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!

Last night, I joined the tail-end of an interesting conversation on Twitter about the utility of NC (“non-commercial”) clauses in Creative Commons licensing. Some time ago, I quietly dropped the non-commercial specification from my own blog and Flickr stream, switching my license from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY. Yesterday’s exchange of viewpoints has prompted me to explain why.

The CC-BY-NC license I first adopted permitted attributed use of my content but restricted that use (without further, explicit permission from me) to non-commercial republication venues. CC-BY, on the other hand, means I’m only asking that my name appear in some way attached to my words (or images, or other intellectual property). US law asserts that the moment I have “fixed” my thought into some expression I have tacitly copyrighted it — meaning that any republication (beyond fair use and without my explicit permission) is pretty much a form of theft. Unattributed re-use would be plagiarism.

Baby, I’m givin’ it away.

When it comes to scholarly communication, I stand in Jeffersonian discomfort with the notion of “monopolies of invention” (a subject I’ve addressed before). In the humanities — where we are constantly and rightly concerned with our ability to reach broad audiences and articulate the public good of investment in the liberal arts — assertions of exclusive ownership may well “produce more embarrassment than advantage to society.” Commercial exploitation? We should be so lucky.

So, why did I adopt an NC designation, only to change it? I had had a fuzzy notion about non-commercial use being more in line with the impulses that were driving me toward the “copyleft” approach of Creative Commons in the first place. That is, I wanted my information to be free — so what could be more perfect than asking others to distribute it freely?

On further reflection — prompted in part by the experience of my colleagues in trying to reconcile disparate licenses of well-intentioned contributors to the Hacking the Academy project — I came to understand that my “non-commercial” requirement was actually weakening the Commons.

First, I realized that I was discouraging or at least slowing down any possible re-use of my content by requiring that people ask my permission. Yes, there is, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick muses, something unsettling in deliberately relinquishing control over one’s intellectual property — especially for academics working within a system that almost only rewards individual achievement, and which teaches us to polish our ideas until they are bright and perfect gems, to be carefully and deliberately placed for best effect. But I could only (and that with some difficulty) imagine edge cases in which I would not automatically grant permission for re-use of content I had published here. Which led me to my second conclusion.

More restrictive licenses, for me — for the kind of thing I write and work on, for the paths and audiences I imagine for that work, and for the kind of #alt-ac scholar I want personally to be — read like progressive degrees of arrogance. This goes beyond an admittedly flip, knee-jerk “we should be so lucky” reaction. Does an NC license imply that I believe my content to be of recognizable commercial value of which I should be in full and solitary control? (Well, I did blog it, after all.) No, it’s more the sheer, unthinking presumption I now see in well-meaning “NC” restrictions.

I’m just not bright enough to presume to predict financial aspects of future publishing models. Limiting my default scope to non-commercial ventures seems presumptuous and naïve. Current presses and projects I admire are struggling, and if any of my content, bundled in some form that can support its own production by charging a fee, helps humanities publishers to experiment with new ways forward — well, that’s precisely why I CC-licensed it in the first place. I also want to minimize my participation in any system that could lead to an “orphaned works” problem. Perhaps there’s a very clear answer to the question of who gives permission on my behalf if I am dead or incapacitated and my heirs are unreachable or unresponsive. My guess, however — since I am no writer of importance — is that, in my absence, any little roadbump on the path to permission will virtually assure my content not be republished. If it’s already becoming evident that more restrictive enfranchisements slow down re-use of Creative Commons-licensed content, and that US copyright law is geared to support the interests of big business — how hard do we expect future small-potatoes humanities editors to try?

However, it would also be naïve to assert that no-one stands to get rich on humanities content. George Williams is right to cite price-gouging in textbook publishing (and I would add bundled journal subscriptions) as a factor that gives pause to potential droppers of the NC restriction. But (and here I’m back to questioning the ethos-to-ego ratio of the humanities scholar), do I really think that drips and drabs of my own content will make a difference in these vast machines? The textbook will go on without me — and that means without my work and whatever good its inclusion might have done, for me professionally and for the spheres of knowledge and praxis I want to advance.

