Briefly Noted for March 31, 2010

Yikes! Another Facebook Privacy SNAFU — Another reason to be happy I left Facebook: it seems a bug in Facebook’s code allowed its 400 million members’ email addresses to be exposed publicly for 30 minutes yesterday. As Mashable writer Jennifer Van Grove correctly noted in her report of the incident, while we may be inclined to forgive this kind of privacy breach in a startup, Facebook is now a several billion dollar company with hundreds of developers and really should do better.

Preserving Video GamesMITH Associate Director and all around good guy, Matt Kirschenbaum appeared today on WAMU and NPR’s Kojo Nnamdi Show to discuss issues of video game and virtual worlds preservation.

Picking on someone our own size

Friends of the blog will know that I have long been skeptical of historical video game projects. One of several critiques is that our budgets are just too small to compete in the cultural marketplace with the likes of EA and Activision. I understand that we’re not in direct and open competition with those companies for our students’ attention and that, if necessary, we have other means of compelling attention, especially in the context of the classroom. I’m also not saying anything about the pedagogical value of those games once students are made to play them, nor am I talking about casual games for Facebook and other platforms, which I’ll admit present a more level playing field for digital humanities. Caveats aside, I still see no getting around the fact that when students and others look at the video games and virtual environments we develop, they can’t help but compare the production values and game play to things they’re seeing on Xbox.

Consider these figures:

How can we possibly keep up?

Now consider that Foursquare, the wildly popular place-based social network has to date received a total of $1.35 million in venture funding. Again, Foursquare built a thriving social network, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies, for little more than what’s available to individual applicants through IMLS’s National Leadership Grants program. Try building a top video game for $1.35M.

That’s a number we can match, and the reason why, for my money, I’ll be sticking to the web and mobile space and giving history video games a pass.

[Thanks to Leslie Madsen-Brooks for the email that inspired this rant.]

Rethinking Access

[This week and next I’ll be facilitating the discussion of “Learning & Information” at the IMLS UpNext: Future of Museums and Libraries wiki. The following is adapted from the first open thread. Please leave any comments at UpNext to join in the wider discussion!]

In addition to the questions posted on the main page for this theme—I will be starting threads for each of those over the course of the next two weeks—something that has been on my mind lately is the question, “What is access?”

Over the past ten or fifteen years, libraries and museums have made great strides in putting collections online. That is an achievement in itself. But beyond a good search and usable interfaces, what responsibilities do museums and libraries have to their online visitors to contextualize those materials, to interpret them, to scaffold them appropriately for scholarly, classroom, and general use?

My personal feeling is that our definition of what constitutes “access” has been too narrow, that real access has to mean more than the broad availability of digitized collections. Rather, in my vision, true access to library and museum resources must include access to the expertise and expert knowledge that undergirds and defines our collections. This is not to say that museum and library websites don’t provide that broader kind of access; they often do. It’s just to say that the two functions are usually performed separately: first comes database access to collections material, then comes (sometimes yes, sometimes no, often depending on available funding) contextual and interpretive access.

What I’d like to see in the future—funders take note!—is a more inclusive definition of access that incorporates both things (what I’m calling database access and contextual access) from the beginning. So, in my brave new world, as a matter of course, every “access” project funded by agencies like IMLS would include support both for mounting collections online and for interpretive exhibits and other contextual and teaching resources. In this future, funding access equals funding interpretation and education.

Is this already happening? If so, how are museums and libraries treating access more broadly? If not, what problems do you see with my vision?

[Please leave comments at UpNext.]

Briefly Noted for March 30, 2010

Old Sturbridge Village Shaping Up — I have spent more time at Old Sturbridge Village, which is two towns over from where I grew up, than at any other museum I haven’t worked at. So I’m very happy to see that its attendance and finances appear to be improving after a very rough decade for what is in many ways the quintessential living history museum.

Organizing Digital Humanities in Southern California and New England — Recent days have seen the announcement of regional digital humanities hubs in Southern California and New England. Set up as group blogs, the two new websites will disseminate information about events, projects, and employment opportunities of interest to digital humanists. Both sites encourage community participation and ask for guest posts and other contributions from the field.

