by Tom Scheinfeldt
I came across this old quote last night in finishing up David Post’s In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. It seems a fair approximation of how things work (should work?) in the new digital humanities:
“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”
David Clark, “A Cloudy Crystal Ball: Visions of the Future.” Internet Engineering Task Force, July 1992. [PDF].
Scholars may not like it, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the 21st century’s fragmented media environment, marketing and branding are key to disseminating the knowledge and tools we produce. This is especially true in the field of digital humanities, where we are competing for attention not only with other humanists and other cultural institutions, but also with titans of the blogosphere and big-time technology firms. Indeed, CHNM spends quite a bit of energy on branding—logo design, search engine optimization, cool SWAG, blogs like this one—something we view as central to our success and our mission: to get history into as many hands possible. (CHNM’s actual mission statement reads, “Since 1994 under the founding direction of Roy Rosenzweig, CHNM has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.”)
In my experience, branding is mostly a game learned by trial and error, which is the only way to really understand what works for your target audience. But business school types also have some worthwhile advice. One good place to start is a two part series on “personal branding” from Mashable, which provides some easy advice for building a brand for your self or your projects. Another very valuable resource, which was just posted yesterday, is the Mozilla Community Marketing Guide. In it the team that managed to carve out a 20% market share from Microsoft for the open source web browser Firefox provides invaluable guidance not only on branding, but also on giving public presentations, using social networking, finding sponsorships, and dealing with the media that is widely transferable to marketing digital humanities and cultural heritage projects.
It may not be pretty, but in an internet of more than one trillion pages, helping your work stand out is no sin.
(Note: I’ll be leading a lunchtime discussion of these and other issues relating to electronic marketing and outreach for cultural heritage projects later today at the IMLS WebWise conference in Washington, D.C. I’ll be using #webwise on Twitter if you’d like to follow my updates from the conference.)
Along with “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” “release early and often” is something of a mantra around CHNM, especially when it comes to software and web application development. For a variety of reasons, not least the invaluable testing and feedback projects get when they actually make it into the wild, CHNM has always been keen to get stuff into users’ hands. Two good statements of likeminded philosophy: Eric Ries’ Lessons Learned: Continuous deployment and continuous learning and Timothy Fitz’s Continuous Deployment.
Lisa Spiro continues her excellent roundup of Digital Humanities in 2008 with a discussion of developments in open access. Readers should also make sure to catch Lisa’s first installment on digital scholarship. Nice to see that CHNM makes an appearance in both.
Drunk History presents “history as it’s never been told before”: by drunks. Check out Volume One, where Arrested Development and Juno’s Michael Cera does a turn as Alexander Hamilton. Thanks, Ken.
Showing extreme negligence earlier in the week, I somehow forgot to mention the opening of applications for THATCamp 2009. Last year’s event was great. This year will be (a little) bigger and better.
Another late entry: Our colleagues at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities have launched their spring series of Digital Dialogues. I’m posting too late for readers to catch CHNM’s Jeremy Boggs (who spoke this past Tuesday), but there’s plenty of time to plan a trip to College Park for Mills Kelly’s provocatively titled “What Happens When You Teach Your Students to Lie Online?” in April. Other topics this semester include Project Bamboo, Shakespeare, and robots.
A somewhat unlikely place for the subject matter, Slashdot nevertheless has a great discussion of How Do I Start a University Transition to Open Source?
Finally, from the New York Times, some tips on how to run better meetings: Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time . Thanks, Jerm, hint taken.
Nat Torkington at the O’Reilly Radar blog has news this morning that George Oates, Senior Program Manager in charge of Flickr Commons and an original member of the Flickr design team, has been laid off by Flickr’s parent company Yahoo! As the person at Yahoo! responsible for bringing together the energy and cultural resources of the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Powerhouse Museum, the National Library of New Zealand, the Library of Virginia, the Imperial War Museum, and, most recently, the New York Public Library, Oates has quietly done as much as anyone in the past several years to increase and improve online access to cultural heritage collections around the world. It’s sad enough just at that. But Oates’ layoff also raises some larger questions. Is this just one of those things we see in a bad economy, or is it a reason why cultural organizations should roll their own rather than using commercial services for online work?
Torkington believes that the enthusiasm and community Flickr Commons has attracted will sustain the project through the economic downturn and what at best is likely to be a period of neglect by Flickr and its parent. Let’s hope so. A less rosy scenario is that Yahoo! decides that in tough economic times the goodwill and visibility generated by hosting the educational and cultural heritage materials of public institutions isn’t worth the cost of bandwidth.
