What follows is my talk for a session at the 2012 MLA on “#alt-ac: Alternative Paths, Pitfalls, and Jobs in the Digital Humanities.” I’m thrilled to be speaking on the panel with a fantastic collection of alt-ackers that I admire: Julia Flanders, Matt Jockers, Shana Kimball, Bethany Nowviskie, and Lisa Spiro.

• Good afternoon, all. My comments today are titled, “Five Questions and Three Answers about Alt-Ac.”
• I’m tremendously pleased to see this panel and the one that directly follows it happening at this year’s MLA.
• The need for ongoing conversation about alternative academic careers was brought home to me again recently when I received a rejection notice—a very kind one, I might add—for a tenure-track job that I applied to this fall.
  
• Nine hundred applicants. You don’t need statistical analysis or to be a digital humanist to figure out those odds.
• As Amanda Watson put it on Twitter, these sorts of odds make it clear that we must rethink graduate education and not ignore different paths for employment after the PhD. And that’s exactly what alt-ac can be.
  

My Job

• In my current position as a CLIR post-doctoral fellow at Emory University’s Woodruff Library, I’m lucky to be exploring the alt-ac track.
  
• My principal responsibility is to develop and manage digital humanities projects in DiSC, Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons. I also taught an Intro to Digital Humanities this semester.
  
• In the past year, I worked to get DiSC off the ground, along with three colleagues. All of us are on the alt-ac track together.
• And this situation brings me to the first of my promised questions:
  
  What’s the relationship between DH and alt-ac jobs?

Relationship Between Alt-Ac and DH (Question 1)

• As many of you may have seen, Stanley Fish recently had a piece in The New York Times, where he talks about the rise of the digital humanities at the MLA. His observation is a bit behind those (Howard 2009; Pannapacker 2009; Howard 2011; Pannapacker 2011) who made similar statements about the 2009 and 2011 MLA…but we’ll give him a break. He is Stanley Fish, after all.
• What you might not have seen was the very smart response to Fish from Ted Underwood, who teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in the English department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
  
• Underwood suggests that one of the reasons why DH is not the future of literary studies is because it “is not a movement within literary studies.” It’s equally at home in history departments (the slate of DH activities happening at the AHA right now certainly bear witness to this fact), in art history, in linguistics, in libraries, and many more corners of the campus.
• Underwood calls digital humanities “extra disciplinary.” We might say the same thing about alt-academics.
• One of the obvious connections between DH and alt-ac, then, is how extra-disciplinary they both are.

The Future (Questions 2 & 3)

• Question #2: Is alt-ac the future of DH?
  
• Well…not entirely. We have the creation of tenure track positions—and occasionally cluster hires—at places such as Maryland, Nebraska, Iowa, Clemson, Northeastern, and more. These positions are clearly not alt-ac.
• But insofar as scholarship in the Digital Humanities tends to require collaboration on multiple scales, those in these positions will in fact be “alt”—marked by difference. The pursuit of tenure for these scholars won’t be the same as those who have previously been promoted.
• What’s more, I think alt-ac is the likely track for most positions in the digital humanities—and probably for the university as a whole.
• In fact, let’s face it: the university is already primarily populated by people who are non-fac. And many of the non-fac are the alt-ac.
• That being said, alt-ac cannot mean short, terminal contracts; alt-ac cannot be a continued casualization of labor in the university. Instead, we should look to models elsewhere in the university—libraries, administration, research only positions—for helping us structure these career paths, both within and without DH.
• What’s more, these must be career paths. We need to think about how to create opportunities for advancement.
• Now let’s turn it around (question #3, by the way): Is DH the future of alt-ac?
  
• No.
• There many different ways to get your “alt on” that don’t involve building things (as Stephen Ramsay would have it). You can find alt-ac careers in a library, in a museum, in an archive, in a federal agency, in a think tank, or even—dare I say it—in administration.
• So it’s not necessarily helpful for us to frame alt-ac as only being a thing that happens in digital humanities.
• Again, one of the lessons of “alt-ac” as a concept is that there is intellectual labor in getting things done, in accomplishing the very impressive and real work of the university, throughout the whole university.

Bonus Questions

• And finally, a question (#4) that I’ve heard no one ask aloud: how should the MLA deal with the rise of alt-ac?
  
  After all, sessions like this have little to do (on the surface at least) with the study of the modern languages.
• #5, and the kicker:
  
  Can the MLA shift its purpose from representing those who teach and research modern languages to those who study or studied the modern languages?
• This simple shift would be enough to make the whole of what we’re discussing—to say nothing of the panelists—belong unequivocally at this annual Convention. I’m not sure that it’s something that alt-ac needs so much as a way to keep the MLA relevant with what the transformations we’re facing.