National Air and Space Museum Launches Mobile Website — The National Air and Space Museum (NASM) has become the first of the Smithsonian museums to launch a mobile website. The site includes the kind of information visitors especially would want to find: a calendar of events, a database of objects on display, and basic visitor information for both the downtown and the Dulles museums. I know the team at NASM worked very hard on the new mobile site, but at the same time, by choosing a light-weight, quick-to-market, browser-based approach (as opposed to building native iPhone, Android, and Blackberry apps), their work shows that providing useful and usable mobile access doesn’t have to be an exceedingly difficult or drawn-out process or involve hiring specialized development talent.

iPads and irResponsibility

Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania has announced it will give every full-time student a new Apple iPad upon arrival in the fall. This seems remarkably irresponsible to me. In a time of scant resources, does it really make sense to commit hundreds of thousands of dollars to a device very few people have ever even touched and for which not a single device-specific educational application has been built and tested with real students? With a total enrollment of approximately 2000, and a per-iPad cost of approximately $500, Seton Hill could spend $1,000,000 on this experiment.

The iPad may very well turn out to be an excellent, maybe even game-changing, device. But let’s at least give it a test drive. If the iPad proves a flop—Steve Jobs is not without his failures; remember the Lisa, the Cube, and the Apple TV?—Seton Hill will have spent an awful lot of money simply to (and I hate to put it this way) tie itself to the Apple hype machine for a day or two.

"Soft" [money] is not a four-letter word

I will be the first to say that I have been, and continue to be, extremely lucky. As I explained in an earlier post, I have managed to strike a workable employment model somewhere between tenured professor and transient post-doc, expendable adjunct, or subservient staffer, a more or less happy “third way” that provides relative security, creative opportunity, and professional respect. The terms of my employment at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) may not be reproducible everywhere. Nor do I see my situation as any kind of silver bullet. But it is one model that has seemed to work in a particular institutional and research context, and I offer it mainly to show that fairness doesn’t necessarily come in the form of tenure and that other models are possible.

Taking this argument further, I would also argue that fairness does not necessarily come in the form of what we in the educational and cultural sectors tend to call “hard money,” i.e. positions that are written into in our institutions’ annual budgets.

Of course, the first thing to admit about “hard money” is that it doesn’t really exist. As we have seen in the recent financial crisis, especially in layoffs of tenure-track and even tenured faculty and in the elimination of boat-loads of hard lines in library and museum budgets, hard money is only hard until someone higher up than a department chair, dean, or provost decides that it’s soft.

The second thing to acknowledge is that the concept of “hard” versus “soft” money really only exists in academe. If those terms were extended to the rest of the U.S. economy—the 90+ percent of the U.S. labor force not employed by institutions of higher education (although government may be another place where this distinction is meaningful)—we’d see that most people are on “soft” money. My wife has been employed as lawyer at a fancy “K Street” law firm in Washington, DC for going on six years now. She makes a very good living and is, by the standards of her chosen profession, very successful. And yet, you guessed it, she is on soft money. If for some reason the firm looses two, three, four of its large clients, her billing and hence the money to pay her salary will very quickly dry up, and the powers that be will be forced to eliminate her position. This is true for almost any job you can point to. If revenues do not match projections, layoffs occur. One can debate the justice of particular layoffs and down-sizings, but without wholesale changes to our economy, the basic rule of “no money in, no money out” is hard to deny.

Indulge me for a moment in a bit of simile. In some ways, CHNM is very much like any other business. At CHNM we have clients. Those clients are our funders. We sell products and services to those clients. Those products and services are called digital humanities projects. Our funder clients pay us a negotiated price for those products and services. We use those revenues to pay the employees who produce the products and services for our clients. To keep the wheels turning, we sell more products and services to our clients, and if an existing client doesn’t want or need what we’re selling anymore, we either find new clients or change the range of products and services we offer. Failing that, we will have to start reducing payroll.

How is this situation any different or worse than any other sector of the economy? If people stop buying Word and Excel, Microsoft will have to find something else to sell people or layoff the engineers, designers, project managers and other staff that make MS Office.

I understand that so crass an analogy to corporate America will make many people unhappy. The idealist in me recoils from the notion that the academy should be treated as just another business. Yet the pragmatist in me—a side that is certainly stronger than it would otherwise be from dealing for so long with the often very practical, hands-on work of digital humanities and the frequent sleepless nights that come with the responsibility of managing a budget that supports nearly fifty employees—thinks it foolish to reject out of hand employment models that, however imperfect, have worked to produce so much and provide livelihoods for so many. (Indeed, the democrat in me also has to ask, what makes us in academe so special as to deserve and expect freedoms, security, and privileges that the rest of the labor force doesn’t?)

