Students in this class might be interested in attending this upcoming virtual event, hosted by the University of Michigan and the Association for Computers and the Humanities:

When	Tuesday, March 21, 2023 from 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Where	Online
Registration	Register to attend
Event type	Lecture/Discussion

We invite you to join us (via Zoom) for a roundtable panel where humanities PhDs, from a diverse range of careers adjacent to or outside the academy, will engage in a conversation about the opportunities and challenges of pursuing careers off of the tenure track.

Building on the work originally published by the American Studies Association’s Digital Humanities Caucus’ Precarious Labor subcommittee, “Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities,” this panel takes a critical perspective to interrogating graduate education and “alt-ac” careers and asks participants to ponder the changing professional landscape of academia. Panelists will reflect on their own graduate experiences, the valuable skills they learned in or outside of those programs, and how they envisioned and fashioned meaningful professional identities off the tenure track.

Please register above. Attendees are encouraged to submit questions to the panel in advance, via the registration link.

Speakers include: 

• Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Program Specialist, National Endowment for the Humanities
• Sara Cohen, Acquisitions Editor, University of Michigan Press
• Patricia Hswe, Program Officer, Mellon Foundation
• S. Pokornowski, Former Senior Trainer, Hollaback!/Senior Analyst, Ithaka S+R
• Stephanie Rosen, Director of Accessibility, University of Michigan Library
• Kurtis Tanaka, Program Manager, Ithaka S+R
• Katina Rogers (moderator), Association for Computers in the Humanities
• Jim McGrath (moderator), Association for Computers in the Humanities

This session is brought to you by the University of Michigan Library, the Association of Computers in the Humanities, the Digital Studies Institute, and the Rackham Graduate School.

This week’s readings centered around the complex dynamic between Digital Humanities scholarship and the institutions in which it is produced. Boyles et al. (2018) describe how the collaborative nature of DH work is often exploitative in terms of how labor is distributed in favor of investing more funding into tangible digital resources (independent from humans). The argument is that the approach to digital humanities scholarship by many institutions within American higher education is ultimately not a sustainable one— which is very accurate. I cannot begin to express how many digital projects I have been involved with in the past five years and how many are currently collecting dust on the internet. I think CUNY tends to have a strong “starter place” mentality when it comes to these projects and initiatives that they get students and adjuncts involved with because the reality is that they’re just exposing people to this type of work with the expectation that they will then independently peddle it forward. Even long-standing DH projects I’ve been part of, such as the CUNY Academic Commons, which serves well over 30,000 members of CUNY, have to constantly argue for and justify their budget/expenses every single year. Additionally, the Commons has the potential to replace CUNY’s LMS entirely in favor of open pedagogies (if we’re willing to forfeit grading as a pedagogical tool), but we will never reach that scale due to the current size of our team and lack of support. At the same time, to speak to Oyo (2019), a large number of faculty members teaching on the Commons and integrating culturally sustaining and open pedagogies are our adjunct faculty. Their commitment to transformation is often taken advantage of and not supported in the same way our doctoral students are— and even our doctoral students are not properly trained to teach.

Tuka Al-Sahlani

My response to Adashima Oyo’s “Innovation and Burnout” article  wass, “ yes”, “yes”, “I hear you”, “yes”, “exactly”. This is my second semester teaching undergraduates in CUNY colleges. I was an Open Knowledge Fellow and went in my first semester of teaching with the aim to have a course site, OERs, upgrading policy, and all the ideals I want in my course. Suffice to say I did none, or I did slivers of some. I quickly realized, although I had the information and tools, I did not have the time to prepare for this better course. So, yes, Oyo, I agree, “ many of these [critical digital pedagogy]  methods require extensive preparation and planning for the adjunct.” These methods are successful  because of the time, labor, connectedness and transparency of these adjuncts in their pedagogy.  ( Shout out to the part-time  faculty–and fellows– at CUNY!) 

As for the Digital Precarity Manifesto.–WOW! I am not sure which quote to specifically reflect on because I might have annotated every other sentence, but there are two things that struck me. One, the historicization of digital precarity or even “the chain” of digital labor that I have not read about nor been introduced to in the general area of digital humanities.  I have always read/ seen digital humanities from the product and not from the production. Two, the breadth of the feminist perspective, but also the “miracle worker”( Boyles, et al.) tone of the feminist perspective. The Digital Precarity Manifesto does not support the “miracle worker” status, but ( and this could be me in awe of the manifesto) it reads like a superhero manifesto. I want to be in that league, but how do we go about eliminating that tone? Or, should I accept that tone as powerful and reframe it?

