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17 Time, Labor, and “Alternate Careers” in Digital Humanities Knowledge Work
- University of Minnesota Press
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292 ] Time, Labor, and“Alternate Careers” in Digital Humanities Knowledge Work julia flanders T he quick transition of “#alt-ac”from Twitter hashtag to term of art has been an index of its evident utility: as a rubric for discussing a topic that has long been in need of a name, a terminology, and an agenda. The alternativeness of careers in digital humanities has in fact been a subject of long debate and much concern; many early researchers in what was then termed “humanities computing ” were located in liminal and academically precarious institutional spaces such as newly created instructional technology support units and grant-funded research groups. Much energy was devoted—then as now—to discussion of how and whether this domain could become a discipline, with its own faculty positions and academic legitimation. And although those faculty positions and degree programs are starting to appear, many jobs in what is now called “digital humanities” are still para-academic, though their funding and institutional position has been consolidated somewhat.What has received less discussion,interestingly,is the word “career”itself.Its origins in horse racing (“the ground on which a race is run,a racecourse . . . a short gallop at full speed”1 ) are long past but not irrelevant: the word articulates a sense both of boundaries for a specific type of effort and of the intensity and directedness of the effort itself. In professional terms, a career has both direction and impetus; it is inescapably competitive. The phrase“alternate careers”is thus remarkable at second glance not for suggesting that there are alternatives but for the centrality it still accords to those academic careers that are not alternate. This centrality is not just an effect of graduate study and not only perceptible within the academy;it shapes the way universities are understood as workplaces even by those who stand outside them. So, for instance, when I mentioned to the person who was fixing my truck that I worked at Brown University, without giving further detail, he assumed that I was a professor there. (If he was being deliberately flattering, the point is surely the same.) As a guess, this was not only wrong but a poor play of the odds: faculty positions make up only part iv ][ Chapter 17 Time, Labor, and “Alternate Careers” [ 293 about 30 percent of all full-time employees at Brown, whereas 45 percent are some other kind of professional: technical, administrative, legal, executive, and managerial . Thus on the basis of pure statistics (and even allowing for my apparent level of education and socioeconomic positioning), I am much more likely to be anything but a faculty member. The professoriate, though, provides the characteristic paradigm through which we understand the nature and function of the university: an institution composed of professional faculty whose job is to teach students and to perform research. Thisidealizedviewstandsinfortherealcomplexityof theuniversityasaninstitutionalecologyof work—inwhicheveryhourof facultyworkisbroughtintobeing by hundreds of hours of time spent maintaining the physical and administrative space within which that work is conducted: libraries, network, payroll, buildings, andalltherestof it.Butitalsostandsinfor,andobscures,therealcomplexityof even the “purely academic work” that goes on within the university. The sketchy wireframe figure of the professor suggests a division of labor and a level of intellectual independence that, in the emerging age of digital scholarship, is increasingly obsolete .It also suggests a strongly defined intellectual and professional career trajectory that, as Alan Liu astutely observes in The Laws of Cool, may no longer be characteristic of modern knowledge work:“to be a professional-managerial-technical worker now is to stake one’s authority on an even more precarious knowledge that has to be re-earned with every new technological change.”2 To fill in these complexities is to gain a clearer understanding of how other kinds of academic jobs stand in relation to that of the tenured faculty and also to see how those relationships have been structured in the academic imaginary. These “alternative”or“para-academic”jobs within the academy have a great deal to teach us about how academic labor is quantified, about different models of work and work product, and about the ways that aptitude, skill, expertise, and productivity are weighed in assessing different kinds of work. Situating the discussion within the domain of digital humanities puts these issues into more specific focus. It brings into view a wider range of work practices and roles: the novel job descriptions that arise out of digital humanities project work but also the novel forms of...