Andrew Prescott
I recently took part in an “awayday” meeting to develop a strategic plan for the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Among the suggestions for improvement of the department made on a sticky note was “NO MORE SPREADSHEETS.” It was a fair comment. No one becomes involved with digital humanities in order to ensure that digital humanities projects are more accurately costed or their management made more streamlined. Digital humanities is about creativity and experimentation; they should be a disorganized play space, not a model of managerial propriety. I became interested in digital humanities because I am fascinated by archives and manuscripts, and want to see how digital technologies provide new perspectives on them. Anything that distracts me from that is a waste of time and energy. I do not want to write strategy documents or prepare Gantt charts. I find bureaucratic processes such as research assessment or teaching reviews soul-destroying. I am very bad with money and not a good person to be in charge of budgets, and I am too distracted by research and writing to be a good manager. I do digital humanities because I want to do cool things. But if I want to get the money and resources to do cool things, I need to write carefully costed grant applications, to prepare project plans, and to persuade the university’s managers that digital humanities work is worthwhile. To achieve that, I need to fill out spreadsheets, and get others to complete them as well. The spreadsheets are an inescapable part of our condition.
In 1993, Kevin Kiernan and I undertook some digital imaging of a burnt Cotton manuscript at the British Library. Kevin wrote that the experiment seemed “to portend the start of something really big, expensive, and earth-shattering” (Kiernan, 1994). Digital humanities is potentially (but not necessarily) expensive. We have equipment requirements which can go beyond those of conventional humanities departments, as recent use of synchrotron light sources to examine ancient manuscripts illustrates (Morton et al., 2004; Fleming and Highfield, 2007). We generate data which requires a storage infrastructure and specialist staff to manage the data. Ensuring that digital scholarship is preserved and made sustainable over a long period of time requires resources to undertake the curatorial activities of selection, maintenance, and updating. However, the main expense in digital humanities work is not the capital cost of equipment and buildings. If all we needed was specialist digital equipment, we could probably persuade university administrators and funding bodies to buy it for us, as capital expenditure is a nice containable one-off. What makes digital humanities expensive is the people.
Conventional humanities research is still frequently undertaken by the “lone scholar,” digging into books, manuscripts, and other cultural artifacts in libraries, archives, and museums. Such research can be fitted into regular research days and university vacations. Many assumptions of university management about scholarly publication patterns and career paths in the humanities are still predicated on a “lone scholar” model, even in newer disciplines such as media and cultural studies. One characteristic of digital humanities is that much of its scholarship is team-based and does not easily fit into such historic administrative structures. Of course, this does not mean that digital humanities research cannot be undertaken by lone scholars. Some of the most important reflexive discussion of how engagement with technology is transforming understanding of history, culture, and society continues to be undertaken in these traditional ways. As the volume of digital materials grows, such critical commentary will become more, not less, important. But digital humanities also involves the creation of digital resources ranging from online editions to 3D reconstructions, and at the heart of the digital humanities is the idea that humanities scholarship can be carried out and expressed in a digital environment, that the humanities need no longer be bound by the technological restrictions of the printed codex. The conventional academic structures of humanities scholarship are geared to the production of books and articles. As humanities scholarship moves away from the production of scholarship in book or article form, so different administrative structures will be required.
In order to engage in such digital scholarship, teamwork is essential. The principal investigators who inspired and directed the creation of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org) were legal historians but they needed to enlist many other people to bring their vision to fruition. They required advice from project analysts with experience in the creation of digital resources as to how to approach the material. They used a digitization team to scan the original printed proceedings. These images were turned into machine-readable text by teams of keyboarders. The structure of the XML tags which control the display and search of the digitized text was defined by specialist XML designers. Automated software was used for some of the tagging, but other tagging had to be undertaken by experienced editors with an understanding of the way the XML was structured. A high degree of computer expertise was required for the design of the search engine, the indexing of the data, the creation of the interface, and the mounting of the resource on servers. Again, these various activities were often best undertaken by a team. This complex network of activity had to be tied together with strong project management. Four separate funding agencies provided funding for the development of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, as well as the three universities in which the project was based. The project web pages list 22 people who were involved in its development. The administrative infrastructure required for the creation of groundbreaking digital scholarship has more in common with filmmaking than old-style academic publishing.
