Introduction

An integral part of humanities disciplines, doctoral programs are designed to reflect the scholarly landscape and prepare candidates for the type of work they will be expected to carry out upon graduation. The dissertation—the sine qua non of the humanities doctoral program—is intended to produce scholarship that emulates the values of academia. Today, the humanities dissertation primarily follows the monograph model that culminates five or more single-authored chapters, ideally to be submitted as a book proposal in the subsequent stages of an academic career. The format of the dissertation has largely withstood the changes in the scholarly landscape over the past few decades and the ever more robust integration of digital scholarship into the doctoral dissertation and training. While the monograph dissertation model is still effective for preparing graduate students for an academic career trajectory, it less readily applies to doctoral work that includes digital components, primarily because the workflow required for a monograph dissertation does not integrate neatly with the fast-paced, collaborative, interactive nature of the type of digital intellectual work that graduate students are increasingly engaged with.

Despite the change in the medium and methods for carrying out scholarship, a majority of English departments today still default to the monograph model. This necessarily raises the following questions: are the expectations of graduate students entering the academic profession and engaging with digital intellectual work today still the same as they were of graduate students a decade, two, and even three ago? Should their training and dissertation follow the same format as those graduate students engaged in non-digital work? What does the monograph prove about its author? What academic values ought to be emulated in the dissertation’s format? And finally — when the pace, scope, and type of research that the digital medium facilitates have changed from those in the pre-digital age, as well as the very means and methodologies that underlie them, does it still make sense to default to the pre-digital dissertation model?

Reflecting on the structure and goals of the doctoral dissertation as a dynamic form of knowledge production and means of scholarly communication that is representative of its scholarly landscape ought to be an essential and iterative practice of the academy, and their results iteratively implemented as we move forward. In this article, I describe what the digital dissertation is and how it can reflect the type of environments that digital humanists are already engaged in—ones that value collaboration, access, and dynamicity. Drawing on the portfolio dissertation more common in the sciences and social sciences, I discuss how this model has been adapted for my doctoral dissertation carried out in the English Department at the University of Victoria (UVic). To be clear, this article does not argue against the monograph model, which has been and continues to be successful for many graduate students who engage in digital or other work—rather, it prompts us to consider alternative models that can be more formally implemented alongside the monograph model instead of emphatically defaulting to a one size fits all monograph dissertation.

Digital Humanities values

The turn of the decade marked a substantial debate about what digital humanities (DH) is, carried out by scholars such as Budrick et al. (2012), Kirschenbaum (2012), and Rockwell (2011), among others. Rather than reopening the discourse about what DH is, one way of discerning what the DH scholarly landscape looks like today is to identify what some its defining qualities, or values, are across its many branches, highlighted by scholars including Risam (2014), Robertson (2016), and many others; these are 1) DH is collaborative: reflecting its interdisciplinary nature, most DH work is carried out collaboratively. In doing so, DH is challenging the concept of the siloed researcher and values social, interdisciplinary, collaborative scholarship. 2) DH is open: DH largely values the “open” movement, most regularly expressed through the dissemination of open access and open source resources. A considerable number of DH journals, websites, projects, and tools are available under Creative Commons and other open licenses, and many tools are published in open source. 3) DH is dynamic: DH is a fast-paced field that involves experimenting with novel forms of scholarly research and communication. The type, scope, and format of research are quickly evolving with the ever-changing methodologies, tools, and platforms. These prevailing qualities or values of DH point to a different research workflow from non-DH knowledge production processes that happen on the ground and encourage a revisit of the current dissertation model.

With the emergence of DH and new forms of digital scholarly communication, formal scholarly bodies in the humanities are starting to recognize alternative dissertation formats. For example, the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) former president Russell Berman has called to reform doctoral education, detailed in Huffpost’s “Reforming Doctoral Study: Shaping a Better Future for Humanities Ph.Ds” (Starkman 2013); MLA Commons’ Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology has also published an article by Jojo Karlin (2019) titled “Our Digital Literary Legacy: Producing and Preserving Digital Dissertations in English” that makes a case for digital dissertations. The American Historical Association’s (AHA) guidelines for “Professional Evaluation of Digital Projects in History” and MLA’s “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media” both recognize digital work as part of the robust academic conversation and scholarly output. In Celeste Sharpe’s interview with AHA Today, AHA’s newsletter, Kritika Agarwal refers to Sharpe’s dissertation “A History Dissertation Goes Digital” (2017) as exemplary scholarship in the field——a piece that reflects a positive reception of digital scholarship by AHA. Other similar examples exist, but they are far from the norm.

