Quintessence of Ham

More Hiring!

2020-07-20T00:00:00+02:00

Over the past few months my new team has been modeling digital research methods into modular “workflows” that can be mixed and recombined in an open-source software workbench we have been prototyping at C²DH. We have made good progress with our small team of five and are now ready moving to the next stage of the project, where we will hire additional humanities researchers and software developers to continue prototyping and begin implementation. Today we’re announcing searches for two new developers to join us this fall.

The new developer positions are roughly divided between front-end and back-end responsibilities. For the front-end developer, we’re looking for someone with extensive experience in JavaScript for software development (ideally including React). Because we’re designing software for novice users, we are particularly interested in candidates with a background in UI/UX. The back-end developer should also have experience in JavaScript, and also familiarity with Python for software development, since much of our core analytical code is in Python. On the back-end side, we’re especially looking for someone with experience and an interest in containerization and virtual environments, which will be essential for enabling replicability and traceability of researchers’ methods. As part of a small team, both developers will have responsibility over core components of the project and the freedom to experiment and find creative solutions to tough problems.

Position details and application information for both jobs are available on the University of Luxembourg’s recruitment page.

Now Hiring!

2019-09-12T00:00:00+02:00

In a few weeks I’ll begin a project – the Digital History Advanced Research Projects Accelerator – as part of my new position at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). The Accelerator aims to create and promote software that capitalizes on digitalized historical research practices. More important than this software – and the key to its success – is the team I am currently recruiting to participate in its development and design. With the generous support of the Luxembourg National Research Fund and the University of Luxembourg, we’re running searches for a dozen new positions over the next year, including three postdoctoral researchers, three software developers, four fully-funded PhD positions, and administrative staff, and we also have funding to hire external consultants as needed. As with other projects I’ve been fortunate enough to lead, the Accelerator will depend on deep collaboration between software developers and academics, students and faculty. And inside the C²DH, the Accelerator team will be able to draw on and contribute to this much larger (and still growing!) laboratory for creative historical research and teaching. We’re going to build some crazy and fun things together.

Two key positions already open are:

I hope that you’ll share these notices widely, or consider joining the team. Because the timing of the postdoc search is awkward, given the time of year and the expected start date, I encourage you to get in touch with me even if your profile or availability doesn’t match one of the currently advertised positions.

Tropy

2017-10-26T14:39:47+02:00

In late November 2010, on the last day of a research visit to Aix-en-Provence, I set down some thoughts on how historians’ practices had seemed to change overnight:

what is the future of the archive?

archival work now focused more narrowly, more intensely. but also potentially doesn’t provide enough time to get the feel for the archives and change direction.

digital photography as a major change. archives now about raw collection, little or no feedback loop between what’s being observed and what comes next.

requires a fundamentally different rhythm, one that i’m not yet comfortable with

My reflections — which went on to include such uninspired predictions as “finding aids will soon all be online” — drew on my own experience working in an unfamiliar archive, but also on my observation of other researchers in the reading room. What had been an unusual practice just a few years earlier — Mary Gayne stands out as a trendsetter — was now simply the way one worked in archives. The other researchers I met that month in Aix — Erica Johnson, Jenna Nigro, and Jessica Pearson — all spent the bulk of their time photographing.

Seven years later, I’m still not entirely comfortable with the new rhythm of archival research. In the interim I tried to make sense of it with software like Zotero and DEVONthink, iPhoto (and later Apple Photos), and even my old friend FileMaker, all without success. And so it is precisely this discomfort, unalloyed, that inspired Tropy and that drives so much of the “digital” work in a discipline whose research practices are already entirely mediated by digital objects. Even with these notes in hand it’s now almost impossible to imagine how disorienting it once seemed to spend time in the archives photographing thousands of pages rather than reading tens; nonetheless, this is an experience shared by all but our most junior colleagues. We’ve changed our ways, but along the way we’ve unwittingly created new problems of organization and analysis of our effectively limitless personal digital archives. Where the historian’s research program once imposed some kind of order, however idiosyncratic, on an archive (itself already orderly, in all likelihood), the imperative to photograph as much as possible dissociates objects from context, atomizes documents into fragments, promises abundance but delivers disorder. There’s no technological quick fix, and as yet no new professional norms to offer guidance, but my hope is that this little piece of software will serve as a first lifeline for researchers adrift on a silent sea of JPGs.

