CDS celebrated its 30th anniversary with a symposium and party. Here’s the remarks I gave.
Thanks to Ashley Champagne and Tara Nummedal for the invitation to explore old emails and read old documents and explore CDS on the Wayback machine. Tara asked us three questions – our involvement with CDS, what made Brown a good place to do digital humanities work, and what makes Brown’s digital humanities work special.
I’m going to use the first question as an outline to reflect on the other two. I have had variety of connections with CDS – some unique, but many of them typical of faculty as they have interacted with the Center over the years. One of the great joys and strengths of CDS has been its flexibility, its ability to keep changing, its ability to work with faculty and staff and students in so many ways.
I’ve had four types of involvement with CDS: Competitor, Client, Consultant, and Co-leader
Competitor—though it’s more accurate to say cooperator, or some combination of those two. I arrived at Brown in 2004 to establish the public humanities program at the John Nicholas Brown Center. There was clearly an overlap between digital humanities and public humanities, and over the years we tried to figure that out, in a number of different configurations. The JNBC offered digital humanities courses and had digital humanities instructors; we did similar work, but we also worked together.
That relationship raises two questions. Where should the digital humanities sit at Brown, both intellectually and bureaucratically? A variety of centers and departments have taken on digital projects, but what strikes me, looking back, is how consistent the Brown University Library has been in its support for this work. Librarians Hariette Hemassi, Joe Meisel, and Nora Dimmock were steadfast in ther support of what must have at times seemed a wriggling puppy of a program.
The second question: public digital humanities work raises a question of definition that CDS has always wrestled with: How to define scholarship. Is it research, is it teaching, is it dissemination? How much is the public side of this work part of research? For CDS, it’s been all three. That balance has changed as dissemination became easier with the Web and as platforms like WordPress and Omeka and Storymaps and Scalar came into fashion. It’s changed as community-engaged and community-centered research became increasingly important. It’s likely to change again as AI changes the research side of CDS’s work.
It’s the thoughtfulness of balancing act that reveals CDS’s flexibility. Digital humanities is a field that changes all the time, and CDS has changed with it, sometimes lagging, sometimes leading.
Client—I’ve come to CDS asking for help with particular projects. That’s probably the most usual relationship faculty have had with CDS. The largest project I worked on was in 2018, about the 1853 New York Crystal Palace— a scanning/database/mapping project.
Which raises a question, one that CDS has wrestled with: how to pick projects? How to get the word out that CDS can help? Is CDS a consultant for hire? Is it trying to shape the course of digital scholarship by picking certain kinds of projects, and if so, what kind? Cutting-edge? Ones that meet certain political goals? Ones that are good for the university? Ones that fit the Library’s strategic goals? Ones that fit the skills of CDS staff? It’s an ongoing challenge, but I want to give CDS credit for its recent work in being much clearer about this.
I was also client for another kind of project – a class project, a digital storytelling class. That’s another kind of balancing that CDS has done over the years – the balance of how CDS thinks about teaching and product work. (I guess this is just a subset of what faculty, indeed the whole university, worries about all the time.)
And what kind of teaching? I think there’s a trajectory from single class sessions to longer-term engagement with a class to workshops to the new graduate certificate, and that seems like a good trajectory.
Consultant—At various times, when CDS or one of its predecessor organizations – including the Center for Digital Initiatives and the Scholarly Technology Group was being rethought, or when Brown was thinking about strategic directions—which happens every 5 years or so—I’d get called to a meeting of interested faculty. We would read a report, talk with library leaders, CDS leaders and staff, and offer wise counsel. In preparing for this presentation, I went back to take a look at some of those reports and meeting notes. It’s no surprise that there have been similar issue raised throughout.
The proper place for digital humanities at the university—mentioned earlier—comes up in all of those reports. One change I note, though, is an increasing interest in collaboration—with the Grad School, with the Cogut Institute, computer science and data centers, with departments, with the Dean of the Faculty, and other groups on campus. That’s a good thing—I believe much of CDS’s recent success comes from those collaboration. This strikes me as a very Brown style, but not always as inclusive of the Library as it should be.
Another perennial question: The balance of doing and critique, or in the late and not-lamented phrase of DH, hacking and yakking. Still a concern, but it seems like CDS, and the field as a whole, has decided that both gain when they are done together.
A third: just what is digital humanities. I noted a narrowing of the definition of the field, in some ways. At various points CDS and its predecessors was more open-minded to more hands-on practical work, catalogs and the like, as well as to physical computing, for example 3-D printing.
What’s broadened is a new sense of the importance of working with outside groups, engaged scholarship—I don’t know if the public humanities program at Brown can take some credit for that (I like to think so!) but I think it’s the case that CDS is doing remarkable work in this area –it’s what is distinctive about it today. “Stolen Relations” and the “Mass Incarceration Archive” are just the two largest projects that are breaking new ground here.
Finally, Co-leader—I spent three years as faculty director, up until 2 years ago. This was my most recent engagement with CDS—also my deepest, and most fulfilling. Much of it was during Covid, of course, and that brought about a radical refocusing on the online across CDS – it’s what finally killed off our physical computing projects!
But those few years set up an exciting present. Just mention a few things that I think CDS should be enormously proud of in the past few years:
- Community-engaged projects that I mentioned above
- The new Graduate Certificate and courses, in conjunction with the Cogut Institute
- A clear sense of mission that’s well communicated on the website
- A clear sense of process—also on the website
- A new and improved relationship with the Data Science folks at Brown.
- The beginnings of a thoughtful, balanced, approach to Artificial Intelligence
It’s best to end with AI; I think that CDS’s long history of balancing research, teaching, critique, and engaged scholarship positions it well to take on this new challenge. I look forward with great anticipation to seeing where it goes next.
