The digital humanities postdoc

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Miriam

In the last few years, I’ve noticed a certain kind of job ad appearing with more and more frequency. I think of it as the “make digital humanities happen” postdoctoral fellowship. Often based in a library, these positions’ descriptions include some combination of “liaison,” “catalyst,” and “hub,” with a heavy dose of coordinator syndrome thrown in. The person is meant to generate enthusiasm for DH among faculty, perhaps serve as a consultant, and head up a new DH initiative. I do understand why a postdoc is attractive to institutions.

  1. They know that faculty like talking to people with Ph.D.s.
  2. They’re not sure they want to go all-in on DH, and thus the built-in term limits of the postdoc make sense.
  3. They want someone young and hungry, willing to take direction, with a lot of ideas and energy.
  4. Often, the source of funding for this position is insecure; perhaps it’s provided by a grant.

I’d like to suggest that this particular kind of postdoc, except under very special circumstances, is not, in fact, a postdoc, but a temporary staff position. A postdoc, I maintain, should be characterized by some combination of generous mentorship and/or the freedom to do one’s own research. Many of these postdocs provide neither; indeed, in some cases, the hiring institution has not even worked out who this person will report to.

Who gets to say what a postdoc is? I do. We all do. A “postdoctoral fellowship” is what we collectively agree that it is, and I say that we should hold employers to some standards. For whatever reason, a “postdoc” sounds more prestigious than “employee with no job security.” Let’s call it what it is.

There are good DH postdocs out there, definitely, but they do not involve being dropped, resource-less, to serve as a “catalyst” in an institution with no DH activity.

Institutions considering hiring a “make DH happen” postdoc, should I think, reconsider. Not because it ain’t right, which it ain’t, but because it won’t work. A postdoc, no matter how committed, ingenious, and entrepreneurial, cannot just make digital humanities happen at any institution. This piece, by Stephen Ramsay, mirrors my feelings on the subject very well.

If you yourself are offered this kind of postdoc; well, that’s complicated. The job market is what it is, and one doesn’t always have the luxury of haranguing one’s hiring institution. Here’s what I recently advised someone who emailed me with this question:

If you do decide to pursue this job, I recommend, first of all, that you read this piece, by Bethany Nowviskie. I can attest to the truth of everything she says. In addition, given the particulars of the job you describe, I would:
  1. Get the library to define your reporting and evaluation structure. Who’s your boss? Who are your colleagues? How will your work be evaluated?
  2. Negotiate for some amount of time (20%, for example) to be devoted to your own research.
  3. Campaign for professional development resources, including training, conference travel, and research travel. Be explicit that this conference travel will not necessarily be to the American Library Association; it may be to the MLA.
  4. Inquire as to the possibility of this becoming a permanent job. How will this happen, and when will you know? Sometimes EOE guidelines require that a library advertise a job, even if it’s been “promised” to you. Be sure that this is not the case for you, and get it in writing. Hell, get everything in writing.
  5. Ideally, your professional development would include site visits to other institutions with successful DH initiatives. These were definitely the most educational, useful things I did as a postdoc.
Be clear that you require these things so that you can do a good job. Because you do.
As the Library Loon says, “Be wary of postdocs in the library not because they’re Ph.Ds, not because they don’t hold MLSes, but because they’re on one- or two-year contracts.”

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Training grad students for a new scholarly landscape

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Miriam

Here’s what I just said about graduate student training at a workshop (with Daniel Chamberlain, Mary Francis, Tara McPherson, Leslie Mitchner, and Patrice Petro) on “the changing profession” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual meeting:

As we watch the academy change around us, I think it’s becoming clear to us that the way we prepare grad students has some inadequacies. We talk about preparing them for the job market, but I think we’re all aware that calling this crisis a “market” — implying that there’s some basic equity between supply and demand — is becoming increasingly perverse. I know you’ve seen good, smart, hardworking people washed up on the rocks. I know I have.

