2020 Three Year Review

Between 2017-2020, IDAH has had nearly 600 people sign in to our workshops and Speaker Series events. Attendance data for the Institute's early years is scarce, but records from 2016-2017 suggest numbers have been holding steady since. Although 2019-2020 shows a sharp decline in total attendance, we attribute this partially to the fact that several of our spring workshops and lectures were disrupted or cancelled due to COVID-19.

Since 2017, IDAH has held over 340 consultation sessions with consultees from all over campus. We offer at least four scheduled sessions each week during Fall and Spring semesters with the option to request additional consultations as needed. Schools served include:

• the College of Arts and Sciences,
• the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design,
• the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies,
• the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering,
• the School of Education,
• the Maurer School of Law,
• the Media School,
• the Jacobs School of Music, and
• the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

The consultation program rapidly grew after IDAH began consulting jointly with the IUB Libraries’ Digital Collections Services department in August of 2017, and has quickly reached capacity. We are regularly booked weeks in advance. The Institute piloted a flexible office-hours style addition to our consultation schedule in January of 2020, but COVID-19 limited our opportunities to determine its efficacy. We hope to reinstitute these extra hours when the University returns to its normal schedule.

The number of awards distributed by IDAH each year has increased significantly . IDAH has awarded 52 fellowships, scholarships and Incubator awards since the 2017-2018 academic year. This is more than the previous seven academic years (2010-2016) combined. Between the Faculty Fellowship program, the HASTAC Scholarship program, the Graduate Fellowship program, and the Summer Incubator, IDAH has distributed a total of over $190,000 in research funding and course releases for students and faculty over the course of three years.

Though we have little data on grant submissions and awards in prior iterations of IDAH, we have seen an increase in successful submissions since 2017. None of the Institute’s applications were successful in 2017; however, in 2018 and 2019, IDAH and IDAH affiliates have received a number of both external and internal grants to support a wide variety of research projects. In total, the Institute has been involved with over two and a half million dollars' worth of submissions between 2017 and 2019.

Introduced in 2017, IDAH committed to support digital pedagogy interventions through consultations and classroom visits as a way to introduce faculty and students to the research potential when leveraging digital methods for teaching and learning. To date we have logged over 60 pedagogy consultations that led to over 20 class visits. Several instructors have returned to IDAH over the last three years for ongoing classroom collaborations.  Other instructors have transitioned to exploring digital methods in their own research through other IDAH programming like research consultations, IDAH Summer Incubator and the IDAH Faculty Fellowship.

Introduced in late 2017, IDAH’s certificate and minor program has provided credentialing for 13 IU alumni. We have seen a significant uptick in enrollment and interest for the program, and regularly attend new student orientations each August to publicize the program and recruit new enrollees. In 2018-2019 alone, we had 8 students enrolled in either the certificate or minor, and an additional 3 had declared their intent to enroll. Besides formal credentialing, IDAH has significantly enhanced or assisted in the completion of 44 terminal degree projects through our consulting and HASTAC Scholarship programs.

We’ve seen early evidence that IDAH’s pipeline model is working—first-time consultees come back for second and third consultations, graduate consultees regularly enroll in our certificate and minor programs, veteran consultees apply for funding programs like the Summer Incubator, and funding program participants go on to apply for Faculty Fellowships and external and internal funding. We are launching a formal assessment of the IDAH pipeline in fall of 2020 in preparation for a forthcoming DLF Forum presentation. This pipeline development naturally contributes also to a culture of community among DAH practitioners on campus.

These anecdotal successes in pipeline building contribute to IDAH's inherent long-term sustainability, and the vast majority of our individual activities—from workshops to research programs to grant making to open-access publishing—are explicitly structured to support the continued evolution of DAH on campus and beyond. Our "baked-in" approach to sustainability likely contributed to high ratings across this category.

For those that are already interested in or engaged in digital arts and humanities research and pedagogy, our programming is incredibly useful. We often get consults for more advanced projects that need more advanced needs, such as technical support or sustainability concerns.With the expansion of our flash consults and sandbox hours, we also give more advanced scholars a chance to come in and as brief questions as needed, freeing up our extended consultation sessions for new digital arts and humanities practitioners.

INTERNAL CONNECTIONS

IDAH’s situation in the library puts us in the best position to refer our audience to other resources on campus. Our collaborative consult model means we can invite relevant personnel to advise the consultee. We have referred our audience to such resources as subject librarians, maker spaces, and UITS technical support. This collaborative model means that our audience has an incredibly diverse set of resources to turn to with their research questions.

