Join Digital Scholarship Librarian Kristy Golubiewski-Davis for this series of online conversations, where we’ll be discussing the issues and topics presented in the “Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities” special issue.  The volume is published as an open access online book by Debates in the Digital Humanities.  The discussions throughout the 21/22 academic year are informed by the publication, but no reading is required to join this discussion.

We encourage you to join regardless of if you’ve read the articles or not.  You are invited to read any selection of the chapters below that interest you or to join the discussion and bring your own experiences.

Discussion prompts:

• When we engage in digital scholarship, who are our intended audiences?  Who are we including or excluding when we make that decision?
• Digital Scholarship Teams
  • Do Digital Scholarship project teams have a potentially to create a more flattened team heirarchy?  How do student workers play a role in this?
  • When working with students, how does the process of making the project (digital or physical) relate to skills that students learn?  In an academic setting, what responsibilities do we have to incorporate “on the job” training for student who engage in DS projects, or is it reasonable to make sure students working on projects come with existing experiences?  If expecting them to come with experience, how do you judge that?
  • If you are familiar with the Collaborators Bill of Rights, what are parts that particularly resonate with you?  If you aren’t familiar with it, what would you make sure was in such a document?
• What does sustainable Digital Scholarship look like?  How do you ensure Research, Relevance, and Replicability?
• Given the quote: “more effort should go into exploring the intersections between maker culture and humanities theory, It is equally important to avoid hitching the humanities to questionable trends in technology” (from James Smithies in Chapter 10):  How do we, as scholars and DS practitioners, evaluate when the work we are doing is exploring these intersections and when it’s just hitching a ride on a questionable trend?
• Roxanne Shirazi asks: “Do libraries support DH scholarship, or are they producers of it? Is DH just another suite of services to be offered by the library?” - Where is the line between service and scholarship in DS?

Related Reading (not required):

The above questions were chosen based on the information presented in the following chapters.  We invite you to read any chapters that interest you prior to the discussion meeting and participate in an asynchronous discussion on the readings through our DH Debates reading group.  The built-in tool annotation tools will allow you to engage with comments from other readers in this group asynchronously between discussion meetings.  

Part II. Made by Whom? For Whom?

• Making the RA Matter: Pedagogy, Interface, and Practices | Janelle Jenstad and Joseph Takeda
• Reproducing the Academy: Librarians and the Question of Service in the Digital Humanities | Roxanne Shirazi
• Looks Like We Made It, But Are We Sustaining Digital Scholarship? | Chelsea A. M. Gardner, Gwynaeth McIntyre, Kaitlyn Solberg, and Lisa Tweten
• Full Stack DH: Building a Virtual Research Environment on a Raspberry Pi | James Smithies
• Project Snapshot: Mic Jammer | Allison Burtch and Eric Rosenthal
• The Making of a Digital Humanities Neo-Luddite | Marcel O’Gorman
• Project Snapshot: Made: Technology on Affluent Leisure Time | Garnet Hertz
• Reifying the Maker as Humanist | John Hunter, Katherine Faull, and Diane Jakacki
• All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on Disability | Sara Hendren

Part II context:

““Made by Whom? For Whom?” is the second section, which stresses what is routinely taken for granted in popular maker cultures: who is working, for whom, and under what assumptions about labor and power. Here we have questions about how collaboration and agency are articulated across ranks in the academy (Jenstad and Takeda), together with inquiries into how the academy is made and reproduced, often through affective labor that parses scholarship from service (Shirazi). Service and scholarship are interwoven even further when we consider how digital materials are maintained post-production (Gardner et al.), not to mention how research environments are built, with what resources, and through which dependencies (Smithies). Of course, we must also ask how “makers” get defined in the first place (Hunter et al.; O’Gorman), and in what relation to normalcy and ability (Hendren). Projects in this section parody popular maker cultures (Hertz) as they expose the long-standing alliance of technologies with force and surveillance (Burtch and Rosenthal). Ultimately, this section resists celebratory or romantic models of making to instead examine how technologies — as negotiations — correspond with agency and vulnerability.”

- Excerpted from the Introduction: “I Don’t Know All the Circuitry” by Jentery Sayers
 

This discussion will be virtual, and you will receive a Zoom link by email when you register.

Participants who register early will receive an email update with the discussion questions at the beginning of the month.

All discussions in this series:

10/29: Introduction
12/3: Making and the Humanities
1/28: Made by Whom? For Whom?
2/25: Making as Inquiry
3/31: Making Spaces and Interfaces
4/29: Making Spaces and Interfaces (continued)
5/27: Making, Justice, Ethics