Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools:Working in the Digital Academy

Julia FlandersDigital Scholarship Group

NULab for Texts, Maps, and NetworksNortheastern University

English Department (1988-1993?)

Direct report to Brown University Provost (1993?-1997?)

Brown University Scholarly Technology Group, Computing and Information Services (1997?-2003)

Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library (2003-2013)

Digital Scholarship Group, Northeastern University Library (2013-present)

Is what I’m doing research?

I’m not a faculty member!

My job is in an IT unit! but I have a humanities PhD!

When I write code, is it scholarship?

Image from Wikimedia Commons

My humanities colleagues think I’m a programmer!

My programmer colleagues think I’m a literary critic!

DH librarian

Instructional technologist

Web applications programmer

XML programmer/analyst

E-science librarianAssistant director

Project managerGIS specialist

Data visualization coordinator

Profess of Digital Humanities

Digital humanities developer

Post-doctoral fellow in DH

Digital liberal arts specialist

Digital Scholarship Librarian

Data and Visualization Librarian

Digital Humanities Analyst/Developer

Database developer/programmer

Data curator

Information designer

Senior Associate, Data Scientist

Metadata librarian

Digital repository manager

Senior software architect

Drupal designerCollections strategist

Senior Technical Project Manager

Director of Academic IT Services

Geospatial Resources Librarian

Digital Humanities Specialist

Digital Humanist / Software Developer

Assistant Professor of English specializing in Book Publishing/Digital Humanities

1. At what point in a digital project work flow should error correction be done, and by whom? In what form should the data be exposed for this work to proceed effectively?

2. Is text digitization an integral part of digital scholarly editing, or an implementation of it?

3. To what extent do scholarly users of a digital resource need to understand its use of metadata standards?

4. How can the underlying information architecture of a digital edition effectively represent its editorial principles?

5. When a work of digital scholarship is complete and its original researchers have retired, who takes responsibility for it and where in the institution does that responsibility lie? How substantively can we expect those with long-term responsibility to maintain and extend the resource?

6. Do we need to understand the complete inner workings of our digital tools in order to use them responsibly and critically?

7. With whom does final intellectual responsibility for a digital humanities project lie? In what specific components of the project does that intellectual responsibility make itself felt?

1. At what point in a digital project work flow should error correction be done, and by whom? In what form should the data be exposed for this work to proceed effectively?

2. Is text encoding an integral part of digital scholarly editing, or an implementation of it?

3. To what extent do scholarly users of a digital resource need to understand its use of metadata standards?

4. How can the underlying information architecture of a digital edition effectively represent its editorial principles?

5. When a work of digital scholarship is complete and its original researchers have retired, who takes responsibility for it and where in the institution does that responsibility lie? How substantively can we expect those with long-term responsibility to maintain and extend the resource?

6. Do we need to understand the complete inner workings of our digital tools in order to use them responsibly and critically?

7. With whom does final intellectual responsibility for a digital humanities project lie? In what specific components of the project does that intellectual responsibility make itself felt?

1. At what point in a digital project work flow should error correction be done, and by whom? In what form should the data be exposed for this work to proceed effectively?

2. Is text digitization an integral part of digital scholarly editing, or an implementation of it?

3. To what extent do scholarly users of a digital resource need to understand its use of metadata standards?

4. How can the underlying information architecture of a digital edition effectively represent its editorial principles?

5. When a work of digital scholarship is complete and its original researchers have retired, who takes responsibility for it and where in the institution does that responsibility lie? How substantively can we expect those with long-term responsibility to maintain and extend the resource?

6. Do we need to understand the complete inner workings of our digital tools in order to use them responsibly and critically?

7. With whom does final intellectual responsibility for a digital humanities project lie? In what specific components of the project does that intellectual responsibility make itself felt?

Is humanities computing merely a hobby for tenured faculty? I am beginning to think so. I have just finished looking through the October MLA job list along with the computer science equivalent. As in past years, I see no jobs relating to humanities computing. At best, there are 1 or 2 positions where experience in computer aided instruction might be helpful. … I started out as a German professor here at Yale and then was, in effect, booted out when I consorted with the CS people. Now I am a full-time lecturer in computer science, teaching a curriculum of humanities computing along with regular CS courses… But I am also painfully aware of the fact that I have this job because I MADE this job, and it took 5 years of continuous drudge-work and diplomacy to get to this point. …I can tell you this: if humanities computing is to be more than a gentleman's sport, somebody has got to start creating jobs for this field. How many more Goethe specialists do we need? Give it a rest. Hire someone who will rock the status quo. …20 years from now there will be departments of humanities computing. No doubt someone will write a doctoral thesis on the history of the field and my name will appear in a footnote: "wrote some interesting early works, 'German Tutor', 'MacConcordance', 'Etaoin Shrdlu', and then disappeared from the field". I don't want to be a footnote. I want to be the head of the department. Make a job in humanities computing this year.”

—Stephen Clausing, Humanist Vol. 6 Num. 357, 15 Nov 1992

“Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things. [. . .] If you are not making anything, you are not…a digital humanist.”

—Stephen Ramsay, “Who’s In and Who’s Out”

“In recent practice, ‘digital scholarship’ has meant several related things: a) Building a digital collection of information for further study and analysisb) Creating appropriate tools for collection-buildingc) Creating appropriate tools for the analysis and study of collectionsd) Using digital collections and analytical tools to generate new intellectual productse) Creating authoring tools for these new intellectual products, either in traditional forms or in digital form”

—“Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences”

For tools to be theories in the way digital humanists want—in a way that makes them accessible to, for example, peer review—opacity becomes an almost insuperable problem. The only way to have any purchase on the theoretical assumptions that underlie a tool would be to use that tool. Yet it is the purpose of the tool (and this is particularly the case with digital tools) to abstract the user away from the mechanisms that would facilitate that process. In a sense, the tools most likely to fare well in that process are not tools, per se, but prototypes—perhaps especially those that are buggy, unstable, and make few concessions toward usability.

—Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Developing Things: Notes Towards an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold, 2012.

Thank you!

Julia Flandersj.flanders@neu.edu

@julia_flanders