This story drove home to me a contradiction in my own rhetoric that I hadn’t noticed before. On the one hand I have been a proponent of Flickr Commons, university channels on Google’s YouTube, and the like, recommending them to partners and colleagues as an easy way to reach out to new audiences, build communities around content, and basically just get your stuff up without the hassle of software and sys admin. On the other hand, I have repeatedly criticized the enthusiasm some digital humanists have shown for Second Life, in large part on the basis of the fact that Linden Lab (SL’s parent company) could at any moment go under or simply decide to take another business direction—and in doing so take with them all the hard, largely publicly-funded work museums, libraries, and digital humanists have put into the platform. Only today, when I read of George Oates’ sacking, did I realize that what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. While the long term prospects of Yahoo! and especially Google may be brighter than those of Linden Lab, nevertheless they are still big companies whose first responsibility is to their shareholders and the bottom line, not to cultural heritage, education, or the work of digital humanities.
My guess is that Flickr Commons will be just fine, and I still believe there is a lot of good in the idea. But the news about George Oates, someone who was universally well-regarded in our business and in the web business more generally, should give all of us pause. Specifically, it should let us ask again whether the benefits in ease, reach, and community of using commercial services for presenting cultural heritage collections and educational resources really outweigh the costs in storage, systems administration, and content segregation of rolling your own.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The Oral History Association has launched a new and improved website, including a social network and an instructional wiki.
Jim Spadaccini has a great post about the special kind of planning involved in building museum and other cultural heritage websites that incorporate social networking features. Jim writes, “While the standard methods of web design—such as wireframes and mockups—are still part of the process, we’ve been concurrently working on plans for social interaction.”
AHA Today points to TimesTraveler, a new blog from the New York Times. The premise is simple: TimesTraveler excavates Times’ headlines from exactly 100 years ago, giving readers a sense of what was happening on this day in 1908. Surprisingly compelling and very well done. For a more entertaining and more creative glimpse at 1908, however, I suggest TweetCapsule—time-twittering life in the last century. (Thanks, Tad.)
Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb continues his must-read series on design process for digital humanities with some notes (and code) for Front End Development.
Again on front ends and again via Clioweb, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has unveiled a new “dashboard” user interface, a numerical, widgetized overview of how IMA’s online collections, programs, and social networks are being used.
The National History Coalition reports the welcome launch of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative, a collaborative effort by a dozen federal agencies “to define common guidelines, methods, and practices to digitize historical content in a sustainable manner.” Anyone thinking of applying for federal funding in the next few cycles would be wise to keep an eye on this initiative. The standards established by this group are sure to turn up shortly in NEH, IMLS, NHPRC and other grant program guidelines.
Many thanks to Elisabeth Grant and Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association for mentioning my recent post on “Making It Count” in the latest edition of their “What We Are Reading” series. Elisabeth and Rob make the great suggestion of reading a new report from the American Council on Education alongside my post. Entitled “Too Many Rungs on the Ladder? Faculty Demographics and the Future Leadership of Higher Education,” the report argues that the current dearth of twenty- and thirty-something tenure-track faculty members will translate into a dearth of candidates for senior administrative positions in just a few years’ time. There are, the authors say say, only three solutions to the impending crisis:
If the current model will not work for those entering the leadership pipeline today, then higher education must find ways to bring more young people into the permanent faculty and advance them through the academic ranks more quickly, alter the career ladder so that people can skip rungs and rise to the presidency with fewer years of experience, or become more open to individuals from areas other than academic affairs.
Personally I vote for all of the above. As I wrote last week, the nature of academic work is changing, and the terms, conditions, and models of academic employment and career advancement will have to change along with it. We don’t have to relegate old models of tenure and promotion to the chopping block. But nor should we stubbornly insist on their unique primacy or fool ourselves that they’re somehow eternal and unchanging. Whether we are the ones seeking or bestowing the promotions, we need to recognize that an institution as diverse and kaleidoscopic as the modern research university can, should, and will accommodate more than one employment model and path to advancement and leadership.
Over the summer there was much discussion among my colleagues about making digital humanities work “count” in academic careers. This included two fantastic threads on Mills Kelly’s Edwired blog, a great post by Kathy Davidson, and an informal chat on our own Digital Campus podcast. As usual the topic of tenure also undergirded discussions at the various digital humanities workshops and conferences I attended during June, July, and August. The cooler weather and tempers of autumn having arrived, I’d like to take a quick look back and commit to writing some of the thoughts I offered on our podcast and at these meetings.
Let me use Mills’ “Making Digital Scholarship Count” series as a starting point. For those of you who weren’t following his posts, Mills argues that if scholars want digital scholarship to count in traditional promotion and tenure decisions, then they have to make sure it conforms to the characteristics and standards of traditional scholarship (though Mills points out that some of those standards, such as peer review, will have to be modified slightly to accommodate the differences inherent in digital scholarship.) At the same time Mills suggests that we have to accept that digital work that does not fit the standards of traditional scholarship, no matter how useful or well done, will not count in traditional promotion and tenure decisions. Essentially Mills makes a distinction between digital “scholarship” and other kinds of digital “work,” the first which bears the characteristics of traditional scholarship and the second which does not. The first should count as “scholarship” in promotion and tenure decisions. The second should not. Rather it should count as “service” or something similar.