What can we do, as the ground shifts underneath us, to prepare these people whom we care so much about? By now, it should be obvious that it is no longer humane or sufficient to tell ourselves that our best students will get jobs. This is a fiction that helps us sleep at night.

But neither is it humane or sufficient to simply despair. So I offer four suggestions:

We need to get serious about tracking statistics about our students once they graduate. What kind of labor are they doing, how secure is it, where is it happening? Entering students need to be able to make better-informed decisions about the programs they choose.

We need to start seeing that caring about our grad students requires caring about the issue of adjuncts and other casualized labor in the academy. We need to see that this is part of mentoring, too.

We need to start countenancing the possibility that not all students will want to be professors. I want to be careful here, because I know not all students will want to follow a path like mine. But you might be surprised at how many grad students are quietly curious about other kinds of jobs. We need to help graduate students see that these paths are OK, too, and part of helping them to see this is visibly taking seriously the intellectual labor of other academic professionals in our orbit — the librarians, archivists, technologists and others.

Finally, I would like to see a reconsideration of methodological training for our students. Students are highly aware that they need different kinds of skills — digital skills, collaborative skills, administrative skills, budgeting skills — and we should see it as our job to meet these needs. For reference, I offer the example of the Praxis Program, at the University of Virginia, where graduate students work in teams alongside developers and administrators to accomplish projects collectively.

I know you’re here because you care about your students, and I know we’ve all been doing everything we can to prepare them for this new landscape. What I hope to say, more than anything, is that truly advocating for grad students requires understanding and intervening in the larger academic ecosystem.

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Things we share

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Miriam
Green print that reads "Make something good today."

This print, by Jen Renninger, hangs in my office. (Click the image to get one of your own!)

So, that post. I’ve never written anything that’s gotten much attention before, and the experience has been strangely, intensely stressful. Is it too divisive?, I wonder. Too hastily written? When I wrote the post, to be honest with you, I was livid about job-market news from friends, not to mention the latest VIDA stats. Should I have been more constructive? I was short with people in the comments, and I regret that. (Sorry, Ben.) Should I have said more about how much I love the community of DH? Because I do, because it’s been life-changing for me, because I love spending time with you. Am I now Gender Lady? I hope not, because I really don’t want to talk about this all the time.

I was glad to see the post gain traction — and I prodded it along — because I want the conversation to take place. But I’m extremely self-conscious about being near the center of it.

On Sunday, it felt like time to shut down the computer and dig out my sewing machine, which is something that consoles me. I first learned to sew from my mom, but I was too impatient to stick with it. It wasn’t until college that I picked it back up again. I really came of age too late to be a riot grrl. But this was in Portland, where, as we all know, the dream of the ’90s lives on, and stuff like sewing and crafting was part of DIY feminist culture. (Just as it was for Jacqueline Wermont!) We taught each other to sew and knit, and, yes, we put many a bird on it.

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Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Miriam
First panel: Two men stand at a chalkboard. While one man works on an equation, the second man thinks, "Wow, he sucks at math." Second panel: A man and a woman stand at a chalkboard. While the woman works at an equation, the man thinks, "Wow, women suck at math."

XKCD, "How It Works"

Oh, how I hate being the bearer of bad news. Yet I feel I have to tell you something about the frustration I’m hearing, in whispers and on the backchannel, from early-career women involved in digital humanities.

Here, there, and everywhere, we’re being told: A DHer should code! Don’t know how? Learn! The work that’s getting noticed, one can’t help but see, is code. As digital humanities winds its way into academic departments, it seems reasonable to predict that the work that will get people jobs — the work that marks a real digital humanist — will be work that shows that you can code.

And that work is overwhelmingly by men. There are some important exceptions, but the pattern is pretty clear.

In principle, I have no particular problem with getting everyone to code. I’m learning to do it myself. (And a million thank yous to those of you who are helping me.) But I wanted to talk here about why men are the ones who code, so that we can speak openly about the fact that programming knowledge is not a neutral thing, but something men will tend to have more often than women.