Long-term Sustainability of PressForward

2015-10-23T17:20:55+02:00

As this year’s Open Access Week winds down, I’m really pleased to share that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will generously fund a new, three-year phase of PressForward to ensure its long-term sustainability. The key deliverables of the grant are the launch of a dozen high-quality science publications and the continued refinement of the PressForward software to lower the barrier to entry for new research groups who want to create a collaborative publication.

While “sustainability” is probably the most dreaded criterion of any grant application, it’s an area that I actually enjoy working on in its own right. At RRCHNM we’ve been fortunate to shepherd Zotero and Omeka through phases of grant funding that were explicitly intended to lay the foundation for the projects’ long-term viability, and we’ve also worked hard to establish an effective business model to keep those projects running and growing indefinitely, on their own steam.

Zotero, for example, has been entirely sustainable since April 2013. We continue to do some important grant-funded work, but these projects are now essentially above and beyond the costs of Zotero’s infrastructure and core development, which are sustained via the sale of Zotero services (primarily cloud syncing and collaboration).

While Zotero might seem like an edge case — how many DH projects have millions of users, some fraction of whom are willing to pay for an optional service? — the principles behind its path to sustainability are fairly generalizable:

Build something good, open, and free that’s easy to use and encourages others to help develop it
Get as many people as possible using your project in order to benefit from whatever percentage of that user base “converts” to contributing in some tangible way (e.g. informal outreach, code contributions, paying for optional services)

At first glance this model might look a lot like a business plan for a crappy startup. But there are two key ways in which it differs. First of all, the “open” aspect isn’t just good politics: it’s a powerful motivator for encouraging community involvement in a project, and it signals that the project isn’t simply top-down. Second, there are no “???” and “Profit!” phases to the plan, which frees us take a long-range perspective on user experience.

Launching a new project is of course exciting, both for developers and for funders. But establishing a project on sound footing for the long-term is particularly rewarding, because it means that all the hard work and money and good will that went into the project will continue to benefit the community. We’re all extremely fortunate that Sloan and other funders (e.g. Mellon and NEH) are increasingly sensitive to the importance of long-term sustainability, and that they are taking an active interest in working with projects to put them on a sustainable path.

We’ll be sharing more details next week about the specifics of PressForward’s new direction phase in a formal announcement at the project’s blog, but in the meantime, congratulations to the entire PressForward team!

Hello Tropy (soon)

2015-10-02T16:56:18+02:00

I’m happy to announce the funding of Tropy, a major new RRCHNM initiative that Stephen Robertson and I will lead over the next two years. Thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Tropy will fill a crucial need in the initial phase of the research process: where humanities researchers organize and analyze their vast and rapidly growing personal collections of digital images collected in the archives. In the coming months we’ll be working closely with researchers and a range of archives to develop an entirely new digital tool that enables the efficient import, editing, organization, search, and sharing of images taken in the archives.

Although we’re just getting started, I’m already excited about Tropy for a whole host of reasons:

First, Tropy is something that researchers want, right now. Unlike Zotero, which required (and in some cases, still requires) some convincing to get humanities scholars to use it, people working in the archives are well aware that they’re drowning in the sea of digital images. And on the other side of the transaction, archives are struggling to meet the rapidly evolving demands of their users. No existing software meets these needs, since photo management applications like Apple Photos or Google Picasa are geared entirely toward the photograph, not to the artifact it depicts.

Second, although we remain a long way from a shipping piece of software, Tropy is already the product of over two years of planning and input from a wide range of experts. Stephen and I began discussing it way back in 2013. Like so many ideas at RRCHNM, the plan for Tropy took further shape thanks to the intellectual generosity of countless colleagues: Faolan Cheslack-Postava, Mandy Regan, Jim Safley, Lisa Rhody, Ken Albers, Kim Nguyen, and John Flatness, among others. And so even before development has begun in earnest, Tropy is already an intensively collaborative enterprise. And if you — a researcher, an archivist, a software developer — are interested in participating in this project, there will be ample opportunity in the very near future.

Third, Tropy will significantly extend an already critically important scholarly infrastructure developed at RRCHNM. Zotero remains best-suited for bibliographic data, notes, and citation; Omeka for the public presentation of research collections; PressForward for the collection and dissemination of scholarship. Tropy, in contrast, targets the discrete research tasks of collection, discovery, organization, and sharing of images.

