[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 03 : Bettivia and Flanders

Wed Mar 18 06:31:20 AEDT 2015

Thank you, Kevin and Rhiannon, for bringing me into this conversation--I'm excited to be able to participate. I have a few thoughts to share right now and will follow up with some more detailed ideas shortly.

One thing that has struck me as interesting about the ways that digital humanities has been taken up in the larger public discourse is that it seems to stand in for a very broad set of concerns with labor, power structures, collaboration, professional training, and the nature of academic work, even in ways that don't connect closely with specifically "digital" concerns. I think Rhiannon touches on this below; for instance, the goal of increasing collaborative work in the humanities is closely associated with the digital humanities, even though arguably it is desirable on its own merits and its relevance is by no means limited to digital work.

I think one result of this effect is that the set of research issues that are genuinely at the core of the digital humanities and make it distinctive as a research domain are now quite hard to discern: they aren't a clear part of the agenda. In effect, digital humanities functions (publicly at least) as a kind of platform for generalized reform of the academy. While I do think that digital humanities work intensifies and sheds a particular light on issues of labor and professional identity, it's not the only locus for these issues nor is it the sole source of change (obviously!). 

So with those thoughts as background, to speak directly to your first question:

What role do you see the digital humanities playing in the evolution of labor prospects for
researchers who are trained in university settings? 

I think it's interesting to unpack this question in two directions. If we think of the "digital humanities" as a set of practices, work spaces, activities, etc., then I think one important role it plays is to provide a professional space in which an alternative set of professional relationships are in operation. These relationships aren't necessarily normative (they don't provide a roadmap or ameliorative plan) but that's actually good: we can actually see how specific roles and relationships are shaped in real-world situations, what seems to work and what doesn't. If we think of the "digital humanities" as a self-aware community or even a set of professional organizations and influential sites of collective action, then another important role it can (and does) play is a community for open discussion and advocacy.  I'd like to say more in response to this question and I'll try to come back to it again in a subsequent response.

I'd be really interested in hearing other perspectives on this, and I'll reply at greater length soon!

