MIT Program on Information Science Talk -- Julia Flanders on Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools: Working in the Digital Academy
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The document discusses the evolving landscape of digital humanities and the roles of professionals in this field, highlighting both the interdisciplinary nature of the work and the challenges faced in gaining recognition and creating job opportunities. It raises critical questions about the responsibilities associated with digital projects, such as error correction, metadata understanding, and the long-term maintenance of digital scholarship. Several voices, including Stephen Clausing and Stephen Ramsay, reflect on the need for the field to mature and be taken seriously within academia, emphasizing the importance of creating tangible outputs and job positions in humanities computing.
![“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”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/mit2015slides-160301152143/85/MIT-Program-on-Information-Science-Talk-Julia-Flanders-on-Jobs-Roles-Skills-Tools-Working-in-the-Digital-Academy-12-320.jpg)
MIT Program on Information Science Talk -- Julia Flanders on Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools: Working in the Digital Academy
- 1. Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools: Working in the Digital Academy Julia Flanders Digital Scholarship Group NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks Northeastern University
- 2. 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)
- 3. 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!
- 4. DH librarian Instructional technologist Web applications programmer XML programmer/analyst E-science librarian Assistant director Project manager GIS 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 designer Collections 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
- 5. 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?
- 6. 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?
- 7. 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?
- 8. 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
- 9. Library Academic Departments Information Technology DH librarian Digitization manager Research support staff Instructional technologist Developer E-science librarian Faculty Postdoc Graduate student Postdoc Developer Research support staff Research Centers Research support staff Center director Postdoc Developer Systems administrator
- 12. “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”
- 13. “In recent practice, ‘digital scholarship’ has meant several related things: a) Building a digital collection of information for further study and analysis b) Creating appropriate tools for collection-building c) Creating appropriate tools for the analysis and study of collections d) Using digital collections and analytical tools to generate new intellectual products e) 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”
- 14. 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.
Editor's Notes
- #4: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_Scream_by_Edvard_Munch#/media/File:Scream.jpg