Schedule

The Invisible Lab: Collaborative Individualism and the Paradox of the Digital Humanities
What does it mean to collaborate in the Digital Humanities? Specifically, what can the environment of the Laboratory (or Center, or workshop, or seminar) enable as the site of such collaboration? A successful cooperative endeavor in the Digital Humanities lies at the intersection between disciplines, skills and professions, bringing together practitioners from diverse backgrounds to unite around common goals. Yet, within the space of the Digital Humanities Lab, each member of a given project — be it critical inquiry, building a platform, or founding a program — often experiences diverging expectations, or works towards individual ends. In this presentation, I want to examine the uniquely collaborative nature of the DH Laboratory both as a group of individuals and as a collective, to see how competing individual goals can be brought to bear on a common set of problems, and to determine the points at which the individual nature of specifically Humanities research becomes at odds with the cooperation that is necessary for most DH projects. I will touch on the unique needs of the various members of Digital Humanities collaborations, considering how they may be constrained by their professional roles, who might be more focused on output as a standalone product, and whose contributions to the projects are often overlooked or take divergent forms that are undervalued in an academic context. By using my own experience with the Stanford Literary Lab as a test case, I hope to shed light on the paradoxical nature of collaboration and facilitate discussion on how we can create new, more successful models, for the future of the field.

The Unequal Labor of Open-Access Scholarship: or, Who Said Digital Projects Aren’t Rigorous?
This presentation considers twin dilemmas. On the one hand, “digital scholarship” and “open access” are often conflated in scholarly communication circles, causing some motivations underlying each agenda to become flattened or overlooked. On the other hand, whole swaths of communication discourse in academia are unconvinced that digital/OA work can be scholarly, peer-reviewed, and rigorous — staples for legitimizing research that gets published online. While there are many reasons for this unconvincing, some of them hinge on differing assumptions about what constitutes “un/equal labor.” In this presentation, I invite us to consider the rigor of authoring webtexts in the context of the Digital Humanities. I will ask us to consider what we mean when we talk about “digital scholarship” in the humanities, with a particular focus on digital humanities projects that take the form of scholarly multimedia published in open-access, online-only journals. Within the context of dozens of journals that publish this type of scholarship, I will invite us to look closely at the editorial peer-review process of the leading journal, Kairos, as an exemplar of both rigor and unequal labor, and as a testament to the challenges to legitimacy that online, open-access journals (particularly in the humanities) still face.