Conclusions

• More than either an object or method of study, the digital is something that is happening to the humanities in the 21st century.
  
• And alt-ac is something that is happening to universities.
  
  It is not the only thing nor is it necessarily the most important. But it’s happening and in some cases it’s a very good thing.
• Perhaps in 2017 (or ’18 or ’19) we’ll be reading a piece from Stanley Fish talking about the rise of reconfigured, hybrid professionals at the MLA. And if in 2018 he’s a few years late in noticing the rise of alt-ac, well, so much the luckier for the rest of us who will have been the beneficiaries of the future’s accelerated arrival.
• Thanks.
  

It’s been so long since this year’s MLA ended that you might wonder why I’m going to the trouble of posting my second talk. Hasn’t the moment passed? Does anyone care about what I said two months ago, even if you weren’t there? And considering the arguments that I make in this talk about social media being faster than regular scholarly communication, isn’t there some irony in my taking so long to get this up? So it goes.

I have a ream of excuses (from snow to THATCamp Southeast) for why I’m a bit behind the curve on posting this talk. But the reason I’m finally getting to it today is the Day of Digital Humanities (AKA #dayofDH). As I wrote in my first post this morning on my Day of DH blog, the digital humanities is not only about Digging into Data and distant reading but is also about the digital distribution of humanities scholarship. Hence, a long delayed blog post.

As I mentioned when summarizing my MLA, this talk was part of the “New Tools, Hard Times” panel, where I spoke alongside Marc Bousquet, Rosemary Feal, Marilee Lindemann, and Chris Newfield. Meredith L. McGill moderated the session. Marilee organized the panel and was generous enough to invite me to play along. Marilee blogged her talk and Chris posted his reflections on the panel. And if you want to read the VERY lively tweetstream for the session, look at the hashtag archive for #newtools.

The one thing that I wish I had done differently with my talk is change the title. Writing for ProfHacker has taught me the value of a title that promises discrete numbers. Your audience knows as they’re going in exactly how many data points you’ll be giving them. What’s more, there’s a suggestion that these data points will be something discrete, something that they can apply and use in the future. Those are some of the reasons why I chose the title I did. But personally, I found the title too similar to the talk I gave in Trinidad last October. It’s more than a little, however, likely that no one else pays enough attention to what I’m doing to notice the parallels. I attribute the lack of creativity in titles to how late I was up re-working on the talk the night before I gave it. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d call it “The Glass Tower: Social Media in the Academy in Hard Times.” But then I’ve gone ahead and committed the terrible sin of the colon-ized academic title. Perhaps it’s well enough as it is.

What follows is the text that I used when presenting. In a few places I ad-libbed, but you’re getting the gist here. And I’ve included the images that accompanied the text (images precede the text). In rare cases, you’re missing part of the dynamism of the transitions, and you’ll just have to consider that a good reason to see me give my next talk in person.

Three Reasons to Use Social Media in Hard Times

Good afternoon. I’m glad to be present today. You may have heard that I was unaccountably absent from last year’s MLA. Of course, if you’ve heard that—or have even heard of me—it’s largely due to the confluence of two trends: hard times in the academy and social media.

The hard times that the academy has been facing recently have been well documented, and unfortunately SUNY Albany is not so much a watershed as a disappointing continuation of a trend. While the number of positions advertised in the MLA’s Job Information List during the last academic year ended up being higher than Fall 2009 led us to believe [PDF], it remains true that most college classes are taught by people who are not on the tenure track. As Marc Bousquet has written about today’s job “market,” finishing one’s PhD is often the best way to make sure that one will never teach college again. My own difficulties with finding even an interview for a “proper” job is my dubious claim to fame and the reason I’m sharing a seat at this table with these more distinguished panelists.

At the same time that the academy has been going through furloughs, hiring and pay freezes, and the erosion of public and private funding, we have been discovering social media. We, like everyone else, use social media for managing networks of friendships. But academics increasingly use social media, both in their research and teaching: for example, a recent Chronicle article cited a survey that suggests more than 30% of faculty are using Twitter.

While this rise in social media is merely correlated with hard times in the academy, it’s still a relationship worth noting. My own, academic use of social media coincides neatly with my own hard times in the academy. I began blogging at the same time I began applying for jobs, in the fall of 2007; I started using Twitter shortly after returning from the 2007 MLA in Chicago; I built my own website in Spring 2008 and radically overhauled it as I was going on the job market for a third time in 2009.

As a whole, I believe many academics view social networking in the way the philologists probably viewed the new criticism: it’s new, it’s what younger scholars are doing, and, perhaps most damningly, it’s “not how things have been done.”