It is a commonplace that success in the digital economy depends as much on successful business models as on technological innovation. T. Michel Nevens (2000:81) has observed that “Although Silicon Valley is justly famous for technological innovation, innovations in management approaches, policies and investment strategies – in short, business models – are equally responsible for the Valley’s extraordinary economic performance.” As is well known, the success of Google depends on its highly targeted advertising, while the resurgence of Apple reflects the success of the business models associated with iTunes. Amazon’s initial focus on book selling reflected the fact that books are suitable commodities for online ordering and dispatch, while the Amazon fulfillment service, in which third parties undertake warehousing and dispatch while Amazon provides the ordering platform, is a good example of an innovative business model in online retailing. Just as with Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, the ability of digital humanities to establish itself as a significant force driving forward the academic world’s development of digital scholarship depends on its ability to create innovative business models within the academy. According to Nevens, successful Silicon Valley business models are:
flexible. They are highly focused … They are talent driven. Technical, marketing and managerial talent are in short supply, and Silicon Valley firms have devised ways to leverage other people’s talent as well as develop their own. Finally, Silicon Valley business models are open and fluid.
(Nevens, 2000:81–2)
Notwithstanding the importance of Stanford University in fostering the development of Silicon Valley, universities are generally conservative bureaucratic environments which are far removed from the open and flexible environment of Silicon Valley. If flexibility and openness are preconditions for success in the digital world, can this be achieved by digital humanities units in a university environment?
In recent years, utopian claims as to the way in which digital humanities might reshape the academy (usually the American academy) have become commonplace. The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (2009) envisages the emergence of a new institutional topography: “not just disciplinary, but one involving alternative configurations to producing knowledge – open-ended, global in scope, designed to attract new audiences, and to establish novel institutional models.” The manifesto imagines the disappearance of the traditional academic department and its transformation into a temporary pop-up phenomenon of “finite knowledge problematics” which “comes into existence for a limited period, only to mutate or cease as the research questions upon which it is founded become stable and their explanatory power wanes.” Among the kind of transient departments imagined by the manifesto are a Department of Print Culture Studies, an Institute of Vocal Studies, and a Department of Erasure Studies. This is an attractive vision, but the reality would probably prove less appealing: arbitrarily defined subject areas reflecting whatever the university’s marketing department thinks is the best choice, taught by adjunct staff on short-term contracts. Utopian visions of the sort found in the Digital Humanities Manifesto are helpful insofar as they encourage debate about the nature and character of humanities scholarship, but are less useful as a blueprint for the exploitation of the potential of digital technologies to stimulate the production of innovative forms of scholarship.
Commentators have acknowledged the importance of developing appropriate institutional structures to support the digital humanities, but there is little detailed discussion of what these structures might look like. Thus, while Willard McCarty in 2008 surveyed the different types of practice within digital humanities and urged that “the institutional structures we build for the digital humanities should reflect the nature of the practice as it has emerged in the last few decades” (McCarty, 2008:259), he did not develop further what this meant, beyond a recognition that digital humanities was more than a “support” activity. Similarly, Christine Borgman (2009) argued passionately that the digital humanities were at a critical moment of transition from a niche area to a fully fledged community, and stressed the importance of arguing for the development of infrastructure to support this, but was again vague as to exactly what this structure might consist of. The potential contribution of particular areas of the academy to the development of digital humanities has occasionally been stressed. Kirschenbaum (2010) has stressed the particular affinity between English departments and the digital humanities, while Sula (2013) points out that digital humanities also embraces materials and methods of interest to many other disciplines apart from English, and argues that libraries are particularly well placed to develop networks of expertise in the digital humanities.