In a digital dissertation, the digital component comprises a significant part of the intellectual work of the dissertation—it informs its argument either through the theoretical framework, methodology, or some other significant aspect integral to the original contribution that the dissertation makes. A dissertation that simply has a digital component for the purpose of visualizing or elaborating part of its content is not a ‘digital dissertation.’ Digital dissertations do not adhere to any specific format; some combine the monograph model with a digital project and put them in conversation with each other, while others adopt digital intellectual work more fully. Around the mid-2010’s mark, digital dissertations started gaining some traction, with DH becoming more widely practiced. An example of a successful digital dissertation is Amanda Visconti’s, “How Can You Love a Work If You Don’t Know It?: Critical Code and Design Towards Participatory Digital Editions,” (2015) carried out at the University of Maryland. This dissertation is in the form of a whitepaper that reports on the process of building and the findings of her platform “Infinite Ulysses” (Visconti 2014), an open access, participatory, social digital edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where members of the public were invited to highlight, annotate, and tag different parts of the work, together meant to serve as an experiment in a community reading of Ulysses. Another example is Erin Glass’s open dissertation or #SocialDiss from CUNY titled “Software of the Oppressed: Reprogramming the Invisible Discipline” (2017). This work is written in an open access platform that invited members of the public to give feedback on the different components of Glass’s dissertation, after which that feedback was drawn into the revision process. Uncoincidentally, the two examples involve a social element, and at the time of development, were open access, interactive, expanding platforms—reflecting the qualities of DH research identified earlier.

The portfolio dissertation model and program requirements

Non-monograph-style dissertations are still more common outside of the humanities. In a study by Bonnie Fong (2017) on the predominant format of dissertations in roughly ten departments in each of the sciences (chemistry department), social sciences (political science) and humanities (English department), Fong found that although the sciences still accepted monograph-style dissertations, they seemed to prefer portfolio dissertations—namely dissertations made up of multiple articles that are published in reputable journals in the field. Notably, multi-authored articles were admissible. In the social sciences, portfolio dissertations are also widely acceptable, but single-authored works are preferred, since they reflect the predominant trend of publication in the field. Finally, Fong observed that traditional monographs are still the mainstream format in the humanities, and, whereas accompanying digital components are starting to become accepted in some universities in recent years, departments encourage students to hold off on publishing their research until after completion. Despite the small sample used for the study, it does commend the wider acceptance of the portfolio dissertation model in the sciences and social sciences than in the humanities.

Most universities will have different program requirements for the dissertation. Portfolio dissertations are admissible at UVic; in fact, the university does not specify the format for the dissertation, and rather states that it “must embody original work and constitute a significant contribution to knowledge” and “[m]aterial embodied in the dissertation should, in the opinion of scholars in the field, merit publication” (UVic 2019). The guidelines do not specify that publication must take place after defense, but rather that “the dissertation may include materials already published by the candidate, whether alone or in conjunction with others.” Published, multi-authored works are accepted as part of a dissertation, but multi-authored publications must be accompanied with “a description of the student’s contribution to the research and the student’s role in each publication must be provided.” This document typically outlines the exact role of the graduate student in the publication(s) and is approved by all co-authors before the defense date. However, the program requirements make it clear that the student is responsible for the entire content of the dissertation at the oral defense, including “portions of co-authored papers which comprise the dissertation.” What is reinforced in this model is that rigorous academic standards concerning the dissertation’s contribution to the field and quality of work are upheld and are measured by whether they “merit publication”; in the case of pre-published works then, they demonstrate that they merit publication.

Geospatial research prototyping: Visualizing literary space

Modelled after a portfolio dissertation, my dissertation comprises six peer reviewed articles or book chapters that have been published or are currently awaiting publication. Publication venues are directed at audiences interested in DH, early modern studies, scholarly communication, or a combination of the three. The dissertation proper draws all the materials together through a theoretical framework, argument, and connecting pieces between each part, that, together, meet the length and criteria of a dissertation according to the aforementioned UVic requirements for a doctoral dissertation, where the overarching argument “[is] the intellectual and conceptual glue that holds the (port)folio together” (Walker 1998, 94). The dissertation is also accompanied by three prototypes that I describe below. In what follows, I give an overview of my dissertation, explain why I chose the portfolio dissertation format, and provide more pragmatic details about the process of writing a portfolio dissertation and the role of my committee.

“Geospatial Research Prototyping: Visualizing Literary Space” is my digital dissertation that approaches the full scope of geospatial humanities, a subfield of DH that marries literary spatial analysis and GIS technology. While many existing geospatial humanities projects exist, they primarily focus on the literary, spatial aspects of the research. My dissertation acknowledges that geospatial humanities projects are rarely solely literature and location focused: they often involve building and running software in collaborative, multidisciplinary environments. Together, my dissertation asks “why map literary texts?” in each aspect of this multidisciplinary endeavour and explores this question by building various prototypes to visualize literary space at a distant, large scale level and at a closer, multilayered, rich level. By drawing on geospatial methodologies, software prototyping, and early modern literature, the dissertation essentially argues for the validity of prototyping as a research methodology for scholarly inquiry into literary spatial representation, as well as for developing enhanced models for interdisciplinary collaboration and data visualization.