PROJECT EXECUTION

With these resources at their disposal, we further encourage our audience to see their projects through to the end. Whether it's simply an assignment for class, a graduate capstone project, or a component of a dissertation or dossier, we encourage digital arts and humanities practitioners to execute their projects to the best of their abilities. Finished projects now include poster presentations, published articles, and digital exhibits, all fostered through IDAH's pipeline.

IDAH's framework for digital humanities scholarship emphasizes the importance of research questions above all else—avoiding the pitfall of technology for technology's sake. While we make space for technical exploration during our workshops and events, this extremely practical approach to research is in large part what makes IDAH accessible to our constituents regardless of their academic background or familiarity with digital techniques. 

After a period of revitalization in 2017, IDAH’s guest speaker lectures are consistently well-attended by an academically diverse audience that includes faculty, students, and staff, and our outreach and advertisement pipeline is well-established. We curate our speaker series to explore new ideas and unconventional uses of DH across the digital landscape. 

CONSULTATIONS

Since 2017, IDAH’s joint consultation model with IU Libraries’ Digital Collections Services has been extremely well-received, and the program has grown at an exponential rate. Subscription increased by 70% between 2017 and 2019, and IDAH has served a total of nearly 350 consultees during the same period. It is clear from the growth—and maxing—of consult subscription that there is a need for a welcoming, but expert, environment in which people can experiment with integrating their disciplinary expertise and a digital method.

INCUBATOR

The week-long Summer Incubator is a newly developed program first launched in the summer of 2018 and is the most visible example of IDAH's pragmatism in action. The Incubator provides an intensive collaborative environment designed to kickstart early-stage digital projects that otherwise might not have the opportunity to get off the ground. Feedback from the Incubator’s first two cohorts has been overwhelmingly positive, and many alumni have gone on to receive internal or external funding for their projects.

FACULTY FELLOWSHIPS

Over the years, the Faculty Fellowship program has evolved to address both digital project support and intellectual recognition of those digital projects as part of tenure and promotion. Former fellows often refer colleagues to the program, further increasing the program’s sustainability, and there’s a pipeline from the Summer Incubator to the Faculty Fellowship that positions fellows to hit the ground running. Based on feedback we have received from recent cohorts, we plan to revitalize the program even further to better support future Faculty Fellows by extending the fellowship year by an additional semester and providing set hours of dedicated technical support to ensure projects do not stall.

HASTAC SCHOLARSHIP

Since 2017, the IDAH HASTAC program has grown considerably. We receive 10-20 applications on average, signaling that demand for the HASTAC Scholarship program has increased. The applications are top-notch and our sponsorship numbers have ranged between 7-10 over the last three years. Feedback from awardees has been consistently positive, and funding was expanded in 2018 due to its success.

GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIPS

Perhaps the most established of IDAH's programs, we hire two College graduate assistants each year, along with one SICE/ILS graduate assistant. Job placement for this program has been very successful with alumni going on to fill positions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of California-Santa Cruz, and University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY SUPPORT

The feedback we have received from our pedagogy consultations and in-class interventions have been overwhelmingly positive. Faculty often ask us back year after year to develop their digital curriculum further. We also receive feedback from the students themselves, talking about how much they enjoyed learning a new digital method and wondering how they can keep working with a particular tool. To better support digital pedagogy in the future, our staff is developing teaching templates for faculty to include in their curriculum for either long- or short-term projects, something we think will be very beneficial as we participate in online teaching environments.

WORKSHOP SERIES

Much like our Speaker Series, our workshops are well-developed and well-attended, with an established and consistent audience base. We developed an introductory fall workshop series that welcomes both novice practitioners and the digitally-curious, while our spring workshop series focuses on meeting emerging needs and interests by responding to consultation trends from the prior semester. This multi-pronged approach to programming has proven effective in both welcoming new practitioners and engaging with seasoned artists and scholars and feedback collected over the years  confirms we are largely meeting the needs of our audiences.

GRADUATE CERTIFICATE AND MINOR

Though it scored highly on our self-study survey, it is worth mentioning that IDAH’s certificate and minor program was designed primarily with humanities Ph.D. candidates in mind. While the program is on the upswing, the nature of its focus can pose barriers to some students, particularly those studying in the fields of art and informatics. We have addressed these barriers in other parts of our pipeline model, but this issue warrants further consideration as the Institute moves forward.