The administrative landscape of the digital humanities is filled with what McGann (2014:131) has vividly described as “a haphazard, inefficient, and often jerry-built arrangement of intramural instruments – freestanding centers, labs, enterprises, and institutes, or special digital groups set up outside the traditional departmental structure of the university.” The directory of digital humanities centers maintained by the international umbrella organization centerNet (http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet) listed in August 2014 nearly 200 separate digital humanities centers across every continent. Similarly, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC: www.hastac.org) has over 400 affiliated organizations. The digital humanities center has provided the main engine for the growth of digital humanities over the past 25 years, and there can be no doubt that digital humanities centers will continue to play a leading role in shaping digital scholarship. This is apparent from two recent reports, a survey of digital humanities in the United States produced in November 2008 for the Council on Library and Information Resources by Diane M. Zorich (2008), and Sustaining Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start-Up Phase by Nancy L. Maron and Sarah Pickle (2014). These works provide the most detailed accounts of the administrative framework of the digital humanities, but most of the examples discussed in them are from the United States of America. To provide a more international perspective, it is also essential to refer to the remarkable series of articles by Patrik Svensson (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) reviewing the emerging landscape of the digital humanities. Svensson addresses many aspects of the intellectual formation of the digital humanities, but his emphasis on the way in which various digital humanities units function as spaces allowing new forms of intellectual contact and collaboration is vital in understanding the success of the center as a means of promoting digital humanities. John Bradley (2012) has also provided important insights into the philosophy underpinning the development of digital humanities centers in his description of the way in which the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London was conceived as a unit for the pursuit of collaborative research in which the computing specialist works hand-in-hand with the humanities researcher as an intellectual peer, with none of the distinction between academic and professional staff which so frequently bedevils collaborative work.
The digital humanities center is helpfully defined by Diane Zorich as “an entity where new media and technologies are used for humanities-based research, teaching, and intellectual engagement and experimentation. The goals of the center are to further humanities scholarship, create new forms of knowledge, and explore technology’s impact on humanities-based disciplines” (Zorich, 2008:4). Among the characteristic activities of a digital humanities center are the creation of digital resources, the production of digital tools for humanities work, the organization of lectures and seminars, the provision of digital humanities training in a variety of forms ranging from workshops to academic degree programs, and collaborative work in developing digital skills, expertise, and projects in other departments. While the digital humanities center is not a necessary precondition of digital humanities activity, nevertheless many of the hopes and dreams of digital humanities have in recent years been bound up with the work of such centers. The funding and advocacy of the digital humanities offered by bodies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Mellon Foundation has encouraged universities to invest in the creation of digital humanities centers, many of which have quickly built up imposing portfolios of projects. One of the oldest and most celebrated of such centers is the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (www.iath.virginia.edu), which since 1992 has built up a portfolio of over 50 collaborative research projects by faculty from both humanities and computer science departments in subjects ranging from Tibetan literature in the Nyingma tradition to the circus in America. One of the attractions of such centers for university management is that they are often very successful in attracting large quantities of research income. The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London secured over £8 million in research grants for about 30 projects between 2008 and 2013.
While there is a strong family resemblance between digital humanities centers, almost every center differs in its formal character, with a plethora of ingenious administrative and institutional solutions used by different universities and colleges to create, develop, and maintain their centers. Some are freestanding institutes, administered at faculty or university level; others form parts of existing academic departments, in disciplines ranging from literature to library studies; some are academic departments in their own right; others are treated as support services and are part of the library or computing services; some just consist of loose alliances of local enthusiasts. The disciplinary relationships of digital humanities centers are equally complex: some are avowedly interdisciplinary and float above faculty or school level; others are placed under disciplinary umbrellas. Most longstanding digital humanities centers have undertaken a bewildering institutional journey of change, development and uncertainty in their funding and governance. The Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Sheffield, for example, arose from the shared location of a number of early humanities computing projects in office space provided by the University Library. The Arts and Humanities Graduate School provided the HRI with a more formal governance structure through a management committee, leading the HRI to acquire an additional role in promoting interdisciplinary activity. The HRI eventually became one of a number of overarching “supercenters” and was funded directly by the Faculty. However, growing emphasis on its digital services saw it subsequently formally defined as a support service within the Faculty. Many older digital humanities centers can tell similar tales of administrative improvization and adjustment, reflecting a consensus among university administrators that, while it was important that there was digital expertise in the humanities, no one was sure exactly where it fitted in.