The dissertation itself consists of three main, interrelated components. The first part, geospatial humanities and literature, explores how rendering elements of a research framework such as geocriticism—a term introduced by Westphal (2011) that refers to a multifocal, geocentered approach to analyzing literary space—into concrete functionalities of a digital tool can help study the literary space of a text and explore the affordances and limitations of the research approach itself (here referring to geocritcism). The prototype —TopoText—is a response to Westphal and Tally’s speculation that geocritical research will necessarily involve collaborative work using digital means in order to analyze corpora of texts organized around spatial criteria (Tally 2013, 143). This part of the dissertation draws on my role as the project lead and manager of two software prototypes—TopoText (2015) and TopoText 2.0 (2016)—that were developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Computer Science department at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Available in open source on GitHub, these tools perform “text to map” conversion; users can simply upload a text, and TopoText automatically extracts all the place names that are mentioned in the text and visualizes them on a map. TopoText also supports word-place collocation that allows users to trace most frequent topics in selected passages or across the entire text. For example, a user can explore what the most frequent words collocated with Vancouver are in a text. They can also select a part of speech to collocate with a place, such as the most frequent nouns or verbs collocated with Vancouver. This type of collocation can help track themes and patterns of words related to place names across an author’s career or by multiple authors in a specific year, for instance. The second version (TopoText 2.0) has some additional features; the prototype allows users to export the geoparsed data (geoparsing refers to identifying place names in a text and linking them to their geographic coordinates) produced from the text-to-map conversion and reuse it on other platforms. It also provides an option to correct mismatched geographical points; for example, if the geoparsing linked Vancouver with the city in British Columbia, Canada, but in fact the author intended Vancouver, Washington in the US, the user can easily correct this information in the dataset. This version of TopoText also allows for the inclusion of text annotations in the dataset that can be visualized on the map. Together, the second prototype is a more accurate mapping tool and an open geodata provider. In this part of the dissertation, I address the questions: how can a geospatial prototype integrate the elements of a research approach, such as geocritcism, to analyze spatial representation in texts? What are the affordances and limitations of automatic and semi-automatic geoparsing techniques? And: how can a literary map advance our understanding of the spatial project of an author? As open source tools, TopoText and TopoText 2.0 have been applied in multiple DH classes and workshops, including the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the European Summer University in Digital Humanities, and term-long DH courses at AUB. A study using TopoText 2.0 was also implemented in Thomas Baur’s (University of Cologne) double major Bachelor thesis in Information Processing and Geography, titled “The Use of Geographic Information Systems in the Humanities (Spatial Humanities). Problems and Limitations of GIS: A Research Experiment with TopoText 2.0.” (2018), which led to Baur’s current MA project to start developing a plan for a third, web-based iteration of TopoText (2020).

The second part of the dissertation, research prototyping, addresses collaborative prototyping in the humanities and across the disciplines. In this section, I explore what it means to build prototypes for humanities research, how prototyping can serve as a method for exploring research questions, and what multidisciplinary collaboration with software developers and computer scientists entails. Some questions I address are: what forged vocabularies do collaborators coming from different fields need to share in order to effectively communicate? How do we ensure that collaborators coming from different disciplines are making contributions to their field while still sharing overarching project goals?

Rather than taking a broad-scope text-to-map approach like TopoText, the final part offers a deep dive into the spatiality of a single text—John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Written in the 17^th century, a time that witnessed many leaps in cartography, Milton draws on texts, but also on maps in order to build his intricate spatial project. A Map of Paradise Lost, co-created with Marcel Schaeben from the University of Cologne, is an exploratory map, or geo-edition, that offers a visual entry point into the complex and multitemporal terrestrial space of John Milton’s epic poem. The project is an interactive digital map that includes locatable place-name references, the passage in which a place name appears, editorial context that explains the significance of a place, and an experimental visualization of a close reading (in this case, to test the hypothesis that Milton gives ‘moral’ connotations to places in Paradise Lost, such as associating places around the Mediterranean basin occupied by the Ottoman Empire with pagan worshipers and those mentioned in the Bible with holy deities or muses), all against a backdrop of the historical and biblical maps that inspired Milton’s spatial imagination when writing Paradise Lost. In this part of the dissertation, I address the questions: what can a digital geo-edition tell us about a literary work? How can mapping a literary text advance our knowledge of the text and how does it contribute to DH scholarship? How can prototyping in collaborative teams enhance models for interdisciplinary collaboration? And: how can we productively merge GIS-based scholarly inquiry and early modern spatial thought?

One of the defining features of the digital is that its infrastructure, methods, and tools are rapidly evolving; many digital resources become outdated, are superseded with more advanced methodologies, make leaps, or take falls. Digital work makes its biggest impact when shared, engaged with, integrated, and built-upon in a timely manner. Taking the monograph route in this case would require writing a book-length work and creating all three prototypes before searching for a publication venue for the research—whether in the form of a monograph or a series of articles. This delay in publishing research that is engaging with the rapidly developing GIS methodologies and their application in the humanities will risk missing the metaphorical train, and render the work meant for timely scholarly contribution obsolete, or at best, substandard. At the same time, publishing research and projects as they are conceptualized and carried out allows others to engage with the materials and provide feedback. This is especially useful in research prototyping work, which is based on iterative development, where new versions build more advanced prototypes based on previous ones, such as in the case of TopoText 2.0 that builds on TopoText. Another option for still producing this type of work would be to write a monograph dissertation, while at the same time building prototypes and publishing separate articles about them, since prototypes do not yet stand as contributions to knowledge in themselves, despite efforts by scholars such as Alan Galey and Stan Rucker (2010) and others. Although this route is possible, it is an unnecessarily labour-intensive model that does not fit within the timeline of a doctoral program, which involves other elements such as coursework, comprehensive exams, teaching, participating in conferences, holding research assistantships, publishing, and preparing for the job market, to name a few.

