Julia Flanders, who is the Director of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library, and a Professor of Practice in Northeastern's English Department gave a talk on Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools: Working in the Digital Academy as part of the Program on Information Science Brown Bag Series. In the talk, illustrated by the slides below, Julia discusses the evolving landscape of digital humanities (and digital scholarship more broadly) and considers the relationship between technology, tool development, and professional roles. For more see: http://informatics.mit.edu/event/brown-bag-jobs-roles-skills-tools-working-digital-academy-julia-flanders

1. Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools:
Working in the Digital Academy
Julia Flanders
Digital Scholarship Group
NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks
Northeastern University

2. English Department (1988-1993?)
Direct report to Brown University Provost (1993?-1997?)
Brown University Scholarly Technology
Group, Computing and Information
Services (1997?-2003)
Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library
(2003-2013)
Digital Scholarship Group, Northeastern
University Library (2013-present)

3. Is what I’m doing
research?
I’m not a faculty member!
My job is in an IT unit! but I have
a humanities PhD!
When I write code, is it
scholarship?
Image from Wikimedia Commons
My humanities
colleagues think
I’m a programmer!
My programmer
colleagues think I’m a
literary critic!

4. DH librarian
Instructional technologist
Web applications programmer
XML programmer/analyst
E-science librarian
Assistant director
Project manager
GIS specialist
Data visualization coordinator
Profess of Digital Humanities
Digital humanities developer
Post-doctoral fellow in DH
Digital liberal arts specialist
Digital Scholarship Librarian
Data and Visualization Librarian
Digital Humanities Analyst/Developer
Database developer/programmer
Data curator
Information designer
Senior Associate, Data Scientist
Metadata librarian
Digital repository manager
Senior software architect
Drupal designer
Collections strategist
Senior Technical Project Manager
Director of Academic IT Services
Geospatial Resources Librarian
Digital Humanities Specialist
Digital Humanist / Software Developer
Assistant Professor of English specializing in Book Publishing/Digital Humanities

5. 1. At what point in a digital project work flow should error correction be done, and
by whom? In what form should the data be exposed for this work to proceed
effectively?
2. Is text digitization an integral part of digital scholarly editing, or an
implementation of it?
3. To what extent do scholarly users of a digital resource need to understand its
use of metadata standards?
4. How can the underlying information architecture of a digital edition effectively
represent its editorial principles?
5. When a work of digital scholarship is complete and its original researchers
have retired, who takes responsibility for it and where in the institution does
that responsibility lie? How substantively can we expect those with long-term
responsibility to maintain and extend the resource?
6. Do we need to understand the complete inner workings of our digital tools in
order to use them responsibly and critically?
7. With whom does final intellectual responsibility for a digital humanities project
lie? In what specific components of the project does that intellectual
responsibility make itself felt?

6. 1. At what point in a digital project work flow should error correction be done, and
by whom? In what form should the data be exposed for this work to proceed
effectively?
2. Is text encoding an integral part of digital scholarly editing, or an
implementation of it?
3. To what extent do scholarly users of a digital resource need to understand its
use of metadata standards?
4. How can the underlying information architecture of a digital edition effectively
represent its editorial principles?
5. When a work of digital scholarship is complete and its original researchers
have retired, who takes responsibility for it and where in the institution does
that responsibility lie? How substantively can we expect those with long-term
responsibility to maintain and extend the resource?
6. Do we need to understand the complete inner workings of our digital tools in
order to use them responsibly and critically?
7. With whom does final intellectual responsibility for a digital humanities project
lie? In what specific components of the project does that intellectual
responsibility make itself felt?

7. 1. At what point in a digital project work flow should error correction be done, and
by whom? In what form should the data be exposed for this work to proceed
effectively?
2. Is text digitization an integral part of digital scholarly editing, or an
implementation of it?
3. To what extent do scholarly users of a digital resource need to understand its
use of metadata standards?
4. How can the underlying information architecture of a digital edition effectively
represent its editorial principles?
5. When a work of digital scholarship is complete and its original researchers
have retired, who takes responsibility for it and where in the institution does
that responsibility lie? How substantively can we expect those with long-term
responsibility to maintain and extend the resource?
6. Do we need to understand the complete inner workings of our digital tools in
order to use them responsibly and critically?
7. With whom does final intellectual responsibility for a digital humanities project
lie? In what specific components of the project does that intellectual
responsibility make itself felt?

8. Is humanities computing merely a hobby for tenured faculty? I am beginning
to think so. I have just finished looking through the October MLA job list along
with the computer science equivalent. As in past years, I see no jobs relating to
humanities computing. At best, there are 1 or 2 positions where experience in
computer aided instruction might be helpful. … I started out as a German
professor here at Yale and then was, in effect, booted out when I consorted with
the CS people. Now I am a full-time lecturer in computer science, teaching a
curriculum of humanities computing along with regular CS courses… But I am
also painfully aware of the fact that I have this job because I MADE this job,
and it took 5 years of continuous drudge-work and diplomacy to get to this point.
…I can tell you this: if humanities computing is to be more than a
gentleman's sport, somebody has got to start creating jobs for this field.
How many more Goethe specialists do we need? Give it a rest. Hire someone
who will rock the status quo. …20 years from now there will be departments of
humanities computing. No doubt someone will write a doctoral thesis on the
history of the field and my name will appear in a footnote: "wrote some interesting
early works, 'German Tutor', 'MacConcordance', 'Etaoin Shrdlu', and then
disappeared from the field". I don't want to be a footnote. I want to be the head of
the department. Make a job in humanities computing this year.”
—Stephen Clausing, Humanist Vol. 6 Num. 357, 15 Nov 1992

9. Library
Academic
Departments
Information
Technology
DH librarian
Digitization manager
Research support
staff
Instructional
technologist
Developer
E-science librarian
Faculty
Postdoc
Graduate student
Postdoc
Developer
Research support
staff
Research Centers
Research support
staff
Center director
Postdoc
Developer
Systems
administrator

12. “Personally, I think Digital Humanities is
about building things. [. . .] If you are not
making anything, you are not…a digital
humanist.”
—Stephen Ramsay, “Who’s In and
Who’s Out”

13. “In recent practice, ‘digital scholarship’ has meant
several related things:
a) Building a digital collection of information for further
study and analysis
b) Creating appropriate tools for collection-building
c) Creating appropriate tools for the analysis and study
of collections
d) Using digital collections and analytical tools to
generate new intellectual products
e) Creating authoring tools for these new intellectual
products, either in traditional forms or in digital form”
—“Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American
Council of Learned Societies Commission on
Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences”

14. For tools to be theories in the way digital humanists
want—in a way that makes them accessible to, for
example, peer review—opacity becomes an almost
insuperable problem. The only way to have any purchase
on the theoretical assumptions that underlie a tool would
be to use that tool. Yet it is the purpose of the tool (and
this is particularly the case with digital tools) to abstract
the user away from the mechanisms that would facilitate
that process. In a sense, the tools most likely to fare well
in that process are not tools, per se, but prototypes—
perhaps especially those that are buggy, unstable,
and make few concessions toward usability.
—Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Developing Things: Notes
Towards an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities”, Debates in
the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold, 2012.

16. Thank you!
Julia Flanders
j.flanders@neu.edu
@julia_flanders