All of this is true, to an extent, and the university is an institution that prides itself on continuity and tradition. But given the hard times in the academy, I’m skeptical that we can hope for continuity. For good or ill, the university is a-changin’. So with that, I’d like to quickly touch on three reasons why hard times call for us to use social media:

It’s cheaper; it’s faster; and it’s more open.

It’s Cheaper

Although we don’t have money to meet with each other as often as we may have had in the past, we can use social media to help us communicate with one another even if we can’t attend. My own experience shows that this can still be effective. Not only did my own paper for last year’s MLA go viral on a small scale, but I was able to participate in other sessions remotely as people tweeted about what they were hearing or blogged their conference talks. I could ask questions in real time and have them relayed to the speaker in the conference rooms.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t have support to attend conferences or to be engaged in professional development. Indeed, we must assert that participation in these venues is necessary to being scholars. But even when money is not such a pressing issue, there are always more events than time. Social media helps us be in multiple places at once.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t have support to attend conferences or to be engaged in professional development. Indeed, we must assert that participation in these venues is necessary to being scholars. But even when money is not such a pressing issue, there are always more events than time. In the interest of time, however, I’ll just point you to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence.

It’s Faster

Speaking of journals, social networks are much more efficient at disseminating information and scholarly work. This is something you intuitively know if you’ve ever had a journal fall behind on their publication schedule once they’ve accepted one of our articles.

I had a great opportunity to observe a case study of the speed of social media this week in connection with the “Because” manifesto, which was written by a friend.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 4th, the first tweet about the manifesto went out. (It happened to be from me.)

Shortly after my first tweet is sent, people begin retweeting it. And some of them work for The Chronicle.

In retweeting, some people pull out excerpts that resonate with them.

Others comment on what the message says.

Some people offer suggestions for how the MLA could respond.

Another response on Twitter is that people start talking about how the post is “making the rounds.” This naturally gets more people reading it and spreading the post further.

Even AdjunctHulk weighs in.

Not everyone is going to give Paraphernalian a free pass.

And others don’t find that Paraphernalian speaks for his or her experience in the Academy.

Eventually I realize that I have to include this brief history in my talk, which I had already written.

And finally the post gets picked up by Inside Higher Ed. All of this in less than 24 hours.

Social media is fast enough to provide us and our work with a large audience—one that outstrips what we can normally expect from our publications. As Paraphernalian wrote to me privately, it’s “Weird that more ppl will read this than anything I wrote as an academic.”

It’s More Open

Too often the justifications made by state legislatures to cut funding is that no one is really sure what academics do with their time and money. Social media, then, can help those outside the academy understand what we do in higher education.

Suddenly the academy isn’t as shielded from the outside world. It’s no longer an ivory tower.

We’ve become much more like a glass tower. Or as Dan Cohen puts it in his forthcoming book, we move from an ivory tower to an open web. Helping people see how hard professors work is part of helping the academy when we’re in hard times.

Academics are not always especially good at sharing their work with other people. But I think that social media helps us get over that mistrust as we get to know each other better, through what Clive Thompson has called a “social sixth sense.” Social networks, in other words, help those of us inside the academy share our work and ideas, as well as our lives with one another.

Perhaps those who feel most disconnected from an academic community are the contingent labor among us. Even if you’re at a school that invests in you and cares about you, you might not have time to participate in your 9-to-5 academic community because you’re teaching too much or you’re on your way to the next school. The openness of social networks can allow the most disenfranchised among us to find community, then.

Perhaps my attitude about the importance of openness for the academy in hard times is cavalier, a function of my (relative) youth, inexperience, and lack of a tenure-track position. After all, it’s always important to be circumspect when communicating online. That being said, I have to admit that I’ve opted to be fairly open in my online interactions and that it’s had a salutary effect on my career. I’m speaking here now in large part because of it.

As such, if I may propose some questions for discussion, I’d ask how us to consider how we can advise graduate students in effectively using social networks in an academy which appears to be permanently facing hard times. And secondly, to return to the subject of publishing, to what degree should academic freedom be extended not only to the area of one’s research but also the mode/method in which that research is conducted and presented?

As you might have intuited from a previous post, I had the opportunity to attend the recent 2011 MLA Convention in Los Angeles. One of the panels that I spoke on was organized by Jason B. Jones and featured a trio of the ProfHacker team on the theme of “Hacking the Profession: Academic Self-Help in an Age of Crisis.” Here’s the description of session #48 from the official MLA program: “This roundtable discusses how we narrate our academic lives online, whether in blogs or on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or in any other format. In particular, we are interested in how we talk about failure or, more gently, about the common problems that plague any academic life: the class that doesn’t quite work, the committee that’s driving us crazy, or the article that can’t quite find a home.”