Fourth, Tropy takes RRCHNM development in a novel technical direction. Without getting too much into the technology we’re putting into Tropy, it will very much be a “2016 and beyond” environment. Thanks to newly emerging platforms like Electron, we will actually be able to build a cross-platform tool that functions the way we want it to, something that simply would not have been cost-effective or even feasible given the environments we’re currently using for projects like Omeka (LAMP) or Zotero (XULRunner/PHP).

As the project takes shape we’ll be launching a dedicated project site and (of course) making the code freely available. More soon.

More coverage:
Stephen’s post
University press release
RRCHNM announcement

On Bubbles, or This Time It’s Different

2014-05-09T07:19:58+02:00

This week Inside Higher Ed stirred the DH pot with a thinly-evidenced piece suggesting that we’re in the midst of a “Digital Humanities Bubble” which is supposedly about to burst. As someone who has spent nearly eight years struggling to fill a range of alt-ac, tenure-track, and tenured digital positions, while simultaneously trying to retain the good people we already have at RRCHNM, this comes as welcome news!

If only.

Since 2006 I’ve been party to over a dozen hires in digital and “traditional” history, and in every single one of those cases, the market dynamic in digital searches has been profoundly different from traditional ones. Whether there’s rapid or modest growth in digital history positions is kind of beside the point; the “bubble,” such as it exists, is relative in the sense that there simply aren’t enough candidates to fill the positions we already have, let alone the ones that may or may not be created in the future.

I first began thinking about this issue systematically after Bethany Nowviskie published her “Asking for It” piece in February, itself a response to the OCLC’s report, “Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?” Like Bethany I found the premise of the original report odd, but my sense was that one could just as easily answer the question, “You can’t have one anyway.” For years we’ve all been increasingly competing over the same, barely growing pool of qualified candidates. The only way a new center can find plausible people is to hire them away from somewhere more established, with tenure, etc., and there simply aren’t enough qualified people out there.

If we’re going to talk about a job market, we need to look at both parties, the buyers and the sellers. The IHE piece and its disenchanted sources assume that the sellers, here candidates, look something like they do in the humanities academic job market writ large. In other words, that there are hundreds of them for every open job, and so “one or two new positions” created at “many institutions” will have no discernible effect. But in digital history, at least, that’s simply not the case.

After some near misses with a research faculty hire and a few developers in my first years at RRCHNM, the first truly alarming example of this dynamic came to my attention in 2008-2009, when we ran the search that ultimately hired Fred Gibbs. Even with a deliberately vague description of “digital history”¹ and a fairly desperate openness to what that might entail, we were barely able to assemble a slate of three plausible² finalists, a mix of history and English PhDs.³

Over and over since then, in complete contrast to the hundreds of applicants we might get for a non-digital position, most of whom are entirely plausible, we see an order of magnitude fewer applicants for digital positions. Take just the last four tenure-track and tenured searches in which I was involved over the past two years:

U.S. and the World: 153 applicants, 100+ plausible
RRCHNM Director: 11 applicants, 4 plausible
Nineteenth-Century Europe: 129 applicants, 90+ plausible
Digital History: 13 applicants, 4 plausible

In other words, if you are “digital” and not completely full of shit, you are probably already a finalist.⁴

And so while the digital humanities may not “save the humanities” or even “save humanities jobs” — and I’m still not sure where those straw-man claims originated — it certainly appears that it can dramatically improve one’s chances of landing a history job. I present to you what is, of course, anecdotal evidence. But at least it’s evidence, and I’d love to hear more about what others are actually finding on the hiring side of things, and how it compares to our experience.

Assistant Professor, Digital History. George Mason University, Department of History and Art History invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in digital history. The successful applicant will be expected to manage a range of projects at Mason’s Center for History and New Media and to teach digital methodology for the department. ↩
“Plausible” is a slippery term of course; here I’m using it in the most generous possible way, that the candidate actually demonstrates the bare minimum expertise in the position’s field to teach and conduct research. As in, not a crank or random applicant. ↩
And it is no coincidence that the other two finalists are currently very much employed in extremely good jobs. ↩
Given these very tiny pools of candidates, it’s no surprise that even people who are entirely full of shit still wind up in “digital humanities” positions. ↩

A Digital Humanities Tenure Case, Part 3: Decanal Retention

2013-07-25T21:57:58+02:00

After some turbulence at the college committee level, my tenure case reached my dean in the spring. Here’s what he had to say about “some” — that’s the college committee’s own wiggle word — determining that digital projects should be considered “major service activity” rather than research:

Although [Zotero] might appear as simply a technical advance, in fact the three outside reviewers consulted on this part of the case repeatedly note that it is a deep and important intervention into scholarly debate. Zotero depends on an understanding of the research techniques in the humanities and contributes mightily to their improvement. Zotero is thus a scholarly work because it makes significant methodological advances.