To take a more pragmatic stance, CC BY-ND is about as much control as I’d ever want to exert in those situations. The “ND” stands for “no derivatives,” meaning that — if attached to a CC-BY license — future publishers (commercial and non-commerical) would be able to re-use my work only if it is clearly attributed to me and not altered in any way. This would be my opportunity to contribute a coherent thought to a collection and come closer to assurance (thus addressing one of my imagined “edge cases”) that my words are not twisted in support of a project or ideology with which I’d disagree.

Fundamentally, I’ve concluded that CC-BY is more in line with the practical and ideological goals of the Commons, and the little contribution I want to make to it. I still have a residual clingyness about my words that I can only assume comes from eight years spent in pursuit of a doctoral degree. I’m getting over it, though, and am even more cavalier about my non-textual work — software, interface design, and sketches or photographs. If Flickr would allow me to remove the “attribution” clause from my snapshots, I’d be giving them away even more freely than my words. I’d be placing most of them explicitly in the public domain.

For humanities scholarship, and for the kind of institutional and administrative mutterings I publish here, I truly believe — there’s no where to go but out.

For the past two weeks, I’ve had the great privilege of presenting ideas (ranging from the institutional and professional to the scholarly and creative) in a series of six public lectures in four cities across New Zealand and Australia. These were invited talks and keynotes at events as diverse as: a project-specific and infrastructure-oriented workshop at Victoria University, Wellington; a joint DH and library Information Futures forum at the University of Melbourne; two gatherings geared toward archivists, curators, and arts and design faculty at schools and cultural heritage institutions in Canberra; and a thought-provoking digital editing symposium at Sydney Uni. The visit was was break-neck, whirlwind, and a great deal of fun, mostly thanks to my splendid hosts Sydney Shep, Craig Bellamy, Tim Sherratt, and Mark Byron. It didn’t hurt that it was summertime and end-of-term in the southern hemisphere, with the journey framed by a sparkling harbor in Wellington (which, it’s true, you can’t beat on a good day) and another in Sydney.

Happily, the visit afforded me an opportunity to learn from and better understand the values and working conditions of the Antipodean digital humanities community, members of whom I had only met before as exotic and sometimes jetlagged creatures out of their natural habitat. I considered it excellent timing and came to care about these folks, because they show a great deal of energy just now, not only for enlivening humanities scholarship through digital tools and methods, but for organizing — creating stronger local networks and a broad, new Australasian professional society for scholars and practitioners of the digital humanities: the first in the hemisphere. This could be an initiative that partners with ACH, which I represent, and stands on par with SDH-SEMI as a vibrant regional DH organization and potential ADHO collaborator. You should care, too. Here’s why.

(And let it be said that these are just my own impressions, written on a plane after 24 hours of travel and based on lots of informal conversation. I invite people better informed to extend them or correct me where I have gone astray!)

First, and most obviously, the digital humanities in New Zealand and Australia exhibit strong cultural connections and collaborative ties with European and North American projects, initiatives, and interests. I’ll offer just a smattering of these, to indicate range. Some of this activity, across universities and cultural heritage organizations, is bolstered by policies (as have not yet commonly been extended to the humanities in the US) that ensure publicly-funded work be publicly-accessible.

