Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

1. 

   Alex Galarza
   Member

   At the Digivangelism session at Great Lakes Thatcamp last month, many people brought up some great points regarding converting our colleagues to the digital humanities. As a graduate student I pointed to the importance of 'selling' the digital humanities to a committee. By 'selling', I mean justifying the time we spend building Omeka archives, Zotero libraries, using TEI, and making our work openly accessible.

   Some campers brought up excellent points, such as how open-access scholarship is cited more frequently than material behind paywalls. Many advisers and committee members ask tough questions about our time commitments and it would be beneficial for grads to these sorts of stories, statistics, and examples at their fingertips. This way, we can answer concerns by saying "Incorporating DH methods into my project will make me a better scholar and teacher because... x/y/z, and check out these links that say so!"

   So, I am asking for articles, studies, concrete examples, and any other sorts of evidence to compile into a post titled "Having the DH conversation with your committee" for gradhacker.org, a Profhacker-like site that will be launching this June. Do you have the article that proves open-access scholarship is more frequently cited? Do you have an excellent example of a digital dissertation? Do you have a blog post about using Zotero to collaborate with other grads in a writing group? A how-to on building an online presence and how it helps your work? I am looking for ammunition to answer not only tech-hostile committee members, but mentors who are concerned about their students' time commitments, project feasibility, and the rewards of embracing DH tools. Thanks in advance for the links to articles, posts, stories, etc...

   For an idea of how the digivangelism session panned out, Amanda French's notes can be found here: http://bit.ly/jH0Ha0

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   Posted 5 years ago Permalink
2. 

   Dorothea Salo
   Member

   Steve Hitchcock maintains an entire webliography on the open-access citation-advantage question. It is as comprehensive as anything I know -- which means that not all the listed articles confirm an advantage!

   A digital dissertation I have used as an intriguing example of same is Exploring the Hype(r). You might also like this music master's thesis (bias disclaimer: I archived that one).

   Hope this helps.

   Posted 5 years ago Permalink
3. 

   mkirschenbaum
   Member

   John Unsworth pointed me to this thread and asked me to offer a reply.

   I was in the enviable position of not having to work to "sell" DH to a committee at Virginia that included John and J. McGann, among others, but I can speak directly to the consequences of "doing" DH as an integral element of my dissertation work.

   The dissertation itself was conceived as a critical intervention in the emerging discourse around hypertext and electronic text more generally. The DH component of it was primarily in the realm of scholarly communication and information design, by means of writing the dissertation openly, in public, on the Web (1.0), in straight HTML. In essence, I was working toward the kind of open access scholarship we now see with resources like MediaCommons, CommentPress, Twitter, and so forth without any of that social media apparatus being in place (the dates here are roughly 1996-9). Nonetheless, even in this early rendition, the network turned out to be an excellent place to, well . . . network. Readers found my work online, including some of the more prominent critics and commentators in the field, which in turn led to my work getting linked to and cited, invitations to conferences, and so forth--that kind of recognition turned into the kind of near-term gratification that is so rare when one is embedded within the longue duree of scholarly dissertation writing.

   I think the key take-away here is that whatever the specific form your digital humanities work takes, the salient argument to your committee has to be about scholarly communication and professionalization. On these terms the significance of DH is unassailable.

   And may I offer one other piece of advice? Think of DH less as a "thing," that is a bill of goods to be sold, and more as a kind of ethos, or commitment to the way your want to do your work, long-term, in whatever venue or circumstances you find yourself. Otherwise the risk is one of the "digital" becoming a kind of add-on, something that you can reward yourself with once you've done the "foundational" work of the dissertation. But tools, platforms, and networks are pretty foundational in and of themselves, or ought to be, or so it seems to me.

   Good luck!

   Posted 5 years ago Permalink

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