The digital humanities center offers many advantages. It provides a clear focus of expertise within the university, a place where academic researchers can easily find authoritative and trustworthy advice on digital humanities. The way in which digital humanities centers develop portfolios of projects covering a wide range of disciplines, countries and periods illustrates to academic colleagues the potential scope of digital humanities and promotes the cross-fertilization of digital humanities approaches across different disciplines. The digital humanities center helps assure the long-term sustainability of digital scholarship by ensuring that standards and technical approaches used by projects are open and sustainable. For Mark Sample (2010), a digital humanities center can be “the chance to work with programmers who speak the language of humanities as well as PERL, Python, or PHP,” to share notes with “colleagues who routinely navigate grant applications and budget deadlines, who are paid to know about the latest digital tools and trends - but who’d know about them and share their knowledge even if they weren’t paid a dime.” In Sample’s view, a center is valuable as “an institutional advocate on campus who can speak within a single voice to administrators, to students, to donors, to publishers, to communities about the value of the digital humanities.” Digital humanities centers often act as “interdisciplinary ‘third places’ – a term sociologist Ray Oldenburg has used to identify a social space, district from home and workplace” (Zorich, 2008:vi). Within this “third place,” projects and ideas can cross-pollinate, so that the musicologist can see how the approach of (say) classicists to the digital markup and presentation of material is relevant to her. One of the most valuable roles of a digital humanities center is in providing a neutral space for shared discussion, programming, making and sharing of ideas. Patrik Svensson has described how this interest in creating new spaces of scholarship (an interest shared with librarians) has influenced the development of the Swedish HumLab. There is perhaps a tendency to want to assign fixed functions to a digital humanities center, and a feeling that it should perform a readily defined and well understood role, just like a library or archive. However, as Sula (2013) has illustrated in his thoughtful discussion of a conceptual model to define the relationship between digital humanities and libraries, the boundaries between the digital humanities center and other institutional components of the academy are usually fluid, reflecting not only local institutional structures and strengths but also the evolution of technology and scholarly methods.
The digital humanities center has been the major institutional vehicle of the digital humanities, and this will probably continue to be the case. However, it would be mistaken to assume that the self-funded digital humanities center is the indispensable sine qua non of digital humanities. The potential value of funding and infrastructural development by national government or regional agencies is illustrated by the European experience. In the UK, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils has been very active since the 1970s in promoting many digital initiatives in a variety of disciplines and has been the main architect of the cyberinfrastructure of UK higher education, while the Arts and Humanities Research Council has funded a series of initiatives including the Arts and Humanities Data Service and an ICT Methods Network (although funding for these was withdrawn in 2008). In France, the national service for funding and carrying out academic research, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, has supported the development of Le centre pour l’édition électronique ouverte (Cléo) which has developed a highly integrated platform for open access academic publishing in the arts and humanities. There have been some major European Union initiatives, such as for example NeDiMAH (the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities: www.nedimah.eu), which is mapping the use of digital research across Europe and promoting its coordination by creating an integrated ontology and online forum, and the ambitious DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities: www.dariah.eu), which seeks to build an integrated cooperative network of people, information, and tools to facilitate long-term access and use of research data across Europe. DARIAH has recently established a formal legal consortium to allow members from fifteen European countries to collaborate together in developing a shared European research infrastructure. The international federation, centerNet, a constituent organization of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, is also seeking to build links between digital humanities centers internationally. The way in which these various international networks and initiatives develop will be fundamental to the future development of cyberinfrastructures for digital scholarship in the arts and humanities.
It is easy to create a digital humanities center; on the centerNet web pages, Lynne Siemens provides a guide as to how to set up a digital humanities center which suggests that the main requirements are enthusiasm and support (ideally in the form of some seed corn funding) from the university’s management (Siemens, 2012). The difficult trick with a digital humanities center is to keep it going ten or twenty years down the road. Most digital humanities centers are established following some successful research grants, and “soft” research funding is generally the lifeblood of the center. Consequently, digital humanities is a land populated by projects. Anne Burdick and colleagues, in their book Digital Humanities (2012), see the project as the basic unit of digital humanities: “Projects are both nouns and verbs. A project is a kind of scholarship that requires design, management, negotiation, and collaboration” (Burdick et al., 2012:124). In the view of these authors, the project is the main means by which digital humanities is shaping post-print scholarship and exploding the conventions associated with a book- and article-bound academy. This is perhaps an exaggerated view: projects are equally important in many other types of academic activity, as the large number of non-digital projects including activities ranging from performances to research networks funded by research councils illustrate. The growth of the project in the arts and humanities is perhaps due more to changes in the funding opportunities available to scholars than to the rise of digital media. This raises an important point: the extent to which digital humanities centers pursue research because of its inherent intellectual interest or simply in order to raise the research income necessary to keep the center in business. As a center grows, securing sufficient new research projects and income to retain all the staff can become increasingly difficult and demanding, and may discourage risk taking. All those who have been involved in developing a digital humanities center will be familiar with the difficult decision as to whether to pursue a project which is not technically or intellectually rewarding but might offer some funding to keep a member of staff in post. For many digital humanities centers, the pressing issues of sustainability are not technical ones but the rather more prosaic ones of securing reliable long-term funding to keep the center’s staff in place.