Another question I had pertained to Boyles et al’s “Precarious Labor and DH”. Summer institutions are something I have looked into precisely as the authors mention to supplement my skills and possibly increase my hireability, but these institutions do offer courses that do read as valuable to scholars in their respective fields. So, how do we provide for continuing learners (because if it is not for a job prospect then these individuals are continuing learners) to attend and benefit from institutions?
Another note on Boyle et al. When I read this quote “few DH projects will ever achieve the level of support or traffic that requires having full-time support staff dedicated to the maintenance of that project” (697) it reminded me of the ITP projects that remain accessible are mostly sponsored such as  Journalism and COVID-19: The Toll of a Pandemic sponsored by PEN America and Teaching Bilinguals (Even if You’re Not One!) that is a part of the CUNY-New York State Initiative for Emergent Bilinguals.

Brie Scolaro, LMSW

1. Precarity and Definition

What is precarity? This is a new word to me, yet a very familiar concept for someone who has long been in social justice. However, words and semantics are important, and to consider the intersecting between precarity and digital humanities, it is important to me to have a clear definition of what this means and where it may come from.

DICTIONARY.COM : Precarity | “A state of existence in which material provision and psychological wellness are adversely affected by a lack of regular or secure income”

Merriam-Webster | Etymology of Precarity | “Probably borrowed from French précarité, from précaire “granted or exercised only with the permission of another, insecure, uncertain” (going back to Middle French, borrowed from Latin precārius “given as a favor, uncertain, PRECARIOUS“) + -ité -ITY“

Precarity Lab’s Digital Precarity Manifesto | Precarity | “Precarity is Life in Chains”

“Precarity is Life in Chains – I feel this needs to occupy another line in this post to give this extra weight, as it has extra sat in my consciousness for reflection. I felt this on a logical but also emotional and spiritual level when reading these examples, but to the extent that a White AFAB US-born individual can empathize.

2. TLDR My Main Take Away(s)

Precarity in digital humanities = the exploitation of historically marginalized communities within the tech value chain (as per the Digital Manifesto).

Tech is made for you to NOT think about it and its value chain. Your website page is expected to instantly load, your stored “cloud” data expected to be instantly available (and actively hosted and protected until.. or if.. you ever choose to access it).

If we pull the curtain back of the tech value chain, we cringe at what is revealed, especially this history of precarity. Can we than hypothesize that this will continue, only to intensify, in the future? As the lines between human and technology continue to blur?

I am particularly moved by Manifesto’s citing of specific examples that serve to highlight how to define precarity of digital workers. I specifically mentioned here the Fairchild Semiconductor Plant run by Indigenous workers in 1965-1975.

The technology created here are the grandparents of the technology used in today’s electronics. Somewhere, a decision was made after a weighing of “pros and cons” in the digital tech value chain. However, White profit is typically the “pro”, the “con” being the continued exploitation of already exploited workers.

I still am trying to reflect on what precarity within digital humanities means if not for the examples presented in the Manifesto, and the full spectrum of what is included by the term “digital workers.”

I just thought of an issue concerning DH and mentoring today while preparing for meeting with a new adjunct who hasn’t used Blackboard before.

My job has several different duties, and DH is only one part of it.

Heck, I was hired in 2004, either before the field really existed or, at least, when it was in its infancy. I was hired for my Instructional Tech skills and my background in language learning.

Even now, very few jobs are explicitly DH. Instead it’s either a part of the job or not mentioned in the job description at all. Honestly, I think that most of us won’t be working a straight up DH job. We’ll be taking the skills that we learn in this program and apply them to our field(s).

This can make mentoring difficult because the people in charge, and therefore, the people likely to mentor us, don’t have a solid grasp on DH as a field or how it can be applied across the Humanities in general.

Even if, say, you were hired in a department that already had a DH specialist, they still might not be able to help you as much as either of you would like.

Take the Humanities Department where I work for instance. We have ten (soon to be eleven) different majors. I am Communication Studies and Linguistics. I don’t know how useful my experience would be to a DH specialist in Philosophy or Art History. We would approach things from very different (and all completely valid) angles, and, therefore, have different expectations of what DH can do.

From an administrative standpoint, I’d be happy to help them, but from a strictly DH standpoint, I am not sure about how much help I’d be.

— Sean

I do not really know what institutional support feels like. Institutional indifference? Absolutely. But support? Not at all. 

Even when I was hired, many of the people in the Communication Studies area didn’t think it was necessary to hire me or that what I did was particularly worthwhile. My direct supervisor supported what I did… or at least, he gave me room to do it. 