Huh, so that’s it. With just three sentences, digital projects are now research again. To anyone who knows anything of our (now former) dean, this conclusion will come as little surprise. A longtime friend and colleague of Roy Rosenzweig and a great supporter of CHNM, he was exceedingly unlikely to declare digital works to be service rather than research. With the dean’s support, the final approval of the provost, president, and board of visitors was entirely uneventful, and I am now tenured.¹ Thanks are in order to all the colleagues and collaborators I’ve been fortunate enough to work with over the past six years!

Though great news for me, it’s less clear what the implications are for future DH cases. One’s dean shouldn’t have to have his finger on the pulse of the digital humanities (or indeed any particular field) to be evaluated fairly for tenure. And that dean has since retired, while nine out of twelve members of the college P&T committee are returning to vote on this year’s cases. I’ll be keeping a very close eye on how future cases proceed, especially since we plan to make a tenure-track hire in digital history this fall. Stay tuned for more details on that search in the coming months.

In the meantime why not kick off your shoes and enjoy some fine summer reading? I present for your consideration my tenure case’s complete set of letters, minus of course the outside reader reports:

This process is everywhere shrouded in far too much mystery, and I’m happy to do my small part to expose it to a little cleansing sunlight.

Or, technically, “without term,” as we say in Virginia. And also not in effect until the end of August when my new contract begins. ↩

A Poorly Reasoned Suicide Note

2013-07-24T17:33:35+02:00

Whenever I encounter the research of newly minted PhDs (or the researchers themselves, often at conferences), invariably my first step is to retrieve the relevant dissertations on ProQuest or the researcher’s institutional repository. Over the past few years I’ve run across a handful of cases where I couldn’t locate the dissertation; in each case I’ve contacted the historian in question, who have all provided me with some variant of the same explanation: “I don’t want to be scooped by someone before I write my book.” To me this is insane reasoning: not only does it quite obviously harm the field’s state of knowledge by limiting access, it naively assumes that the researcher is protecting herself from theft by hiding her findings rather than by publicly and preemptively asserting ownership over them, which is precisely what we do with intellectual property.

And now the AHA has gone ahead and attempted to institutionalize this insanity.

In a statement released this week, the hidebound organization urged university programs and libraries to embargo history dissertations from digital release for up to six years. If you believe this to be an appalling proposal because it limits the circulation of all the exciting new research that’s happening in graduate programs, you’re thinking exactly like the AHA, so long as you substitute “awesome” for “appalling.” Reducing dissertation circulation to a trickle is precisely the AHA’s goal.

But even if you believe in this goal — I know that a few colleagues of mine are similarly paranoid about sharing research — the AHA’s logic is still fatally flawed:

“In the past, most dissertations were circulated through inter-library loan in the form of a hard copy or on microfilm for a fee.” Hmm, “in the past”? for an organization that’s supposed to be “historical” that’s a pretty vague statement. When I completed my dissertation eight years ago, it was deposited into UMI/ProQuest immediately. During the previous years when I researched and wrote my dissertation I accessed and cited new dissertations in digital form. If digital dissertations are not a new phenomenon, why is the AHA acting now?
“At the same time, however, an increasing number of university presses are reluctant to offer a publishing contract to newly minted PhDs whose dissertations have been freely available via online sources.” How many presses? Which ones? Can the AHA point to a single book proposal that was rejected on this basis? The AHA isn’t even marshaling anecdotal evidence here. There’s simply no evidence at all.
“Presumably, online readers will become familiar with an author’s particular argument, methodology, and archival sources, and will feel no need to buy the book once it is available.” “Presumably”? Seriously? But OK, who are the buyers of academic monographs? University libraries. The same institutions that are requiring open access digital dissertation deposit? It’s a conspiracy!
“It is not unusual for an early-career historian to spend five or six years revising a dissertation and preparing the manuscript for submission to a press for consideration. During that period, the scholar typically builds on the raw material presented in the dissertation, refines the argument, and improves the presentation itself.” If this is the case, then the book is not the same as the dissertation, so why would one compete with the other? Or is the AHA simply proposing that scholars no longer go through these steps, since the dissertation can now appear “fresh” six years later?