The dependence of centers on soft funding from research grants is both a blessing and a curse. Digital humanities centers are often among the most successful humanities units in grant capture, but their desperation to keep the money flowing can mean that the center and its staff end up on a treadmill, putting in grant applications in which they are not terribly interested just to raise money, thereby losing control of the intellectual agenda of the center. Bethany Nowviskie (2012) in a perceptive lecture reviewing the evolution of provision in the digital humanities at the University of Virginia, perhaps historically the leading institution in the field, has described how the Scholars’ Lab stemmed from previous facilities in the library and IT service. As a result, the Scholars’ Lab has stable funding provided by the library and IT service, and Nowviskie considers this a major factor in explaining its success. Likewise, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, another of the most successful US centers, is jointly supported by Maryland University’s College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries. It is possible that, in our anxiety to affirm the intellectual credentials of digital humanities and demonstrate its parity with longstanding humanities disciplines, we too quickly distance ourselves from libraries and IT services. In funding terms, if nothing else, there is a great deal to say for digital humanities centers having a closer relationship with libraries and IT services.
Another means of creating a mixed economy and reducing financial risk is to develop teaching income. Teaching has been an important component of digital humanities centers since their inception. For example, the early workshops organized by Harold Short and Willard McCarty at King’s College London were fundamental to developing institutional support for the development of digital humanities there. More recently, the organization of summer workshops and institutes has been a major means of spreading the gospel of digital humanities. The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, a week-long program held at the University of Victoria in Canada, attracts annually over 600 participants. Many centers offer full Masters’ programs and a number are now offering undergraduate programs. But while teaching can provide a means of ensuring the financial sustainability of the center, it creates its own difficulties and dilemmas. In designing a digital humanities teaching program, it can be difficult to ensure the right balance of practical skills and reflective analysis. A program that simply engages in a highly theorized form of “digital studies” will not give sufficient weight to the aspiration of digital humanities to transform scholarly practice and communication. On the other hand, teaching that focuses on, say, programming and technical skills runs the risk of overlooking the potential of the humanities to provide new critical insights into our digital praxis. Above all, there is the problem of who undertakes this teaching. For most university courses, a doctoral qualification is an essential qualification for teaching. However, the staff in digital humanities centers with the deepest technical understanding and awareness of digital humanities practice often may not have doctorates. How far and in what way do they get involved in the teaching program? Is a doctorate an essential qualification to being a fully paid-up member of the digital humanities community?
These tensions around staffing and career structures are at the heart of the dynamics shaping the institutional infrastructure of the digital humanities. For Jerome McGann (2014:130–1), the very existence of the various digital humanities centers, labs, and institutes represents (paradoxically) a rejection by humanities academics of digital scholarship, a wish to keep at arm’s length the different types of people and skills required for digital work. He points out how:
The emergence of digital technology has brought a new and crucial populace into the university. So far as the university’s political and social structure is concerned, they are employees hired to serve the faculties. I leave aside the fact that these people are often scholars of distinction in their own right.
