collaboration – Page 2 – Bethany Nowviskie

how we learned to start/stop “speaking in code”

Posted on 24 October 20133 November 2014 by Bethany Nowviskie

[UPDATE: #codespeak is over and was a smashing success. See a post on outcomes, including a kit for hosting similar gatherings, here. This entry is cross-posted from the Re:Thinking blog at CLIR, the Council on Library and Information Resources, where I’m honored to be serving as Distinguished Presidential Fellow. Check out all the great content at CLIR!]

Here’s a consummation devoutly to be wished: digital humanities research and practice becomes its best self, and finds scholars and technology staff engaging as peers in mutually intelligible conversation. It sounds like a modest hope, until you reflect on how far we are from achieving that vision.

Communications gaps are deep and broad, even among humanities-trained software developers and the scholars with whom they collaborate. Much (not all) knowledge advances in software development through hands-on, journeyman learning experiences and the iterative, often-collaborative development of built objects and systems. Much (not all) knowledge advances in humanities scholarship through fixed and fluid kinds of academic discourse: referential, prosy, often agonistic. A real division exists in style and practice, even when the subjects and objects of humanities inquiry are the same. What might bridge a gap like that? And can we move past an historical moment in the academy, in which the onus is almost entirely placed on archivally and theoretically trained humanities scholars to become tech-savvy digital humanists—to build a concomitant sense of momentum, responsibility, and opportunity in our community of DH software engineers? Can we build greater community itself, just by making a space in which such problems are addressed? Continue reading “how we learned to start/stop “speaking in code””

prism, for play

Posted on 9 May 20139 May 2013 by Bethany Nowviskie

This week marks the release of a new version of Prism, a web-based tool for “crowdsourcing interpretation,” constructed over the course of two academic years by two separate cohorts of graduate fellows in our Praxis Program at the Scholars’ Lab.

Praxis fellows are humanities and social science grad students across a variety of departments at UVa, who come to our library-based lab for an intensive, team-based, hands-on experience in digital humanities project-work, covering as many aspects of DH practice as our practiced Scholars’ Lab staff can convey. Continue reading “prism, for play”

lazy consensus

Posted on 10 March 201230 March 2023 by Bethany Nowviskie

[This is a roughly-edited version of a keynote talk I gave last month at #code4lib, a fantastic annual conference for software developers and systems folks working in libraries. If you want to hear my bad jokes and attempts to pander to the crowd (or at least to let them know that I was conscious of the back-channel), or if you’d like to see what happens when I indulge my nerdiest tendencies in slide production, I recommend the archived livestream. I’m skipping a long pre-amble that included the Super Friends, hostile IRC bots, and a description of my own professional background – in which I slowly moved from literary and bibliographical scholarship to working with independent DH projects in scholarly think-tanks and projects that sat alongside libraries, to working in and for a library, and as a part of the blended digital humanities/library community that many of us inhabit now.]

The biggest surprise I had about my emigration to Libraryland will be of no surprise to those of you who have been here longer, or who came out of an I-school, or otherwise basically grew up in the culture. And that is that the shift radicalized me. Coming to the Library woke me up: on matters of privacy, on labor conditions and class issues in higher ed, on the sucky practice of training of humanities grad students for non-existent jobs, on free & open access to information, and (especially for those of us who work at publicly-funded institutions) on the rights of taxpayers to expect quality work for the public good out of what they help pay for.

So it may sound like I’m going to give an activist talk. That’s true to some degree, but I’m mostly going to give an impatient one — a talk that comes from where I am now. Although I used to be on the design and development side of things, I am now a soulless administrator, and therefore I thought the most useful function I could perform at code4lib would be to bring something back to you from that perspective. My title will therefore not immediately suggest an activist agenda.

Welcome to… “Lazy Consensus.”

two & a half cheers for the lunaticks

Posted on 8 January 201212 September 2014 by Bethany Nowviskie

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

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

where credit is due

Posted on 31 May 201111 December 2012 by Bethany Nowviskie

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

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

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

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

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