And the questions keep coming. How many history dissertations are published as monographs within six years of the PhD? Even if the book contract was signed before the embargo ended, wouldn’t the dissertation still likely appear before the book was on the shelves, or while the book was on the shelves? And wouldn’t that appearance then curtail book sales? Does the AHA think that acquisition editors are so stupid that they cannot count?

In the end this proposal will likely accomplish little. I suspect that libraries will ignore the AHA here, and history departments will be constrained by depository policies applied at the college or university level. So nice work, AHA, you’ve fully internalized Animal House: “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part. And we’re just the guys to do it.”

We Are All Managers

2013-05-07T15:52:13+02:00

When my wife attended an orientation session for her first post-college job, the human resources representative supplied helpful tips for developing “manageatorial” career skills. This felicitous neologism — it wonderfully conjures the image of a janitorial executive — has provided a reliable punch line for two decades; Daniel Allington’s recent jeremiad against digital humanities offers yet another opportunity to trot it out.

For someone who’s adamantly not a digital humanist Allington certainly seems to know quite a bit about these soulless managers. He writes, for example, “Humanists today are less likely to be technologists than managers of technologists. Why do something for yourself when what you will be rewarded for is having found the money to pay someone to do it for you? And how can you find time to learn a programming language anyway, when your core competence is fluency in the language of grant applications?”

To highlight just a few of his specious claims:

He fantasizes that digital humanities project budgets are artificially inflated to be “conveniently expensive” and that we willfully ignore opportunities to reduce costs.
He imagines that humanities funding serves as a university profit center, when unlike in the sciences it’s particularly likely to come from private foundations which typically don’t contribute a cent in indirect costs back to the university administration.
He characterizes DH technical staff as casual labor akin to adjunct faculty or worse, when vast majority of our developers and staff at my institution and at peer DH centers are salaried university employees who are not fired when a contract runs out (and in fact can’t be). The few contract developers we have are not regular employees by their own choice.

The whole post was so off-base I initially dismissed it as sour grapes, thinking he was simply feeling left out of what he imagines is a club of “successful players of the funding game.”¹

After reading his extensive followup exchange with Stephen Ramsay, however, it became clear that Allington is writing from within a framework that digital humanists understand all too well from the other side of the fence, with their (often self-congratulatory) rhetoric of collaboration. And it is this aspect of his argument that deserves the closest scrutiny, and not because it marks Allington as an outsider, as he would like us to believe. Allington doesn’t appear to be antagonized so much by digital humanities in particular as by the notion that individual humanists should be dependent on anyone other than themselves. In response to pointed questioning from Ramsay about higher education’s essential vast array of human infrastructure arrayed to support professors like Allington, Allington declares, “What I disagree with is your assertion that these people are managed on my behalf. They aren’t.” In a later comment he adds, “Absolutely none of them acts at my behest – not because there’s anything democratic about the whole organisation but because each of us is contracted to provide a service. I provide one service, they provide others.”

Allington not only denies that DH is collaborative: he effectively denies that collaboration exists anywhere in academia across the faculty/other divide. Any relationships that span this divide are, by his definition, managerial, perhaps because Allington cannot imagine a relationship where the “humanist” (professor?) is not the boss of the programmer.

Allington thus declares himself unambiguously as not just an outsider in a system with interests utterly unaligned with his own, but someone who works above this system. To engage with that system is to dirty the hands and become manageator… er, managerial. Whether or not this system exists anywhere outside Allington’s imagination is irrelevant: the key point is that these interests have nothing to do in particular with digital humanities. He’s simply using a very big club (“managerial” academia is bad) to attack a very small problem (digital humanities is irritatingly “trendy”). I thought that the Enlightenment had freed us to start valuing the hands as well as the mind, but maybe it was just the pretext for totalitarianism. It’s easy to get confused.

Of course no scholar, humanist or otherwise, works wholly independently. What threatens this sense of independence isn’t really the oversight of project staff, it’s the dependence on outside funders, academic administrators, publishers, etc. Becoming a mere link in a Great Chain of (Scholarly) Being can never appear as gratifying as imagining oneself an academic hermit cultivating genius in exalted isolation.

Ultimately the fatal flaw in Allington’s argument isn’t that he dislikes digital humanities; it’s that he positions himself as if he is in the aggrieved minority, under ferocious assault from the grant wizards of DH and their administrative masters. And yet the collective experience of anyone who has ever undertaken any digital academic research points overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, that is to say that traditional scholarship is rewarded while digital work is universally undervalued or misunderstood. One can certainly sympathize with Allington’s irritation with the grandiloquent promise of the digital humanities, but there’s a very wide gulf between the echo chamber of Twitter and the backroom shenanigans of tenure and promotion committees. The latter, to date, are certainly more likely to find themselves in Allington’s camp than anywhere else.