By publishing the dissertation as I go, my dissertation committee, comprised of Ray Siemens (UVic English; academic advisor), Stephen Ross (UVic English), Jonathan Bengtson (UVic Libraries), and David Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi Humanities) take on a similar role to peer reviewers of an article or book chapter. Each piece that is submitted for publication is also submitted to the dissertation committee that provides feedback on the work. When revising the work, I integrate the feedback of reviewers and committee members, and turn it around until I receive approval for publication from both parties. This has been a successful approach for me since my committee is involved in the entirety of the process; the feedback I receive along the way helps shape each article and build a stronger foundation for the work to follow. This approach also means that once an article has moved into the copyediting phase, my committee has signed off on it and I can work on integrating that piece into the larger overarching framework of the dissertation. In each article, the prototype and content inform each other and, together, attempt to expand our understanding of the various processes involved in building geospatial humanities projects and the type of knowledge they produce.

In addition to researching and writing, my dissertation involves international interdisciplinary collaborations with multiple research groups and scholars with whom we built the aforementioned prototypes. This is reflected in the dissertation proper, where some of the articles are co-authored to reflect the team that was involved in building the prototype and contributing to the related article; in these cases, I appear as first author to reflect my role as project manager and lead author, alongside my collaborators. All publications (except for one book chapter) are available in open access, and the prototypes are shared in open source, inviting others to engage with our research. The skills developed from this dissertation overlap with those produced from the monograph dissertation in that both are concerned with producing quality research that provides new insights into the fields it relates to, which is communicated through scholarly publications. However, the digital dissertation also simulates the real-life settings digital humanists often find themselves working in, namely in interdisciplinary, collaborative environments that involve developing a digital component, such as a methodology, prototype, platform, or edition, most likely to be shared as an open access or open source project.

Conclusion

Many arguments are made about the importance of training humanities graduate students to work in collaborative teams and acquire digital skills in order to prepare them for alt- and non-academic jobs that many may end up pursuing. However, this type of training is also necessary to prepare students for academic work that is already happening in the humanities: increasingly more projects require multidisciplinary teams to carry out research and produce public-facing platforms that showcase research findings. This article does not argue that the monograph dissertation model ought to be abandoned, nor that DH research cannot be communicated through a monograph. On the contrary, countless excellent examples of monograph dissertations and books on DH exist and continue to be published every day. Instead, this article argues that rather than defaulting to the monograph dissertation model, other means of knowledge production and academic workflows that are already happening in the field ought to be recognized and offered as an option for graduate students. One of these models is the digital dissertation that can take many different forms, where the digital aspect is integral to the scholarly contribution of the work. My interpretation of the digital dissertation takes on the portfolio model—a series of published articles and prototypes developed with multidisciplinary teams. The dissertation is not just a ‘portfolio’ of related works but is developed with an overarching argument across each of its components and is reflective of the environment in which it evolved, which is collaborative, open, and dynamic. Although this article is meant to showcase just one take on the digital dissertation, it also demonstrates that alternative forms to the monograph model exist, and that there can be a more direct continuation between the work that many graduate students are engaged in and the type of scholarship they are expected to produce.

Competing interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Editorial contributions

Guest Editor, DSCN Student Issue 2020: Colette Colligan, Kimberly O’Donnell and Kandice Sharren.

Section Editor/Copy Editor: Darcy Tamayose, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Copy Editor/Bibliographies Manager: Shahina Parvin, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Introduction

Last November, I gave a talk at the Student Digital Showcase, a one-day event hosted jointly by Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the University of Victoria that consisted of presentations from students on their respective projects, as well as on digital pedagogy more generally. I had been asked to reflect on my own digital project, which I began in 2015 as an undergraduate assignment and completed in 2018 as a master’s project—my cohort (2016) being the first in the SFU English Department to be offered the option of a digital project in lieu of a master’s thesis or further coursework. My completed project is a digital edition of the first two published versions of Jane Austen’s last, unfinished manuscript Sanditon, began and abandoned by Austen in 1817. The fragment was not published until 1871, when excerpts of it were included in the second edition of A Memoir of Jane Austen (Austen-Leigh 1871), and not printed in its entirety until 1925, part of R. W. Chapman’s Oxford University Press Jane Austen editions (Austen 1925). My digital edition includes a link to the digitized manuscript at the Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts (JAFM) website (Sutherland 2010), meant to guide users to compare the manuscript to the published versions. I also have a critical section investigating the editorial interventions done by Chapman and Austen’s nephew, the author and editor of A Memoir of Jane Austen, asking what these men’s modifications do to the fragment and why they matter to its publication history. The project is largely comparative, with digitized copies of the 1871 and 1925 print editions embedded into the site. Initially begun as a WordPress site in 2015, for the graduate version I began the work in Omeka, but due to frustrations and limited knowledge on my end, decided to revert to WordPress. The project is currently (2020) offline, as I opted for the paid version of WordPress in order to support plug-ins I needed such as a PDF viewer which would display like a book reader, but have not renewed my paid WordPress account.

