The Marriage of the Digital Humanities and Alt-Ac Positions

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• November 13, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Sarah Ruth Jacobs.

Announcement: This is a reminder that submissions for short, blog-length sections in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy are open year-round on a rolling basis. If you would like to share a teaching fail, an opinion, a project blueprint, a tech tool, an assignment, or a review of a book or event, please see the short section submission guidelines.

This year I am one of 20 fellows in the Modern Language Association’s Connected Academics Proseminar, an enrichment seminar for graduate students who are interested in pursuing alternative career paths.

As part of the seminar, participants complete career development and networking activities, including attending group visits at potential employment sites (a more detailed description of what the proseminar entails can be found here).

One of the observations that has come out of the proseminar thus far is how those who are most qualified for alt-ac jobs are those that have had the chance to take on administrative, alt-ac, and technology-related jobs during grad school. In fact, technology skills in particular seem to be high in demand in potential alternative positions for academics.

This makes sense when one considers that the rising profile of alt-ac jobs coincided with the rise of the digital humanities, as well as with the increasingly dire job prospects for new Phd recipients.

Google Trends shows how the popularity of the search term “digital humanities” continually rose since 2007:

Figure 1. Popularity of the Google search term “digital humanities,” where the level over time is relative to the highest part of the chart.

In comparison, the term alt-ac wasn’t coined until 2009, when, as Brenda Bethman and C. Shaun Longstreet note, a Twitter conversation between Bethany Nowviskie and Jason Rhody used “alt-ac” as shorthand for alternative academic (Nowviskie publicized the conversation here).

However, the notion of academics in non-traditional roles, just like the notion of digital applications for the humanities, preceded their popular terminology. Collin Brooke’s 2005 reflection on being “a technology specialist working in the humanities” would be a fine example.

Just as digital technology is opening up job opportunities across a number of different sectors, it is hardly surprising that academia is one area of tech growth.

In the spirit of alt-ac, I would like to use this roundup to bring attention to a few new and ongoing alt-ac opportunities and resources.

In addition to the MLA’s Connected Academics proseminar for current and recently-graduated doctoral students, the NEH is offering institutional grants for graduate schools to improve their alt-ac student and faculty outreach, or even to change the requirements for the degree to be more alt-ac friendly.

On Twitter, accounts with info on #altac job searches include @altacliberation, @MLAConnect, @VersatilePHD, and @humanistsatwork. Brenda Bethman has a list of resources, and Josh Boldt solicited and received a great list of websites at the bottom of his piece in Vitae.

For reflections, stories, and tips on pursuing alt-ac jobs, check out @altacadvisor, @BeyondAcademia, @Phdsatwork, @0ffthebench, and @GradSquare. MediaCommons also has articles on its #alt-academy site, where Brian Croxall‘s alt-ac guide serves as a great example.

Please tweet to @srujacobs if you would like to add to this list. Thanks!

Reflecting on Technology, Information, Society, the Digital Humanities, and Pedagogy

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• October 26, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Kimon Keramidas.

This week marked the five year and one-month anniversary of the first gathering of the group that would make up JITP’s editorial collective. Because of this I’ve been reflecting on how far we’ve come and where this journal fits within an evolving academic landscape where technology and the digital are having an increasing impact on the lives of faculty, staff, and students. From within the collective there is a sense of accomplishment. We’re on the way to publishing our eighth issue and continue to strive to find new ways to promote alternative forms of publication (still a daunting challenge) and facilitate discourse amongst like-minded scholars and pedagogues. But after leading a roundtable on the digital humanities at the gathering of the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Special Interest Group in Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS) earlier this month, I was reminded that there are many places where the work we at the journal see as self-evident and a logical progression in the evolution of the academy has yet to penetrate and/or still meets significant resistance.

First, a little background for those who may be unaware of the origins of the journal. JITP developed out of a certificate program in interactive technology and pedagogy at the CUNY Graduate Center that has been in existence for more than a decade, and has deep roots in significant work accomplished by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning in digital public history. This work at CUNY predates the recent explosion of interest in digital humanities, and rather than focusing on the algorithmic analysis and visualization of literary corpora that has driven much DH work emphasizes a critical and theoretical awareness of how technology has impacted human endeavors throughout history.

