Elisa Beshero-Bondar PRO
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
What Matters
and What Lasts?
Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Professor of Digital Humanities, Penn State Erie
(used to be Assoc Prof. of English, Pitt-Greensburg)
Mastodon: epyllia@indieweb.social | X and Bluesky: @epyllia
MLA 2024 Panel 404: Evaluating Digital Scholarship Today: Problems and Solutions
6 January 2024: 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM
Background image generated by DALL-E via Bing, in response to prompt about this talk: 2023-12-22
Our students can't / don't want to read and think they never have to write again.
Our administrators don't remember what they learned in humanities courses.
Corporate and political control of our institutions devalues what we care about.
AI is changing our thought processes and workflows.
Limited university support for digital project hosting
Background image: Flickr from Bureau of Land Management: New Carissa shipwreck
Background image source: Mission Lifeline Search and Rescue
See People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center, eds. Anne B. McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier (2022).
Roopika Risam, “Stewarding Place: Digital Humanities at the Regional Comprehensive University." In People, Practice, Power, Digital Humanities Outside the Center, eds. Anne B. McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier (2022).
[...] we have reframed the limitations of a regional comprehensive university—student profile, unique untapped resources, and emphasis on student success—as affordances for our local approach to digital humanities. We approach design from this perspective, recognizing that there would not be need for digital humanities at the university if not for its value to our students. There is simply not enough time or money available to invest in projects based on faculty research alone, and digital humanities experiences are especially valuable to our students.
—Roopika Risam, about Salem State U.
Who defines the "impact" of humanities scholarship?
See HumetricsHSS: Humane Metrics Initiative
"Current incentives and rewards create an unsustainable and unstable scholarly ecosystem."
"Making change requires understanding the levers you control within your institution and outside of it; recognizing your own agency and the spaces in which you have influence."
"Values work is iterative, ongoing, and moves at the speed of trust."
Image credit: Lorenzo Petrantoni, in "Research evaluation: Impact." Nature 502, 287 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/502287a
"Bring out number, weight, & measure in a year of dearth"
—William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets
Examples/suggestions inspired by the digital and public humanities
Image source: Pinterest. Inspiration, Blade Runner (1982, director's cut)
Schools, departments, programs, you can:
Andrew Pilsch and Shawna Ross, "Labor, alienation, and the digital humanities," The Bloomsbury handbook to the digital humanities, Bloomsbury Handbooks: 2022, https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:50071/ .
Modeling Early Career Research Profiles in the Digital Humanities
Kandice Sharren
Assistant Professor, University of Saskatchewan
kandice.sharren@usask.ca
Photo by Oliver Frsh on Unsplash
Began PhD
(September)
Finished PhD
(defended October, revisions submitted December)
First campus interview for a permanent TT position (March)
Began TT position (July)
Began three-year postdoc at the University of Galway (February)
Two podcast episodes
Two events ("listening parties")
One journal article
Ongoing collaborative relationship
AudiAnnotate text (Moffatt only)
… the practice of employing postdoctoral researchers as long-term researchers, with little mentoring and little hope of moving into a career that requires advanced research training, is becoming more common. The mentored training aspect of a postdoctoral researcher’s experience can be inconsistent and often inadequate. The mismatch between the expectations and outcomes of the postdoctoral experience causes disappointment and disillusionment for some postdoctoral researchers, and may discourage undergraduate students and graduate students from continuing to pursue careers in research... (68)
— National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited (2014)
1. What are the candidate's unifying methodologies, questions, or practices?
2. Is there evidence of the candidate maintaining collaborative relationships over time?
3. Is there evidence of leadership within projects?
4. Has the candidate engaged effectively with institutional structures?
5. How can the hiring committee adjust for personal or institutional biases?
Anderson, Katrina, et al. “Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 010, no. 1, Feb. 2016.
Battershill, Claire. “The Stories We Tell: Project Narratives, Project Endings, and the Affective Value of Collaboration.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 017, no. 1, May 2023.
Berens, Kathi Inman, and Laura Sanders. “DH and Adjuncts: Putting the Human Back Into the Humanities.” Disrupting the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, Punctum Books, 2018.
Boyles, Christina, et al. “Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities.” American Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 693–700.
Brown, Susan. “Delivery Service: Gender and the Political Unconscious of Digital Humanities.” Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism, MIT Press, 2020.
Gailey, Amanda, and Dot Porter. “Credential Creep in the Digital Humanities.” #alt-Academy: A Mediacommons Project, 6 May 2011, http://mediacommons.org/alt-ac/pieces/credential-creep-digital-humanities.
Keralis, Spencer D. C. “Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities; or, The Classroom Is Not Your Crowd.” Disrupting the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, Punctum Press, 2018, pp. 273–94.
Koh, Adeline. “A Letter to the Humanities: DH Will Not Save You.” Disrupting the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, Punctum Books, 2018, pp. 39-48.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited, The National Academies Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.17226/18982.
By Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Shared Slide Deck for MLA 404 Talks by Elisa Beshero-Bondar and Kandice Sharren. Contains EBB's "Digital Scholarship for Keeps: What Matters and What Lasts?" and KS's "Three CV Lines Walk Into a Bar: Modeling Early Career Research Profiles in the Digital Humanities".
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.