Wednesday, 22 June 2011, 10:30–noon
SES-36: The “#alt-ac” Track: Digital Humanists off the Straight and Narrow Path to Tenure (panel abstract)
Bethany Nowviskie1, Julia Flanders2, Tanya Clement3, Doug Reside3, Dot Porter4, Eric Rochester1
1University of Virginia; 2Brown University; 3University of Maryland, College Park; 4Indiana University
Nowviskie gave a quick overview of her newly launched edited book. “Non-tenure track does not mean non-academic.” No shame. Began using #alt-ac hashtag on Twitter about two years ago to provide central rallying point.
Julia Flanders: anecdote—“I work at Brown University.” “Oh, what do you teach?” Professoriate provides characteristic paradigm for how we understand a university, but it obscures the many different kinds of work that take place there. Flanders enumerated her job history at Brown: graduate student instructor, managing editor at Women Writers Project, cost-recovery staff at STG, a more senior position at WWP + consultant outside the university, lecturer at Indiana and Brown.
Measures and time: by article, by project, ? How one counts time on projects one didn’t originate. Fungibility of project resources—moving a person from one section to another. Acculturation of DH practitioners and its effect upon comfort levels.
Flanders showed three diagrams: one has projects and production labor emanating from single scholarly labor/identity. One has project ID as center, with production labor and scholarly labor emanating outwards. One has organizational ID as central, projects on next ring outwards, and SL and PL attached to individual projects.
Tanya Clement talked about a two-day symposium co-organized with Doug Reside at MITH, “Off the Tracks: Laying new lines for digital humanities scholars.” Impetus: research-oriented work done by people employed in jobs that don’t look as though they have research duties attached. Paths for promotion, retention in humanities centers, how to evaluate the work. [What about those who aren’t attached to DH centers or even “plain” humanities centers?] Showed range of how difficult a DH job is to define, yet offered a snapshot for some kind of evaluation.
Some career paths: research faculty, TT scholars, library faculty, “research active status.”
Doug Reside talked about the scholar-programmer, like the ant-lion of a medieval bestiary. S/he should probably get a PhD or MLIS, but for those who think of themselves as scholars first, a PhD “demonstrates commitment.” It isn’t necessarily ideal to have a faculty job, nor do (some) DH faculty jobs seek scholar-programmers. [For more, see his chapter in Nowviskie’s volume—all of these were condensed from their respective chapters, I think.] Reside sees a shift away from a faculty-service model towards clustering around grant-funded projects associated with humanities centers.
Eric Rochester talked about his background: medievalist and lexicographer before going into systems programming, then swinging back towards academia; now works at UVa’s Scholars Lab. Perhaps most important to communicate (esp. between the academy and the private sector) is what isn’t talked about but defines a group—shared values, timeframes, assumptions.
Dot Porter’s essay was co-written with Amanda Gailey. Two trends: job ads that require more formal credentials as well as specific technical skills; as DH becomes more mainstream, more prestigious institutions that haven’t been involved much are joining—but those institutions’ former grad students are overvalued relative to those from schools that have been doing it for longer. Gailey and Porter found three categories of job postings: professor, librarian, technical/research (similar to Clement’s “research active status”). People say that having higher bar for credentials narrows the applicant pool usefully, but it can cut out people who’d be very good and don’t have a PhD.
Recommendations. If you’re hiring for faculty, yes, require a PhD. If hiring for DH, make the terminal degree more fluid, and ask applicants to explain how they fit. For mid-level or lower positions, don’t specify what the degree must be in (non-CS types can also code well).
q&a:
What about grant proposals? Non-PhDs cannot head their own projects. Nowviskie: the funding bodies they’ve worked with don’t require a PhD of the lead, but UVa does. Bait and switch! Have a co-PI who’s faculty. Flanders: importance of getting visibility for project participants before someone serves as PI, so that their prior expertise is clear. Reinforce the superiority of experience, a track record, over “pure” credentials on paper.
What about time in an alt-ac career to produce one’s own research work? Reside: cf. Google’s 20% time model. Yes, it’s essential, and it has produced other grant work as well. Clement: it can be instituted informally by your supervisor even if the larger org doesn’t support it officially. Nowviskie: it’s important to formalize this in your job description. Flanders: it’s important also to construct everyone as a researcher, not only staff, on a project.
[I had to leave early and missed the remaining discussion.]