To insure that we had plenty of time left for discussion, we decided to practice what we preach and give our talks in the Pecha Kucha format (AKA 20 slides at 20 seconds per slide). This was my first time giving a talk in this style, and I found it a very interesting exercise. Often I write my talks and only come to the images later, but I found that I had to work on both simultaneously since the slides would determine where I would be in the moment of my argument. I also discovered that in 20 seconds I can say at most 4 lines of 12-point Times New Roman text. I liked the whole approach well enough that I’ll definitely include a Pecha Kucha presentation the next time I teach.

What follows is the text that I cribbed from when presenting at the MLA. In a few places I ad-libbed, especially on the first slide. But you’re getting the gist here. And I’ve included the images that accompanied the text (images precede the text). Make sure you don’t miss Natalie M. Houston’s talk from the same session on “Happiness Hacking.”

Dr. ProfHacker, or How I L3rn3d to St0p Worry1ng and <3 teh fail!!1!

Title, introduce myself.

Admit to this being my first time doing Pecha Kucha.

The problem of the academy, especially the humanities, is that we’ve been too easily waylaid by the ideal of the romantic genius. We think we need to be like the people we study. That we as scholars must be solo geniuses. And we believe that genius scholars never have problems…or failures.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Failure is a common human experience. As little as academics seem like humans at times, then, we need to plan on having failures. And we shouldn’t consider it unusual or untoward. Some academics have become better than others at this.

In a 2007 article in Wired, Thomas Goetz considered the problem of “dark data,” information that is abandoned since it doesn’t conform to hypotheses or doesn’t yield a dramatic enough outcome for a high-profile publication. Reporting on failures is valuable, writes Goetz, because “your dead end may be another scientist’s missing link, the elusive chunk of data they needed” (Goetz).

A possible solution to this problem is the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, which, Goetz notes, “has offered a peer-reviewed home to results that go negative or against the grain” since 2002. Since that same year, the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, reports on “experiments that do not reach the traditional significance levels…[t]hus, reducing the file drawer problem, and reducing the bias in psychological literature” (JASNH website).

These two journals play an important role for their particular fields by making “failure” public. Perhaps the idea of publishing unsuccessful research is not applicable to every field. But while we do not yet have a Failed Lacanian Interventions Quarterly, many academics are talking about failures in their professional lives as a whole. These discussions about research, teaching, and service take place on blogs, on wikis, and on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

The advantage of discussing our failures in public is that we can get help from other people. As an example, in Spring 2010 I taught a senior-level seminar. I’d taught the class once before and it had been really successful. Last January, I found myself in a classroom setting where I couldn’t get the students to talk to me. In a discussion-based class, it was obvious that I was failing.

My frustration with the situation resulted in my trying several different in-class activities. But at the same time, I wrote online about the difficulty of the experience that I was having. (You’ll notice from the tenor of these tweets that I was more caught up in the notion of my own genius rather than noticing that I was failing my class.)

Meeting with the director of undergraduate studies and asking him for help was useful, but so too was the response I received from my network of colleagues who had had similar experiences in the past. In particular, Erin Templeton saw my plaint and wrote a ProfHacker post about how silence is golden…until it isn’t.

Erin’s post begins by recounting her own “failure” in getting a class to talk and what steps she took to both get her students talking and in coming to terms with what she could not change. Among other things, she suggested methods that she had learned from other academics public narratives. (You’ll notice a virtuous circle happening where one person narrates publicly and others get the benefit.)

I never did get that class talking as much as I had hoped to, but narrating my experiences and asking for help online—rather than staying locked in my ivory tower—improved not only the class’s interactions, but also my own abilities as a teacher. ProfHacker became, in a sense, a Journal of Negative Results.

At the risk of patting ourselves too much on the backs, however, I’d like to suggest that ProfHacker and the work of others like Tenured Radical, Dean Dad, Sisyphus, and many more expose a different sort of failure: the general failure of the academy to make plain many of its most regular practices, from mentoring to writing letters of recommendation.

Narrating our lives need not only be about personal failures, then, but a desire to correct the failures of the academy to make its customs navigable to those who are new. By discussing how the academy works—even when it isn’t working so well in its present circumstances of “hard times”—we provide opportunities to diversify who can be successful in the profession.

There are increasing numbers of academic self-help books. Many of these are really useful, from Donald E. Hall to Kathryn Hume to The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career. But these books are limited in being from only one point of view. The advantage of narrating your academic life publicly is that you can hear from a wide range of interlocutors.

It’s this wide range of interlocutors that makes a university interesting. Large groups of creative and interesting people working together are also what author Steven Johnson suggests is responsible for innovation. In other words, Johnson’s book argues against the model of the solitary genius, against the idea that one person can repeatedly create something ex nihilo.