While my talk in November focused on choosing WordPress over Omeka as a platform, I now want to use that frustration and subsequent choice as a springboard to explore a larger issue I see facing graduate digital projects: that of support. I do not want to discount the support I did receive for my work, namely from Rebecca Dowson, Kim O’Donnell, and Michael Joyce at the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) at SFU, my supervisor Dr. Michelle Levy, and my second reader Dr. Matt Hussey. Instead, I would like to examine the institutional structures currently in place for the digital project option—and if I am to criticize any individual, it is myself for allowing frustration of my lack of digital skills and my anxiety over the written portion to get in the way of receiving support.

But where would further support come from, and how might it be formally integrated into the project? This paper takes the stance that the academic library is the most advantageous place from which to draw support for graduate digital projects. In a 2014 report, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) recommended broader collaboration between library and information professionals and the wider academic community (Jacobson and Gibson 2014), and in February 2018 the ACRL revised its “Standards for Libraries in Higher Education,” which “are designed to guide academic libraries in advancing and sustaining their role as partners in educating students, achieving their institutions’ missions, and positioning libraries as leaders in assessment and continuous improvement on their campuses” (ACRL 2018). The suggestion that libraries are ideal to support graduate digital projects—particularly considering the ACRL’s recommendations and standards—may seem obvious; however, there are several factors inhibiting students from approaching the library for digital help, or even knowing about the library as a place to go for this help. Even within the literature I have consulted for this paper, I have found that while graduate students are named as an interested party in digital work, they are often left to discover ways to do their project work on their own, or are guided by supervisors who might be drawing on a limited, or small, knowledge base of digital tools from their own experience. Individual graduate projects were only mentioned occasionally and were not considered within digital pedagogy as much as formal workshops in graduate classrooms, or certificates for graduate programs. I can only conclude that, as graduate digital projects are relatively new alternatives to theses or capstones, their unique needs have not been fully considered within digital pedagogy, an oversight that graduate programs now need to address. As Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross (2017) point out in their book Digital Humanities in the Classroom, these digital projects are often solitary, unusual for digital humanities (DH) work, which is usually collaborative in nature and involves many players from the library, faculty, and student body. In addition to their solitary nature, these graduate projects, because they are alternatives to theses or capstones, often have a traditional academic structure mapped onto them: a master’s thesis, for example, has a faculty supervisor and a faculty second reader from within the department, so a master’s digital project carries this same structure, at least within SFU’s English Department SFU English MA Project Guidelines (Simon Fraser University 2020b). Digital pedagogy asks us to consider shifting how academic instruction has been traditionally conducted (Spiro 2012; Mahony and Pierazzo 2012), and the graduate digital project is one avenue in which this shift might occur, rather than replicating past, analogue models verbatim.

The library should be a key player in this shift in terms of the graduate digital project, as others have seen the library in classroom digital pedagogy more broadly (Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Laura Braunstein, and Liorah Golomb’s 2015 book contains prime examples). Further, the graduate digital project is an opportunity for more parties than the student; faculty and library staff can collaborate and learn as they work with and supervise students’ work. Trevor Muñoz (2013) and Bethany Nowviskie (2013) contend that librarians should be collaborative partners in DH projects, taking on roles that fulfill this function, rather than only providing services for faculty and students. Fred Truyen and Demmy Verbeke (2015), more recently, explain that the question is how the library should join DH work, not whether or not they should (28). I would like to map out the how in the context of graduate digital project work, and argue that librarians can provide services for students, and also be a collaborative partner in the DH project with the faculty supervisor and with the student. To illustrate how this pedagogical partnership between the library and the initiating department of the project would functionally look and work, I will be drawing on my digital project experience as a graduate student within the English Department. I first want to discuss why the library is best equipped to support graduate DH project work, before looking at ways the department and the library might collaborate, offering practical solutions, to support and teach graduate students doing DH projects.

The library and DH

Truyen and Verbeke (2015) remark that libraries are “traditionally expected” to be responsible for activities such as “preservation, curation, discovery, dissemination, and/or digitization” (29), activities often required for DH projects. Margaret King (2018) explains how “[f]or more than a decade the digitization of libraries and their development of digital services for users have been growing up and developing parallel to the evolution of digital humanities research” (40). As researchers have gone digital, so too have libraries. Within the context of digital knowledge, Brian Rosenblum et al. (2015) describe how “DH’s … engagement with issues such [as] publishing and dissemination of knowledge, copyright and intellectual property, file formats, metadata and preservation, and managing and structuring data … are a natural alignment with the goals, activities, and professional expertise of librarians” (165). In fact, some DH scholars may not know how to tackle all of the areas Rosenblum et al. list and helping to fill in these knowledge gaps is one way in which librarians become an integral part of the process of DH work.

Katie Gibson, Marcus Ladd, and Jenny Presnell (2015) emphasize that within DH, “[l]ibrarians need to be perceived as integral players on a team because they can offer both technical and intellectual skills” (15). Kathleen A. Langan and Ilse Schweitzer VanDonkelaar (2015) concur, maintaining that librarians’ diverse educational backgrounds “allow librarians to be professionally ambidextrous to institutions of higher education (IOHE) in ways that one does not expect of other faculty on campus” (19). This position allows librarians to work across disciplines in a way perhaps “easier” than traditional faculty, and, as interdisciplinarity is a key feature of DH, they can leverage this ability for DH work specifically. Truyen and Verbeke (2015), as well, see support and research as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, in the library’s role in DH, once again allowing librarians to oscillate between skills (29).