This means that, much like SHOT, the journal’s lineage owes much to a social and cultural understanding of the history of technology and information. So, when I first attended SHOT’s annual conference and SIGCIS workshop in 2014 I thought I would find a technology-forward community committed to understanding how the tools they studied could best be deployed to improve academic work and the practice of teaching and learning. But, I in fact found the opposite as most of the SHOT community was not engaged actively in developing online communities and papers were structured and presented traditionally with read papers accompanied by Powerpoints. Nor was there significant backchannel chatter on social media or reflective posts online after the conference. I attended one panel where digital humanities was mentioned in the discussion, and as the conversation veered into the inevitable concerns over peer-review, a comment I made about post-publication peer review–which we use as a model for some short-form pieces on JITP–was quickly dismissed as a fleeting and unviable alternative. The orthodoxy of practice that acts as a barrier of entry to new inquiries into the potential use of interactive technology were apparent in the study of the history of technology, just as it still lingers in many sectors of English, history, art history, etc.

Things weren’t all bad, however, because what I found was that parts of the SHOT community were in fact engaged in questions concerning the digital humanities and interactive technology and pedagogy; they were just being very deliberate in their approach and uptake, because more than most they are keenly aware of the social, cultural, and economic ramifications of the introduction of technology into daily life both in and out of the academy. There has been a THATCamp at a previous annual gathering (although it has not been repeated since) and the SIGCIS community is more engaged and hopeful about the affordances of contemporary digital media to expand that group’s activity and constituency. With this in mind I organized a roundtable for the 2015 gathering that asked four historians of technology to discuss how SHOT and SIGCIS could more actively engage in the growing discourse surrounding digital humanities and provide it with a stronger base of history from which to understand the technologies being used to drive that movement. The resulting conversation between panelists and audience was telling. There was a combination of eagerness and apprehension as these scholars of technology, computation, and information were able to see the potentials of using these technologies but also recognized the intellectual and ideological pitfalls of using them without fully understanding them or championing them as saviors of the academy. We discussed algorithmic analysis, data visualization, internet culture, materiality of the virtual, and professionalization and were able to do so while avoiding the issues of copyright, tenure, and disciplinarity that usually bog down proceedings.

But, one thing I did not notice until after the panel was almost over was that we really had not broached the subject of alternative approaches to teaching and learning. It was only when a few of us were having a side conversation and were talking about how students handed in papers that we even touched upon the practice of teaching and learning. Where a minute before we were talking about Python web scraping, complex database queries, and chronographic visualizations, we were now back to “do you use email and print out your papers or do they post to Dropbox?” As Stephen Brier – a member of the JITP collective, founder of the CUNY ITP certificate program, and longtime ASHP/CML collaborator – has noted, “pedagogy is not totally ignored by DH’s growing cadre of practitioners; rather, teaching and learning are something of an afterthought for many DHers.”(1) This was the feeling I kind of left with after the roundtable. I was glad that SHOT and SIGCIS were starting to get invested in the digital humanities, as that community can definitely help historicize the too often sensationalized interest in this burgeoning sector of academic inquiry. But, as we have seen so often, in the march towards a greater understanding and implementing of these new technologies, the pedagogy once again was getting left behind.

So, looking back at five years of JITP I think we can say that we have accomplished a lot and we are encouraged by the near and long-term growth we see coming for the journal and the communities it serves. But, if my experiences earlier this month are any indication, there remain not just corners but entire swaths of the academy that have yet to engage with the possibilities that interactive technologies have to dramatically alter the experience of teaching and learning. One might wonder why after seventy years of modern computer programming, forty years of personal computing, and twenty years of the Internet there remains uncertainty and resistance about the potential for digital culture to impact educative practices, but the case remains that there is still work to be done and five years on JITP will continue to make whatever dents in can in the academic universe.

(1) Stephen Brier, “Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012), http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/8.

This Week: Digital Pedagogy Institute Postmortem and a Podcast Potpourri

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• October 15, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Andrew Lucchesi. 

This week’s roundup is a bit of a grab bag.

First a quick report back on something I mentioned in my last weekly roundup. In August, I attended the first annual Digital Pedagogy Lab Summer Institute, hosted by Hybrid Pedagogy and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (among others). It was my first intensive digital humanities institute, and while I’m not sure I fully knew what I was getting myself into, I left with a bunch of tools and connections I’ll be glad to have going forward. You can check out the massive archive of resources generated from the various tracks at Praxis, Networks, and, the track I took, Identity. While you’re there, you might check out the new series of online courses being developed by the Digital Pedagogy Lab.