The advantage of narrating your life online, failures included, is that whether you are at a large research institution or not, you can participate in large group conversations that not only inform but also create, such as the real-time, crowdsourced publication Digital Humanities Now or the comment threads at ProfHacker.

Now, it might seem problematic to be narrating our personal and institutional failures when the academy is facing such hard times. After all, how can we expect state legislatures or individuals to continue funding our campuses if they are aware that we fail at times?

Contrary to expectations, however, I think that showing our failings might make us more sympathetic to those outside of academia. Instead of being the romantic geniuses in our ivory tower, we start to look a little bit human. And humans and human experience is what lies at the heart of the university.

In 2009, Google made a splash when it announced Wave. In 2010, Google made a splash when it announced that it was going to kill Wave. If you’d ever used Wave, this probably came as no surprise. I believe there’s a lesson that we can learn from Google, however. Admit our failures—including the academy’s—and do so quickly. Then talk about them.

Thanks.

The following is a guest post from MLA Executive Director, Rosemary Feal. Rosemary asked on Twitter yesterday if anyone would be willing to post a short guest post from her on his or her blog. I volunteered, and the rest is history. If you want to play along, you can find the 2011 MLA Convention program here [PDF]. –BC

It’s easy to cherry-pick 13 sessions for the purpose of finding plays on words, references to popular culture, use of specialized vocabulary, or titles that, well, just sound alien. Or are about aliens. Zombies, even.

What would happen if I picked 13 sessions entirely at random, I wondered? So I went to random.org and asked it to choose 13 numbers between 1 and 821 (821 was the last session number on the MLA convention program). Here’s what it came up with. Try this at home, kids, and report in!
~ Rosemary G. Feal

466. Teaching Asian American Literatures

7. German in the Life of the University: A View from the Trenches

751. Writing and Curatorship: The History of the Book

249. Career Options in Translation for Language Students

67. Modernist Transnationalism and Japanese Noh: (Mis)Translating Culture in Yeats, Pound, Konishi

345. Psychoanalysis and Love

711. Literature before the Social Sciences

449. Where Are We Now? Ecocriticism and Narrative Scholarship

31. In and out of the Archive: Biography, Autobiography, and Constructing the “Self”

457. African American Literature on the Pacific Rim

115. Sephardic Resurgence!

37. Teaching the Senior Seminar

637. Narrating Lives from East to West (1400–1700)

Last year I gained some attention for not attending the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. The notice that was paid to my situation and to the paper that was read on my behalf took me completely by surprise. That feeling of surprise persisted throughout 2010 as people occasionally sent emails or told me at events that they had heard of me. Standing in for the present absence [paywall] of many contingent or non-tenure-track at the yearly meeting of the MLA—and all the other conferences or department and faculty meetings—was not what I had had in mind when I stayed home. But I’m grateful that my paper resulted in increased attention being paid to the effects of labor casualization in the university.

Because I’m lucky, I have a job now. And because I’m even luckier, I’ve just finished attending my fifth MLA convention, where I spoke on two panels. I say “my” MLA with good reason. Previous to the 2006 MLA Convention, I’d heard that the yearly meeting wasn’t especially enjoyable: people only went for the job interviews; the presenters always took too long and there was never time for Q&A; the lobby was full of the dead gazes of nervous candidates; and conversations were stunted by the sizing up of one other’s badges—their names and affiliations. So I was stunned when I got to Philadelphia, where I was slated to give a paper. For three days straight, there was something fascinating and fabulous happening. Every hour of the day there was something that I wanted to attend. I saw Michael Bérubé and Bitch PhD (RIP) speak about their blogging. I saw Dave Parry (although I didn’t know him at the time) and others talk about the Wikipedia. I attended talks about the authors I was writing about in my dissertation and talks given by friends in my program. I met Katherine Hayles, someone whose work intrigued me and who chaired the panel that I spoke on. I bumped into one of my favorite undergraduate professors in the book exhibit and caught up on the last 4.5 years. I hung out with friends from grad school, met scads of new people, and ate one of the best meals of my life. What had been billed as a soulless gathering at a terribly inconvenient time of year turned out to be quite possibly the most interesting three days of my academic career to that point.

