Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 241.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.240: the lab: a solution? (139)
[2] From: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.240: the lab: a solution? (90)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-10-06 03:18:58+00:00
From: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.240: the lab: a solution?
Hi Willard,
I've been constantly frustrated by this class distinction between academic
'masters' and professional 'servants' and the implicit notion that the academics
do the intellectual labour and the professional labour is non-intellectual,
especially in Digital Humanities which is a fusion of academic and skilled
professional work. It certainly does take an arts degree and intellectual labour
to figure out how to reconcile the structuralist constraints of conventional
software architecture and project management with the requirement to produce a
deconstructivist feminist archive, or to reconcile web design principles,
database design, Indigenous ethics, and technology derived from colonial
histories to produce information about a highly controversial and disturbing
subject that responds to public and political debate and withstands the
sophistry of denialists.
Moreover the academics involved, while having a good understanding of their
field, typically do not themselves have the capacity to solve these
intersectional and interdisciplinary intellectual problems. They certainly do
not provide a fully realised specification of requirements for a code monkey to
build and install. As we are typically employed as casual/contractors, it has
been deeply frustrating and counter productive to see academics being recognised
and promoted for our collaborations while we are unemployed after every job, and
constantly juggling 3 to 5 short term jobs at any one time with no prospect of
ever establishing career. Finally, being appointed to two short term part time
academic roles last year, I find it is no benefit, as I'm still casual and don't
have credit for the grants I co-conceived and acquitted over more than a decade,
and am too old and without sufficient publications, having published in the form
of digital productions rather than journal articles, so am still not allowed to
apply for grants or lead research anyway (unless I can find somebody else to put
their name to it just as before). This is a gripe but it is a gripe that is
common to many - it's not a personal gripe but an anecdotal example of a broader
systemic disfunction in Universities which, btw, we are, in Australia, currently
striking over. (This is a gripe I've been struggling to wean myself from talking
too much about in recent years, as I don't want to be known as "that guy who
always complains about that thing" - I'd much rather be getting on with the work
- but it's such a pervasive problem, intruding regularly on my ability to work,
it's inescapable and I find I must reiterate it again and again.)
So having acknowledged this is one among several serious systemic problems with
our collapsing Universities - to answer the question: If you search the
literature for the phrase 'third space professional' (thanks to Evonne Irwin
letting me know this term) you'll probably find a lot of information addressing
this issue in tertiary education more broadly, but definitely in a way
applicable to DH workers. I'm not the expert on this area, just someone with
first hand experience of it, but there has been some serious research gone into
understanding and proposing change in relation to 'third space professionals' -
just no action that I have seen.
(Probably the other main one affecting DH, and eResearch more generally is the
complete absence of ongoing institutional support after short term project
funding ends, resulting in high risk and the loss of millions of dollars
invested. It's doubly frustrating that these two problems - appropriate staffing
and ongoing institutional support - have been the 2 biggest problems and
institutional failures for as long as I've been in DH - more than a decade - and
have been constantly highlighted by people in the field throughout that time,
yet have been consistently ignored by those empowered to and responsible for
addressing the problem, and the situation remains unchanged. And it seems the
problem isn't just 10 years old, but at least 30. Surely the lack of action is
not because of lack of awareness of the problem - so we have to wonder why they
choose not to improve the situation.)
Kind regards,
Bill Pascoe
________________________________
From: Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org>
Sent: Thursday, 5 October 2023 6:29 PM
To: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: [Humanist] 37.240: the lab: a solution?
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 240.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
http://www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
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
http://www.mccarty.org.uk
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2023-10-06 18:55:26+00:00
From: Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.240: the lab: a solution?
Willard, greetings.
On 5 Oct 2023, at 8:29, Humanist wrote:
> 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?
This chimes with a cross-campus conversation I've been having recently, so the
following are rather disjointed reflections on this.
The way you and Jaroslav Pelikan frame your questions suggests to me that there
is a role which answers them.
1. Science departments have post-docs: this is a very well-defined step on the
career path to academia, which seems persistently exotic to at least some of my
colleagues in the humanities.
A post-doc is a journeyman academic. They've finished their apprenticeship/PhD,
so can stand somewhat unsteadily on their own two feet. The canonical career
path is two post-doc positions, of two or three years each, in two different
institutions (ideally not the PhD institution, though there's plenty of
variation on this), after which they are a junior professional, with as much
professional nous -- in terms of leadership, grant-getting, programmatic
independence, and so on -- is felt adequate for a staff job. They typically do
minimal teaching, other than to gain basic experience of it. Very, very few
people would go straight from a PhD to even a temporary lectureship position.
This appears to at least partly match what you're asking for in your question,
Willard, and the remark you quote of Pelikan: a junior post-doc may require some
light mentoring, and will probably align themself at least somewhat with the
programme of their PI; a more senior one is ready to be the PI.
Such posts do of course require Money, which is differently-well-supplied in
different parts of the campus. The humanities do also, of course, have
'research fellow' posts, but these appear to be rare to the point of being
exotic, and are certainly not an integral part of the career path.
Pelikan:
> 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.
> [...]
> "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.”
2. Your and Pelikan's remarks also touch on the idea of 'service' roles, and the
place for academic aspirations for those holding them. I have experience of
that, since for part of my career I was, although formally a post-doc, in just
such a service role from the point of view of funding (a large astronomy data
project). The problem with that was that the only opportunities for publishing
what we were doing were in conference proceedings, which are a low-status outlet
in our particular part of the forest.
This is relevant here because, (a) over the course of the 15 years or so I was
doing this, the sub-discipline changed its self-perception so that this was
increasingly perceived to be a problem in career terms; and (b) the more-or-less
natural solution to that was to found a (another) journal. That normalised the
service role as a new type of academic role. I'm not sure how much that
actually worked, but it seems relevant here, firstly because it hints at the
force of the shared career schema, and secondly, because this and the post-doc
status made it natural to identify these 'service' roles as 'colleagues in the
research enterprise'.
3 (a slightly mischievous remark). You talk of 'the frustration of many trained
by over-producing doctoral programmes'. I remember being at a talk given by a
(science) research council grandee on a visitation, who, on being asked a
similar question to this, said 'no no, the overproduction is entirely
deliberate', and went on to explain that the (successful) case they made to the
Treasury did not presume that the Chancellor wanted to know about any academic
arcana, but that 'surplus' PhD graduates had developed a range of professional
skills which were economically valuable, even if they never again touched a
particle accelerator (or an anglo-saxon corpus). This is frustrating from the
point of view of those graduates who do want to stay in the business, but from
the Treasury's cold-blooded point of view it's a feature, not a bug.
Best wishes,
Norman
--
Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