(McGann, 2014:130)
Although the skills of these staff are essential for digital humanities scholarship, the structure of the institution separates them from regular faculty. McGann points out that, to make matters even more difficult, these staff “are an expensive population to support, commanding high salaries, often higher than the faculty persons they might be working with” (2014:130). These tensions are also explored by John Bradley (2012) in his description of the development of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Bradley rejects the idea that the vision and shape of a project should be determined by the leadership of academics from conventional humanities departments. Instead, he envisages digital humanities research as being taken forward by shared discussions involving a range of academic and technical specialists, with the modeling work undertaken in the development of digital humanities projects representing a major research activity. Bradley sees the digital humanities researcher as equivalent in status (if not in background) to the conventional humanities academic, and takes issue with Jennifer Edmond (2005), who has argued for the creation of a profession of “digital humanities intermediaries” acting as brokers between humanities researchers and technical staff. For Bradley, the process of expressing humanities scholarship in digital form is in itself an act of research just as important and equal in intellectual weight to more conventional humanities scholarship. Bradley expresses concern that in many institutions technical work is regarded as “a kind of support work – perhaps, in extreme cases, as similar to what is done to the academic’s car by his garage mechanics” (Bradley, 2012:11), and deprecates the use of the term “techie” by humanities scholars “who don’t know and understand the work we do.” Abhorring such distinctions, Bradley declares that “innovation in the digital humanities often arises out of the pooled talents of a range of experts, and in the best environment where this happens there is recognition and support for the interlinked actions of many players” (Bradley, 2012:11).
Bradley describes a kind of institutional paradise for digital humanities; the question is the extent to which it has ever been achieved and the scale on which it is likely to be achieved. It is striking, for example, that notwithstanding the philosophy described by Bradley, very few of the more technically oriented staff from the Department of Digital Humanities were submitted by King’s College London to the British research assessment exercise in 2014, suggesting institutional pressures in another direction. In general, the ability of digital humanities centers to provide adequate career development opportunities for their staff has been patchy. Digital humanities centers are frequently created by groups of enthusiastic and charismatic academics who have realized the potential of digital technologies to transform their subject area. They use research income to recruit some students with a talent for coding, perhaps persuade some people with a professional computing background to join them or offer someone from the library or IT services a more interesting job. Everything goes well. More research income is secured, and the team grows and jells. The students had meant to go on and do a PhD, but the work in the center is more interesting and they are after all working in a university. But the more successful the research team is, the more difficult it is to secure the money to keep the team together. Some grant applications fail, and some longstanding members of the Center lose their jobs. Then the indispensable geographic information systems (GIS) specialist, conscious that his skills are in demand in industry, asks for a promotion. The university administration say that there isn’t a promotion mechanism for someone on his type of contract. One of the most talented of the staff who came in as student notices a lectureship in digital humanities elsewhere. With 10 years’ experience on a dozen digital humanities projects, this staff member is superbly qualified for an academic position in digital humanities, but the lectureship requires a PhD, which she never completed because she was so devoted to the work of the center. It gradually dawns on most of the staff of the center that they have become trapped there, doomed constantly to try and secure income from a dwindling stream of research income. Their commitment to the work means that they will probably stay, but their hopes that they were contributing to a new form of academic enterprise and that they might have an exciting new type of career have been betrayed.
This is the situation in far too many digital humanities centers: very talented, scholarly and knowledgeable staff with vast experience of the creation of digital humanities projects who have devoted themselves to securing the projects to keep the center afloat and have never had the opportunity to build the academic career in digital humanities they would like. To some extent, this is an unavoidable result of the way in which academic career structures have developed in recent years. One of the most unattractive features of American university life is the apartheid between “faculty” (with those holding tenure regarded as the highest point of human evolution) and other “staff.” While the intellectual protections provided by tenure are undoubtedly necessary, this does not justify the effective denigration of other intellectual workers such as librarians, archivists, and IT specialists. As Bradley (2012:12) emphasizes, this leads to the unstated assumption in digital humanities that “faculty” provide the vision, while the technical staff implement it. One of the most unfortunate developments in UK higher education in recent years has been the importation of this distinction between “academic staff” and “professional services,” with librarians and other cognate groups losing their longstanding “academic-related” status. In other European countries, similar academic hierarchies frequently mean that digital humanities skills are seen as secondary, and academic leadership and vision is regarded as the most important requirement. It is perhaps in challenging these antiquated power structures that the digital humanities has one of its best opportunities to transform the academy, but one must be careful not to run away with utopian enthusiasm. The adjunct crisis in the United States shows how attacks on the privileged position of academic staff can easily prove counterproductive. Yet somehow we need to find a means of moving towards a reshaping of academic structures so that it can accommodate both the writer/researcher and the programmer as intellectual equals and achieve that vision of a shared enterprise described by John Bradley.