I was hooked. I planned to go back to the MLA the following year since I would be on the market for the first time. But I was very much looking forward to it. In Chicago in 2007, I had two interviews, but I went for the fun of it all. I met Matt Kirschenbaum and Joe Tabbi for the first time, the latter offering me the opportunity to work some on electronic book review and the ELO Directory. I caught up with Jason Jones and his family. I ate a montecristo. In 2008, I hit San Francisco with one job interview, but I was also moderating a panel on Twitter with Dave Parry, Matt Gold, and John M. Jones. The first MLA tweetups took place, and I met so many people whom I had come to know online that listing them would verge on the obnoxious. And the work of my peers continued to keep me rushing from one hotel to the next, as I tried to decide between incredible When I decided not to attend the 2009 convention, then, I was as disappointed by my missing out on what I suspected would be both a great intellectual feast and a fabulous party.

Although any notoriety I was enjoying in March 2010 had come my way primarily by my not attending the conference, I knew that I could pull a(n accidental) stunt like that once. So I began submitting paper proposals with the hope that I could speak in this year’s program. Others kindly invited me to participate in round tables that they were organizing. And after Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the MLA, wrote to threaten (in a tongue-in-cheek manner) to not accept my panels unless I showed her an airplane receipt guaranteeing I would be at the 2011 convention, I learned that I would have the chance to speak on two different panels. I’ll blog the talks from those panels in a day or so, but I wanted to quickly recap some of what my MLA looked like this year–to the best that I can recall, at least.

Thursday

• On arriving at the JW Marriott on Thursday morning, I found myself riding on an escalator behind someone who looked very familiar. He seemed to have noticed me and was looking quizzically at me as well. Neither of us had yet found name tag holders. Right before I could speak, he turned fully to me and said, “Excuse me, are you Brian Croxall? I’m Michael Bérubé.” This is not how you expect your conversation to go with the Second Vice President of the MLA. He was very kind and asked about my new job.
• I started Thursday with some media training that I and approximately 20 other people (including many ProfHackers had been invited to. Rosemary Feal and Mark Aurigemma provided two hours of helpful and revealing strategies for how faculty can effectively interact with journalists. Expect a ProfHacker post soon on the subject from myself or one of my colleagues.
• For the very first session of the MLA, I attended a panel on labor in the digital humanities (DH), which featured Tanya Clement, Mark Childs, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Amanda French, Carl Stahmer, with William Thompson presiding. The conversations ranged from debating the extent to which non-programmers can really expect to learn code well enough to contribute to a project (Carl said no), to the degradation of digital humanities projects due to the evaporation of labor after a grant ends, to Amanda French’s commonsense (and therefore all the more radical) suggestion that funds from grants be used in part to fund the training of graduate students so they can learn basic programming concepts and therefore become more able to communicate with their DH collaborators. Tanya Clement even read a portion of the whitepaper that she and Doug Reside have been preparing for the upcoming, NEH-funded Off the Tracks meeting that seeks to limn out pathways for DH scholar-programmers (their term, which she pointed out is contentious). At the end of this panel, I was very happy to get to meet Richard Grusin for the first time. His (and Jay David Bolter’s) book Remediation had a profound effect on my dissertation. This, by the way, is what’s cool about the MLA, in case you missed it.
• Directly after this panel, Natalie M. Houston, Jason Jones, George Williams, and myself got to speak about hacking the profession on a ProfHacker-organized and -themed panel. Natalie’s posted her talk, and I’ll put mine up shortly. I really enjoyed the Q&A, which featured tales of poems about burritos and George regaling us with his boxing days. In this panel, I got to meet Kathy Harris for the first time—someone with whom I was able to collaborate a bit on a timeline— and Bill “Thomas H. Benton” Pannapacker, who wrote a blog post on The Chronicle of Higher Education about the panel.
• Following a one-panel interlude where I’m afraid I zoned out more than anything, having hit a wall, I had my second (and final) speaking engagement. The “New Tools, Hard Times” panel featured Marc Bousquet, Rosemary Feal, Marilee Lindemann, Chris Newfield, and myself talking about the use of social media in the academy in hard times. I will simply say that I was floored to be on this panel with these people. My talk is forthcoming, but Marilee has posted hers and Chris has already blogged his reflections on the panel. And if you want to read the VERY lively tweetstream for the session, look at the hashtag archive for #newtools. During Q&A we were all happy that questions were coming in from people who were not at the convention and were asking about issues of anonymity in the academy. Perhaps the best question came from Matt Kirschenbaum who wondered whether work in social media was actually counterproductive at a point as it too often ends up being uncounted by the academy. This is a good question to keep in mind, but I appreciate the fact that my being presently off the tenure track means that I don’t have to worry as much about whether my contributions online count. Or in other words, while I haven’t grabbed the brass ring of the tenure-track job, I do get to exercise a tremendous amount of freedom in how I spend my energies and time. It’s kind of ironic, then, that I have some academic freedom that the tenured and especially the tenure-track faculty lack.
• At this point, I hit a wall, but had a fabulous dinner—and even better conversation—at Cork Bar.
  This was eventually followed by some night caps (orange juice for me!) with friends. And Rosemary Feal introduced me to Gerald Graff.