Battershill and Ross (2017) describe how “[l]ibraries have been working broadly in the field of DH since long before the discipline was called by that name, and they often form the nerve center of DH innovation and training at individual institutions” (170). As part of the “nerve center” Battershill and Ross (2017) refer to, many institutions now have digital scholarship librarians, digital humanities librarians, and/or digital humanities centres within the library. Housing DH work inside the library makes logical sense due to the history of libraries and digital work, as well as librarians’ “fundamental interest in information, its histories, its forms, and its disseminations” (Battershill and Ross 2017, 171). Faculty, Battershill and Ross (2017) state, can leverage this interest, especially given that DH “is a growth area in higher education information services[; therefore], faculty have a lot of opportunity to work with and develop the library’s support in ways that […] will be mutually beneficial” (171).

Librarians, then, and libraries, have the educational background, interests, and tools to support and educate graduate students in preparation for and during their digital project work. There is also perceived value in this knowledge for both graduate students and librarians, elucidated in several instances by Kathleen Langan and Schweitzer VanDonkelaar (2015):

[l]ibrary faculty, particularly those fluent in digital research methods, seem to be the ideal candidates to supplement traditional humanities training […] [librarians teach] DH skills, pedagogy, and methodology not only to faculty but also, and arguably more important, to graduate students […] [and t]hese collaborations also provide recruitment and mentorship opportunities for librarians as they work together with graduate students in a newly emerging academic model where technology, humanities, research, and teaching intersect. (24; 20; 24; 34–35)

Based on these examples, libraries are (a) interested in DH work and collaboration, and (b) qualified to perform tasks in a diverse range of DH activities. While this list may appear ideal, in practice these examples may not be so clearly delineated. Without a plan and a clear understanding of the role of faculty members, librarians, and students, implementing librarians as mentors and educators of DH work could result in issues of compensation, or be met with resistance by all parties, especially as digital project work can be outside the norm of traditional academic instruction. In order for librarians to be fairly compensated, faculty to maintain an active role, and students to feel adequately supported, implementation needs to be clear, and institutions and their departments, including the library unit, need to be open to these emerging models of digital pedagogy with the library as a partner. Through ideal implementation, librarians can mentor willing graduate students in “the new academic model,” and may inspire them to pursue “alt-ac” (“alternative academic”) careers through newly acquired digital knowledge, including the possibility of librarianship, particularly as traditional academic positions in the humanities become harder to find (Langan and Schweitzer VanDonkelaar 2015, 21–24; Battershill and Ross 2017, 147–165).

Of course, how or whether librarians contribute to DH work relies heavily on budgetary considerations as well. If the library does not view the work as financially viable or valuable, and departments are not willing to compensate librarians’ contributions, this work is not possible. As mentioned in my introduction, the ACRL encourages academic libraries to advance their role in educational collaboration; to that, they suggest that the budget be “sufficient to provide resources to meet the reasonable expectations of library users when balanced against other institutional needs” (ACRL 2018). The phrase “reasonable expectations” is vague, but given their guidance to promote librarians as partners in education, the ACRL seems to advocate for space in academic libraries’ budgets for things like consultation, instruction, and collaboration. In other words, the library as an academic unit should be able to fund librarians involved in DH work, but that is an ideal situation, and not always the case.

As John White (2016) writes, “adding digital humanities to the core mission of the academic library requires a clear understanding of the resources and skills required. This knowledge is especially important to library administrators who routinely struggle with resource allocation in times of high demand and shrinking budgets” (xiv). It is not enough to desire your library be involved in DH work; the library must also ensure competency of DH so administrators understand the value behind the work as a service for library users and as an opportunity for librarians and library staff. Beyond competency, shrinking budgets is a real concern, and it may be that librarian involvement in graduate digital projects has to take alternative forms beyond the modes I mention in this paper while budgets shift. Brian Rosenblum and Arienne Dwyer (2016) speak to this challenge, stating: “any coadministrators need to work toward a compatible vision of their unit and its place within the university ecosystem. Beyond learning who our core clientele, colleagues, and interested allies were, we learned to adjust our joint vision of our institute to the needs and budget of our institution, also in discussion with our stakeholders” (121). While budget is and will remain a concern for academic library units, those who are interested in helping students and faculty with DH work more largely will have likely done something to allocate funding for such a project; but, how much budget space can be given, and how much librarian involvement in DH the library can afford, will depend on the institution. While I don’t explicitly discuss budget as I am neither an administrator nor currently a librarian, the solutions for DH collaboration I suggest below are scaled from least costly to most costly, as I am cognizant that financial considerations are essential to implementing strategy.