While scoring highly in our self-study, it is worth noting that digital publishing solutions are generally targeted toward more advanced digital arts and humanities practitioners with near-complete projects. While this is part of our digital publishing consideration, our main goal is sustainability. Publication-as-process is therefore the ultimate end result of our pipeline model. We encourage folks in the early stages of a digital project to think about their process and data as publishable in one form. Mid-stage practitioners can foster community engagement both internal and external to IU depending on their platform and encourage use of their work in curriculum. In this way, we address the issue that many researchers don’t consider digital publishing solutions until their project is nearly complete. As we continue to adapt our programming goals, we hope to continue to encourage our audience to consider digital publishing solutions at all stages of their projects so that our affiliates think of the publishing process as encompassing visibility and sustainability.

There was some internal confusion surrounding what "curriculum programming" could mean. For some, it was formal course enrollment. For others, it was hard to find the line between educational research and curriculum development. Ultimately, it was decided that a lot of what we do is affected by curriculum programming. Activities that we engaged in that could be considered part of our curriculum program were overlooked as informal curricular practices. However, at a minimum, our self-study reveals that the Institute would benefit from a rigorous discussion of how our individual programs can advance curricular development on a practical level.

SUPPORTING NOVICE PRACTITIONERS

While it was generally indicated that IDAH programming is effective in supporting both intermediate and advanced practitioners, there was a consensus among our staff that the Institute could be doing more to support novice digital humanists. We have only one core program—our fall "Introduction to DH" workshop series—that is explicitly designed for novices. An investigation into the development of additional offerings for this portion of our audience is warranted, and is especially crucial as IDAH begins to center sustainability efforts over the next several years.  

PARTNER CONNECTIONS

Though IDAH has spent the last three years building programmatic ties with a select number of partners, including the IU Libraries and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, much work remains to be done in terms of strengthening partnerships across the University. This work is vital not only to broaden IDAH's audience base, but also to seed campus with DAH resources, curricula, and practitioners from the ground up. We are committed to identifying and pursuing potential partnerships as part of our multi-year Strategic Plan.

FUNDING DEVELOPMENT

While we have been careful to build our pipeline to promote funding development—both for the center and for our constituents—our rankings revealed that this priority is not sufficiently emphasized through our programs. The Summer Incubator and grant making scored well in this category, but we should consider how we can use the remainder of our programming to highlight internal and external funding opportunities. 

FOSTERING EXTERNAL CONNECTIONS

 It is clear from our rankings that we feel we do quite well when it comes to internal referrals and connections. However, connections external to the University are somewhat neglected. As we seek to bolster IDAH's reputation beyond campus, we must evaluate how we can use our existing programs to cultivate relationships state-wide and beyond.

Our pipeline model is geared towards the advancement of existing projects, leading to funding development and publishing opportunities. However, we have perhaps not stopped to consider how we can best expose our audience to new ideas that are crucial for project generation. Embedding departments with newly established practitioners is certainly one answer, but many of our own programming opportunities are for people who are already in the midst of a previously-conceived project. How can the Institute reshape our programming to allow for the types of exploratory and creative learning that lead to the generation of new project ideas? As we move forward into the next phase of our growth, we should be careful to evaluate how we can support this goal both internally as well as through other departmental connections.

CENTER PARNTERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Though IDAH has spent the last three years aligning and differentiating digital arts and humanities with a select number of partners of service-oriented partners, including the IU Libraries, IU Makerspaces and University Information Technology Services, IDAH recognizes that the campus as a whole—through research centers and similar entities—excels in areas of knowledge and skills that complement digital arts and humanities work. Our goal is to expand those partnerships, but also establish consistent referral protocols as needed to ensure that IDAH affiliates receive all the guidance needed to see through their projects.

PUBLIC HUMANITIES AS SOCIAL JUSTICE

The utilization of public humanities as an avenue for promoting social justice is key to advancing the values laid out in our strategic plan. Our Speaker Series explores issues in which digital and justice intersect. In 2017/2018, we invited Dr. Shirin Vossoughi to talk about equity in makerspaces. We followed her talk with Dr. Kimberly Martin who provided a feminist framing of makerspaces. In 2018/2019, we invited Dr. Kari Kraus to discuss her research in metalepsis and its civic import especially with respect to youth. Dr. Kathryn Tomasek followed with a series of events rooted in democratizing the undergraduate class through digital methods appropriation. Later that year, we invited artist, Caroline Sinders, to talk about biased algorithms and how to combat that by creating feminist data sets. In 2019/2020, we partnered other sectors of campus for GIS day to explore activist mapping with visiting scholars, Maira Álvarez and Sylvia Fernandez.

