15-20 Minute Paper
Sarah Kremen-Hicks and Paige Morgan
University of Washington
Biographies
Sarah Kremen-Hicks is a Ph.D. student in the English department at the University of Washington. She works on the application of digital humanities methodologies to the study of Victorian literature and aesthetics. Her current project involves the analysis of Victorian data structures as a way of understanding the economics of popular fiction in the nineteenth century.
Paige Morgan is a Ph.D. student in English and Textual Studies at the University of Washington, focusing on 18th and 19th-century English poetry and economics, and the digital humanities. Her dissertation, “Economic Enthusiasm: 18th Century Poetry and Finance,” reveals how 18th-century English poets articulated a vernacular economic theory prior to more formal articulations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and other early economists; and examines the way that late 18th and early 19th century authors, readers, and critics understood and responded to the earlier writers.
Her work in the digital humanities includes the creation of Visible Prices, an archive of literary and economic information. Her articles on digital humanities, William Blake, and textual studies, can be found in Romanticism and in the upcoming Palgrave anthology Sexy Blake.
Paige and Sarah are currently collaborating on Demystifying Digital Humanities, a workshop series designed as a non-threatening starting point for DH self-development.
Abstract
In “This Is Why We Fight,” from Debates in the Digital Humanities, Lisa Spiro suggests that the digital humanities community would benefit from articulating a set of core values as a way to define itself without reverting to discussions of who’s in and who’s out, because, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick has observed, “the key problems that [digital humanists] face again and again are social, rather than technological in nature.” In this talk, we will use a new digital humanities training curriculum that we have been developing for the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities and Textual Studies Department in order to explore the effects of using a values statement as the central foundation of DH training.
Demystifying Digital Humanities (http://www.dmdh.org) is a year-long series of six workshops attended by a cross-disciplinary group of graduate students, staff, and faculty. Spiro’s call for a values statement was influential: we chose to frame our course around an ethos and a set of core values we have identified as central to DH scholarship. We did not think we could teach people to become digital humanists in six workshops, but we reasoned that it was more important to provide training that would help them make that decision for themselves. Putting Spiro’s suggestion into practice revealed not only our own unacknowledged biases, but also illuminated the degree to which the digital humanities focus on socialization as an integral part of the process of scholarship, and the degree to which the success of our curriculum depends on our promoting the formation of a socially-bonded cohort.
We also realized how complex and problematic current social practices in academia can be. Specifically, we became aware of how little time many schools allot to thinking about socialization issues, or to encouraging the development of self-efficacy. What role do social activities play in graduate academic training? What role should socialization play, and to what extent might academic department administrations involve themselves, given their already strapped capacities? We will explore the role that social activities play in promoting self- efficacy, both in traditional and digital humanities; as well the potential downsides and issues of privilege and inequality that socialization can create in academic programs. We feel that this is an especially important topic to reflect on as conferences increasingly utilize social media tools in an official capacity. Building a scholarly community through social practices is not the same as building a scholarly community through traditional training in periods and research methodology.
The optimism with which digital humanities is imbued, via increases in the number of DH jobs and steady growth in the numbers of THATCamps and ad hoc DH events, has led to proclamations that DH is the future, and that it can stand against many of the economic and institutional pressures and the accretion of power imbalances that seem to threaten traditional humanities studies. In examining the successes and failures of Demystifying DH, we will argue that DH can only effectively stand as a healthy alternative if training programs actively foreground the importance of agency in their curricula; and if scholars (whether student, faculty, staff, or independent) become aware of the diverse forms which self-efficacy might take.