The library and the department: Pedagogical collaborators

How might graduate students and their digital projects work with the library, which aligns well with DH’s calls for interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and digital knowledge? Much of the literature I consulted called for formal instruction in DH at the graduate level, either through a certificate or degree program, or through workshops over the course of a semester. In SFU’s English department, the graduate digital project is typically three semesters’ worth of commitment, usually adding an additional year and turning what is typically a one-year program, when only coursework is completed, into two years (Simon Fraser University 2020a). In this context a semester-long DH workshop may be adding too much and requiring students to have a formal certificate or degree in DH wouldn’t be possible in the current structure. In SFU’s English department, and departments in similar situations where graduate students work on DH projects, I believe there are three solutions the library could provide which would alleviate this large time commitment, introduce students to a broad range of options for their project, and continue to support them throughout the time spent on the project—whether that is three semesters as in SFU English, or otherwise. These solutions are:

1. creating a detailed research guide, made available through the library catalogue and website, and linked on the department website in the section with documentation for the digital project;

2. offering an introductory overview to DH first to all graduate students through graduate professional development courses in coordination with library services, and, at a later date, providing an introductory overview to DH tools and possible project structures to only those students interested in pursuing the digital project option;

3. and inviting a librarian or member of a DH centre to be a “technical supervisor” of the digital project, fairly compensated within the library unit.

These activities are all spokes out from the hub of the department itself, which I think is imperative to bringing students into contact with librarians and library resources. Facilitating contact with the library for DH work through the student’s department greatly reduces the stress on students of attempting to find places to learn digital skills in tandem with conducting the traditional research portion of the project. Battershill and Ross (2017) state that “[d]igital projects will generally divide the students’ labors between efforts regarding the academic topic or problem and the efforts required to wrangle the digital aspects of the project,” so that “[t]he technical aspects of a project tend to take a lot more time and effort than originally estimated, therefore endangering that necessary interpretive stage that takes data or results and crafts a sophisticated scholarly argument by engaging with it” (153).

In my experience, this situation worked the opposite way: I spent my time and effort with the interpretive stage, and relied on my limited digital knowledge to “wrangle” that aspect, realizing too late that the digital aspects would take more time and effort than I had planned. Had I been provided access to resources within the library through my department—I needed to read graduate project guidelines regardless, for example, so a gesture to the library as a place to find support in this documentation would have been useful— I think this issue would have been circumnavigated and I would have been more prepared in terms of knowing my options for digital tools, as well as the time commitment involved.

Battershill and Ross (2017) summarize this solution by “emphasiz[ing that the department help] students find the resources and opportunities that will provide necessary digital instruction, rather than directly providing that instruction [in the department]” (149). Connecting with the library digitally, through linking to a DH research guide, and physically, by inviting librarians into the department through workshops and supervision, connects graduate students to librarians in a way that removes stress from the student, and allows them to see the support available without needing to look elsewhere on their own. Initiating library contact through the department also helps libraries: if they know departments are informing their students about the services and support available, librarians can create a plan within the library and with departments’ faculty and staff in anticipation of potential workload, ensuring compensation for their time is handled appropriately and ensuring a consistent connection is upheld between the library and the department. The subject librarian for that department, for example, may be the most appropriate person to maintain the connection, which is already part of their position; through this connection, the subject librarian can channel students to the appropriate contact within the library for DH work, who would need to ensure the library is willing and able to compensate them for time spent helping the student(s).

The research guide is an online document with DH resources hosted on the library website as a “Lib Guide,” searchable through the library catalogue. Lib Guides are excellent resources of information that can be updated easily, but they depend on a few things: they need to be maintained by staff, and students need to know they exist and how to find them. I think it would be easier for departments to include a link to the DH resource guide within any documentation regarding the graduate digital project, as there is a high likelihood of interested students reading that type of document. Students may not look at the DH research guide in great detail, but signposting to it on the department website, embedded within digital project information, would help drive traffic to the guide so students can be informed of their options from the library when conducting DH work.

In an example of a particularly effective DH research guide, librarians at the University of Pennsylvania created a publicly editable Google Doc which they tied to the guide, “to collect data from [their] librarians about their own expertise with DH tools” (Anu Vedantham and Dot Porter 2015, 186). Providing students and researchers with a live list of those in the library with DH knowledge is one way the research guide could stay up to date, without relying on one person to keep the guide updated regularly on a static webpage. Further, tying in resources on campus to a guide that includes external links to DH tools and the DIRT Directory is an easy way to orient students and researchers to the people and tools available on and off campus.

The second proposed solution involves bringing librarian(s) into graduate professional development courses. Within the course in SFU English, students learn about the different streams available to them for master’s degree completion, and past graduate students bring their expertise to a session in which they describe their experiences. It would be valuable to have a session that includes a librarian or librarians or faculty-librarian teams to provide an overview of the digital tools available to students, and which tools are supported by the library for project preservation beyond the student’s time at SFU, if that is wanted. Gibson, Ladd, and Presnell (2015) call this sort of connection with graduate students in humanities programs, “especially those who have not yet begun the thesis or dissertation process” a “low commitment” activity in which librarians can engage (15). From this initial session through the mandatory course, students who become interested in the digital project option can sign up for another session with the librarian(s), either hosted by the department or in the library, where they can learn more about DH tools and methods, and begin to get a sense of the tool they would like to use.

