One of the essential questions that emerged for us was, To whom is this work in/visible? Much of the work that takes place in DH projects is invisible to multiple levels of authority, both external to the academy (i.e., the public, state legislatures) and internal (i.e., Department Chairs, Deans, Provosts). This occurs on all scales and even to varying degrees in para-institutional publications, for example, in the coverage of “labor” as a critical topic in discussions in Hybrid Pedagogy, as well as a special issue of First Monday dedicated to “Feminist Perspectives on Digital Labor”. Clearly there are ample institutional practices, ossified academic hierarchies, and individual ways of thinking within different academic roles and communities that contribute to making work that is perfectly valuable seem perfectly invisible, and we must work against such visible flattening. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes, “We in the humanities often resist opening our work to these publics, fearing the consequences of such openness…keeping our conversations private, might protect us from public criticism, but it can’t protect us from public apathy, a condition that is, in the current economy, far more dangerous”  [Fitzpatrick 2012].

However, we risk creating a kind of circularity to our discussion if we always (or only) privilege invisibilities or labor practices that can be solved by external validation, such as not knowing when enough recognition is enough, not knowing whether there is enough credit and compensation to go around, or now knowing how much of that compensation is in the hands of people, institutions, or systems that are “not us.” Moreover, if we are concerned only with making invisible work visible to external validators, we risk invalidating humanities research entirely, in moves analogous to saying that the humanities matter only in terms of helping STEM students become more well-rounded. We learned through the Symposium that perhaps increasing transparency in DH projects requires a decoupling of transparency from external validation, a recoupling of transparency with internally validated assumptions, and then moving beyond notions of validation as credit.

The problem of invisibility is at its core a problem of validation, where the goal of visibility exists principally to make it easier to validate the internal work of the DH participants. Even then, having decoupled transparency from external validation, we must not, a priori, take any of our activities as an unalloyed good. In a utopian vision of DH, one might imagine that if we all received credit for our work, and if institutions recognized and supported all the parties who worked on a DH project, then all would be well. Indeed, there is much to be said and done to advance those goals. But among other general concerns, saying that “all DH work is by nature collaborative and thus democratically realized” may undercut some good work that needs to be singly authored or individually completed.

Similarly, we may not all want the same things, the same rewards, or the same types of credit. The utopian vision of DH as an ideally collaborative and public activity makes some activities resistant to necessary criticism and questioning. Thus, another reality that emerged during the Symposium was the affirmation that not all DH projects need a lot of hands; often what they need is more time — a commodity for which we can and should collaboratively argue even when our projects have disparate goals. While such fractures in the utopian vision of DH may seem threatening, we argue that they are a useful interpretive lever which can expose the complexities of invisibility in practice. For example, Cheryl Ball’s presentation on the evolution of the open-access platform for the journal Kairos gave us options for imagining how to translate that kind of work into rigorous evaluation tools/measures, adaptable to other local or institutional contexts, for defining scalable levels of involvement, and for accounting for different levels of contribution on our reporting mechanisms, such as curriculum vitae. In other words, Ball argued, we have much to gain by observing the processes of activist collectives such as Kairos journal that serve open-access communities while also preserving the values and ethics of particular scholarly groups or disciplines. While the volunteering and mentoring models underscoring Kairos journal were already reflected in the disciplinary ideals of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, other disciplines may support epistemologies or value systems that give us various opportunities for acting visibly in DH — and thus, for transforming how we think about transparency — by promoting shifts in perspective in other areas of the university (e.g., research, service, and infrastructure), and by scaffolding our DH projects so that they necessarily involve short- and long-term training.