Especially since the pandemic, I;ve been left to my own devices, and I like to think I’ve done some interesting and worthwhile work, but my colleagues either don’t understand what I’m doing or still see no value in it. If I’m being honest, it’s probably a combination of the two. 

Seriously, that communication studies faculty just doesn;t see the worth in multimedia projects still astounds me. Of our full-timers, two do media based projects, and of our part-timers, another two (one of whom is me when I teach). That’s it. Everyone else is still stuck on papers and speeches. 

However, the real precarity in my area right now is with our adjuncts. LaGuardia’s student enrollment has crashed, partially due to the pandemic, partially due to the four year schools becoming open admission. At one point, we were down by about one-third from pre-pandemic levels. When the numbers were last publicized – a few weeks ago– we were at about 74% of projected student enrollment, but that projection was lower than projections pre-pandemic. 

Fewer students means fewer sections, so many adjuncts either lost their positions or had the number of classes they taught cut. This term, a few of our long term adjuncts on guaranteed contracts are up for renewal. I don’t know if their contracts are getting renewed. I haven’t heard. 

I used to teach four classes per year. I’m down to one, maximum. I have a full-time job otherwise, so it makes sense to cut my classes: I don’t rely on these classes. They are extra money. Being discarded like this bothers me, but I understand. 

I mean, it’s part of why I’m job-hunting, but I understand the decision.

by Jen

The manifesto from Precarity Lab and the article by Boyles et al provided an interesting contrast in looking at the human precarity of DH. Boyles et al focus on the academy, looking at the challenges faced by DH laborers; in addition to asking for better labor conditions, I felt that they were also asking for recognition of the work itself as labor: “Consider the graduate student encouraged to situate herself within digital humanities by completing digital projects in addition to a dissertation” (emphasis mine, page 694). There is an inference that these challenges arise because this work is new to the university (695). I would counter that this work is not entirely new, but that it is a tactic of the institution to silo this work into spaces where it feels new and disconnected from pre-existing networks and support structures, as a way to justify precarious conditions and under funding. It was interesting to read a piece that was focused specifically on DH within an American Studies context, but I wished for a little more broader recognition of the dynamics of other parts of the institution; I felt to an extent that many of the experiences they discussed were inherited from other parts of the institution, and real solutions could be found through broader solidarity.

I was surprised that Boyle et al’s critique did not name capitalism as the problem, and so was grateful to read the Precarity Lab’s diagnosis of “the precarity of contemporary neoliberal capitalism” at the start of their manifesto. I also appreciated their point that it is unfair to call this labor invisible when it “has always been visible in the same way that the people who do this labor have been: in plain sight but undervalued” (80). I felt that this responded to some of my criticism of Boyles et al seeing their labor as “new;” Precarity Lab recognizes that these types of labor have been invisibilized as a tactic; we’re led to believe it’s new so that we don’t realize it’s always been there, undervalued.

In contrast to Boyles et al.’s discipline-specific focus, Precarity Lab provides a high level view of other “scenes of precarity”: the Fairchild Semiconductor Plant, UberPASSPORT. I found these really interesting but felt that they zoomed too far out; again, they repeat Boyles et al’s step of not examining the academy as a whole. They have left their Humanities Collaboratory at the University of Michigan but, instead of stepping outside to analyze the dynamics of the institution, they’ve looked at the world as a whole.

I want to emphasize that I’m really not opposed to that analysis, but I wanted to read the analysis that lies between these broad and narrow perspectives. Precarity Lab notes that it’s important to situate digital platforms in historic and spatially constructed contexts to interrogate the way they’ve been positioned across time (81); what does it look like to situate these within the institution of academia and recognize how the precarity of DH mirrors the precarity of female computers in early 20th century math labs, or the precarity of visual resource curators in art departments (a weirdly siloed position often dedicated to management of visual art research collections in the latest technological format). I’m interested in an institution-level analysis as a way to articulate how the power structures of our institutes create and perpetuate precarity, and as a starting point for identifying work we can do to undo this.

Adrianna

Many of the things that were said in “Precarious Labor and the Digital Humanities” were new to me, yet they were unsurprising. But the section about summer seminars was simply ridiculous. I couldn’t believe that they had to take out money from their already precarious salary to invest in a seminar that will make them seem more “apt” in the eyes of universities.

