You Complete Me: On Building a Vertically Integrated Digital Humanities Program at the University of Georgia
You Complete Me: On Building a Vertically Integrated Digital Humanities Program at the University of Georgia
Lisa Bayer 0 1
0 University of Georgia Press , USA
1 by Lisa Bayer , Director , University of Georgia Press , USA
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You Complete Me: On Building a Vertically Integrated
Digital Humanities Program at the University of Georgia
“The means of knowledge dissemination may be different in an electronic age,
but the mission remains the same.” — Robert Harington, “Reasons To
Be Cheerful, Part 3,” The Scholarly Kitchen, October 31, 2014.
Ttween the University of Georgia Press
he opportunities for collaboration
beand the UGA Libraries, to whom it has
reported for over five years, have not been a
question of why or how, but why not and how
often. Ours is one of approximately 25 U.S.
and Canadian university presses reporting to
their campus libraries. Refreshingly, the
relationship was not a result of financial distress,
and we have found that our commonalities, for
the most part, outweigh our differences. The
Press and the Libraries are currently working
together with campus partners on DiGA
(Digital Georgia), an interconnected, vertically
integrated program intended to support new
forms of digital humanities (DH) scholarship
through teaching, research, publication, and
infrastructure.
Faculty-driven by historians Stephen Berry and Claudio Saunt (whose Center for Virtual History was recently profiled in the
Chronicle of Higher Education), DiGA’s key
achievements thus far include a DH-focused
faculty hire, a planned “digi” rubric for course
designation, and a Digital Humanities Lab,
located in the main library next to the press,
opening in the coming year. With crucial
support from the Willson Center for the Arts
and Humanities at UGA, we are working with
funders both internally and externally on
startup costs for infrastructure, staffing, planning,
and other needs. Focusing on comparative
advantages, Stephen Berry, Assistant Press
Director and Editor-in-Chief Mick
GusindeDuffy, and University Librarian and Associate
Provost Toby Graham consider DiGA’s
promise for generating and sustaining new forms of
interpretive scholarship.
The project at Georgia involves a facul
ty-run digital humanities lab, the UGA Press,
and the UGA Libraries. Why these partners?
What sets this project apart from the many other DH projects that have preceded it? How are we different?
Steve: DH is an inherently collaborative
discipline, but strangely few DH centers are
set up to offer “end-to-end” support for large,
born-digital, scholarly projects. We see any
number of collaborations that involve multiple
libraries, or multiple presses, or multiple
faculty members, but this kind of “horizontal
integration” has some limitations. For instance,
it tends to reproduce and multiply the same
culture — the culture of the Library, the Press,
or the Faculty — and it does not result in true
“end-to-end” support. We wanted something
that would join these three cultures so we could
all learn from each other.
Mick: A university press supports the
overarching goals and mission of its parent
institution. Those goals are typically built
around three overlapping activities: teaching,
research, and public service or outreach. As
we think about the research aspect of our
mission — helping develop scholarship and
making ideas accessible to as many readers as
possible — it makes sense to combine these
three partners in the process. In fact, we are
really only supplementing established areas
of strength and responsibility: faculty
do the research; presses review,
refine, promote, disseminate
(and monetize) the research;
libraries collect, curate,
and assure longevity and
presentation standards for
the scholarship. Those
“responsibilities” overlap and
interact in interesting ways in a
mostly-digital environment, leading to shifting
responsibilities and shared areas of expertise.
This is a process we need to refine and learn
more about, but the mission remains the same.
Toby: We know from the 2014 Ithaka S+R
report on sustaining the digital humanities that
even on campuses with DH centers, there is
rarely a comprehensive solution in place to
support faculty in all stages in the project’s life
cycle. Programs most often lack sustainable
sources of support. Also, there is a lack of
clarity about how to establish the “value” of
a project or output for the academy and
society. We are advancing a vertical integration
concept in which the institution will provide
support for digital scholarship from origination
through dissemination, including determining
the scholarly merit of related outputs.
What are the possibilities of the Georgia
project for bringing DH scholarship in line
with more traditional monographic work in
the humanities, e.g., implications for peer
review, tenure and promotion, and channels
of dissemination?
Steve: I think I am more sanguine about
these hurdles than most. Technology makes
peer review easier, not harder. Technology
makes (...truncated)