A newish example is soon-to-launch NZ-RED, a branch of the venerable (in Internet time) UK “Reading Experience Database” project, which now spans several countries and is under extensive re-design. NZ-RED will come online at Victoria University in Wellington, which, besides housing the D. F. McKenzie-founded Wai-te-ata Press, is home to the longest-standing electronic text center in the southern hemisphere — modeled after the Etext Center at UVa Library, now the Scholars’ Lab. (As happened at UVa a few years ago, the Etext Centre at VUW is being re-conceived in terms of its mission and relationship to the library — and the process should be interesting to watch.) A solid tradition of textual scholarship and scholarly editing exists, too, at Sydney University, where text-based work is complemented by Ian Johnson’s Archaeological Computing Lab, which creates software and projects with impact far beyond the field of Archaeology. Dictionary and encyclopedia projects are a great regional strength (and there’s a possibility we’ll hear more about them at DH 2011). The GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector in this region is thriving as well, with emphasis being placed at the national levels on shared and open repository services (like TROVE, from the National Library of Australia), and on the enhancement of museum-goers’ experience through digital media (viz Seb Chan at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and Wellington’s brilliant Te Papa Tongarewa). Programs like the Digital Design + Media Arts cluster at the University of Canberra and digital lab at the National Museum of Australia offer lovely models for the visualization and serendipitous navigation of objects of our shared and diverse cultural heritage.

The cultural diversity of Australia and New Zealand itself would be a great asset to a regional professional society for the digital humanities. Given the rich and vexed history of contact and successive waves of migration in these countries, Australasian DH and the society that represents it must adopt a self-consciously multicultural and multidisciplinary stance. In NZ (Aotearoa), for example, where Māori culture is alive and well, celebrated and protected, scholars will always be thinking of multilingual interfaces to resources and projects. This will be immediately resonant in Canada and Europe, but important to us all as our shared DH community becomes increasingly global and transnational. I was struck, for North Americans and DHers in the UK, particularly, at how easy collaborations with New Zealand and Australian partners would be (given the lack of a language barrier and presence of close historical and cultural ties), and yet how enriching — in part due to the seriousness with which researchers in this part of the world address multicultural issues.

That said (and even though I’m coming home with a December tan), it’s not quite sunny in Australasian DH.

In every city I stopped, I heard frustration and worry on the part of scholars and developers that the interpretive focus of Australian DH is in danger of being subsumed in the building of (mostly scientific) e-research infrastructures. The most notable quality of these conversations for me, as an American DH scholar (lacking, as we do, many projects on the scale of European collaborative VRE initiatives), was a brand of fatalism about emphasis on nationwide e-research frameworks and massive “collaboratories.” These are widely accepted to be positive developments in general (like the establishment of ANDS, the very promising Australian National Data Service), but humanities scholars seem to feel voiceless — disconnected from many such initiatives and concerned that their necessarily smaller-scale research and development will be lost in the shuffle. I got the sense from faculty in New Zealand and (the much better-funded) Australia alike that there is little or no support for highly specialized and experimental work like that sparked by our NEH’s Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, and that they are unsure if their funding agencies will soon surface a Brett Bobley.

I heard a great deal about funding problems for DH generally. There seems to be very limited funding for the humanities at all in NZ, and funding strictures in Oz against support for digitization of resources and creation of datasets are inhibiting fundamental work. (Some scholars and librarians remarked that the assumption has been made that Australia is ready for second-generation, born-digital scholarship, when in fact the objects of interest to them have yet to come online.) In both countries, there seem to be few opportunities for collaborative, internationally-funded projects (like NEH has instituted with JISC in the UK, with the DFG in Germany, and with Canada’s SSHRC) — or the scholars I spoke to were unaware of them.

While the Australians make much of their own “cultural cringe,” there is a strong and, frankly, well-founded sense among New Zealanders that DH in their country operates at a great remove, not only from the rest of the world, but their nearest neighbors — and that it presses on despite a sharp disparity in resources. There’s no denying, though, as I heard two Australian scholars say at different times, that New Zealand “punches far above its weight” in the digital humanities. It is a country hungry for connection — and universities, schools, and colleges across its two wild islands are becoming increasingly connected with each other and the outside world through a growing KAREN network. (The workshop I participated in was broadcast live and included speakers and participants from as far away as Canada.)