For Jerome McGann (2014:1), the digital humanities center represents in many ways a failure of the academy adequately to engage with the way in which the whole of our cultural inheritance is being recurated and re-edited in digital forms and institutional structures. McGann points out how, in large projects like Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Google Books, the lead has been taken by large commercial publishers and libraries and there has been little involvement hitherto by scholars of the period, notwithstanding the efforts of projects such as 18thConnect to retrospectively fix the resulting problems. McGann suggests that part of the reason for this lack of scholarly involvement is the liminal position of the digital humanities center and its staff within universities. Similarly, in another powerfully argued piece, Peter Robinson (2014) notes that the growth of the digital humanities since 1995 has been largely due to the support from research funders and the resulting growth of digital humanities centers, which have produced “scores of [projects], worldwide, offering (again and again) access to outstanding scholarship and to resources otherwise inaccessible” (Robinson, 2014:245). This project work has also fed into the growth of shared tools such as TEI. However, Robinson sees this phase as having now reached the limits of its expansion and suggests that a backlash against this model is now evident. Robinson notes that even the 200 institutions belonging to centerNet represent a tiny proportion of 200,000 universities worldwide, and it is unlikely that we will ever see a situation where there is sufficient funding to allow most of these universities to have a digital humanities center. The digital humanities center was an appropriate response to a situation where there were few people with the skills, equipment, and resources to undertake digital scholarship. We are now in a different situation:
Now we have millions of digital objects to address, as the whole body of world knowledge and culture is translated into digital form. Now we have in the Internet a medium that unites communication, collaboration, and publication into an instantaneous and fluid whole. In a moment, we can see what someone else has created, we can add to it, publish it – and in turn, another person can see, add, publish. And “anyone” is anyone with a computer, anyone with a mobile phone – more than a billion people. We are no longer pioneers for a few. The whole world is turning digital, and we are part of it.
(Robinson, 2014:247)
For Robinson, the digital humanities center has fulfilled its role, and we now need to think about the type of connectivity necessary to create large-scale cyberinfrastructures. These criticisms reflect the criticisms of Diane Zorich, who notes that digital humanities centers are prone to becoming standalone silos engaging in “boutique digitization” which limit scale and connectivity:
First, the silo-like operation of current centers favors individual projects that are not linked to larger digital resources that would make them more widely known within the research community. When one examines the projects of the 32 surveyed centers en masse, one finds hundreds of projects of potential interest to larger communities that are little known outside the environs of the center and its partners. Moreover, in the absence of preservation plans, many of these projects risk being orphaned over time, as staff, funding, and programming priorities change. In the absence of repositories that enable greater exposure and long-term access, the current landscape of many silo-like centers results in unfettered and untethered digital production that will be detrimental to humanities scholarship.
The silo-like nature of centers also results in overlapping agendas and activities, particularly in areas of training, digitization of collections and metadata development. With centers competing for the same limited funding pool, they can ill afford to continue with redundant efforts.
(Zorich, 2008:49)
Maron and Pickle (2014), building on some of these concerns, paint a picture of digital humanities work often having an uncertain place in the overall management of data and computational activity within universities. They suggest that, in order to enhance the impact and longevity of digital humanities work, it is necessary to have more integrated institutional support and methodologies.