Next stop, podcasts. The world of academic podcasts is surprisingly vast, so I’ve selected out a few that are fairly young and perhaps attuned to some of our interests here at JITP. The advantage of digging into young podcasts is you can go back and listen to the archive of episodes pretty easily, and if you like them, subscribe for the new stuff as it comes out.

• Masters of Text: Hosted by Ames Hawkins and Ryan Trauman, this podcasts aims to “foster discussion of alternative textual forms of scholarship, and to promote scholarship about alternative modes of textuality” (About). As of last week, they just posted their fourth episode, which explores the queer process Ames went through in translating a written text into an audio text.
• HypridPod: Hosted by Chris Friend, this new podcast presents “the aural side” of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy. There are currently five episodes, the most recent features a stellar panel discussion on the topic of laptop policies in the classroom.
• KairosCast: Hosted by Courtney Danforth and Harley Ferris, this podcast features interviews, tutorials, conference rundowns, and segments focused on topics relevant to the good folks at Kairos journal. They model great accessibility (a Kairos hallmark) by providing full transcripts for their episodes. Check out all six episodes up now.
• From Students to scholars: a Graduate Center Peer Mentoring Podcast. This one’s a home-grown property developed this year by students in the CUNY Graduate Center. This podcasts aims at providing peer mentorship to grad students navigating the challenges of building professional identity, developing research projects, and surviving the turmoil of academia. The site just went live last week, and currently features three episodes for download.

Other quick highlights:

MLA members now get discounted attendance rates to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

CFP: Debates in the Digital Humanities 2017, Abstracts due November 2, 2015.

CFP: FemTechNet Distributed Open Collaborative Conference, Proposals due December 1, 2015.

This Week: #transformDH

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• October 7, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Amanda Licastro.

My weekly round-up consciously focuses on one inspiring event: the #transformDH conference at University of Maryland. In a week filled with violence, loss, heartache, political and economic strife around the world, this conference was a shining beacon of hope for me. TransformDH flipped the script on academic conferences in so many important ways: it was free to attend, the speakers were all from groups marginalized in academia, it included multimedia presentations from people outside of higher education, and it was intentionally accessible (including live-streaming, ASL interpreters, captioning on the media, and a location in an handicap accessible building).

Despite the impending hurricane, the room was filled with a small but passionate group of students, staff, and faculty members from all realms of the humanities broadly defined, in addition to the dozens of virtual attendees participating via livestream and twitter (see the Storify here). All of these participants believed in the mission that imbued this event: inclusion. And not just inclusion simpliciter, but inclusion that is transformative. This was demonstrated by the welcoming environment and the focus on providing – to borrow Jarah Moesch’s term – “care” for everyone involved.

The #transformDH movement started in 2011 at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference in Baltimore, but the core team is adamant that anyone who uses the hashtag and contributes to the conversation is part of this collective. The concept “collective,” stressed and historicized in opening remarks by Martha Nell Smith, recurred throughout the presentations. “Collective” came to mean a collaboration that is not hierarchical, or a distributed network that crowdsources knowledge and labor toward a common end.

This concept was enacted through panels of presenters and collections of projects that showcased a wide range of perspectives on how the digital humanities can be used as a tool for intervention (see full lineup here). The conference website (maintained by Alexis Lothian and by those mentioned here) proclaims the mission of #transformDH as

an academic guerrilla movement seeking to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects that push at its boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and inclusion” (#transformDH Tumblr).

And this is precisely what happened over the course of the day. The first half of the day featured commentary and projects which raised awareness about the many issues facing those engaged in Digital Humanities (DH). For instance, panelist Anne Cong-Huyen voiced concerns about the increased reliance on contingent positions funded with “soft-money” in DH, and noted that we need to recognize the work done in marginalized locations such as small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and outside of the academy. Moya Bailey and Amanda Phillips discussed the interdisciplinary nature of DH work, and noted that many scholars working in gender, queer, critical race, and ethnic studies do not identify DH as their home discipline, either because they do not feel welcome or because they are dedicated to legitimizing their fields without DH.

The panel also discussed institutional barriers to working as a “collective,” such as the need for individual recognition and formalized mentoring structures that do not allow for a distributed network of collaboration. The room seemed to tangibly feel the tension between the need to recognize the labor of individuals, and the desire to acknowledge that none of us works alone.

