Big-Tent Digital Humanities

Big -tent Digital Humanities.

Opening line sums up a lot of the problem. People don’t know a lot about it. 

“The academic tendency to value individuality over team work”, this is not just an academic tendency but something much farther reaching. Has any collective endeavour been truly equally rewarded. Every team has its leading figures that generally reap a greater percentage credit or financial reward.

The next paragraph talks about the increasing transformation of higher education into a system of casual labour off the tenure track, continues to make it much harder for young scholars to get established, but is this not a system that fits better with the idea of collaboration or does the human spirit really ever welcome the idea of equality without the prospect of climbing the hierarchical ladder.

The old order is changing in terms of tenure and promotion. In the ever increasing layers of ever more qualified graduates , postgraduates and PhD’s,  itself a product of a self perpetuating education system, the retirement  or attrition rate fall s vastly short of  the qualified, or over-qualified but unemployed  next generation of professors  knocking on the doors of academia.  

There is interesting discussion about how DH is changing the nature of education, where the work being undertaken in faculty-student collaboration towards projects are not just going to be graded and forgotten but can lead to something much more meaningful. This is again to be applauded but how will these collaborations can be graded and how those grades are are going to fare in a very competitive employment market.

“Alternative academics” those who stay –“often as second class citizens” may have an upside to their somewhat tenuous status in higher education “is that many of the rules of professional advancement no longer apply”. I guess this can be liberating, to a point, though I’m sure not without a measure of resentment towards the creators of the system.

The system that exists where there are vast numbers of highly qualified graduates but very few opportunities except short term, part time and fragmentary positions. This is again a fault with a system that benefits from a workforce expected produce more and work longer than their tenured colleagues in order to stand any chance of advancement.

In the final sentence “we need to find new ways to be humanists, while recognising that alternative academic careers must coincide with substantial resistance  to the deprofessionalization  and adjunctification  or the humanities” Surely this is the nub of the problem. How in a culture, or maybe a species that values hierarchical structures as something to aspire to, in order to feel successful, do we  create the seismic shift  necessary to avoid this impression of deprofessionalization  and lowering of standards?