The common thread in all these recent criticisms of the digital humanities center is the need to scale up the work of the centers and to create greater connectivity. Exactly how this can be achieved is often left unclear. The most concrete suggestions are made by Peter Robinson (2014), who argues for the development of new forms of online collaboration by scholars working with the millions of digital objects now available so that “What Google Maps and TripAdviser do for hotels and restaurants, what Orbitz and SkyScanner and Expedia do for airline schedules, we could do for books, manuscripts, texts, knowledge” (Robinson, 2014:253). Robinson sees collaboration around tools, rights, and access as essential to achieving this, and argues for a shift from content creation towards collaborative work on existing data. This is a beguiling vision. While humanities is frequently depicted as the domain of the “lone scholar,” it has nevertheless always been a highly collaborative endeavor. We may gather our data separately, but we then often share and discuss it. What we need to do is to transfer this behavior into an online environment, so that we collaborate and link together our explorations of libraries and archives. However, such collaborative environments will still require some kind of technical support and focus, and the digital humanities center will continue to have a role here. If digital humanities is to have an impact on our future digital state in a world of “big digitization” by large commercial interests, increased cooperation and links will be essential. The work of centerNet will be vital in fostering such collaboration. As Robinson notes, the role of the European DARIAH project, with its explicit focus on the sharing of data and the creation of infrastructures to facilitate this, also points a way forward. The creation of large-scale research infrastructures of the type envisaged by DARIAH can be seen as representing a digital parallel to the emergence of library consortia in the twentieth century, and may prove to be equally influential in the way in which future scholars access information and disseminate their scholarship.
This still leaves uncertain the question as to how digital humanities relates to the mainstream academy. McGann sees the digital humanities labs and centers as a means of distancing academic engagement in the development of digital infrastructures. Does this mean that we should as a community be pressing harder for the development of digital humanities centers into full-blown academic departments? There is of course a risk that by corralling digital humanities into a separate department, we provide an even more effective silo which discourages the adoption of digital methods in other disciplines. However, it is more likely that digital techniques will become so commonplace in other disciplines that the function of digital humanities as a separate activity will be questioned. Peter Webster of the British Library, for example, has remarked that “The end game for a Faculty of DH should be that the use of the tools becomes so integrated within Classics, French, and Theology that it can be disbanded, having done its job” (Webster, 2013). This is perhaps an oversimplistic view of both the nature of digital methods and the structure of humanities research. As Robinson (2014:255) observes, there will always be a need for trailblazing new developments on the intersection of humanities and information technology, and it is undoubtedly in this kind of pioneering scientific work that an important part of the future mission of digital humanities lies. But what is the most appropriate nature of the space in which such work can be taken forward? As we have seen, the center, for all its strengths, has significant drawbacks, and may have outlived its usefulness. The academic department seems too constrained by past traditions easily to cope with the mixture of skills and perspectives which the digital humanities will require. We may perhaps need to think about the development of specialist labs and units, with a more focused scientific agenda than the present digital humanities centers, perhaps analogous to the units in which systems biology is studied or the “dry labs” of bioscientists.
Digital humanities centers have played an important part in transforming the landscape of humanities scholarship, but as we seek to build and extend our digital infrastructure to cope with the new digital world, the mission will be a twofold one: first, to build greater connectivity and collaboration between and across existing centers, resources, and practitioners; and, second, to ensure that we do not lose our pioneering spirit and continue to seek out and explore technologies that will shed fresh light on our cultural heritage and inheritance. In pursuing that mission, building and creating networks is the most important activity of all. We must build alliances with coders, librarians, curators, photographers, archivists, artists, project managers, and all the range of new professions and skills. This must inherently involve restating where the academic sits into that network – wherever it is, it is not automatically at the top of the tree. Those engaged in digital humanities work in universities also need to forge alliances with those bodies outside the academy that shape our digital and cultural landscape: libraries, archives, galleries, opera houses, theatres, orchestras, dance companies, broadcasters, as well as digital artists, and startups of all kinds. The digital humanist should be an explorer in this new cultural landscape, and in doing so should be constantly seeking to create new cross-connections and new links.
As Mark Sample has eloquently stated:
don’t sit around waiting for a digital humanities center to pop up on your campus or make you a primary investigator on a grant. Act as if there’s no such thing as a digital humanities center. Instead, create your own network of possible collaborators. Don’t hope for or rely upon institutional support or recognition. To survive and thrive, digital humanists must be agile, mobile, insurgent. Decentralized and nonhierarchical. Stop forming committees and begin creating coalitions. Seek affinities over affiliations, networks over institutes.
(Sample, 2010)
The existing infrastructure has provided a very effective means of building digital humanities in its first phase, but we must be wary of putting all our energy into preserving that infrastructure. The institutional landscape of the digital humanities must evolve and change as the digital world changes, and the watchwords will always be flexibility and nimbleness. The digital humanities has always been pragmatic and effective at building alliances and connections, and it needs to draw on these strengths in developing its next phase.