A session at THATCamp SE, 10 March 2012, University of Georgia

southeast2012.thatcamp.org/03/08/rebooting-graduate-training/

Participants

David Lee Miller, University of South Carolina, English and CDH
Franky Abbott, Emory University, DiSC
Paul Fyfe, Florida State University, English and HoTT
Richard Urban, Florida State University, SLIS
Robin Wharton, Georgia Institute of Technology, Writing and Communication Program
Stewart Varner, Emory University, DiSC
Donna Lanclos, U North Carolina Charlotte, Libraries
Moya Bailey, Emory University, DiSC
Roger Whitson, Emory University, DiSC

*

This document created by session participants and

licensed Creative Commons, Attribution

Rebooting Graduate Education THATCamp SE 2012

Introduction

Core Competencies

What Are Students Being Prepared For?

Institutional Issues

Short Term Solutions

Programs

Articles

Nontraditional/Multimedia Dissertations/PhDs

Resources

Introduction

How can we integrate #altac into graduate education? What is #altac training?

David Lee Miller: in process of starting certificates, went to research methods course with this plan: read the Horizons report and start talking about changes in the disciplines. Lots of interest from the grad students (almost a sense of panic) in pursuing this.

Richard Urban: MLIS transitions were similar in prepping librarians for digital work. Their approaches to core competencies could be useful for digital humanities programs as a model.
Core Competencies

Donna’s Q: Are there accepted core competencies? Are there accepted best practices? How do we train students to deal with problems we cannot yet anticipate? (As in CS programs that do not get hung up on specific programming languages?) How do we allow for institutional growth along with the development of these fields?

PF: What would Cathy Davidson’s ideas of playful, self-structured pedagogies look like at the graduate levels?

Franky Abbott: because DH is a totally different academic practice, has different ideas about production and labor. Involves talking about process, product, and what makes things successful or not. Very different kinds of research questions. Need to look in detail at the arc of a project rather than core competencies. Project management is better observed that taught.

D. Miller: shouldn’t insist that these become part of the curriculum, but will always rely on some autodidaticism. What we teach is always an occasion for students learning to teach themselves. Modeling for students the confidence they’ll need to engage things we have not mastered. Curriculum should be to give them skills with the goal of promoting this confidence.

Robin Wharton: analogy of competencies relative to field (e.g. Latin for medievalists). Perhaps there are core competencies but should be multiple ways for students to fulfill those competencies. Provide opportunities within the curriculum for this.

Moya: how much does graduate training prepare students to talk across the disciplines? Especially as so much of DH depends on those conversations?

Franky: does DH training come from within a department or from elsewhere in the university?

R. Wharton: is the final artifact of graduate training adequate evidence of being a scholar in this field? (Relates to D. Damrosch’s argument about the “masterpiece” dissertation at MLA12.)
What Are Students Being Prepared For?

Q: what are students really being prepared for in the traditional sense anymore, especially considering the job market as it is?

Franky: Need to fulfill the promise of this training in the ultimate product for the degree. (Not being able to put it into a PDF.) This also differs from traditional dissertation in the single-author model.

David: formulate the question about the diss from its institutional afterlife, the places where it will be stored and shared. Not books, but repositories and work in the life of the institution.

Donna: if new standards are going into T&P documents (a la Mark Sample), then we ought to allow graduate students to exercise the same flexibilities. Also, should be models ought there from non-humanities fields. What are the structures that help us define the effects of our fields? Where can they come together? Probably a library or a center.

Robin: post-docs offer another model for flexing post-graduate training into new forms, allow credential disciplinists to start crossing those lines.

Franky: likes the idea of separating what DH does from what disciplines do, allows for more fruitful exposure and interactions among methodologies.
Institutional Issues

R. Urban: this versus that model of graduate training is overdone: solitary versus group work. Instead, ought to conceptualize how this work extends the familiar forms of mentoring and support, embeddedness in the new structures of the institution.

Donna: too easy to be provincial about graduate training when, internationally, all sorts of different models.

R. Wharton: careful not to romanticize the laboratory and STEM models. The sciences have specific problems that it would be dangerous to import into the humanities. Need to stay conscious of them.

Moya: sciences can use articles for their dissertations. What about different shapes of scholarly production and their aggregates? (Relates to Dan Cohen’s promotion of “right sizing” scholarship. Can we do that for graduate work?) Clearly this relates to the prevailing publishing model in these disciplines. But as that changes …

The question: what is there to lose by changing? Pace Olsen article in the Chronicle.

Issues of what is “useful” work. See “Fear of Being Useful” in Inside Higher Ed. Adopting this model in some ways impugns your advisors who have been doing “useless” stuff all their careers. But there’s a groundswell of attention to the public humanities, humanities advocacy, etc.

Lots of institutional obstacles to even assembling committees. Example: has to be staffed by TT faculty with PhDs.

R. Urban: the impulse to do traditional things extends all through the early career of faculty. The dream of doing different stuff keeps getting deferred. Get tenure, then go crazy. But by that point, you’re well programmed and skilled in doing the same.

Franky: promotes the Praxis model for student work in hands-on stuff, theoretical discussions,
Short Term Solutions

Donna: so what do we do for our graduate students in the meantime?

Robin: sub-specialize in Rhet/Comp. Really useful.

Franky: work at a library or DH center. Build some skills.

Donna: we need to model the kinds of possibilities for our own graduate students, to make visible the variety of endpoints for them, to meet a range of people that might have nothing to do with your intellectual comfort zone.

Perhaps getting to students before they go to grad school. Undergraduate mentoring, advise at least a gap year, going to other jobs, go to a big city, travel. Come back to grad school as a capable professional and a knowledge worker, not just a student.
Programs

Emory

Digital Scholarship Certificate Program

UVA

Praxis Program

USC

Center for Digital Humanities

Indiana

Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities

Articles

Bethanie Nowviskie

Alt-Academy
“It all starts on day one”

Cathy Davidson

“Invisible Gorillas are Everywhere.”
How Digital Humanists Can Lead Us to National Digital Literacy
“Digital Literacy: An Agenda for the 21st Century.”

Lisa Spiro

Knowing and Doing: Understanding the Digital Humanities Curriculum

Roger Whitson

A Plea to Graduate Advisors and Programs

Paul Jay and Gerard Graff

Fear of Being Useful

MLA

Profession 2011 (Requires MLA Membership)

Nontraditional/Multimedia Dissertations/PhDs

Gardner Writes

The problem(s) of the multimedia dissertation

Corydon Ireland

Scholarship Beyond Words

Alex Reid

What Does an English Department Mean? And How Long Should it Take?

Matt Bloch

Exploring non-traditional dissertation forms

Scott Jaschik

Dissing the Dissertation

alternativephd

What is a dissertation, anyway?

Resources

Special Interest Group on Digital Libraries

Developing Curriculum for Digital Libraries and Digital Curriculum

Microsoft

Digital Literacy Curriculum

Zotero

Library, Useful Links

U.S. Dept. of Commerce

digitalliteracy.gov

CUNY

DH Syllabi

EPOCH

Proposed Curriculum for Digital Heritage Studies

University of Virginia

MA Curriculum in Digital Humanities
Final Report for Digital Humanities Curriculum Seminar

Loyola

MA in Digital Humanities

UCLA

Curriculum Development in Digital Humanities and Archival Studies

Indiana

Decoding Digital Humanities Bloomington

ACLS

iSchools & The Digital Humanities