regular, “9-month” position, to determine whether you really believe you’ll be able to take 3 months entirely away from the job each year — or whether calling it a 9-month salary is just a way of explaining why it’s 25% less than they wish they could pay.

Finally, if you have another concrete offer, or a counter-offer for staying in an existing #alt-ac position, for goodness’ sake, mention it! I have heard of several instances where prospective employees have balked at stating counter-offers baldly. You can’t feed your family on good taste or a misplaced sense of gentility. Even if you’re not inclined to accept the counter-offer, you can present it for useful comparison in order to open negotiation on issues including — and far beyond! — monetary compensation.

Status:

Can you still be on the faculty? Retaining faculty status can have a number of benefits. Some feel strongly that it improves your ability to keep open the option of future tenure-track employment. (I have my doubts: there’s much more permeability between these boundaries than you, in the throes of your initial decision to pursue #alt-ac employment, are likely to suspect — and the arcana of local faculty/staff class distinctions are likely to be opaque to your future hiring committee, anyway.)

Other benefits are of the immediate, HR variety. An #alt-ac position might already be classifed as a “research assistant professorship,” a post-doc within a particular school or division, or an appointment as [insert your title here] on what is sometimes called the “general” or “administrative,” or “professional” faculty. Some libraries, for instance, have preserved regular professorial status for professional, credentialed librarians — not all of whom may teach. Others make appointments in the categories of assistant, associate, and full librarian. (I am, for instance, as Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library, going up for promotion from Assistant to Associate Librarian next year with a portfolio that looks for all the world like a tenure packet.) Much depends on the vagaries of your institution. Run-of-the-mill, early-career research-associate positions and very high-level administrative appointments alike can fall into categories in which employment policies — like those governing leave time or eligibility for sabbaticals — mirror the policies for teaching faculty.

But what do you do if the job you have been offered is, technically, a staff position even though the search committee made it clear that your scholarly profile was an important factor in the hiring decision? Or if local policies governing non-tenure-track faculty do not afford you some benefits that are important to you? Even if the position was not so advertised, if the institution wants you enough and the financial stars align, you might be able to swing a joint appointment in a relevant academic department, which (depending on local policies) might afford you status and representation through the bodies that govern faculty as well as staff or non-tenure-track employment. Courtesy titles (the ability to list yourself as “Research Assistant Professor of X” in addition to your primary title) are also not out of the realm of possibility at many schools.

Be careful in either case, though, to make sure that the academic department is entirely welcoming of this arrangement. You don’t want the joint appointment if there’s any hint that a begrudging department has been leaned on excessively or sees this as a short-term financial commitment that might be revisited without warning. (The exception here would be if the financial aspects of a shared appointment have been agreed upon, in writing, by both parties and if you have access to that agreement and feel comfortable that it addresses what happens to your position if either group bows out.)

If there are no logistical red flags associated with such a joint appointment, you still might not press for it if you believe the culture in the academic department would be unfriendly. What would the appointment mean in terms of your active participation in teaching? in the committee work of the department? How do they treat their adjuncts? Have they hosted other joint appointments or faculty-level “research positions” in the past? How did things turn out for those people? Would you have desk space? Don’t be greedy here, if you are already being given another office across campus — but a willingness to create a dedicated office, some swing-space, or at least a shared landing-spot for you in the academic department may indicate the degree to which you’d feel welcome in other ways. And even a courtesy title may be a local liability, if you sense your colleagues would be uncourteous about it.

On the other hand, you could also just stuff it, ignore the categories, and accept a staff position — from which you then actively demonstrate to everyone around you that you remain a scholar, with a difference, in your new role. (One major caveat here is that many schools forbid “staff” members, as opposed to faculty — even of the non-tenure track, “general” or “administrative” sort — from serving as sole PI on grants. Although it’s possible to collaborate, as a staff member at places like those, with someone on the faculty and be listed as co-PI, this could be a major emotional and/or practical deal-breaker for you. Ask this question!) In general, however, maintaining your sanity while maintaining your scholarly profile as an “alternative academic” depends to a great degree on the next category.