SFU’s DHIL offers this type of support to faculty through “course-integrated training,” in which they can provide 10 hours per instructor per semester to teach digital tools or offer input about digital assignments (Simon Fraser University Library 2019). The availability of DHIL staff for course-integrated training is contingent on the current workload at the lab. This example demonstrates how DH centres or libraries can allocate resources for providing workshops within classrooms, without taking time away from staffs’ central roles within their units. Providing clear documentation on their website protects library staff from being in danger of taking on too much, and also gives faculty the opportunity to discover course-integrated learning as an option; faculty do not necessarily have to rely on their own knowledge, which may be blossoming yet, to show their students the myriad options available to them when conducting DH project work.

Bringing librarians in to co-teach or discuss options with students for the digital project brings them out of the library and into digital pedagogy, not only beneficial for librarians and faculty, but also for students. In an era when students prefer to consult Internet resources before or instead of coming into the library, it is important to create connections between students and the library that begin in their own departments. The library can also be an intimidating space for students, so removing that environmental factor and replacing it with one the students are familiar with can alleviate potential stress and foster relationship building.

Conclusion: Is there space for librarian supervision?

As my heading suggests, I want to end by exploring the possibility of librarians as supervisors of graduate digital projects. There are institutional barriers to supervision by a non-faculty member, including issues with time, or with conducting formal assessment. However, working through these hurdles would allow students to form a connection with the library that is two-sided, rather than viewing the unit as disembodied external support. Librarians, after all, are “professionally ambidextrous,” as Langan and Schweitzer VanDonkelaar (2015) point out (19), and this flexible knowledge base could help institutions avoid the siloed nature of academic departments and embrace the interdisciplinarity of DH work. I don’t see collaboration with the library as building tools for the student or co-authorship—tool-building for researchers is an adjacent DH service which the librarian supervisor can facilitate if resources and funds are available—rather, the collaborative opportunity is primarily between the faculty member and the librarian.

Time constraints would need to be addressed in library policy, and explicitly understood by the faculty member, the librarian, and the student. Library units, ideally, would allocate time for supervision, but adding this role to already existing structure may be met with challenges if librarians are not willing to take on the work. To avoid time issues, the library could state supervision is contingent on current workload, as SFU’s DHIL does for course-integrated training. Students and faculty could also invite librarians on a case-by-case basis to supervise; for example, if a student is working with rare materials, they may ask a librarian in Rare Books and Special Collections to be their supervisor. In some instances, as Joan K. Lippincott explains, some librarians “see this [engagement] as time away from librarians’ core responsibilities” (x), while others may feel pressured to agree to supervise when they may not have the time. To alleviate these issues, libraries could implement financial and practical measures. The library’s budget should reflect its aspiration to engage librarians in assessment and educational partnerships; if nothing else, embedding this potential role within the unit’s budget structure would indicate that this level of engagement with students is financially feasible, which may remove reluctance to take on the role. In a practical sense, libraries could create a live document in which librarians can document their interest in supervision, and in which departments, much like the document created at the University of Pennsylvania mentioned above.

I have been supervised twice by librarians: once in my MLIS program, where the librarian was my only supervisor, and the course was a professional experience with a pass/fail grade, and once in my English MA, where I did a directed study in Special Collections and also had a faculty member as a supervisor. In the latter situation, the faculty member graded my final report; the librarian, from Special Collections, was available throughout my time there to assist me with my work and familiarize me with the Special Collections environment. When supervision involves a librarian, assessment could take the shape of my situation, or it could involve the librarian. However, barriers may exist that prevent the librarian from formally assessing student work, such as those experienced at Western Michigan University when they asked a librarian to teach a DH course; she had to be nominated by a degree-conferring department in order to teach and formally assess student work (Langan and Schweitzer VanDonkelaar 2015, 31). Further, there may be issues if a faculty member and librarian cannot agree on assessment, and institutional hierarchy could prevent cooperation from either party.

In spite of these challenges, it is important to consider the ways librarians could be more hands-on and collaborative within digital pedagogy. DH pushes the boundaries of traditional pedagogy, and by its nature creates interdisciplinary connections; the graduate digital project can create relationships between the library, department faculty, and the student body, where each group can tap into the others’ unique skill sets. Not only is the student creating a project that is fairly new in terms of its digital component, but the project is creating a workflow and a set of protocols that transcends the initiating academic department. Library collaboration in DH can help faculty teach tools with which they may be unfamiliar, while students are exposed to a perspective that may inspire them to pursue librarianship as an “alt-ac” career. Finally, rather than the library waiting for researchers and students to come to them with questions about DH work, the exchanges I have proposed within the pedagogy of the graduate digital project give the library agency to create relationships and offer their expertise in creating and teaching DH.

Competing interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Editorial contributions

Guest Editor, DSCN Student Issue 2020: Colette Colligan, Kimberly O’Donnell and Kandice Sharren.

Section Editor/Copy Editor: Darcy Tamayose, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Copy Editor/Bibliographies Manager: Shahina Parvin, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Acknowledgements

Mary Shelley’s Gothic Tales in the Keepsake has been supported by a SSHRC doctoral fellowship, tuition scholarships to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) and support from its instructors, and an Open Knowledge Practicum from the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria.

Competing interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Editorial contributions

Guest Editor, DSCN Student Issue 2020: Colette Colligan, Kimberly O’Donnell and Kandice Sharren.

Section Editor/Copy Editor: Darcy Tamayose, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada.

Copy Editor/Bibliographies Manager: Shahina Parvin, The Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada.