by Sean Palmer

My one suggestion for the syllabus is that the power dynamic between institutions and the person needs more than one week. 

The difficulty is that that relationship is awfully complicated: it depends on institutional concerns, departmental concerns, and personal issues. 

Take my position for example. After a visit from the Middle States accreditation agency (I’m not sure what to call them, if there is a term better than agency, I’ll happily edit this.), LaGuardia was tasked with improving students’ oral communication skills. Part of that involved replacing the VERY outdated tape-based language lab with a digital one. 

The college needed to hire someone to run it because they had no one with the proper skill set, so I was hired.

Since I was hired to run the new Speech Lab (later two speech labs) and be the oral communication person, I was immediately put on the committee to write the Oral Communication Assessment Rubric.

So, in institutional terms, I should have been a good fit. The personality issues, however, got in the way. At one point, about two years into my employment, my department chair said something like, “Please understand, it’s nothing personal. I just don’t think your line was necessary.” 

In fairness, this person changed their mind and we work together well now. 

But at the time, my thought process was, “How do I deal with THAT?” 

There were other issues, but that one still sticks out to me. Sometimes, someone in power doesn’t understand or respect what you do, and you have to figure out how to cope with that. 

This is why I think more time spent on the institutional – new hire relationship is worth considering. 

by Jen Hoyer

In looking over the syllabus, I’m glad to see Bethany Nowviskie’s writing assigned for week 6. I’m a big fan of confronting the reality of the environmental impacts of digital projects, and while Nowviskie touches on some of this, I’d love to see even material to help us think about how digitization, digital preservation, and digital sustainability is tied up with the climate crisis. Nowviskie references Eira Tansey‘s work with Project ARCC, which plays a key role in this conversation; I also find Stacie Williams’ writing about Sustainable Digital Scholarship really helpful, and Pendergrass et al’s article Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation is also a great (open access) read. I think that it’s critical for us to use a lens of climate impact to bring all the nuance we can to conversations about preservation and sustainability of digital work.

In reading the introduction and first chapter of Data Feminism, I was also reminded that part of what constitutes data feminism is re-defining what constitutes “data”; we need to change the terms of “quantification is representation” by broadening the possibilities for representation. In considering the fact that systems of power can only be undone by allowing new forms of data to be represented, and new voices to be heard in new formats, I went back to the syllabus to consider the ways that knowledge is represented in our assigned readings. I’m glad that we’re listening to voices in a variety of forms (video, podcast, academic and non-academic writing; creative projects), but also know that my imagination of what forms we can listen to is constrained by the systems of power that have taught me what to listen to. I’d love to think more about what other formats — performance, poetry, music, visual art — might help us consider the issues we’ll be looking at together.

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