When I teach digital scholarship and digital project management, I emphasize collaboration and credit, processes over outputs, and the ability to adapt to unexpected challenges. These are essential skills and practices for engaging with digital projects; they are also shared values. For Lisa Spiro, the digital humanities (DH) community unites around and is distinguished by “openness,” “collaboration,” “collegiality and connectedness,” “diversity,” and “experimentation.” These values, Spiro explains, highlight “what the digital humanities community aspires to achieve” (2012).
Shared values and practices offer a way of thinking about connections between DH community members (including librarians) even though the term “digital humanities” signals a variety of digital methods, research questions, and kinds of projects. While “digital humanities” is an umbrella term, it is also a subset of “digital scholarship,” a broader concept that encompasses the careful and intentional use of digital methods and tools for research, teaching, and the promotion and presentation of scholarly work in any discipline. Although “digital scholarship” and “digital humanities” are sometimes used interchangeably, “digital humanities” describes “work at the intersection of digital technology and humanities disciplines” (Drucker, et al., 2014). For many practitioners, digital humanities is “akin to a common methodological outlook” (Kirschenbaum, 2012) that involves the use of digital methods “to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities” (Fitzpatrick, 2012). In practice, digital methods enable humanists to achieve results—such as analyzing large amounts of textual data—that would not have been possible without computers. Digital technologies and tools also change how scholarship is produced and shared. Approaching research questions through digital methods may lead to such scholarly outputs as websites, maps, online archives, data visualizations, open educational resources, digital exhibits, art installations, and digital dissertations.
Primarily employed in academic libraries, DH librarians have multi-faceted and evolving roles in the creation, sharing, maintenance, and preservation of digital scholarship. DH librarians may have expertise in 3-D modeling, digital scholarly editing, GIS mapping, text analysis, data visualization, and/or programming languages (like Python). They may provide instruction in using digital tools or support instructors in introducing students to digital project planning. Some DH librarians build projects and teach with numerous digital methods; others, including me, specialize in one or two. Many DH Librarians manage or coordinate digital projects—their own, as well as those of faculty, staff, and students. They identify potential collaborators and resources, advise on which stakeholders should be included in project conversations, and design workflows to achieve project goals.
Librarians and scholars have identified challenges to engaging in digital humanities work in libraries (Posner, 2013), including how differing definitions of DH complicate efforts to support scholarship and pedagogy (Poremski, 2017). Zhang, Liu, and Mathews see the following roles for library professionals in the digital humanities: “creator and contributor; curator; messenger and liaison; educator; mediator and interpreter; host; partner; innovator; hybrid scholar; advocate; consultant” (2015). It is this potential to define job responsibilities and shift between supporting and collaborator roles—to “live on the hyphen” as “librarian-scholar-digital practitioner” (Huet, et al., 2019)—that I have found to be the most rewarding and challenging aspect of digital humanities librarianship.
Aspiring DH librarians should seek opportunities for hands-on digital project experience through an assistantship or practicum and consider coursework in humanities subjects and methods, digital methods, and/or the digital humanities. Library and Information Science skills that align well with DH careers include grant writing, metadata creation, digitization, digital preservation, public engagement and outreach, digital publishing, and copyright and intellectual property (Yao and Xiao, 2022; King, 2018). Students with expertise and work experience in these areas, as well as patience with those new to digital projects, will prove valuable partners in digital scholarship and pedagogy.
There is much work left to be done to live up to and to continue developing the shared practices and values to which DH community members aspire. Jessica Marie Johnson has located in DH the potential to use digital tools to “create new communities”—within and beyond academia (Dinsman, 2016). Graduate students and librarians in digital humanities librarianship are likely to find themselves at the heart of new communities of collaborators and engaged in discussions not just about what DH and digital scholarship are, but about what they can and should do (Moritz, et al., 2017) on campus and in the world. The future of digital humanities and digital scholarship intersects with academic hierarchies and power structures, efforts to credit labor and make it visible, environmental concerns, and global connections and perspectives. I have faith that graduate students and librarians have integral parts to play in building communities and in creating a future for digital work.
Works Cited:
Dinsman, M. (2016, July 23). “The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with Jessica Marie Johnson.” Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/digital-humanities-interview-jessica-marie-johnson/.