best wishes, Julia

> On Mar 16, 2015, at 11:53 PM, Bettivia, Rhiannon Stephanie <rbettivi at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------First, I will start with thanks all around.
> Thank you, Kevin, for the most generous introduction and thank you,
> Julia, for offering up your thoughts and time for this endeavor.
> 
> 
> I want to begin by asking Julia a question
> regarding the digital humanities.  Despite having worked along side, and
> sometimes in it, I am never quite sure what Œdigital humanities¹ means,
> and I
> often employ a quote from Julia¹s paper with collaborator Trevor Muñoz to
> describe
> how I feel about this term.  In their paper, An Introduction to Humanities
> Data Curation, they say:
> 
> 
> "The term and the idea of
> "curation" is experiencing a moment of cultural cachet that simultaneously
> threatens to empty it of meaning.²
> 
> 
> Substituting the term digital humanities for
> curation seems apt to me‹ this term is so often and broadly used that it
> is hard to find meaning in it.  It is offered as both the death knell of
> traditional humanities as well as it¹s inevitable savior.  For some, it is
> seen as the process of making humanities disciplines into something more
> akin
> to hard science‹ and this is meant as a positive appraisal.
> For others, this shift is part and parcel of changes and responses
> to the crisis that higher education is currently facing, regardless of
> whether said crisis is manufactured or caused by something a little
> more difficult to pin down.  In a recent panel discussion at Columbia
> University, as part of the Research without Borders lecture series, a
> variety
> of faculty and journalists spoke of removing humanists from the silo and
> encouraging/forcing collaborative enterprises in the humanities, citing
> this
> change as necessary and desirable.  I have often seen this label used in
> ways that I would describe as wholly pragmatic: in searching out DH
> projects, the goal of some lab and maker space endeavors seemed to be
> nothing
> more than purposeful harnessing of the current cachet of the term to fund
> humanities doctoral students to engage in research that, if not entirely
> productive for desired academic careers, funded them to do their work.
> It is perhaps a sign of the times that I find such programs entirely
> laudable.
> 
> 
> Julia, in your piece for the Literary Anthology
> in the Digital Age, you speak as both caution and champion of the digital
> humanities, and situate this field of study within the current changes
> taking
> place in higher education.  This article in particular made me think of
> your work in the context of the empyre listserv and the Engineering the
> University project being undertaken by the Seeing Systems Cohort at the
> University of Illinois.  My first question to you is to ask for your
> opinions on tying these threads together.  What role do you see the
> digital humanities playing in the evolution of labor prospects for
> researchers
> who are trained in university settings?  How does this role look different
> those those inside, including those with alternative academic positions
> (I.e. Not professors) and those outside academia altogether?
> 
> 
> Rhiannon Bettivia
> Doctoral Candidate
> Graduate School of Library and Information Science
> University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 3/16/15, 4:46 PM, "Hamilton, Kevin" <kham at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> March on empyre : Engineering the University
>> 
>> WEEK THREE :
>> The #Alt-Academy: Technology and new Research Labor
>> 
>> GUESTS:
>> 
>> Rhiannon Bettivia 
>> Doctoral candidate (ABD)
>> Graduate School for Library and Information Science
>> University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
>> 
>> Julia Flanders
>> Professor of the Practice, Department of English
>> Director, Digital Scholarship Group
>> Director, Women Writers Project
>> Northeastern University
>> 
>> Today we're starting our third of four weeks of conversations about the
>> changing shape of academic labor in research settings. Each week, one of
>> the grad students in our Seeing Systems
>> (http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/) cohort here at Illinois will lead a
>> conversation with a scholar whose work and path lends some possible
>> examples, models or theories to reflective engagement or critique of
>> existing academic structures.
>> 
>> This week we'll be led by Rhiannon Bettivia, a scholar whose work also
>> relates closely to many on empyre, in that she has spent a great deal of
>> time on the question of archiving and preserving digital art. Through her
>> past work while in the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at
>> at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, Rhiannon worked on
>> digital preservation and archive projects for the Museum of Modern Art
>> (MoMA), the Federal Reserve Bank, NYU Libraries and the Internet Archive,
>> the Hemispheric Institute, and artist Alan Berliner. Her current research
>> focuses on preservation with a focus on film, games, and time based media
>> art. Among our cohort here at Illinois Rhiannon is the most qualified to
>> talk in specific detail about the intersection of social and the
>> technical, especially as they interact in the development and enactment of
>> artifacts such as reference models for information storage. She studies
>> the use, creation, and critique of such artifacts, with a special emphasis
>> on gender, race and ethnicity.
>> 
>> Rhiannon invited to the discussion Julia Flanders, who shares with
>> Rhiannon an intellectual and professional path that moves in and out of
>> traditional academic settings, through archives, libraries, scholarship
>> and practice-based work. Julia has maintained a crucial role in Digital
>> Humanities discussions, debates and research, through contributing
>> simultaneously to the vanguards of practice, in her leadership in the Text
>> Encoding Initiative, and in critical application and examination of that
>> practice. Through her work on the Women Writers Project Julia helped
>> demonstrate early on the potentials of new digital scholarly techniques to
>> address previously marginalized bodies and bodies of work. Her
>> publications, speaking and workshops continue to bring a needed focus to
>> questions of labor that emerge from these new techniques, and fold very
>> nicely into matters introduced by Mimi and Chad in the past weeks. Julia
>> is currently editor in chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and her work
>> is included among many other places in the very useful Debates in the
>> Digital Humanities anthology published last year by University of
>> Minnesota Press.
>> 
>> I want to welcome Julia and Rhiannon to empyre, and again to encourage
>> others to jump in over the week. THANK YOU ALL!
>> 
>> THE HANDOFF TO RHIANNON:
>> 
>> Rhiannon, you've known Julia's work for some time, though some of our
>> cohort just learned of her work and the whole notion of the alt-ac. What
>> aspects of Julia's research and practice are most present for you right
>> now in the context of this discussion, and what would you like to ask
>> Julia in the context of our month's topic?
>> 
>> -- Kevin Hamilton
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> 
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