Academics in both NZ and Australia face rounds of quantitative research-productivity assessment similar to those vexing their colleagues in the UK. This is hugely problematic for DH, as it is typically much harder to articulate the value of a digital humanities project against a traditional book or article, and the system itself (which scores publications in certain classes of journal higher than others) strikes me as a great inhibitor of the creation and uptake of new modes of scholarly communication and new publication venues. Who would start an experimental and unconventional publishing project like Vectors or MediaCommons in such a climate? And who would contribute to it? As with funding issues, the relationship of interpretive (not to say boutique) humanities projects to massive e-research infrastructures, and multicultural and multi-lingual concerns, the development of best practices for assessment of digital humanities scholarship in Australasia is an opportunity for the international DH community to engage.

CenterNet is one avenue, and an increasing number of Pacific-area labs and centers have joined this international association, through which they have steering committee representation. But for the professional societies of ADHO to engage effectively and in open exchange with DH in the Australasian region, there must exist a partnering, regional professional society.

In support of the notion of a regional DH society, the Australian Academy for the Humanities has awarded seed money to Dr. Craig Bellamy of VeRSI in Melbourne, who is partnering with Dr. Paul Arthur of the Australian Dictionary of Biography at ANU. Craig and Paul plan to hold small exploratory and governance meetings in the new year as part of a larger, open process for the formation of the society. In addition, a joint meeting of CHCI with centerNet will be held in Canberra in 2012 — a splendid opportunity for a new professional society to reflect on its mission in relation to those two organizations, which have themselves recently entered into partnership around concepts of the public humanities and the digital inflection of discipline-formation.

So, what did I take away?

Besides a really delightful set of new and strengthened personal connections and ideas for our work in Scholars’ Lab R&D, I’m coming home with a desire for much more conversation with academics, administrators, and developers in Australia and New Zealand. Concepts I presented about #alt-ac, or alternate and hybrid career paths for computing humanists and about smarter policy-making around intellectual property, open source, and data management plans for the humanities resonated (though with subtly different inflections) in a variety of institutional settings — as did the model of a digital humanities group, like the SLab, administratively embedded in a university’s research library. DH Answers (as a grassroots approach to digital humanities community-building) seemed either well-known and admired or new and vastly energizing to the people I spoke with. I was reminded again that the ACH’s outreach committee, which I chair, should be consciously expanded to include people from more than one hemisphere, people who can help to inform our efforts in the global sphere and channel our energy more effectively. Mostly, I was struck (as I am after every DH conference or unconference) at how lucky I am to have the chance to work with collaborators from around the world who share a set of basic values: that hacking is a way of knowing, that we can engage with theory through method, that constraints-based approaches are paradoxically liberating, and that the best new scholarly work is the work of many hands.

[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!]

There’s a scene, in the filmed version of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, in which Tyler Durden leads our Everyman narrator on an expedition for biomedical waste. They’re raiding the trash bins of a liposuction clinic for lipids that can be rendered into soap. This is expensive soap, boutique soup — value-added soap. It’s the kind of soap probably only bought by the kind of woman who frequents a liposuction clinic.

“It was beautiful,” we hear. “We were selling their own fat asses back to them.”

This week, a powerful letter was distributed to all faculty of the financially-imperiled University of California system — the libraries of which are now faced with a 400% price increase if they would like to continue to provide access to 67 important scientific journals distributed by the Nature Publishing Group. One of these is NPG’s flagship journal, Nature. The price increase would bring the annual cost of a single NPG journal from approximately $4500 to over $17,000. When, in conversation today, I’ve shared this number with my librarian colleagues at home and abroad, I’ve heard a lot of incredulous laughter. But laughter turns to quiet musing (“would that work here?“) when I go on to say that the California letter threatens complete boycott, in clear terms and with the support of a system-wide advisory group on scholarly communication, of all UC faculty involvement in the production machine of the Nature group, if the costs for these journals cannot be brought in line with reality.

The UC/Nature story was covered swiftly and well by Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her article was followed today by a set of must-read musings by Dorothea Salo, from the perspective of a repository librarian and open-access advocate. And, of course, all of this is contextualized by any number of scholarly committee and task force reports, and by the work of thinkers like Kathleen Fitzpatrick. I thought I had nothing to add, at this early stage of the UC system’s game. However, I’ve already noted enough bafflement on the part of humanities faculty and graduate students at the affair to think I should talk in a pithy way about Fight Club soap — and then share a conjecture about the bizarre, perennial surprise that seems to be attendant on these conversations.