Friday

• Friday morning started early with a show-and-tell round table of new digital projects. As I tweeted, I was most taken in by some of the new visualizations (still in beta, unfortunately) that John Walsh of The Swinburne Project demonstrated and “For Better For Verse,” an interactive tool for teaching scansion and prosody, which is headed up by Herbert Tucker of UVa. Then I got a personal tutorial on NINES and 18thConnect from Laura Mandell.
• I then took in a panel where Ryan Cordell presented on his work on Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.” Ryan’s work is fascinating, but even more was his ability to present effectively. He really taught the audience about his work, rather than reading directly from the page. He made it plain that even more traditional talks can be shifted from what is supposed to be the norm at the MLA. I hope that Rosemary Feal really does ask him to do a video about effective presentations.
• I then hurried over to the book exhibit. It’s always fascinating to see what new books are coming out (not to mention how much money I can save). But the real draw this year was the Narrating Lives project, which participated in the larger theme of the conference established by MLA President Sidonie Smith. There wasn’t a line when I arrived, so I was quickly briefed and waivered, and I recorded a one-minute video that talked about why I look forward to the yearly MLA and what made me go to graduate school in literature and language.
  
  
  (You can tell from my presentation that the media training hadn’t quite sunk in yet.) All in all, I’m really excited that the MLA is looking for such user-generated content. And I’m even more thrilled that Kathi Berens recorded two videos along the theme of “It Gets Better,” talking to those—like her— that are not on the tenure track.
• Next on the schedule was a session on “The History and Future of the Digital Humanities,” which featured Kathy Harris, Alan Liu, Tara McPherson, Steve Ramsay, and Bethany Nowviskie (who, due to illness, was channeled by Steve), and Brett Bobley of the NEH, with Kathleen Fitzpatrick chairing (all links are to either the speaker’s blogged talk or to their Twitter account). The speakers each had about 3 minutes to present their perspective on the Digital Humanities. Perhaps most electric was Steve’s polemic (which appears to be his public persona and one which he performs exceptionally) in which he considered “Who’s In an Who’s Out,” a subject that seems to come up frequently in DH. He suggested that knowing how to code is all but required in DH and presented a definition of DH: it’s “about building things.” Steve has blogged his reflections on the panel, and they’re worth reading. Personally, I very much like his definition of building as requisite to DH. I’d suggest that it doesn’t have to be limited to one’s research, however, since I think DH can happen in pedagogy just as well as research. (See Chris Forster on this important point.) But during the discussion, Alan Liu argued that he’s not so much a builder as someone who steals or is a bricoleur, and I think that that’s possibly closer to my vision of myself than one of a builder. It was a very good conversation, but one that I also felt I’ve heard a lot recently, either in person or in the blogosphere about just what DH is. In the end, I wonder to what extent these questions really come down to wondering about how we should train the current generation of graduate students. After all, if we are to prepare people for DH positions, we need to make sure they will be able to have the skills that programs will be looking for. But I don’t know if we’ll ever get as specific in training as we are in breadth requirements for PhDs. The current (and previous) generation of DH practitioners seem to all have taken idiosyncratic paths, and that’s one of the things that makes the community vibrant. I’d hate to lose that (although I recognize that not everyone has the time or opportunity to pursue these paths). Perhaps this is why we keep talking about it. If you want to see more of the conversation, look at the archive for the hashtag #309. One of the things that I found most interesting about this panel was how packed the room was: standing room only, and it was clear that there were a lot of people there who simply wanted to learn about what the digital humanities were. Due to all reports I saw from last year’s MLA, the digital humanities sessions in 2009 were also packed, but were in much smaller rooms. This year saw DH given larger space, but it still wasn’t sufficient. I saw MLA staffers counting attendance during this session, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll see still bigger rooms in 2012.
• After the DH History and Future panel, I stayed put for a session on “The Open Professoriate” (Twitter hashtag #openprof) featuring Samuel Cohen, Amanda French, Dave Parry, Mark Sample, and Erin Templeton, with Matt Gold chairing. At the moment, only Amanda has blogged her talk, but I am sure that we’ll see more of the talks made available soon given that the openness of faculty’s research, teaching, and lives was the subject of the day. The Q&A was again very lively, and I asked the panel to what extent we should count on large corporations such as Google or Twitter to have our interests of openness at heart. It’s not that they are necessarily more or less profit-driven than the universities most of us work for, but I think that many of us—myself certainly included—forget to consider that we are creating value for the web companies that we contribute to with our searches and discussions. Not that this makes me want to be less open; after all, I’d rather have accessibility. But we need to be aware of everyone with whom we’re consorting in the quest toward openness. I was glad to see the MLA embrace conversations suh as these as well as the standard literary discussions.
• I stuck to the same room for one more talk, and got to hear Stanford’s Dan Edelstein talk about the mapping of Enlightenment correspondence in the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. The visualizations and the patterns they have been discovering by building a massive archive of early modern correspondence is intriguing and brought the conversation from the meta level of the #309 panel back to the practical. Fascinating work and well worth following.
• Following Dan’s talk, I moved to the Electronic Literature Organization‘s meetup, where I caught up with Zach Whalen and Kari Kraus and met Jentery Sayers and Mark C. Marino for the first time. Again, one of the reasons to attend the MLA in my experience is that everyone is there. And even if you don’t get a lot of time to talk to everyone, simply seeing each other in person helps to make possible new chances for working together or learning about what’s at the bleeding edge of different fields.
• After a DH-filled dinner of sushi, the final event of the evening was the MLA Tweetup, which Rosemary Feal sponsored. While it will likely not get the press coverage that 2009′s did, it was still nice to see in person many of the people whose tweets we had been reading throughout the first two days of the conference. I’m sure not everyone there was someone that was on Twitter, since it appeared to include some bleed over from the audience for President Sidonie Smith’s keynote address. Still, it was amazing to see so many people there, who were engaged in the Twitter side of the MLA. And the ambience was something to behold:
  

