N.B.: I began this post before seeing John Glover‘s Shock and Awe proposal. These could easily be combined.
For those lucky enough to have jobs that directly relate to the Digital Humanities, whether you’re working in academia, museums, libraries, or archives, part of your job is to advocate to the unconvinced. While those that created the position may have seen the importance of digital work– or were at least keeping up with trends and understand that DH is the new hotness– many of your colleagues may be less convinced.
We have to find ways to advocate to those in our fields about the advantages of digital work– and persuade them to invest time, money, and energy into digital projects. Likewise, we have to reach out to our audiences and get them to use our digital tools and resources.
I’d like to propose a discussion on best practices for advocacy and outreach. What do you find helps convince your institutions to get onboard with projects you can’t do alone? How do you shift institutional inertia and get people to work together who may be skeptical about DH projects? How do you raise awareness of your projects when they’re ready to go live? How do you convince people outside your institution that it’s worth investing energy and time into your projects?
I see this as a wide-ranging and rather loose conversation, an opportunity people to share across disciplinary, institutional, and other boundaries about what has worked for them, what has not, and why they think that is. Topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):
- How do you persuade the curatorial department of your museum to do the extra work so that your online exhibit might be more than just an online version of the physical exhibit?
- How do you talk to fellow academics who are inveterately analog when you feel they might benefit from DH approaches?
- How do you convince an archive that textual records are important to digitize too– not just the photos that drive a lot of hits?
- How do you work to gain the trust and efforts of a community to contribute materials for an online archive, transcription project, etc?
- Twitter: is it really useful for outreach, or are you just preaching to the choir?
- How do you weigh the need to do advocacy and outreach against the needs to actually produce scholarship/tools/databases/etc?
- Is there ever going to be an end to “What is the Digital Humanities and…” panels at every conference? Is it better to integrate DH scholarship with the rest of the group or to put DH at center stage?
- How do you reach out to other comparable institutions so they know about your projects, and perhaps either send interested parties your way or even collaborate?
…This may not be a super-groundbreaking topic– it’s something we’ve all talked about amongst ourselves. But I think it’s one of those perennial discussions we have to keep having as we all navigate a fairly new and frequently-shifting landscape.
Tad, this looks great. I’m interested in hearing more about best practices for advocacy and outreach generally, and I can’t see the questions/concerns you bring up going away in the near term. I had some of the same thoughts (e.g. “not groundbreaking”) when writing my proposal, but I think it says something that these concerns persist and the questions are still being raised. I’d be happy to merge these, or not, depending on how many folks are interested, whether large groups are interested in substantially different aspects, how much space we have, etc.
As someone very new to this with a background in Religious Studies, it seems that much of what I am seeing with the digital humanities “movement” parallels the form and structure of a mission. A missionary movement, if I may. Discuss? Implications? Is this a provocative or useful way of understanding digital humanities outreach? Does advocacy differ from evangelism? Does this make sense? Is this a relevant or interesting idea?
John– I think that merging them might be a really great idea, actually– some of my favorite THATCamp sessions have been merged ones, because it tends to bring in multiple people with different points of view and perspectives on a topic, which just enriches the discussion.
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Yvonne– I actually used the word “evangelism” in my first pre-draft of this post. 🙂 I decided to drop it just because the term has different connotations for different crowds. Can one be an evangelist without being uncritical? It’d really depend on who you asked.
That said, “evangelize” and “evangelist” seem to be used most frequently in the academic quarters of DH. I would have said “evangelize” a couple years ago, definitely. After a little while working in the world of museums and libraries, I’ve picked up their jargon. I probably picked up “outreach” from working in museums, especially museum educators. And “advocacy” is a huge buzzword in libraries.
I’d actually say that, to a certain extent, academic DH has turned away from evangelism in the last couple years– when I’m feeling glib, I describe it as the “Fish Effect.” So many influential articles on the Digital Humanities in the 2000-2011 period were evangelist in nature. They promoted DH by arguing for the legitimacy of the techniques, and the place of these techniques within the humanistic tradition. These were papers, articles, and books that argued that DH was real, it was valid, and it was exciting. At a certain point, though, there was a shift, and more of the top articles now are about application of digital methods, deepening the theory that undergirds DH, issues like that.
There was a move, I’d argue, away from advocacy and outreach, at least in what constituted the most exciting additions to the DH corpus. If I’m looking for a tipping point, I’d look to Stanley Fish’s 2012 series of (negative) articles about DH for the NYT Oppinionator blog. If Fish, who the anti-theory defenders of New Criticism have been pointing to for years as an example PoMo faddishness, is dismissing DH as simply a fad (and doing so without irony)– well, then, the tipping point’s been reached, DH has made it, advocacy seems passe.
Or at least that’s my (extremely flip) take on it. But the thing is, even if we are all on board with the notion that we need to push DH publishing and scholarship past evangelism, that evangelism, or advocacy, or outreach, or whatever you want to call it, is still part of the project. And in jobs that relate to DH it’s often part of the job description, either officially or unofficially. You’re often being brought in to push people or institutions in a direction. So maybe it’s more informal and ad hoc, but it’s still a big part of the “work” of DH.
…And I’ve completely gone off on a tangent, now.
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((ahem…))
((Strike all the above.))
Yvonne– Yes! I used the word “evangelism” myself, in an early draft of this post!
I think this is something that could spark further conversation if this becomes a panel!
Then let ours be the chocolate/peanut butter of advocacy/outreach. This is my first THATCamp, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the session wrangling works.
Yvonne, I think the evangelism point is really good. My personal interest stems from talking with people who, in 2013, have little or no awareness of DH, but I think there remains a “DH divide” — not in terms of pro-/con-, but organizations where it’s well-integrated vs. not at all. There’s enough exposure that there’s pushback, as Tad mentioned, but Fish (or Snarky anti-DH memes) may not mean that there isn’t still need of “missionary” work.
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