The position in which libraries find themselves vis-a-vis Nature, Elsevier, et al is laughable — once you’ve shed a tear for all of the humanities collections (monographs and periodicals) that have already been cut in response to previous gouging by journal providers. Large companies have cornered the market on access to scientific research which universities see as mission-critical, and can therefore name their own prices. The first victims of the hard decisions forced on collections stewards at many institutions have been less costly, lower-profile, slow-knowledge, lower rate-of-use, disorganized and a la carte humanities publications — with the dire results we have seen across the academy over the last decade. Libraries have cancelled standing orders with university presses. Many presses and journals, having lost their best (sometimes almost only) clients, have responded by reducing the number of worthy book manuscripts and articles that make it into print. Others have folded entirely. A generation of humanities scholars, still struggling to meet the “or perish” tenure and promotion expectations of a bygone era, feel they have nowhere to publish. Students and faculty have lost access to whole threads of our shared, cultural conversation — conversation that continues in humanities publications their schools now cannot afford. Other threads (genres of work, areas of inquiry) have been cut short entirely.

Ready to laugh again? Let’s look at the statistics provided by the California Digital Library in its letter to faculty, and then let’s talk about soap. Articles published by UC faculty in NPG’s flagship journal, Nature, numbered 638 over the past six years. And that’s just Nature. Sixty-six other journals are part of NPG’s proposed rate hike. Approximately 5,300 articles by UC faculty have appeared in them in the same timeframe. But that’s not the kicker. Pause now for a moment to imagine the countless, unquantifiable hours of UC faculty labor that have gone not only into the research for and writing of these articles — but also into their vetting. How many UC faculty have spent how many hours engaged in peer review or serving on advisory committees to the journals that their libraries now cannot afford? How much intellectual labor already paid for by the University of California system is now being sold back to UC’s own libraries at exorbitant costs? How much Fight Club soap are we willing to buy?

And how long have we all seen this train wreck coming?

I’m a humanities PhD who has worked in an administrative position in a major research library for nearly three years. I’m still new enough to feel productive cognitive dissonance and the occasional wave of culture shock. Often this centers, for me, around the beautiful service ethic of librarians, and their desire to make things easy, and make things work for the faculty and student researchers they serve. It’s a different kind of monasticism from the “life of the mind” for which I was trained, but I recognize devotion of all sorts, and I bet you do, too.

There is, however, a distinct danger in this impulse — to provide a level of self-effacing service that does not distract the researcher from his work. With the best of intentions, it can lead to a strategy of hiding the messy stuff, or laying a smooth, professional veneer over increasingly decrepit and under-funded infrastructure. And then there’s the degree to which the service mentality prevents librarians from engaging with faculty as true intellectual partners — developing the kind of relationships that foster frankness. (Of course, we need to be met half way. Why is it that librarians’ advocacy for open access initiatives has provoked such discomfort among faculty at so many institutions that the word on the street is now: don’t speak up, don’t be pushy, know your place?)

Combined, these factors can mean librarians fail to blow the whistle on journal pricing and subsequent collections implications until it’s too late. (Witness the shock and anger of many faculty bodies at recent cancellations of humanities subscriptions or closures and consolidations of whole libraries at institutions around the country.) The University of California’s statement, its coverage in the Chronicle, and the open discourse that I hope it promotes among researchers and librarians is a great social positive — even beyond the impact I predict it will have on pricing models by monopolistic journal providers and the visibility it will provide for open-access alternatives like those outlined in the UC letter. We shouldn’t let this crisis go to waste, or overlook what it can reveal about the way we work together in higher ed.

We’re in untenable and intertwingled positions, all of us. I advocate the talking cure. Why should the first rule of Journal Club be, for librarians and faculty alike, not to talk about Journal Club?

[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.]