This matter is of no small concern to me. It is breaking my damn heart to see how many women I know have earnestly committed themselves to codeacademy because they want to be good citizens, to prove they have what it takes. These are my friends, and this is their livelihood, and this is the career we’ve chosen.

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The wind in the trees: Regimes of attention

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Miriam

“What the modern movie lacks is beauty,” said D.W. Griffith, melancholy at the end of the a long career, “the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.”

At film’s inception, it’s said that viewers didn’t necessarily know where to rest their eyes. Film hadn’t organized itself into the streamlined patterns of cause-and-effect that we recognize as narrative. Why not let the eyes wander to the wind in the trees?

An unspoken truth about early silent film is that it’s really hard for most people to watch for any length of time. At class screenings in grad school, we students would settle in with the best of intentions. But after an hour or so, having exchanged complicit looks, one of us would sidle up to the DVD player and press fast-foward. The damn things are silent, after all. We got the gist, even at double-speed.

The problem is that early silent film counts on a kind of attention that we didn’t have: an open-eyed fascination with the appearance of moving photographic images, and the ability to grasp allusions to any number of turn-of-the-century pop-culture references.

Having watched enough of these films, I can now, with a great deal of concentration, summon up a reverie that I imagine to be like the kind of attention early viewers brought to film. When I can, I do see things that I don’t usually see — my own equivalents of the wind in the trees.

I thought of all this because I’ve been following some of the talk around the blogosphere about concentration in the digital age:

In broad strokes, I agree with Sample. Having now done this digital work a bit, I can promise you that it does indeed require deep focus and intellectual energy. (And, let it be said, I think Olson’s piece is an example of the worst kind of academic concern trolling.)

I like the melancholy Griffith quote, too, though, for its reminder that we’re at a transitional moment in our mode of apprehending the world — far from the first, and assuredly not the last, but an important one. There’s beauty to be found in the new regime of attention (we couldn’t have had Vertigo without narrative), but there was beauty in the last one, too. I know Sample and Davidson would be the first to agree with this; I’m not actually disputing anything they propose.

This is just to say: I was drawn to silent film because its difficulty rewards a viewer with an unfamiliar kind of beauty. I probably won’t stop assigning longer papers and books, not because I think they’ll somehow prepare students better for the workplace or some such nonsense, but because there’s beauty in them, of the kind that comes from immersion in a different regime of attention.

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Utopianism and its detractors

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Miriam
Alice in Wonderland reflected in a CD

"Digital Reflections," by seriykotik1970

This year, the American Historical Association’s annual meeting included a THATCamp, which I was happy to attend. Andrew Hartman, a professor at Illinois State University, published an interesting response, which I wanted to take a moment to address.

Hartman enjoyed himself but wondered if the scholars attending THATCamp evinced an unwarranted utopianism about the prospects of technology to transform the practice of history. It’s a good question, and an understandable reaction, but I don’t think it’s altogether accurate. First, I think that what Hartman understood as utopianism may in fact have been an attempt by the participants to make newcomers like Hartman feel welcome. If there’s a utopianism present at THATCamp, I think it’s more about the possibilities of new forms of interacting with each other, not the technology itself.

(As an aside, I think that for women this may hit a particular nerve. Digital humanities’ vaunted niceness is an aspect of the field I love, but for women in particular being “nice” is often read as an admission of intellectual inferiority. Some people can easily afford to be nice; for others, the cost is higher.)

In fact, as I’ve written before, technological utopianism bothers me a great deal for very personal reasons, and it’s a stance digital humanists have been quite active in countering.

More substantively, I’d like to respond to another of Hartman’s points: that while digital history is “an important new tool … it does not change the way we conceptualize the past.” I’d like to argue that it does, and in ways that directly counter the characterization of digital history as utopian. In fact, much of it has an activist project that, like Hartman, draws on Marxist theory.