Drucker, J., Kim, D., Salehian, I., & Bushong, A. (2014). Introduction to digital humanities concepts. Methods, and Tutorials for Students and Instructors. (First edition, composed 2013). University of California, Los Angeles. https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11649226.
Fitzpatrick, K. (2012). ‘The Humanities, Done Digitally’, in Matthew K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis, MN, 2012; online edn, Minnesota Scholarship Online, 24 Aug. 2015), https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677948.003.0002.
Huet, Alteri, S., & Taylor, L. N. (2019). “Manifesto: A Life on the Hyphen: Balancing Identities as Librarians, Scholars, and Digital Practitioners.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 13(2). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/2/000418/000418.html.
King, M. (2018). “Digital scholarship librarian: What skills and competences are needed to be a collaborative librarian.” International Information and Library Review, 50(1), 40–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572317.2017.1422898.
Moritz, C., Smart, R., Retteen, A., Hunter, M., Stanley, S., Soper, D., & Vandegrift, M. (2017). “De-centering and re-centering digital scholarship: A manifesto.” Journal of New Librarianship, 2(2), 102–109. Retrieved from https://newlibs.org/index.php/jonl/article/view/615
Poremski, M. D. (2017). “Evaluating the landscape of digital humanities librarianship.” College and Undergraduate Libraries, 24(2–4), 140–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2017.1325721.
Posner, M. (2013). “No half measures: Overcoming common challenges to doing digital humanities in the library.” Journal of Library Administration, 53(1), 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2013.756694.
Spiro, L. (2012). “This Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities (NED – New edition, p. 16). University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677948.003.0003.
Yao, W. & Xiao, P. (2022). What contributes to a qualified digital humanities librarian and ideal digital humanities pedagogy? An exploratory qualitative study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 48(6), 102524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2022.102524.
Zhang, Yin, Shu Liu, and Emilee Mathews. (2015). “Convergence of Digital Humanities and Digital Libraries.” Library Management 36(4-5): 362–77. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-09-2014-0116.
Resources for Further Reading, Listening, and Viewing:
Digital Scholarship Handbook. (n.d.) Boston College Libraries. https://bcds.gitbook.io/handbook.
Fischer, B. and Jacobs, H. (2018). “Visualizing Objects, Places, and Spaces: A Digital Project Handbook.” https://handbook.pubpub.org/.
Morgan, P. (2017, December 17). “Please don’t call me a miracle worker.” https://blog.paigemorgan.net/articles/17/please-dont.html.
Nowviskie, B. (2012). “Evaluating Collaborative Digital Scholarship (or, Where Credit is Due).” Journal of Digital Humanities 1(4). https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/evaluating-collaborative-digital-scholarship-by-bethany-nowviskie/.
The Digital in the Humanities: Special Interview Series by Melissa Dinsman, in the Los Angeles Review of Books (2016) https://lareviewofbooks.org/feature/the-digital-in-the-humanities/
Reviews in the Digital Humanities https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/
The Programming Historian Tutorials https://programminghistorian.org/
The Data-Sitters Club Books https://datasittersclub.github.io/site/index.html
Digital Humanities LibGuide at the University of Exeter: https://libguides.exeter.ac.uk/digitalhumanities/dhresources
Digital Humanities Pedagogy Research Guide at San José State University https://libguides.sjsu.edu/digital_humanities/classroom
Collaborators’ Bill of Rights https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:31187/
A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights https://humtech.ucla.edu/news/a-student-collaborators-bill-of-rights/
Global Debates in the Digital Humanities (2022) https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/global-debates-in-the-digital-humanities
Debates in the Digital Humanities (2023) https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-202
Stephanie M. Blalock teaches Metadata: Theories and Applications in SLIS. She is a Digital Humanities Librarian in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio with the University of Iowa Libraries. She is the Iowa Project Manager for the Walt Whitman Archive and an Associate Editor for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.
She is the author of “GO TO PFAFF’S!”: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon, a peer-reviewed digital edition published by Lehigh University Press (2014). Her research interests include Walt Whitman, nineteenth-century periodicals and print culture, textual recovery, social reform movements, nineteenth-century humor, digital scholarly editing, project management, and the digital and public humanities. She has published numerous book chapters and articles on Walt Whitman and has worked on several projects for the Whitman Archive, including editing (with Nicole Gray) the Fiction Section of Whitman’s Published Works and managing the Archive’s Late-Life Correspondence section.