Therefore, in my book, “soft money” isn’t necessarily and always bad. If it funds good, relatively secure, fairly compensated jobs, in my book soft money is OK. CHNM has several senior positions funded entirely on soft money and several employees who have been with us on soft money for five, six, and seven years—a long time in the short history of digital humanities.

What isn’t OK is when “soft” equals “temporary” or “term.” This, I readily acknowledge, is an all too frequent equation. Many, if not most, soft money post-doc, research faculty, and staff positions are created upon the award of a particular grant to work on that grant and that grant alone, and only until the term of the grant expires. I make no bones that these defined-term, grant-specific jobs are inferior to tenure or tenure-track or even corporate-sector employment.

At CHNM we try to avoid creating these kinds of jobs. Since at least 2004, instead of hiring post-docs or temporary staff to work on a particular grant funded project when it is awarded, where possible we try to hire people to fill set of generalized roles that have evolved over the years and proven themselves necessary to the successful completion of nearly any digital humanities project: designer, web developer, project manager, outreach specialist. Generally our people are not paid from one grant, but rather from many grants. At any given moment, a CHNM web designer, for example, may be paid from as many as four or five different grant budgets, her funding distribution changing fairly frequently as her work on a particular project ends and work on another project begins. This makes for very complicated accounting and lots of strategic human resource decisions (this is one of the big headaches of my job), but it means that we can keep people around as projects start and end and funders come and go. Indeed as the funding mosaic becomes ever more complex, when viewed from a distance (i.e. by anyone but me and a few other administrative staff who deal with the daily nitty-gritty) the budget picture begins to look very much like a general fund and staff positions begin to look like budget lines.

Perceptive readers will by now be asking, “Yes, but how did CHNM get to the point where it had enough grants and had diversified its funding enough to maintain what amounts to a permanent staff?” and I’ll readily admit there is a chicken-and-egg problem here. But how CHNM got to where it is today is a topic for another day. The point I’d like to make today is simply that—if we can get beyond thinking about project funding—soft money isn’t essentially bad for either the people funded by it or the institution that relies on it. On the contrary, it can be harnessed toward the sustainable maintenance of an agile, innovation centered organization. While the pressure of constantly finding funding can be stressful and a drag, it doesn’t have to mean bad jobs and a crippled institution.

Just the opposite, in fact. Not only does CHNM’s diversified soft money offer its people some relative security in their employment, pooling our diversified grant resources to create staff stablity also makes it easier for us to bring in additional revenue. Having people in generalized roles already on our payroll allows us to respond with confidence and speed as new funding opportunities present themselves. That is, our financial structure has enabled us to build the institutional capacity to take advantage of new funding sources, to be confident that we can do the work in question, to convince funders that is so, and in turn to continue to maintain staff positions and further increase capacity.

CHNM is by no means perfect. Not all jobs at CHNM are created equal, and like everyone in the digital humanities we struggle to make ends meet and keep the engine going. In a time of increasingly intense competition for fewer and fewer grant dollars, there is always a distinct chance that we’ll run out of gas. Nevertheless, it is soft money that so far has created a virtuous and, dare I say, sustainable cycle.

Thus, when we talk about soft money, we have to talk about what kind of soft money and how it is structured and spent within an institution. Is it structured to hire short term post-docs and temporary staff who will be let go at the end of the grant? Or is it structured and diversified in such a way as to provide good, relatively stable jobs where staff can build skills and reputation over a period of several years?

When soft money means temporary and insecure, soft money is bad. When soft money facilitates the creation of good jobs in digital humanities, in my book at least, soft money is OK.

[Note: This post is part of a draft of a longer article that will appear in a forthcoming collection to be edited by Bethany Nowviskie on alternative careers for humanities scholars.]

[Image credits: Denni Schnapp, identity chris is.]

Briefly Noted for March 23, 2010

Omeka-Powered Digital Amherst Recognized by ALA — The American Library Association’s (ALA’s) Program on America’s Libraries for the 21st Century has recognized Digital Amherst with one of three awards for best use of cutting-edge technology. A project of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, Digital Amherst is a collaborative Omeka-powered website celebrating the town’s 250th anniversary. The official announcement [.pdf] quotes Lead Technical Developer Kirstin Kay saying, “using Omeka software as the backbone of our digital library allowed us to focus our limited resources (both labor and money) on high impact areas. The very easy administrative and cataloging areas were simple to learn and allowed us to quickly get items ‘live’. Pre-made design themes gave us a jumping-off point to really customize the public interface to showcase our collection.”