Research:

High on your list of priorities for a new, #alt-ac position may be the ability to keep up with scholarship in your field. This may mean time for revising past work for publication, undertaking new research and writing projects, teaching the occasional course, or simply reading in order to stay current in your discipline. This is strictly evening-and-weekend stuff for some #alt-accers, but many of us have “research time” either written formally into our job descriptions or informally instituted as workplace practice. (In my own shop, it’s a little of both — which works well, because we are able to keep Fridays, as “research days,” free of meetings and other distractions, and I am — as a manager — able to demonstrate both up and down the org chart that we hold ourselves accountable for research time well spent.)

Particularly if this is your first #alt-ac position, I encourage you not to negotiate for and undertake that kind of research time with an eye solely toward “staying marketable” for future tenure-track positions. This way lies madness. Do it instead because you love the content, want to continue to make meaningful contributions, and firmly believe anything you’d do in this vein would add value to the insititution that’s hiring you. If it’s just a grind to keep your options open, your work will suffer on both ends and you and your hiring manager will know it. And — to put it in the plainest terms possible — don’t be a jerk. You’re being hired to do an important job, not to cruise while you’re revising your dissertation and waiting for the market to improve. You’ll make the rest of the hard-working #alt-ac crowd look bad.

A better question than, “Will I have time on the job to pursue my own scholarship?” is something on the order of, “What’s my ability, within the position I’m being hired to fill, to shape the mission of the group and bring my own academic research interests to bear?” In other words, does your job description lend itself in any way to your personal research interests? Any answer to this question will be highly revelatory. The most surprising thing you may learn is that the job is less precisely defined than you may expect. In a supportive and decently-resourced environment, this can be good: it means you have latitude to define it yourself, matching your strengths and interests to the needs and goals of your organization and making it up, in the most exciting way, as you go along. (But trust your gut as to whether the job is only superficially vaguely-defined. Ask questions designed to reveal what the institution would consider “success” and — if that turns out to be a fairly precise thing — whether you will have the resources to achieve it.)

If it turns out that your new place of work can’t grant as much regular, on-the-clock research time as you would hope, or that your duties cannot be made to align in obvious ways to your scholarly passions, you may still choose to take the job. Other scholarly benefits accrue almost by default to people who work in colleges and universities. These include free and easy access to primary sources (special collections) and secondary research materials, like databases and journals. Therefore, before you sign on the dotted line, you should ascertain whether your school subscribes to your journals or has other holdings you need — or whether you will have consortial borrowing or interlibrary loan privileges in your new position. Newly-hired teaching faculty often receive a little discretionary budget meant to augment library collections. Is there any chance of something similar in your new position?

Be aware that library collections budgets are suffering everywhere, so — if that’s just not possible for you — you should still ask what your avenue to a subject librarian might be, since these are the people who field general purchase requests. Connecting with your subject librarian is a good idea anyway, because he or she typically circulates news about lectures and events of interest to particular departments. Even if you’re not a member of the department, “your” subject librarian will probably respond very positively to a request that you be kept in the loop.

If you will continue to pursue your own research during work hours or with the use of what could be called substantial university resources, perhaps the most important conversation you can have as you switch to an #alt-ac position has to do with intellectual property and open source — that is, with your ability to assert ownership and/or freely give away the products of your intellectual labor. Policies governing this crucial issue for staff and non-tenure-track faculty generally differ from those that apply to teaching faculty and students. Who owns copyright or the ability to patent your work? Who can sign off on an open-source or Creative Commons license? I have written about these problems elsewhere. “Substantial university resources” is a phrase that’s open to local interpretation, but could mean much less than a gigantic, costly laboratory: it could mean as little as the hourly equivalent of your salary while you’re researching or writing. This one — as a policy matter — is bigger than you, so it will not likely be negotiable as part of your contract, but it is certainly something you and your future supervisor should be aware of and have a strategy for adhering to, turning to your advantage, working around, or challenging — depending on your shared ethical stance.

