It’s once again the season for the “DH Awards”, an international DH-themed popularity contest with an award category for “best exploration of DH failure” that debuted in 2014, the year “What Ever Happened to Project Bamboo?” was published. Alas, that year I lost to Melissa Terras’s “Reuse of Digitized Content”, and I haven’t had anything worth nominating in that category since.

This year, I decided to revisit and submit my keynote from last year’s “On the Benefits of Failure” symposium at the University of Alberta, recently made available through their digital repository. 

Truth be told, I hate watching videos. I also never write out my talks in advance, so I have nothing written to draw upon, beyond my slides. A text version, then, was only possible as a derivative. I ran the video through YouTube’s auto-captioning, cleaned up the transcript, and did a light edit before posting the text on my website.

“Digital Humanities Across Borders” (DLCL 204, cross-listed with Comp Lit and English) kicked off last week. As of today, there are seven registered students and three intrepid auditors (including two area studies librarian colleagues). 

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute workshops I’ve taught before have a similar number of classroom hours, but packing them into a single week produces a very different dynamic. My DHSI classes focused on one specific, technical topic (Drupal for DH projects), which led to a very different experience of both class preparation and teaching. When it comes to building Drupal sites, there’s a clear set of sequential steps. There’s a set of functionality that are relevant for most humanists, and that’s what we cover. In the afternoons, the students work on their own projects, because we only have five days to build something and giving homework isn’t particularly feasible. I wrote all the course materials and came up with the pacing for the syllabus myself, but it wasn’t difficult to make it all fall into place.

The “Academic Technology Specialist” (ATS) role at Stanford follows an unusual model for a DH alt-ac job. These positions are jointly funded by Stanford Libraries and a department, and while ATSes report administratively through the library, they typically have their office in the department, and spend most of their time working with scholars there. As an ATS, your assignment is straightforward but expansive: support your department in whatever way you can. The job description has a laundry list of expertise that one should have, but in practice, what you work on is shaped by your actual expertise and interests.

With an eye towards making the reality of the ATS position more comprehensible to both local colleagues and others who might join the organization in the future (since I didn’t have a clear picture of the job when I started, to say nothing of when I applied for the position), here’s what I’ve ended up doing my first quarter here.

Existing projects

Projects built on content management systems need care and feeding, and my predecessor, Mike Widner, built a lot of Drupal-based sites. Some of them were hacked during the interim between his departure and my arrival, and were infected with javascript that uses visitors’ computers to mine cryptocurrency. Others were hacked and tampered with, in ways that didn’t come to light until I tried to do something with them.

Thanks to some swift book-ordering by Glen Worthey, our Digital Humanities Librarian, Stanford became one of the first universities with a copy of Roopika Risam’s book New Digital Worlds last week. It was recalled before I even picked it up, leaving me with only a week to read it. As it turned out, there was no need to be concerned: Risam has accomplished the rare feat of crafting a monograph that is simultaneously scholarly, engaging, and applicable. Last Thursday, I started reading it on my 2-hour morning commute, continued during lunch, resumed on my 2-hour evening commute, and — with a brief hiatus for a rousing bedtime chorus of favorite cartoon theme songs with two small children (of such things are modern folksongs made) — spent the coveted post-bedtime hours finishing it. It was around lunchtime that I realized that I needed my own copy and ordered it on the spot. 

"Can you say something about using enterprise tools for DH?" Annie Swafford asked towards the end of a recent meeting. I think she knew that prompt was like pulling out a chocolate advent calendar in front of a 3-year-old, and I managed to show some restraint by limiting myself to the short form of my usual rant, so that everyone could make it to their next meetings on time.

For over a decade, I worked in central IT, first at the University of Chicago and then at UC Berkeley. There are lessons (positive and negative) that digital humanities can take from central IT, but it's important to think carefully before adopting their tools.