This conversation is particularly timely in the context of the maturation of digital humanities as a method and its emergence as a prominent field over the past two decades. The publication of the MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media in 2000 (updated in 2012), the establishment of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities in 2008, and the steady growth of digital humanities units in academic libraries all point to growing support for and recognition of digital humanities research and scholarly output. We are arguably entering an era in which digital humanities is both widely accepted and expected in higher education. Take, for instance, the 2015 NEH Summer Institute for Advanced Topics in the Humanities for community college digital humanists (led by Anne B. McGrail), and Matthew K. Gold’s remarks in "The New Wave in Digital Humanities" (2017) that DH work “increasingly extends across institutional types and institutional spaces.” In this context, this panel seeks to reframe digital humanities project management by increasing focus on project collaborators and on the humanity of those communities represented on the screen or in the database.
In 10-12 minute presentations, panelists will address the range of labor issues and institutional networks that DH project managers navigate, as well as the intellectual work required of project management. The panel will open with two presentations that consider histories of DH project management in higher education to provoke discussion about the increasingly important role of project managers in orchestrating flexible, human-centered projects that can withstand changes in institutional research environments. The latter half of the panel will focus on project management practices that generate, as Theresa Burress and Chelcie Juliet Rowell recommend in “Project Management for Digital Projects with Collaborators Beyond the Library” (2017), “an understanding of collaboration as engagement, rather than collaboration as service provision.”
Paige Morgan will open the discussion by addressing the tension in DH work between the need to follow documented, organized procedures and the strong conviction that adherence to such organization is antithetical to the spirit of humanistic inquiry in “Reconsidering Skunkworks; or, What Might a Politics of Work Look Like in a Digital Humanities Project Management Context?” Revisiting Bethany Nowviskie’s influential 2011 talk, “A Skunk in the Library,” Morgan will consider administrators’ underestimation of the additional labor needed to implement the products of skunkworks—innovative, experimental lab spaces—into larger organizational systems. The result is poor work conditions and projects with a high risk of unsustainability. Morgan’s talk will revisit the idea of skunkworks and innovation spaces nine years later: do we still need them and are they still feasible? How might we resituate them, or critically rethink how humanities practitioners’ pursuit of inquiry and experimentation shapes labor conditions?
Jacob Heil will take up the conversation about DH project management in its institutional landscapes in “Avoiding Cog-ification to Center Humanness in Digital Initiatives” by pushing against the instrumentalization of human labor that is evident in terms such as “human infrastructure.” Noting the shift in emphasis on “product” to “process” in DH project evaluation, Heil will discuss what we have gained by positing learning and experience as metrics for DH work. Building on an ethics of care and generous thinking, as put forward by thought leaders such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Bethany Nowviskie, he will explore the possibility of interrogating process-oriented language and evaluation to recenter the importance of human relationships in DH research. This presentation will ask: Is it possible to foster a bleeding-heart project management style while working at the bleeding edge of technological development?
Laura Braunstein will consider the emotional work required to implement such human-centric DH labor practices in “Managing Projects, Managing Emotions: Project Management as Emotional Labor.” Drawing on recent scholarship by Paige Morgan, Braunstein will argue that an absence of emotional labor to mitigate the anxiety in DH projects that may arise when learning new technologies and rethinking longstanding practices can result in missed opportunities to expand disciplinary boundaries or develop collaborative partnerships. The presentation will demonstrate that project managers’ emotional labor, while often overlooked or disavowed, constitutes skilled labor and is crucial to the success of DH projects. Braustein will recommend practices that value and recognize the emotional labor necessary to conduct collaborative digital work.
Concluding the discussion, Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla will present “An Act of Border Humanization through Digital Humanities,” identifying emerging research practices of borderlands digital humanities that can help us move beyond a “basic engagement” model that still risks dehumanization, stereotypes, and homogenization through re-publication of images of marginalization and oppression in borderlands. Drawing on her experience collaborating on the DH projects Borderlands Archives Cartography and Torn Apart / Separados, Quintanilla will propose DH project management as a form of humanistic intervention through the ways it directs the creation of data and facilitates the integration of transnational archival material and public data with mapping and visualization tools.
Respondent Rennie Mapp will highlight the presentations' unifying themes, emphasizing the relevance of this topic for DH practitioners in a variety of roles in and beyond project management. The 15-20 minute Q&A will consider strategies for facilitating sustainable DH projects and practices amidst changes in institutional support for digital humanities scholarship.