Perks:

If you’ve been a grad student or contingent faculty member before taking your first #alt-ac position, you will likely be delighted at the opportunity to place an equipment order. Yes, your employer is going to provide you with the gadgets — and sometimes even tech books and other goodies — you need to do your job. The first question to ask, is: “What’s in line with what other staff are using?”

Ask this question for two reasons: your grad-school parsimony may drive you (as it did me!) to demand too little. I still recall shamefacedly questioning the IT staffer who suggested I order an extra laptop power-cord for travel and home use about whether the University of Virginia could really afford such extravagance. On the other hand, finding out about the equipment norms among your colleagues will also prevent you from kitting yourself out to an obscene degree — especially if you will be working with staff who, for whatever reason, were not able to make specific equipment requests. Before making a final equipment decision, be sure to find out about the “technology refresh rate” in your organization. In other words, how long will you be living with this stuff? Does your department lease its equipment (which means there will be a predictable turnover rate), or will it be purchased outright? If you are purchasing your desktop computer, a laptop, or any kind of mobile gadget, you may want to ask about extended warranties and whether your department is budgeting for replacements and upgrades. Outright purchasing — especially if future tech budgets aren’t protected from on high (for instance, through dedicated endowments) — also makes buying top-of-the-line models, maxxing out your RAM, and taking other steps toward longer-term satisfaction with your equipment much smarter. Even the shiniest new laptop will be a sorry beast four or five years from now.

Professional development opportunities are another frequent perk of #alt-ac employment. This phrase may ring of job-related seminars (or, worse, “webinars” and “retreats”), but actually often means both attractive internal and external opportunities. Internal programs may include tuition remission to the tune of a course or two per semester — which can, over time, provide you with a free graduate degree: allowing you to complete your PhD, or acquire that second one you need like a hole in the head; or return for a new degree like an LIS or MBA, perhaps unrelated to your original field of study but highly relevant to your new career. Other internal opportunities could include competitively-awarded research grants and sabbaticals. You should also ascertain (again, without raising red flags about your commitment to the job for which you’re being hired!) whether you will be eligible to apply for external grants and fellowships, and whether employees at your institution are granted annual, matter-of-course travel and professional development budgets that they can spend in consultation with a supervisor or at their own discretion. For purposes of comparison, it may be helpful to know that both staff and faculty-status employees at the University of Virginia Library are currently granted $800 annually in travel funds (sometimes supplemented at the department level, and always doubled in the first two years of faculty employment) as well as $2000 per year in tuition funds, which they can spend on UVa classes or certified courses and training programs elsewhere. That said, every school and unit is different, and the most important thing for you in considering and negotiating #alt-ac employment is to ensure that what you’re being offered is equitable locally and not so paltry as to make you miserable.

Teaching:

A further perk, for some positions, may be the ability to teach courses. Teaching can happen in a number of ways. One is as a routine part of your job duties, in which case you will likely not be negotiating for extra pay, but may have an opportunity to come to an understanding about how the assignment will be handled — especially if it was not at first evident to your employer that “teaching release” (or on-the-job time granted for course prep and instruction) should be written into your job description or formal, annual goals. If the teaching is to be routinized in an academic department, you may also want to get some aspects of that arrangement in writing. (And see my discussion of “courtesy titles” above.) Finally — especially if you are the first #alt-ac hire in your organization, or the first one to desire a formal teaching partnership with a separate, academic department — you may want to suggest to your new supervisor that a financial arrangement could be made to offset your time. My staff sometimes teach semester-long graduate and undergraduate courses in their academic specialties. A reasonable funding transfer from the department that solicits their services has allowed me to hire graduate student assistants to pick up the resultant slack on our end — with a side benefit of providing those grad students (from the very department that is indirectly funding them!) with valuable methodological training and hands-on experience. Insert “administrative experience,” “project-management experience,” or whatever service your shop provides, and this model may be transferrable.

Teaching could also happen outside the loop, if you are adjuncting for pay, either at another school or within your home institution. (In the latter case, you and the department chair hiring you should be sure to familiarize yourselves with local regulations about overtime assignments or “academic overloads.”) Either at home or elsewhere, if you are being paid money for teaching, beyond your primary salary, you must be scrupulous about your time. Be sure that you and your supervisor agree on how to handle or offset any teaching or holding of office hours during work time — and make sure that you will be able to handle the level of after-hours course prep and grading that you are about to sign up for!

