Slides from a talk called "Our Marathon, Digital Humanities, and Graduate Student Labor" given as part of the "Conversations in Digital Scholarship" series at the University of Connecticut (sponsored by Scholars' Collaborative) on November 7th, 2014.

1. Our Marathon,
Graduate Student Labor,
and
Digital Humanities
Jim McGrath, Northeastern University
November 7, 2014
@JimMc_Grath
#GradDH

2. Questions for Discussion
1. How is graduate labor on digital humanities projects
implicitly and explicitly valued (and undervalued) by
faculty, departments, institutions, the job market?
2. DH projects rely heavily on graduate labor &
collaborations between faculty and students: how
does this dynamic reveal tensions over ideas about
graduate labor, credit, and compensation in college
environments?

3. Julia Flanders on Labor
“Time, Labor, and ‘Alternate Careers’ in Digital Humanities
Knowledge Work”
Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012)
“academic work is considered to have the privilege of self-regulation,
being in this respect more like the work of a poet
than of a journalist”
work interpenetrates life, and we do what is necessary”
“the vast preponderance of actual work involved in creating
humanities scholarship and scholarly resources is not done by
faculty”

4. Julia Flanders on Graduate Labor
“Make it practically possible and professionally rewarding (or, at the very
least, not damaging) for graduate students to hold jobs while pursuing
advanced degrees. This would involve rethinking our sense of the timing of
graduate study and its completion…”
“Devote resources to creating meaningful job and internship opportunities at
digital humanities research projects, scholarly publications, conferences, and
other professional activities with the goal of integrating students as
collaborators into these kinds of work at the outset.”
“Encourage and reward coauthoring of research by faculty, students, and
para-academic staff. This involves actions on the part of departments (to
create a welcoming intellectual climate for such work) and on the part of
journals, conferences, and their peer review structures to encourage and
solicit such work and to evaluate it appropriately.”

5. Graduate Labor in DH at Northeastern

6. Grad Students At Northeastern

7. DH Projects Dependent on Grad Student Labor
• Our Marathon
• Early Caribbean Digital Archive
• TAPAS
• The Women Writers Project
• Viral Texts
• Digital Humanities Quarterly

8. northeastern.edu/marathon
Twitter: @OurMarathon
Share your story!

9. Our Marathon
• Crowdsourced digital archive: stories, photos, oral
histories, social media related to the 2013 Boston
Marathon bombings & aftermath
• Began collecting content in early May 2013
• over 9.500 items presently in archive
• Permanent home at NU’s Archives & Special
Collections
• Partnerships with Boston Globe, WBUR, Boston City
Archives, DPLA, Archive-It (among others)

10. Our Marathon’s Core Staff
Primary Investigators: Ryan Cordell and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
(Faculty, English)
Project Co-Directors: Alicia Peaker & Jim McGrath
(Doctoral Candidates, English)
Technical Lead: Dave DeCamp
(Doctoral Candidate, History)
Oral Historians: Jayne Guberman & Joanna Shea O’Brien
(freelance)
Oral History Project Manager: Kristi Girdharry
(Doctoral Candidate, English)
Community Outreach Lead: Joanne DeCaro Afornalli
(Undergraduate, English)

11. Our Marathon Additional Labor
• Simmons College GSLIS Semester Interns: Andrew Begley,
Ryan McDonough, Claudia Faith Willett
• Library Consultants (Metadata Specialists): Sarah Sweeney,
Dan Jergovic
• Library Staff (Storage / Server Access): Patrick Yott, Karl Yee
• Archives & Special Collections: Giordana Mecagni, Michelle
Romero, Jen LaBarbera
• Boston City Archives Metadata Team: Kevin Smith (Manager),
various grad students from History & English
• Additional Project Alum & Volunteers: primarily graduate students
• Undergraduate Work-Study, Interns, & CAMD Collaborators

12. Our Marathon Funding (Primary)
• College of Social Sciences and Humanities
• NULab for Texts, Maps & Networks
• WBUR (Oral History Project)
• Northeastern Libraries
• Iron Mountain / Boston City Archives

13. My Work on Our Marathon

14. Alicia & Jim (Co-Directors)

15. VariousWeekly Tasks (A Sample)
• Management of Our Marathon Staff & Volunteers
• Management of Web Site & Contributions
• Management of Partner Relationships
• Oversight of Project Finances
• Overall Project Development
• Social Media Outreach
• Interviews with Media & Academics
• Oral History Work
• Emails
• Emails

