January was a rough month, between the last gasps of a too-long family trip over the holidays, getting ready for teaching a new course on Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists, and then being out sick for a whole week. Amidst this new year chaos came a DH Twitter project that shone a thoughtful light on some of the daily decisions that go into the beginning of the quarter.
Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Mimi Winick, and Amanda Henrichs set out the prompt of a month of “Generous Thinking”, in the spirit of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book of the same name. What are concrete steps that we can take — especially those of us in various alt-ac and other staff positions — to make the university a more humane place, and meaningfully engage with broader world?
The timing couldn’t be better for this kind of thought experiment, especially here at Stanford. The new chair of my disciplinary department (the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, DLCL), Cécile Alduy, has named care and generous thinking among the values she wants to cultivate for the division. On the other side of my split position, I find myself in the strange position of being the longest-standing DH person in the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) in the library, after being at Stanford for only 15 months, following the departure of Glen Worthey (for the HathiTrust Research Center) and Scott Bailey (for the NC State University Libraries). Meanwhile, CESTA is under new leadership as well, with Giovanna Ceserani recently appointed director. This confluence of changes has left us all reimagining what DH will look like at Stanford, how we’ll work together, and how we’ll adapt to bigger changes taking place at the institutional level, including around funding for grad students, and the undergraduate curriculum.
I didn’t manage to share something in the spirit of generous thinking every day in January, but it was often on my mind. Among the things that occurred to me:
- We need more experiments — and relatedly, more room for failure — in making the university more humane. This month, my CIDR colleagues and I tried DH lightning talks and discussion as an alternative form of “consulting” at CESTA, followed by a happy hour. I’m grateful that people came, and were willing to experiment with us.
- I also continue to be grateful to my students in the Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists class, who are the first people to try out playing the Dungeons and Dragons style “DH RPG” I’ve dreamed up. I love how human they’ve made their characters, and how generous they are with these characters, letting them live interesting, rich lives, instead of using their characters as an optimized means-to-an-end of trying to “win”.
- Dinah Handel, the Digitization Services Manager in the Library, came to visit the class, and gave a very thought-provoking talk about labor and digitization. (This happened the same day as a “hands-on” session for the students, where I had them actually sit or stand at a desktop computer and operate a flatbed scanner, so they could have some idea of what that’s actually like.) For all the years I’ve done digital humanities, and all the digitization I’ve done myself, it’s remarkable how easily I’ve put out of my mind the people doing the work of outsourced digitization. It was reassuring to learn that the person who recently digitized a literary journal for us is based out of LA, and the “Joseph” whose name I saw as the image uploader is the same person who did the scanning, and who talked to Dinah over the phone about the project. Still, it’s work that takes a toll — repeated stress injuries, and the like — even when the material itself (e.g. war crimes documents) doesn’t inflict more damage on the people doing the work. Dinah talked about the decisions they make in the digitization lab: they recently decided against getting a particular kind of light, because it was physically painful to use. But for past projects at other universities, when the digitization work was outsourced, who was overseeing the labor conditions? Did they think about the impact on their workers when they were choosing the equipment? It was a sobering and thought-provoking presentation — how can we extend generous thinking to the collaborators on our projects who we’ll never meet?
- We’re having a two-day event for prospective students in the DLCL in March. I’ll hold longer Textile Makerpace hours both those days, to have a no-pressure space open where the prospective students can have some downtime and a creative outlet.
- While I was out sick, I spent some time updating a fan wiki for The Baby-Sitters Club with information I’d been able to find as part of my research for the Data-Sitters Club. While Wikipedia edit-a-thons are common enough, I think there are some interesting other avenues of engaging fan communities, for scholars in media and literary studies. Maria Cecire’s January post for the Data-Sitters Club was another instance of generous thinking for that project, where she wrote candidly about the challenges of collaboration, particularly when you’re the disciplinary expert who needs to rein in the over enthusiasm of DH colleagues (like me).
- In January, with some help from Simon Wiles and Glen Worthey, I managed to track down why Elijah Meeks’s old blog, Digital Humanities Specialist, had gone offline. (It was tied to Glen’s user account, which went inactive when he left.) It made me reflect on the amount of labor that goes into making sure anything still works, especially after the primary stakeholder leaves an institution. Caring for resources that people use and cite (I discovered it was down when a footnote in a reading I’d assigned my class failed to resolve) is another form of generous thinking, but there is a real question of where to draw the line.
- A related act of generous thinking is helping fund infrastructure — even when you feel like it’s the sort of thing some large entity with lots of money should be supporting. I’ve joined the Programming Historian Patreon because they’re doing excellent, thoughtful work: not just publishing tutorials, but thinking about it in a multilingual context. Having failed to run volunteer-only infrastructure (RIP, DiRT directory), I’ve learned the hard way that ongoing funding really does make a difference. In the long run, Patreon alone isn’t going to keep Programming Historian alive, but I felt it was important to join them in this experiment, and invest — even a small amount every month — in the infrastructure I value.
- Participating in a DHARTI Twitter conference got me thinking about other models for sharing scholarship and community that don’t depend on travel. What would it look like to invest resources in more inclusive conference forms that could also better support scholars in the Global South, scholars with care responsibilities at home, etc.? What could we give up from our large international in-person gatherings to make it happen?
- I got to thinking about connecting with people who have moved on entirely from academia, when my husband got an email from Academia.edu that someone in Europe cited two papers he wrote on a really interesting niche topic. As much as he’s not usually a fan of those spammy emails, hearing that someone, somewhere was building on something he’d worked on made him genuinely happy. What can we build into scholarly networks that we can feel better about (e.g. Humanities Commons) to enable those connections in an opt-in way, that won’t compound negative feelings for people who have left academia more recently, and not by choice?
- This “generous thinking” project made me more attentive to some of the generous practices going on around me. Some new staff members have joined my division, and each of them gets a 3-5 paragraph, thoughtful introduction email that includes things like their background, expertise, places they’ve lived, languages they speak, etc. Charo Robinson, our director of finance and operations, sends these emails out to every single faculty member, lecturer, and student in the department. The inclusion of language, in particular, is a thoughtful touch that provides a point of connection and relatability in a modern languages department.
I’m grateful to everyone who shared their own generous thinking ideas and practices in January — it was one of the best things that happened that month. I hope that this conversation continues (if at a less reliable pace) within the broader DH community; you can follow along with the hashtag #GenerousThinking on Twitter.