Off the Tracks

Off the Tracks: Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars

This report is the result of a workshop on professionalization in digital humanities centers called, “Off the Tracks—Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars” held on January 20th and 21st, 2011. This workshop addressed the rapidly emerging phenomenon of alternative academic careers among the hybrid scholar-programmers now staffing many DH centers. Such staff members are not well accounted for by the normative division between the “research” usually associated with faculty positions and the “service” usually associated with staff. As a result, career trajectories and methods for their professional development are unclear. Supported by a Digital Humanities Level 1 Start Up grant granted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), Tanya Clement and Doug Reside led the workshop with the below participants to create these recommendations for establishing career paths within digital humanities centers.

We are pleased to host an open discussion of “Off the Tracks: Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars.” Much thanks goes to the participants for sharing their time and experience with this project.

Participants

• Tanya Clement

  Associate Director, Digital Cultures and Creativity, University of Maryland, College Park

• Brian Croxall

  CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and Emerging Technologies Librarian at Emory University

• Julia Flanders

  Director, Women Writers Project within the Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Libraries.

• Neil Fraistat

  Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland, College Park and the Co-chair of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers.

• Steve Jones

  Co-Director, Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, Loyola University Chicago

• Matt Kirschenbaum

  Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and Director, Digital Cultures and Creativity, University of Maryland, College Park

• Suzanne Lodato

  Director, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Indiana University, Bloomington

• Laura Mandell

  Associate Director, Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online (NINES); Co-
  Director, CHATlab, Miami University

• Paul Marty

  Associate Professor, School of Library and Information Studies, College of
  Communication and Information, Florida State University

• David Miller

  Director, Digital Humanities Initiative, University of South Carolina

• Bethany Nowviskie

  Director of Digital Research and Scholarship (Scholar’s Lab), UVa Library
  and Associate Director, Scholarly Communication Institute

• Stephen Olsen

  Associate Director of Research and Manager of Digital Services, Modern
  Language Association

• Doug Reside

  Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities,
  University of Maryland, College Park

• Tom Scheinfeldt,

  Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University

• David Seaman

  Associate Librarian for Information Management, Dartmouth College Library

• Mark Tebeau

  Co-Director, Center for Public History and Digital Humanities, Cleveland State University

• John Unsworth

  Dean, Graduate School of Library and Information Science;
  Director, Illinois Informatics Institute; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Kay Walter

  Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of
  Nebraska-Lincoln