Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 240.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-10-05 07:12:15+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: the lab

At a recent talk I gave, the question of 'the lab' came up in the
context of the division in status that has separated academic from
non-academic staff. I am aware of Wershler, Emerson and Parikka, The Lab
Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (Minnesota, 2021)* and the
forthcoming Pawlicka-Deger & Thomson eds., Digital Humanities and
Laboratories: Perspectives on Knowledge, Digital Research in the Arts
and Humanities Infrastructure and Culture (Routledge). Are there other
studies that probe into this attempt, as I take it, to bridge the gulf
between an academic appointment and a service job?

How do we increase the opportunities for someone with research interests
and/or desire to teach to do so, to have the time and other
circumstances which teaching and research require? Or is this altogether
the wrong way to think about the frustration of many trained by
over-producing doctoral programmes to desire what they're highly
unlikely to achieve?

Forgive me for quoting once again historian of religion Jaroslav Pelikan
(Yale) from The Idea of the University (1992). About those "who usually
stand outside the classroom but without whom research would halt", he
wrote as follows:

> Indeed, even such a term as "providers of support services" is
> becoming far too limited to describe both the skills and the
> knowledge required of those who hold such positions. Scholars and
> scientists in all fields have found that the older configurations of
> such services, according to which the principal investigator has the
> questions and the staff person provides the answers, are no longer
> valid, if they ever were; as both the technological expertise and the
> scholarly range necessary for research grow, it is also for the
> formulation and refinement of the questions themselves that principal
> investigators have to turn to "staff," whom it is increasingly
> necessary—not a matter of courtesy, much less as a matter of
> condescension, but as a matter of justice and of accuracy-to identify
> instead as colleagues in the research enterprise.”

That was more than 30 years ago.

Comments?

Yours,
WM
-----

*Online in its entirety at:
https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-lab-book
-----


Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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