While Symposium discussions reflected the fact that material and technical access are recurring problems across United States institutions, we acknowledge that internal validation isn’t always (or exclusively) obtained through idyllic notions of access, unless and until we can enable the transformative nature of access as an internal goal. Doing so requires thinking innovatively about how to commodify our processes and not merely our projects or products for outside groups. Transformed notions of access would open up spaces for rewriting involvement, for responding humanistically to the market forces driving our universities, and for carving out institutional positionings for our work that supersede the material advantages often associated (correctly or incorrectly) with DH initiatives. Transforming the nature of access also involves increasing transparency of motives and goals, affirming the differences among them, and defining our working communities beyond the question of who has principal control over certain kinds of credit.

Another essential question that emerged for us through the Symposium was, How much are our problems of visibility caused by our moniker? As expected, the variety of people, professions, and perspectives represented at the symposium highlighted the multiplicity of definitions of Digital Humanities under which we function. In some respects, “big tent” metaphors have served the scholarly community well, establishing a supra-discipline and welcoming all comers [Watrall 2016] [Ridge 2014] [Reid 2013]. However, the big-tent paradigm may prevent campuses like ours from being able to conceive of the uniquely collaborative nature of the DH Laboratory both as a collective and as a group of individuals. Moreover, implying the desire to name the digital humanities as if it were a coherent shibboleth, rather than a set of extant and contrasting methodologies, creates a stultifying vision of what DH could or should be, diverting our attention from how DH can promote transformative notions of access in the immediate and near future [Battles 2016]. While definitions of DH have, often with good reason, sought to situate DH in contrast to existing methods, it is equally important to emphasize the continuity of humanistic modes of interrogation.

Thus, we take as a starting point the assertion that DH work is first and foremost work in the humanistic tradition — the selfsame tradition that may enable us to resist being defined by what we are not. It is a question of humanistic thinking to ask what we value preserving, documenting, and doing the work. It is also a question of humanistic method to ask corresponding questions about practice. In contrast, defining DH work by what it is not (i.e., the “traditional” print-based humanities, the completion of singly-authored work) or what it aspires to be (i.e., “empirical” or “data-driven”, following several lab-based sciences) has the unfortunate consequence of locking us into well-worn modes of thinking about both methods and practice. In that particular fantasy of the field, traditional humanities disciplines might be typecast as the lone scholar toiling in the library, and collaboration becomes a counterbalancing virtue of DH work [Ridge 2014] [Anderson 2016]. In contrast, the science/lab model of the hard sciences, including conventions of generous co-authoring, would become a similarly typecast hero-subject [Keralis 2016] [Nowviskie 2011]. Instead, we hope to complicate this binarism altogether, so as to separate out recognizable ideals from harmful truisms.

Mark Algee-Hewitt’s presentation on the nuances of the digital humanities collective afforded us different perspectives between and among the roles we typically name in our project teams, by articulating connections between our humanities economy within the institution and the larger digital economy we share with other institutions. Recommending “collaborative individualism” over “mere individuals collaborating”, Algee-Hewitt drew on his experiences in the Stanford Literary Lab to illuminate the terministic constraints with certain professional roles when they fall under the DH moniker, and to share his observations about who might be more focused on output as a standalone product, and whose contributions to the projects are often overlooked or take divergent forms that are undervalued in an academic context. What emerged from his keynote presentation was this triad of intellectual conditions: the need for individual goals to be brought to bear on a common set of problems; the need to determine the points at which the individual nature of specifically humanities research becomes at odds with the cooperation that is necessary for most DH projects; and the knowledge of how to respond when that is the case.

If the Symposium exposed anything to its participants, it exposed the elusivity of some of our familiar working terms. Without a shared vocabulary in place, we could not always make progress towards practical solutions in the space of our conversations over two days. In addition to the nuances of “in/visibility”, we found we needed more neutrality in other terms, including “service” and “sole author”. In the case of the former, recognizing the inherent flexibility in what it means “to serve” exposes the more expansive view we must take towards notions like “rigor” and “ethics”. In the case of the latter, single-authored work has historically been built on the work of others, whether acknowledged or not. Thus, a more expansive notion of “DH collaboration” would focus not on the existing conventions of marking collaboration but rather on identifying and exercising a generosity of spirit in academic work.

A third essential question that emerged through the Symposium was, How does our approach change when we acknowledge that while some forms of labor and laboring bodies are deliberately overlooked by those in power, others are made more vulnerable by greater exposure? More problematic than “collaboration” for many Symposium participants was the notion of “credit”, as credit can occur in multiple forms (monetary, reputation, public acknowledgment, private acknowledgment), yet without yielding participatory agency. Reifying credit in existing academic structures — or, rather, in the presumption of a shared understanding of what constitutes credit — makes it too easy to speak past each other about what constitutes the value of work.

While we agree that credit should be discussed or assigned in the early stages of DH projects and processes, we also acknowledge that it may not or need not always be equal. The Symposium revealed that equal partnerships rely less on equal credit and more on an open communication of goals and on an understanding of cash vs. cache — that is, an understanding that equality may be determined not in precisely the same outcomes for each participant, but each participant should still have access to what they need, whether that is in financial compensation (cash) or in project stakes (cache). Put simply, there are types of credit which are often overlooked in a too-rigid framework of credit equals pay or prestige. It might be more important to have ongoing responsibility for a work, or rights to modify a work, than to have public visibility about one’s past contribution or to have continued ownership of it. Reframing the question of credit as a question of epistemic agency [Fricker 2007] — as a way of validating others as knowers, and validating their right to know — transforms the shared goal from developing a precise system of attribution to recognizing the agential labors through documenting work and telling the story that we want to tell.

Roxanne Shirazi’s presentation on the labor activities required by truly innovative historical recovery projects challenged us to become less “obsessed with consumer product thinking” and more willing to embrace the processes required by shared emotional labor. Drawing on the work of Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, and arguing through the lens of Arlene Daniels’ article on “Invisible Work”, Shirazi articulated a key critical distinction between invisible work and invisible worker, suggesting a four-part matrix for DH collaborative teams to use in complicating their values before determining value: visible valued; visible devalued; invisible devalued; and invisible valued. These interplays, as Shirazi called them, should give digital humanists a clearer sense of what problems to scale in their particular projects. They should further demonstrate to digital humanists that not only does in/visibility not have to operate as a negative binary construct in relational work between librarians and their multiple collaborators, in some cases it can provide critical leverage by enabling other forms of recognition, remuneration, or autonomy. The balance between these interplays is fluid, requiring digital humanists to think creatively and strategically about the spaces in and through which they work, before determining that visibility must occur in the same way for all project participants, or that invisibility is solved wholly through shared attribution.

Provoking us to consider positive invisibility and guarded professionalism, Shirazi ultimately challenged Symposium participants to take up a documentary impulse instead. Thus, our end goal was not the foregone conclusion that everyone needs more credit, but rather the question of how disciplines value and preserve their labor, and what interventions could be made in those values. What is at stake in valuing particular work in particular ways? How do we negotiate the values of differing stakeholders? What have we, in the past, chosen to preserve about our methods or about the process of doing scholarship? Many participants in the room recognized the problem with only using DH to produce a highly equitable labor model. Should some invisible work remain invisible? Should other work be made more (if not totally) visible? What kinds of invisible relationships do we assume or perpetuate when using proprietary tools to do our work, without raising public expectations of us and of our work? Could there be nuanced distinctions between invisible and unseen work (i.e., work that is behind-the-scenes but traceable as opposed to work that has been put under erasure)? It became apparent during and after the Symposium that we need not only decide that visibility occurs through attribution, or that all attribution necessarily increases visibility, or that DH’s main task is to resist the erasure of attribution structures. That kind of accounting procedure — even to one another — does not advance ultimately what we are after, which is the advancement of knowledge and scholarship. We became interested during the Symposium in how we might use DH to articulate and propagate a critique of such labor economies inasmuch as those critiques led us to realize other potential mindsets.

For many researchers and practitioners, the digital humanities are one place where their discipline’s methodologies can best perform or make a critical contribution. Conversely, for many disciplines, it is digital humanities projects that effectively make their critical questions publicly accessible or make their disciplinary approaches more textured. Conflating terms and minimizing disciplinary distinctions may be holding us back from the most compelling reasons why DH matters. At the Symposium, considering invisible work from an ecosystemic perspective brought into deeper relief the relationship between two conflated terms: visibility and value. As Shirazi argued, instead of visibility, we might work toward legibility through a renewed attention to documentation and to the everyday tasks of recordkeeping.

The Symposium’s discussions of the critical value of legibility led two participants — Will Hanley and Laurie M. Wood — to reflect on the particularities of their discipline of History.[1] The argument they make about collaborative dis/appearances in History seemed important if largely unvoiced at the Symposium, and its importance became easier to discern by the end of the second day. As Hanley and Wood point out, the problem of uncredited (hence invisible) work by collaborators and assistants is somewhat remote, because the workstyle of their discipline is deeply individualist, causing most historians to do their research, analysis, and writing alone. However, their digital historical work involves a different form of invisibility and a different set of consequences that occur when DH paradigms overlay the historical. One consequence of digital history is that, because historians rarely articulate the details of their work process, they are impaired when they wish to share their labor, document their efforts, or show others (i.e., potential research assistants) what they want to do. To assign a research assistant requires, as a first step, that the historian make visible the methods he or she already has in play, but when it comes time to enlist librarians, archivists, graduate students, or even other historians as collaborators, the invisibility of their work becomes an encumbrance because they have difficulty trusting others to do it. If they are not practiced in articulating their approach in ways that can be reproduced by others, then relying on intuition and experience might fail them when the moment comes to collaborate. This raises questions about how and when to delegate work that historians would otherwise complete alone, over lengthy periods of time, and informed by their particular specialties.

Another consequence is that, because a historian’s labors are often made invisible by the writing, much of their own work disappears in the redistribution of digital labor. Historians generate a great deal of what Michael Polczynski and Amy Singer have called the “intermediate product”, or the research materials they produce between the archival records they read and the books and essays they write — notes and indexes informed by years of concentrated study. These notes and indexes are typically idiosyncratic and impenetrable, and thus lost to other researchers. More importantly, they are not always central to the digital tool. Because the intermediate product is not documented and reproducible, it gets discarded and the work must be repeated by other individuals in their own idiosyncratic manners later on. This outcome seems ironic in a discipline so deeply invested in empiricism, where one promise of digital approaches is the opportunity for historians to become more explicit and articulate about their methodology.

Here, Hanley’s and Wood’s concerns about in/visibility are twofold. First, they are concerned with identifying methods (already in use or created for the task) that can be explained simply to collaborators who may or may not already have the needed research competencies, such as with languages or metadata. Second, supervising historians want to ensure that research assistants gain new or improved research competencies, which they can deploy (again) in the individual mode of historical scholarship. Again, the historian has to articulate the necessary skills and methods, which more often remain tacit, but by entrusting the work of historical research to graduate students, empirical methods may inadvertently change. False cognates might be translated incorrectly for the index, or the student may still be learning how to distinguish unreliable from reliable sources and how to replicate complicated workflows.

Though specific to their discipline, Hanley’s and Wood’s uptake of “intermediate products” allowed us to consider that, while recognizing invisible work can be a provocative methodological path, it is difficult to make all empirical involvements equally visible. This difficulty, in turn, urges us consider the different burdens of diversifying roles and the resulting social labors that become involved in that diversification. It matters whether we think of visibility as inherently valuable and invisibility in academic labor as inherently invaluable. Symposium discussions made clear that those value judgments around such terms can be directly misleading, and that there may be critical and practical value in allowing some labor to remain invisible and aiming instead for making labor legible, if it means unflattening how our own disciplines operate.