Support for Regional THATCamps

In 2008, CHNM created THATCamp—The Humanities and Technology Camp—a yearly user-generated “unconference.” Organized on a shoestring and driven by participant interests, the new style of academic conference attracted a wide range of interest, and it spawned numerous locally-organized regional THATCamps in 2009, including recent events in Austin, TX, Pullman, WA, Columbus, OH, Los Angeles, CA, and East Lansing, MI. In coming months, additional THATCamps are planned for Paris, Toronto, London, Seattle, and other cities around the world.

Until now, the skeleton crew at CHNM (Jeremy Boggs, Dan Cohen, and I) has worked diligently, though not always successfully, to meet the many requests for assistance we receive from prospective organizers. Now, with the announcement of a major grant from the Mellon Foundation, I am happy to say we will finally be able to give local organizers and the regional THATCamp network the attention they deserve.

Our aim with the new funding is not to alter the essential bootstrap nature of THATCamp or the grassroots character of the regional events. None of the Mellon funding will be directed toward CHNM’s own Fairfax camp, and regional THATCamps will continue to be locally conceived, organized, and financed. Instead the program aims simply to make it easier for regional THATCamps to be established and run and to provide new supports for training aspiring digital humanists.

The program has four essential features. Most importantly, a new Regional Coordinator will be on hand to assist local organizers with whatever aspects of planning and hosting a regional THATCamp (logistics, technology infrastructure, application procedures, publicity, evaluation, etc.) they require, making it vastly easier and more cost-effective to establish and maintain a new regional THATCamp. We are extremely happy announce that Amanda French will be joining CHNM to fill the new Regional Coordinator position. With strong qualifications and connections in both digital history and digital literary studies—as well as a natural collaborative instinct—Amanda has emerged as a keystone of the international digital humanities community, and we cannot think of anyone better placed to coordinate a dispersed, self-organized, interdisciplinary network of digital humanists.

In addition to the Regional Coordinator, the new program will support the development of a turn-key package of open source software (“THATCamp-in-a-box”) to enable regionals to get the technology infrastructure of application, registration, and session planning up and running more easily and inexpensively. It will support the development of a basic-training curriculum (“BootCamp”) to run alongside regional THATCamp sessions, providing novices a grounding in the basic skills and methods of the digital humanities and giving them the tools to make the most of their THATCamp experience. Finally, it will support a program of micro-fellowships for graduate students, junior faculty, and other aspiring digital humanists interested in attending a regional THATCamp and participating in the BootCamp program.

CHNM strongly believes these new structures will help expand THATCamp to new audiences, provide much-needed support to local organizers, and improve training opportunities for aspiring scholars. We are excited to see how far THATCamp can go with a little extra energy behind it.

At the same time, we are mindful of the risk increased formalization poses to the success of THATCamp. THATCamp has flourished as a collaborative, participant-driven enterprise, and we remain committed to keeping it so.

It has been more than four years since Josh Greenberg, Bill Turkel, and I bandied about the idea of a digital humanities unconference and more than two years since Jeremy Boggs and Dave Lester put some action behind our yap. At no point did any of us imagine how far it would go. Even nine months ago, at the time of the first regional THATCamp in Austin, it was impossible to foresee the amazing things local organizers would do with the regional THATCamp concept. We are indebted to the regional THATCamp community for its energy and commitment, and we are happy now to be able to start repaying that debt.

Things of History, History of Things

I have just started listening to an new podcast from the BBC, A History of the World in 100 Objects, written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum. Aside from the obvious reductionism and the occasionally irritating interstitials (lots of ambient chanting and pan flute music), the show is excellent, taking one hundred objects from the British Museum’s collections to tell the history of the world from the point of view of its material culture. MacGregor is a natural, and his guests—fellow curators, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and others—are engaging story tellers.

Yet even more interesting from an educational point of view are the live “readings” of artifacts these scholars provide, demonstrating to the audience just how experts tease knowledge from primary source objects. This is much the lesson we at CHNM attempted in our Object of History collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The focus was narrower—six iconic objects in U.S. History—but the idea was the same: objects have histories and their curators very particular expertise in bringing those histories to light.