Hi everyone: I have a former grad student who wrote to me in a panic. Apparently, her current department chair has decided that her previous coursework in DH, book history will not count towards her current graduate program, because it does not "correlate" to literature, composition, or teaching. (Wow. I can barely even.) The chair is apparently reacting to an accreditation review and has asked for justification in language accessible to non-specialist peers. Does anyone have go-to resources for helping us make this case? Thank you --
Why should DH coursework count towards a literature grad program?
(3 posts) (3 voices)-
(We tweeted a bit, but for anyone else happening on this question...)
DH dissertations in general
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1. The CUNY Graduate Center fellows and staff do amazing work making more kinds of dissertation possible, and in particular I'd suggest looking for blog posts and video from their #remixthediss event/project (e.g. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/pieces/what-dissertation-new-models-methods-media).2. They maintain a collaborative GoogleDoc where people doing current or past non-monograph dissertations (humanities and not, digital and not) describe and link to their projects: http://bit.ly/remixthediss-models. I don't think these are included there, but two additional completed DH+textual literature dissertations to check out or use as examples are:
* Lisa Rhody's literature dissertation using topic modeling and visualization to explore ekphrastic poetry: http://www.lisarhody.com/project/revising-ekphrasis/
* Tanya Clement's literature dissertation included the creation of an experimental scholarly digital edition: http://digital.lib.umd.edu/transition/3. Here's a Zotero library of articles and guidelines for doing DH dissertations and applying for DH promotion/tenure (the latter often being applicable to arguing for the former): https://www.zotero.org/amandavisconti/items/collectionKey/V9DA47T7
My DH+textual studies dissertation
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I defended a DH dissertation about public digital humanities and digital textual scholarship for the University of Maryland's literature Ph.D. To show the department chair what a completed DH+textual studies dissertation can look like, or reuse some of the DH and literature precedents I used in my arguments:The dissertation did not include any chapters; I used design, code, usertesting, blogging, and an analytical report written during last month before defense.
The completed dissertation is this website: http://dr.amandavisconti.com.
The dissertation produced a participatory digital edition of Ulysses (http://www.infiniteulysses.com).
My doctoral exams areas were DH and textual scholarship (list and introductory essay explaining choices here: http://literaturegeek.com/assets/ExamsSharingCopy.pdf).
I blogged about twice a month through exams and the dissertation, both about my research and the larger meta aspects of doing a digital/DH dissertation: http://literaturegeek.com/tag/dissertation/. In particular, this post has some practical advice on getting started (http://literaturegeek.com/2012/10/21/startingadhdissertation) and this post has info on choosing your dissertation's format (http://literaturegeek.com/2014/04/02/digitaldissformat).
The slides and text of my successful dissertation defense talk are here: http://literaturegeek.com/2016/06/20/digital-humanities-dissertation-defense-talk
I am happy to email with this student (or anyone curious about DH/digital dissertations!) via amandavisconti@gmail.com.
Posted 11 months ago Permalink -
There's also the MLA's Guide for evaluating DH work. It's (sadly) less about grad students than tenure and promotion, but seems to still apply. If nothing else, the fact that MLA (and AHA, for that matter) have produced guides for DH evaluation says clearly that the professional organization says that DH does, in fact, correlate with language, literature, and teaching.
Posted 11 months ago Permalink
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