One last word about teaching “off-the-clock.” What you do in your own time is your own business. I have witnessed at least two #alt-ac job negotiations (neither at my own institution) go sour when the potential employee began asking too many questions, too early in the courtship, about on-the-side teaching and research. You do not need to ask your employer’s permission to take a second job, especially if you are confident that it will have no bearing on your ability to meet the responsibilities of your primary position. Many employers are slightly cautious about their #alt-ac hires. Does someone who trained so long to be an academic really want — and understand the demands of — an “alternative” job? If most of your sticking-points seem to be about making the position you have been offered into something more closely resembling a teaching faculty appointment — or if you are suggesting, by sheer dint of energy in questioning, that you will be more engaged in seeking adjunct teaching than in taking care of local bidness — your potential employer may think twice. If an offer has already been made, he or she may even start feeling buyer’s remorse. And that’s no way for you to start a new career.

Assessment and Advice:

How will you be evaluated and assessed in your new position? Most institutions have an established, policy-driven practice of holding annual reviews, for which you may be asked to submit a written report of your accomplishments over the course of the year, before sitting down for a heart-to-heart talk with your supervisor. This can also be accompanied by formal goal-setting for the coming year — in which case, next year’s annual review will address the degree to which you met those goals.

Now, that’s the Platonic ideal of the annual review. In practice, assessment and employee evaluation varies widely. Even within a single institution, I have experienced a variety of customs. As a post-doc and, later, member of the research faculty in an academic department, I was frankly not even aware that I was supposed to be undergoing annual reviews. As a librarian and administrator, I both review and am reviewed. You may be inclined to think that benign neglect of the annual review process is just that — benign, a blessed relaxing of the red tape that seems to be threaded around so much of what we do in an academic setting. I advise you to make sure that you are formally assessed by your supervisor on a regular basis, and that you retain an ongoing record of that assessment. I am convinced of the self-interested value of this bureaucratic exercise by the few horror stories I’ve heard: about employees with no ability, in the case of a dispute or questionable termination, to demonstrate that they have been praised for consistent and high-level service to their organizations.

I am often asked about the utility of talking #alt-ac with your dissertation director or academic mentor. As with every aspect of that relationship, your mileage may vary. Many senior professors will be baffled by your questions, having had little experience in the nine-to-five world (even the academic flavor thereof) and none whatsoever with job negotiations for hybrid professionals. Others have been known to become hostile upon realizing that a star student is looking for #alt-ac employment. If either case is true for you (and, hey, do this anyway!), you should focus your attention on your school’s career counselling center or on the services of an #alt-ac friendly director of graduate studies. If those resources aren’t available to you (or again, regardless), you may find that the HR director of the organization hiring you is a more impartial font of counsel than you might suspect. (These people are highly trained to understand good workplace practices, to mediate conversations that promote understanding among supervisors and employees, and to interpret local policy while simultaneously pushing it forward to accommodate changing norms and needs.) All this is not to discourage you from talking with your diss advisor. In the best of situations, an academic mentor may have brilliant advice for you — or, at least, the conversation that you open up will help him or her know how better to respond to the next bright grad student stepping off the tenure track.

I have also been asked if dissertation directors should “go to bat for you,” after you have been made an offer, in helping to articulate your value to the institution. In most cases, the answer is a thousand times no. Your mentor’s direct involvement will make you seem unprofessional and overly-dependent, and effusive letters or phone conversations about the high quality of your scholarship (the only assessment many dissertation directors are qualified to make) may worry your future employers that they are hiring someone unprepared for the “alt” in “#alt-ac.” Scholarly mentors and dissertation directors should never get involved in negotiations after an initial offer has been made (unlike in academic appointments where, I am informed, on some occasions a mentor may work his or her connections with the department that has made an offer, to secure a better package). The time for your advisor to put in a good word is when the hiring committee calls him or her for a reference. Yeah, you’re a grown-up now.

