Teaching Scholarly Agency in a Digital Humanities Context

1. Teaching Scholarly Agency in a Digital Humanities Context Paige Morgan @paigecmorgan paigecm@uw.edu Sarah Kremen-Hicks @rhetoricaltrope sarahkh@uw.edu • UW Libraries Praxis Lecture Series • February 12, 2013

2. What is agency?What is scholarly agency?What is scholarly agency in a digital humanities context?

3. “Impostor syndrome describes a situation where someone feels like an impostor or fraud because they think that their accomplishments are nowhere near as good as those of the people around them. Usually, their accomplishments are just as good, and the person is being needlessly insecure. It's especially common in fields where people's work is constantly under review by talented peers, such as academia or Open Source Software.” --Geek Feminism Wiki http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Impostor_syndrome Agency vs. Impostor Syndrome Text

4. Agency vs. Authority • Agency is internally developed, while authority is externally conferred. • Agency is not just internal knowledge of authority, but internal confidence of the possibility of authority.

5. Scholarly Agency • → the ability to encounter information (in our case, textual information), and feel competent & confident enough to do something with it • → “do something:” use the information as the basis of a question or assertion in an academic production (traditionally a conference paper, article for publication, dissertation or book.) • → possess sufficient social integration to be able to communicate with others to seek help if needed

6. Digital Scholarly Agency • → ability to recognize the variety in the possibilities of “do[ing] something” • → having the confidence to defend and explain a highly-varied definition of “doing something” as digital humanities practice • → having an awareness of the field(s) of digital humanities as greater than the sum of particular skills which allows individuals to make decisions about the type of training that they need • → the ability to interact with others to think critically and discuss project sustainability and long-term purpose

7. What does this mean for teaching digital humanities at UW?

8. Would more classes in digital humanities-oriented skills successfully confer more agency? Image Source: I Can Has Cheezburger http://www.icanhascheezburger.com

9. Two possibilities regarding agency • Is there a fundamental difference between DH content and traditional humanities content, such that agency can’t be attained through coursework? • Or is the problem the lack of an institutionalized timeline that measures the development of digital humanities agency with benchmarks?

10. Digital Humanities Values • auto-didacticism • DIY • ad hoc • iterative development • process & product • failure as valuable • collaboration • open source • public scholarship • public peer review • dissemination

11. Image: Monty Python’s Flying Circus Altered via http://www.roflbot.com

12. Demystifying Digital Humanities is not a programming class • Programming courses and workshops are already readily available on the UW campus. • Learning a particular programming language (HTML, CSS, Javascript) does not necessarily promote the development of agency. • Like many digital humanists, neither of us are professional programmers.

13. What we wanted to do... • crack open the black box of the internet • encourage participants to become comfortable with screwing around

14. Screwing around? I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities. I will not screw around with the digital humanities.

15. Programmatic Access • Ability to understand the overarching structure of a platform or system • Not full “programming” competency • Comparable to being able to effectively navigate an online catalog entry for an item; or understanding what can be discovered via keyword/subject searching

16. Programmatic access for code • coding languages have grammar and syntax • objects, pages, & applications built with code have building blocks • the grammar & syntax that you work with are the top level of a more complex infrastructure

17. “...once you have programmatic access to the content of the library, screwing around suddenly becomes a far more illuminating and useful activity.”-- Steve Ramsay,The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around

18. Cracking open the black box The spectrum of our participants, from more to less experience with programming.

19. Cracking open the black box !=

20. Cracking open the black box It’s libraries all the way down...

21. Cracking open the black box “We might say that all [web-based knowledge-retrieval] systems rely on an act of faith, but it’s not so much trust in the search engine (or the book, or the professor) as it is willingness to suspend disbelief about the yellow wood after having taken a particular road.” --Steve Ramsay, The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around

23. When metaphors attack XKCD #762, Randall Munroe

24. Digital texts and other aspects of computing are acts of transmediation. But they rely on a set of metaphors that come from the predigital, and specifically, in scholarly editing, the predigital book.

25. Image: Zombie Apocalypse -- Des Moines. (2011). Jason Mrachina http://www.flickr.com/photos/w4nd3rl0st/6084086433/

26. It’s difficult to make the connections that seem obvious in retrospect when the content of the metaphor has been changed, but the language (the container) remains the same.

27. Curriculum design that fosters agency • Transparent values • Encouraging screwing around • Promoting suspension of disbelief

29. CAN BECOME A DIGITAL HUMANIST

30. Questions? Comments? Let us know, or visit www.dmdh.org Paige Morgan @paigecmorgan paigecm@uw.edu Sarah Kremen-Hicks @rhetoricaltrope sarahkh@uw.edu We are grateful for the support of the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the UW Textual Studies Program in making the DMDH series possible.