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Why I went (back) to the AHA

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Miriam

Last week I attended the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. Although I’ve always thought of myself as a historian, I hadn’t been to an AHA meeting since my first year of grad school in 2004. In part, I hadn’t been going because I’m affiliated with so many disciplines that it’s difficult to keep up with all the meetings. But I also hadn’t been going because I wasn’t sure what the AHA would do for me. I won’t be interviewing there, since I’m not applying for teaching jobs, and playing the big-conference game (pretending not to notice the thousands of ways people behave disrespectfully to each other) has started to seem unnecessary to me.

I did go back, though, for a few reasons. First, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve only recently come to understand how scholarly societies might be important sites of change within the academy. In my mind, AHA, MLA, SCMS, and their ilk were bureaucratic prestige-machines, awarding prizes and manning the gates for the old guard.

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Dissertation advice

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Miriam
Photo of me holding a T-shirt that says "I survived Yale dissertation boot camp."

The T-shirt says "I survived Yale dissertation boot camp," which is a real thing that exists.

Recently, a much-loved friend asked me for advice on dissertation-writing, not because I’m any paragon of efficiency, but because she knew I’d struggled myself. She wanted to know if I had any words of wisdom about getting through the process with a minimum of pain.

My immediate impulse was to decline to answer, on the grounds that I am utterly unqualified to advise anyone on writing without pain. My next impulse was to solicit advice from my friends via Twitter, and I got some wonderful responses. There were some terrifically helpful practical tips, but one that really got me thinking was from my friend Franky Abbott, who suggested the importance of recognizing “that the dissertation is antiquated process training and not a reflection of your total worth.”

This is a truth that’s only become fully apparent to me in my post-grad school life, and I thought that this might be something useful I could offer to my friend. While of course I knew in a theoretical way that what I was writing was an exercise rather than a finished product, this knowledge meant little to me in the hothouse of grad school. Now, a couple years after leaving Yale, I see  that what I was doing was learning how to write scholarship. My dissertation is no great work of genius, I know that, but I feel no need to apologize. The world didn’t need another dissertation, but I needed the opportunity to learn to write one.

So here’s what I told my friend, and what I would tell myself if I could: You are more important than any damn dissertation.

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Leaving Emory, joining UCLA

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Miriam
Image of the U.S., with the states of Georgia and California highlighted and connected by a dotted line in the shape of a heart.

Illustration by Carrie of the Here & There Shop, who is a pleasure to work with. Click on the image to commission your own print!

I’m equal parts delighted and heartbroken to say that I’ve accepted a new job. As of February 10, I’ll be the digital humanities program coordinator at the University of California, Los Angeles. January 13 is my last official day at Emory. The decision to accept the job was really difficult — I love being at Emory, I love the library, and I love my colleagues. I’m so proud of what we’ve done together. Still, this new position is a significant opportunity for me: the chance to shape a growing program in California, the state where I grew up and which I care about deeply.

I’ll spare you the weepy theatrics, except to say that I feel really fortunate, both for the opportunities Emory has offered me and for the new opportunity I’ve been afforded.

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Research tools redux: What I use

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Miriam
Photo of archival binders

Photo by pixelhut

I posted recently about tools for managing a research workflow, and one of the points I made is that no set of tools will be right for everyone. I’ve tried and failed to foist my favorite tools on enough people to know that this is true.

Still, after I wrote the post, a few people asked me which tools I use. I do indeed have a number of favored tools, and since I find myself endlessly fascinating, I enjoyed the chance to consider why I use them and what it says about me as a researcher. I’d also really love to hear what you use and why!

Here’s what I use in a nutshell:

I haven’t used DEVONthink much in the past, but after giving it a more concentrated trial for my last post, I suspect it will make its way into my workflow, too.

Here’s why these tools work for me:

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Posted in Digital Humanities, History & Technology, Libraries, research, Tools, Writing | 2 Comments