The best advice to be had about #alt-ac careers comes from people who are in them — and believe me, you’ll continue needing guidance well past the job-negotiation phase! Chances are good that your new organization has instituted or toyed with the idea of a new employee mentorship program. Here, again, your HR director will be essential in helping to match you up with someone whose career path is similar to your own. In a university setting, you can broaden your circle and get a quick sense of hot issues for #alt-ac employees by attending the open meetings of your Staff or General Faculty Council, the elected bodies that correspond, for staff members and non-tenure-track faculty, to a typical Faculty Senate. If an officially-acknowledged group does not exist to represent your needs and views, create one! You’ll easily find great models for this at other schools, and you’ll be recognized for your leadership at home.

If you are interested in the digital humanities, you’ll do well to stay connected with the THATCamp movement, mentioned in ProfHacker and the Chronicle numerous times. Regional THATCamps are a great opportunity to connect with fellow #alt-ac professionals, as well as with interesting faculty and graduate students in an egalitarian atmosphere (which — sad to say — you may start noticing and valuing). A similar vibe is to be found at the annual DH conference, which alternates between Europe and North America, and is to be held next year at Stanford University. DH has been a bastion of alternative academic goodness since it was known as ACH/ALLC, a joint conference, beginning in 1989, of two of the three #alt-ac-friendly professional societies that currently sponsor it. One of those societies — the ACH — sponsors a mentorship program that revs up around the annual conference. Watch the Humanist email list for announcements about this opportunity to be connected with experienced (and often quite distinguished) #alt-ac mentors.

For always-on help and advice, take to the Internet. While I am not a member and can’t speak from experience, people I respect have recommended the online community at The Versatile PhD. For me, the most helpful commentary and best connections are centering around the #alt-ac hashtag and its expanded DH community on Twitter. (Look, for instance, at the outpouring of #alt-ac-relevant advice that made it into Brian Croxall’s recent “Open Letter to New Graduate Students.”) And stay tuned for an announcement in ProfHacker about the availability of an online, open-access version of the essay collection mentioned above. It’s the work of dozens of contributors, writing and speaking from a variety of perspectives and in several different formats, in an attempt to reflect on experience, both theorize and pragmatize the issues, and above all offer useful models and sound advice to a coming wave of new colleagues.

Now (in the great ProfHacker tradition) it’s your turn! Please ask questions — or share your words of wisdom to help new #alt-ac folks make smart employment decisions and negotiate their way into happy-making and productive alternative academic careers.

[NB. Do see the comments field on the original post, and feel free to add your observations here or there!]

Over the past several years, I have been privileged both to attend and to help plan a number of invitation-only conferences, institutes, and symposia related to my field, the digital humanities. I use the word “privileged” not because of the exclusivity of these events, but because I know from personal experience how very hard their organizers work to set conditions leading to meaningful experiences and outcomes.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Finally, the need for privacy is not the same as a wish for control. I am fairly unsympathetic to an ownership frustration I have heard from a small number of scholars, manifesting as a desire that ideas they express at conferences — even well-attributed — not be circulated via Twitter. I have come to understand that this concern stems less from a kind of proprietary interest over the ideas (that is to say, it is less a matter akin to copyright), than from a sensation of the loss of control. The level of control we used to feel over the distribution and reception of scholarly statements was only ever an illusion made possible by the small scale and relative snail’s pace of print publication. It was also enabled by authority systems that — while they have performed a salutary function of filtering and quality assurance — are under scrutiny in an age of electronic text, because of their incongruence, economic instability, and cumulatively stifling effect.

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.

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.

Just a quick post to say that I participated again this year in the Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities “community publication project,” along with these fine folks. This is becoming an annual exercise in which digital humanities scholars and practitioners of all kinds document the ins and outs of a typical day.

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.

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.”

[Update! The #Alt-Academy project that had its seed in this post is now available from MediaCommons! -- including, in an initial iteration, two dozen contributions by 33 fantastic authors. I'm grateful to them and to the staff at NYU and UVa libraries, who made the collection such a great pleasure to edit.]

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.

[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. 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.]