I more or less agree this, and I’m fine with Mills’ distinction. Communities have the right to set their own standards and decide what counts as this or that. But this situation does raise questions for those of us engaged primarily in the second kind of activity, in digital humanities “work.” What happens to the increasing numbers of people employed inside university departments doing “work” not “scholarship?” In universities that have committed to digital humanities, shouldn’t the work of creating and maintaining digital collections, building software, experimenting with new user interface designs, mounting online exhibitions, providing digital resources for students and teachers, and managing the institutional teams upon which all digital humanities depend count for more than service does under traditional P&T rubrics? Personally I’m not willing to admit that this other kind of digital work is any less important for digital humanities than digital scholarship, which frankly would not be possible without it. All digital humanities is collaborative, and it’s not OK if the only people whose careers benefit from our collaborations are the “scholars” among us. We need the necessary “work” of digital humanities to count for those people whose jobs are to do it.
Now I’m not arguing we bestow tenure in the history department for web design or project management, even if it’s done by people with PhD’s. What I am saying is if we’re going to do digital humanities in our departments, then we need something new. It can’t be tenure-track or nothing. With the emergence of the new digital humanities, we need some new employment models.
I myself do relatively little work that would fit traditional definitions of scholarship. Practically none of my digital work would. Because of that I am more than willing to accept that tenure just isn’t in the picture for me. With my digital bent I am asking for a change in the nature of academic work, and therefore I have to be willing to accept a change in the nature and terms of my academic employment.
That said, I am not willing to accept the second-class status of, for instance, an adjunct faculty member. My work—whether it is “scholarship” or not—wins awards, attracts hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding, turns up periodically on CNN and in the New York Times, enables the work of hundreds of other academics, and is used every day by thousands of people, scholars and non-scholars alike. That may not make it tenureable, but it’s certainly not second class. My work requires a “third way.”
Fortunately I’m at an institution committed to digital humanities and willing to experiment with new models of academic employment. Technically I have two titles, “Managing Director of the Center for History & New Media” and “Research Assistant Professor.” That puts me somewhere between an untenured administrative faculty member and an untenured research faculty member. It is a position which would frighten some of my tenure-track colleagues terribly, and I can, indeed, be fired from my job. Sometimes that worries me too. Then I remember that probably 99% of the rest of working Americans can also be fired from their jobs. I also remember that just like that other 99%, if I do what’s expected of me, it probably won’t happen. If I continue to win grants and awards from panels of my peers and continue to produce quality, well-received, well-used digital humanities products, I’ll probably continue to have a job. If I exceed expectations, I’ll probably advance.
Just as important to note are the benefits my job has over more traditional scholarly career paths, some of which are pretty serious. I’m not terrorized by the formalized expectations that accompany traditional P&T decisions. I won’t perish if I don’t publish. I also don’t have fixed teaching obligations. I can focus full-time on my research, and I have greater freedom and flexibility to explore new directions than most of my tenure-track colleagues. I get to work on lots of things at once. Some of these experiments are likely to fail, but as long as most succeed, that’s expected and OK. I manage my own travel budgets and research schedule rather than being held hostage to department committees. I get to work every day with a close-knit team of like-minded academics rather than alone in a library. I have considerably greater freedom to negotiate my pay and benefits. And to the extent that it advances the mission and interests of the Center for History & New Media, this blog “counts.”
Mine is not a tenure-track position, and based on the work I do, I don’t expect it to be. Nor do I care. There are some downsides and some upsides to my position, but it’s a reasonably happy third way. More importantly, I believe it is a necessary third way for the digital humanities, which in Mills’ terms require not only digital “scholarship” but also digital “work.” I’m lucky to be at an institution and to have colleagues that make this third way possible. Other institutions looking to build digital humanities capacity should follow suit. If digital humanities are going to flourish in the academy, we need both to accept and advocate for new models of academic employment.
[Image credit: Dave Morris]
Late Update (10/2/08): I very absentmindedly neglected to list my friend Margie McLellan among the important voices in this discussion. Along with Mills and Kathy Davidson, Margie’s three posts, On Defining Scholarship, Scholarship Update, and Is a Blog Scholarship?, are required reading on these matters.
There has been a useful discussion on Twitter (of all places!) among some of the THATCamp participants about how to write a good help wanted ad for programmers for digital humanities projects. Here are a few of the suggestions, mostly from the programmers in the bunch:
Good tips. Good use of Twitter.
[Thanks to Karin Dalziel, Adam Solove, and Ben Brumfield for allowing me to republish this conversation! Image credit: Matt Wetzler.]