16. Special Projects
• Six-Month Anniversary Event (Snell Library, NU)
• WCVB Anniversary Broadcast (filmed at NU)
• “Share Your Story” Events at Public Libraries & Universities
• Conference Talks & Posters (DPLA, NEA,
Digital Commonwealth, DH2014)
• WBUR One-Year Anniversary Programming
• Physical Exhibit at Northeastern University

17. Professional Benefits of Our Marathon
• Motivated me to become more invested in dissertation work
• Experience in project management and development
• Experience with Omeka and Neatline (Consulting Work)
• Introduction to wider DH community (conferences & Twitter)
• Collaborations w/ faculty members at NU
• Collaborations w/ other grad students in DH at NU
• Collaborations w/ Boston-Cambridge communities
• Collaborations w/ other parts of university community
• Collaborations with librarians, archivists, public historians
• Useful CV material
• Invitations to talks like this one

18. Challenges of Labor on Our Marathon
• Impact on dissertation writing / article submissions
• Value of work not always clear to dissertation committee
• Grad student labor not always recognized by college
• Skeptical faculty members and grad students in dept.
• Witness to lame institutional B.S. / power trips
• Impact on graduate funding
• Economic costs of conference travels

19. Value of Grad Labor on Our Marathon
“As we interacted with scholars from many nations, it
was gratifying to see that Northeastern's key role in the
emerging field of the digital humanities, fostered by
both the Humanities Center and the NULab for Texts,
Maps, and Networks, is widely known. The international
community recognizes our commitment to bringing new
digital tools into teaching, research, and public outreach
through such projects as the Our Marathon Digital
Archive and the upcoming NEH Workshop on Digital
Methods for Military History.”
-Dean Uta Poiger, CSSH (Northeastern)

20. Value of Grad Labor on Our Marathon
“Our Marathon could not have happened
without the graduate and undergraduate
students who have done simply amazing work
keeping the project running. There are two
faculty members (including myself) listed as the
project’s “Primary Investigators,” but I assure you
that’s an artifact of institutional structures. The
real story is further down the staff page…”
-Ryan Cordell (ProfHacker)

21. Value of Grad Labor on Our Marathon

22. Value of Grad Labor on Our Marathon
• “Graduate students” from Simmons / volunteers from other
colleges mentioned
• Graduate students were mentioned by PIs in interviews
• Graduate students not asked to be interviewed by Chronicle
• Response: Pis forwarded more interview opportunities to grad
students
• Media generally more invested in faculty than grad students

23. Value of Grad Labor on Our Marathon
Dillon et al. 2013 Dillon, Elizabeth et al,
Our Marathon, 2013, accessed
December 01, 2013,
http://marathon.neu.edu/.
-Citation from Digital Humanities
Quarterly

24. Lessons Learned by Graduate Students at NU
• Your time is valuable: balance DH work with
dissertation completion, protect yourself
• The five-year degree-to-completion funding model
does not value graduate students interested in DH
work; limits on hourly compensation too
• The ideals of faculty members don’t always align with
the university’s objectives
• You know as much / more than some PIs about DH
• Conferences are expensive: request $$$

25. Tips for Grad Students in DH
• Be pro-active in learning technical skills AND project
management
• Go to DHSI, HILT (and make sure your college gives you $$ to do
so)
• Don’t work beyond the hours you are paid
• Consider conferences and articles; document your labor in a
way that is valued by humanities researchers / DH
• Consider alt-ac work, library work, archival work / value of
these fields
• Librarians and archivists are awesome
• DH is pretty awesome
• Be a mentor on campus / communicate online

26. Tips for Faculty / Admins
• Pay your graduate students for their time; don’t treat them
like hired help; Give them credit!
• Have discussions with admins / department heads / deans
about the importance of graduate labor; be an ally
• Set clear objectives for projects and timelines
• Help set objectives tied to students’ professional identities
• Make sure graduate student roles on projects are clear
• Open doors for grad students on campus
• Keep an open dialogue with grad students on projects and
larger issues related to DH at your college
• Respond to e-mails

27. Final Thoughts about DH at NU
• We have extremely supportive and generous faculty members
at NU: Julia Flanders, Ryan Cordell, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
in particular
• We have an extremely supportive library / library staff at
Northeastern; we live at the library, tbh
• Having a collaborative space where students and faculty
interact at the library is extremely useful
• We are concerned about trends re: degree-to-completion /
economic support of grad students doing DH
• Conversations about value of digital projects necessary
• We are all pretty broke / in debt
• We still love DH work and spend lots of time thinking about
DH / talking about DH / working on our projects

28. Thanks!
mcgrath.ja@husky.neu.edu
@JimMc_Grath
#GradDH