We meet on Thursdays. ↩

A Digital Humanities Tenure Case, Part 2: Letters and Committees

2013-02-07T14:20:03+01:00

After my tenure presentation and with the unanimous vote of my department, my department’s RPT committee and our chair prepared additional letters to send the file up the food chain to the college-level promotion and tenure committee. These letters were embarrassingly favorable, and based on the excerpts they included from outside readers, those letters too offered overwhelming support for tenure. The college-level committee, however, wasn’t so easily fooled. Voting 10-2 in favor of my case, largely on the basis of my monograph in French history, here’s what the committee members had to report on the digital side of my portfolio:

The committee also recognized his considerable work at the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as it relates to projects such as Zotero and the substantial funds he and his collaborators have raised to help sustain them. Some on the committee questioned to what degree Dr. Takats’ [sic] involvement in these activities constitutes actual research (as opposed to project management). Hence, some determined that projects like Zotero et al., while highly valuable, should be considered as major service activity instead.

To recap: Conceive projects? Service. Develop prototype software? Service. Write successful grant proposals? Service. Write code? Service. Lead developers and designers? Service. Disseminate the results of the project? Service. I certainly hope program officers from Mellon, Sloan, IMLS, and NEH aren’t reading this post, because I suspect they would be more than a little dismayed to discover that they’ve been funding “major service activity.”

Levity aside, I want to focus on the committee’s disregard for project management, because it’s here I think that we find evidence of a much broader communication breakdown between DH and just-H, despite the best efforts to develop reasonable standards for evaluating digital scholarship.

Although the committee’s letter effectively excludes “project management” from consideration as research, I would argue that it’s actually the cornerstone of all successful research. It’s project management that transforms a dissertation prospectus into a thesis, and it’s certainly project management that shepherds a monograph from proposal to published book. Fellow humanists, I have some news for you: you’re all project managers, even if you only direct a staff of one.

Reductio ad absurdum aside, why this disparagement? One colleague of mine suggests that this neglect of lab work is the inevitable result of my university’s decision in 2006 to cleave off the College of Science from the Humanities and Social Sciences. As a result, our college committee is highly unlikely to include many members who have lab experience. Because that sort of collaborative, multi-layered work is unfamiliar, it gets lumped in my case under the category of “service,” which — let’s not kid ourselves — is nothing more than academia’s equivalent of “other.”

More generally speaking it’s clear that this college committee views “research” through a narrower lens than does our own faculty handbook. There you’ll find a qualitative component that’s admirably broad in scope:

Scholarly achievement is demonstrated by original publications and peer reviewed contributions to the advancement of the discipline/field of study or the integration of the discipline with other fields; by original research, artistic work, software and media, exhibitions, and performance; and by the application of discipline- or field-based knowledge to the practice of a profession.

And the handbook also suggests a degree of quantitative assessment: “There should be evidence that the candidate’s contributions have significant influence on colleagues at other institutions in this country, and where applicable, abroad.”

College committee members, in contrast, considered only my peer-reviewed traditional publication to count as research. Of course, digital work often goes through many stages of peer-review: at the funding stage, with published reviews and awards for the finished project, and in my case through the solicitation of formal assessments of my corpus by peers. And its potential for significant influence on colleagues at other institutions is often orders of magnitude greater than that offered by traditional publications. In the eyes of committee members, however, this sort of review and impact should not count at all. And notably, the committee makes no effort to describe what sort of digital work in my portfolio (or not in it) would merit consideration.

The chilling effect of this stance can’t be overstated: by suggesting that my digital work should not count as research, they’re effectively claiming that no one’s digital work should count. Why? Because my tenure portfolio includes contributions at nearly every conceivable level of digital scholarship, from principal investigator all the way to coder. Much well-founded concern exists within the digital humanities about whether scholarly credit is shared equitably among contributors — we find Bethany Nowviskie in the JDH and the Faircite project more broadly fearing a scenario where the pie is carved up only for the benefit of project leaders. But what if there is no pie? If we’re going to limit ourselves to using traditional modes of scholarly dissemination as a proxy for “research” at RRCHNM’s home institution, then we send a powerful signal discouraging digital research projects elsewhere, at any level.