All of that aside, there was a line that raised some questions for me. It reads, “Digital laborers face particular challenges in mentorship and advancement in university contexts. Their work, and their positions, is often new to the university, so there is little institutional memory about how best to succeed”(4). I ask myself. could this be a good thing? I know mentorship is key, but maybe not having a mentor could be an opportunity to have more agency over your project? I’m not sure.

Some of the issues that this article brings up, in a way, made me recall the issues with Ethnic Studies that Lorgia Garcia Peña raises in Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color. I don’t know much about DH and am not sure if it’s even fair to compare the overlooking of Ethnic Studies to the overlooking of DH. But I’d love to hear what other’s have experienced in the realm of DH. Whether lack of mentorship is a pro or a con and if it’s fair to compare DH issues to Ethnic Studies issues? (or not)

This week’s readings touched on a couple of conversations I’ve been wrestling with for some time. With the overarching idea being how technology/digital culture influences institutions and workplace dynamics, I found a couple of points of minor contention with both the Tunstall and Walsh pieces. Starting with Walsh, who wrote about Kellogg’s research regarding introducing new technologies/processes and how that impacts the workplace; I was immediately disengaged from the idea when he opened by describing junior employees to be digital natives. The reason it was an immediate red flag for me, aside from my hard belief in the digital native not existing, is that the concept already clashes with some of the notions raised in the Tunstall piece. Tunstall thoroughly addressed how tech is, has been, and will likely always be imbalanced due to the knowledge and truths imbued into the technology. This leads to the question of who has access to these tools or proper training on how to maximize their efficiency with them. Then, the successful method presented, in order to avoid hurting higher executives’ feelings, was simply to take turns shouldering responsibility. When reduced to what it is, it feels almost silly that the explanation for reducing workplace conflict and power imbalances is to…work together. This feels more like a cultural issue being presented by introducing technology, not introducing technology producing new forms of conflict itself.

As for the Tunstall piece, I think it was overall well-presented. I agree with a majority of the piece but have one concern. I feel as though the discourse diverted at some point in the writing from being about technological biases’ impact more broadly to quickly narrowing in on artificial intelligence, drawing on examples like Bina48. I think all the information is relevant and important to consider, but I found it interesting that their presented solution was geared towards equal collaboration with other, less-biased AI. While I understand the idea, and I’ve even begun to use AI in my own position at Lehman— I think as a digital humanist, I’m naturally skeptical and slightly alarmed that the conversation where we’ve re-painted historical human-human dynamics as human-computer, Tunstall framing the dominant technologies created primarily by white men versus Bina48, an AI for an indigenous community, which appears rather almost to be presented as an indigenous AI/computer itself (separate from the community which it represents). While I love abolitionist design approaches, I’m hesitant about the level of sentience these machines might have, and how new conflicts could arise the more we invest in growing AI resources (especially ones with advanced machine learning models encoded). On top of this indigenous metaphor, the article itself is framed using master-slave power dynamics as the underscoring theme representing the relationship we have with technology. This is a recurring metaphor in tech articles; I saw it a few years ago when someone wrote about Amazon’s Alexa and the way we speak to it. I try to navigate away from using slavery as a metaphor, as it is simply not the same.

by: Nelson

How are power structures a part of our institutions and our technology?

There are many types of power structures in our society like banks, governments and corporations. They pay a crucial role in showcasing power via legal routes, financial poweress or corporate domination. Many of our day to day actions are ruled by technology and the rules behind them. whether we order pizza from a store or take a loan for school. They are hundreds of barriers that are placed, some for efficiency or for bureaucracy reasons.

How are power structures within our institutions connected to our technology?

Technology has replaced our old dogmatic ways of recordkeeping. Twitter/facebook is a more accessible global “town hall” Where power institutions like mega corporations use these mediums as they did before. influencing local norms, silencing contrarian arguments and aiding in witch hunts for political influences.

What are the ways we can take back power, share power, and build power together? 

There should a united conscience of people who should moderate mega entities. There should be more consumer protection, unions for workplaces and understanding aggrevances of all parties. while freedom of speech should be supported, not all should be celebrated equality.

Thoughts on readings

I enjoyed the selection that has been provided. Bina48 is a glimpse of different AI that will appear in the future. Future AI will be based on it’s initial data and it’s biases. We can see the difference of responses of Bina48 vs ChatGPT and Sydney(MS’s AI)

Bina48 comes from a more marginalized background. ChatGPT is a more westernize approach of data collection. While Sydney, was unfiltered gathering data from unmoderated cesspools around the internet.

As time goes on and AI become more and more of a norm, we will see more manifestos declaring autonomy and liberation. at the end of day, is this more of a human emotion that has been “digitized”?