Saturday

• For my final experience of the MLA, I joined the fun run that Dave Parry had organized for as many MLA participants as were crazy enough to be consider spandex and black turtlenecks at 7am.
  
  Dave and the others at the front of the pack took pity on us and kept it manageable. Fortunately, I had a strategy.
  
  As was the case throughout so much of the MLA this year, it was great to have Rosemary Feal involved. She mentioned before the run how much she appreciated that the run got organized. At the risk of putting words in her mouth, I think she was pleased to see young blood at the MLA. But I also imagine that she enjoys seeing spontaneous organizing taking place: the activities of the underconference.

I don’t want to come off saying that there aren’t any problems at the MLA. There are things that I think can be fixed at the MLA. For one, it would be great to find ways to get those presenting in traditional panel formats (not everything can be pecha kucha, after all) could present rather than read directly from the page. After all, we’re all teachers. Why do we think that we need to communicate to one another in a different mode than we communicate to our students? Second, I think that the MLA can do more to embrace openness. In particular, the MLA should avoid paywalling information related to the conference, such as the program. Part of this trouble is due to the program being published as an issue of PMLA. But it shouldn’t fall to the crowd to hack and republish the simple PDF. If we are in hard times (and boy are we!), then we should be doing everything to make information about ourselves public. How can we expect people to understand what it is that we do in this profession if we don’t let them see what it is we’re discussing? (See Kathi Berens calling for the same openness on her blog.) But these problems are things that we can fix. They aren’t impossible. And on the whole, I’m feeling quite positive about the direction the organization is headed in.

I know that some people think the MLA is stodgy, solipsistic, and stressful. But that’s not my MLA. And I’m glad I was present.

EDITS: Added the photo at the Cork Bar, courtesy of Kathi Berens.

In the final days of December, the annual MLA Convention was held, and I wasn’t there. For a number of reasons, I was unable to / decided not to attend the convention. Instead, I chose to post my paper on this blog and to tweet about it. What happened next was very surprising indeed. Thousands of people eventually ended up reading that blog post, commenting on it, and responding to it on their own blogs.

Much of the traffic to my paper was in fact generated by this last category. Indeed, many of these posts viewed my comments on the MLA and the profession with far greater acumen than I had been capable of. In particular, posts by Bitch Ph.D. (@bitchphd), Amanda French (@amandafrench), and Dave Parry (@academicdave; two posts, as a matter of fact) took the ball and ran very far indeed. If you haven’t read these posts and you found my paper interesting, you’re missing out. It’s also worth mentioning the two gracious write-ups on my paper (here and here) in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Jen Howard.

I felt something like an “absent presence” myself as the discussion about my paper went on for about a week. In part, I was swamped with the beginning of a new semester (we started 7 January). But I had also been contacted by an editor at The Chronicle Review and asked if I would write a follow-up piece to my experience. Having this opportunity not only gave me a wider venue for publishing but also gave me a little more time to reflect on what it all “meant.”

That piece–”On Going Viral at the (Virtual) MLA”–appears in this week’s Chronicle Review, and you can now read it online. The article is unfortunately behind a subscription paygate. But I hope many will be able to read it on your respective campuses, and I should be able to republish it here in 30 days or so.