Next, Martha Nell Smith prompted the panelist to share projects that exemplified the mission of #transformDH. Here is a short list of every link I could capture:

• http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/docc2013/
• http://chineseenglishmen.adelinekoh.org/
• http://www.angeldavidnieves.com/research/mappingsoweto/
• http://viewshare.org/views/drevans/swag-diplomacy-black-travel-memoirs/
• http://moyabailey.com/projects/dh/#Transform

These projects are connected by their ability to give voice and recognition to marginalized populations through the use of digital technology, for which Moya Bailey provided this lovely metaphor:

This panel was followed by a video screening of #transformDH projects that I really cannot do justice with a short description. Fortunately, they are available for you to view here:

Video Showcase:http://transformdh.org/2015-video-showcase/

For audience reactions to these projects, check the Storify for the accompanying tweets, especially by Kathryn Kaczmawr, who captured the second video showcase incredibly well.

The second video showcase was followed by a question and answer session with the creators of the last video; the video and panel were almost entirely in ASL with translators for both panelists and audience members. The video, which consisted of interviews and footage of performances, was awe-inspiring: beautiful, powerful, and passionate. I highly recommend watching. The panel afterward announced that the American Sign Language (ASL) Shakespeare Project will be holding an month long celebration next October in DC, which will include performances of Shakespeare’s plays in ASL, exhibits of original manuscripts, and lectures about the project. The team fielded questions about which version of ASL would be used, why they chose the Bard, and what challenges the language of these texts presented. To find out more come to one of the many exciting event in October 2016.

Then it was time for final panel of the day, “Emergent Intersections of Disability and the Digital,” with M.W. Bychowski (George Washington), Angel Love Miles (UMD), Izetta Mobley (UMD), and Jarah Moesch (UMD), moderated by Beth Haller (Towson University). This panel was not livestreamed, but the discussion was mindblowing. I will respect the rights of everyone in this panel and not divulge too many details, but many of the thoughts expressed can be found on their sites:

• Beth Haller began by quoting from bloggers who use social media for disability activism. Haller praised social media sites as a tool for those with disabilities to communicate the ways in which they face ableism everyday. https://bethhaller.wordpress.com/

• M.W. Bychowski on “digital pharmacy”  – we view DH as a cure, but it is also a poison; accessibility in digital form also creates new forms of inaccessibility to marginalized populations. http://www.thingstransform.com/2015/09/disabilitys-digital-pharmacy-on.html

• Jarah Moesch on “sick” phenomenology, looking at ableist rhetoric in Facebook code, and reimaging the apocalypse as a community of care. http://thejarahtree.com/work-research/

• Izetta Autumn Mobley, who asked: how are bodies entered into the digital archive? Whose bodies? Who is archiving? https://twitter.com/imobley1

• Angel Love Miles who asked us to consider who determines ‘reasonable’ accommodations (hint: usually the able-bodied), and how digital tools designed for accessibility for some (such as Siri, fast processors, and keyboards) shut others out and cause many physical harm.

The keynote Keynote lecture was delivered by Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan),

“The Unwanted Digital Labor of Social Justice: Race, Gender, and the Origins of Call Out Culture.” Nakamura was introduced by Jason Farman who asked us to tweet how Lisa influenced our work, which speaks to the immense impact Nakamura continues to have on this field. I was one of many who tweeted Nakamura’s first article, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” which I read in The Graduate Center’s Interactive Technology and Pedagogy program. Nakamura’s keynote focused on embodied experiences online, particularly how women who “call out” injustice in online forums face abuse wrought with physical rhetoric that has physical effects on the body. Nakamura notes that feminists have always been interested in the material, but that the “body” is left out of the digital conversation. Nakamura returned to Gloria Anzaldua’s “This Bridge Called My Back” to discuss digital labor, pointing to the “This Tweet Called My Back” movement. This led into a discussion of the labor of moderating content on the internet – by “volunteers,” by part-time underpaid housewives (Metaverse Mod Squad), and (as I pointed out in the Q&A) by the human moderators who remove offensive content for media corporations, but also as the free labor of creating content for social media sites to mine:

The concerns Nakamura expressed over the treatment of women online was really a call to action. How can we work together to moderate content on the internet without fear of physical and mental harm? It is time for a revolution.

Thank you to the organizers, speakers, and participants of the #transformDH conference. Your words, actions, and ideas all speak loudly, and incite the desire for change.

I am left with these questions: What if, in our future, we cared for each other / took care of each other / cared about each other’s needs and worked together meet those needs? What would this revolution look like?

This post is dedicated to the victims of the #UCCShooting and their grieving families and friends. You are in my heart.