We are eager to engage in public-facing digital arts and humanities and justice projects and extend other programming to explicitly elevate work in these two areas. As highlighted in our introduction, we have made some early efforts in this area through our partnership with the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society on the “Identity through Objects” History Harvest. This project was a modest success and strengthened IDAH's partnership with CRRES. It led to dissertation support for CRRESS graduate student affiliates. Still more needs to be done. Taking what we know from the History Harvest forward into 2021 and beyond, we must make a concerted effort to incorporate public humanities into not only our outreach programming but also into our internal fellowships and scholarships, curriculum generation, and partnership development.

GRANT MAKING AND SUPPORT

Similar to the curriculum issues, there was some confusion as to how each of us ranked what grant making and support meant. Is this the IDAH office applying for grants, or are we supporting our audience in grant making endeavors? We have crafted a deliberate funding pipeline in which we tap internal grants to develop more advanced proof-of-concept or prototype in hopes to demonstrate to external funders a viable and valuable roadmap for next steps. We have supported or received a number of internal grants to date. We recognize that we have not yet routed external grants led by IDAH affiliates through our office. This is partly due to the necessary work in revitalizing IDAH the last three years, and the tricky timing in knowing whether to apply now or wait until the next round. As IDAH and our affiliates grow together in the next three years, we should see increased submissions for external funding. Whether we are applying for grants of our own or supporting researchers as they go through the grant application process, we can work on submitting as many grants as possible.

IDAH GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPS

As we increasingly support digital dissertations at IUB and encounter as many graduate students as faculty in our consultations, we are committed to creating as many funding opportunities as possible for our graduate students. The IDAH Graduate Fellowship was promoted by extended the HASTAC program to a full two years, as intended. We are unable to do this and fund the whole cohort for two years, but we can award up to two Graduate Fellowships as a way to formalize mentoring, and provide opportunities for more digital skill acquisition, and, in turn, help IDAH by leading workshops and assisting with consultations. As our newest formal opportunity for graduate students, our Graduate Fellowship program needs attention and refinement. Though our initial cohort of two scholars enjoyed their time as Fellows, we are in the process of reviewing the structure of the Fellowship to maximize mutual productivity and benefit.

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH

Incorporating digital methods and research in the classroom is still a relatively new practice. So while it supports three of our four goals and heavily supports learning practices, there is still a lot more that could be done, especially concerning engagement. We could consider partnering with other research centers on campus, or even centers external to IU, to further evaluate digital teaching practices. We could see if introducing digital tools in the classroom encourages students to further pursue DAH scholarship. As this kind of educational research is still new, we know that are many opportunities to improve this program in the future.

While our consultations are open to scholars of all levels and we regularly seek out undergraduates for inclusion in our HASTAC program, much could be done to improve outreach and engagement at the undergraduate level. The undergraduate digital history courses in which we’ve hosted History Harvests have been the site of several surveys that have helped us understand what draws undergraduates to the study of digital history. We have also been in talks with the College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Informatics about developing an undergraduate digital humanities major or minor. Finally, we have offered several undergraduates an extension of their History Harvest work as hourly undergraduate research assistants, as well as a full-semester Spring 2020 internship that provided a site for a double-major capstone project.

OPEN ACCESS CONSULTING

At IDAH, we continue to promote the advantages of open scholarship as a way of sharing creative and research pursuits more openly with both the academy and the public. We are also mindful of concerns our affiliates have when contemplating if and when (and which part) of their work can be shared more openly without compromising tenure and promotion and without being at odds with their peers. Finding the balance between the standard practices of many still-traditional departments and the potential for significant academic impact for digital recovery projects is as significant as a monograph. Artists and humanists often engage in more productive open access discussion and explore their options in consults that include the Libraries’ Scholarly Communications experts. At present, we draw on Scholarly Communication when we or our consultees have explicit questions about institutional repository or open access publishing. In order to increase emphasis on open access from the very beginning stages of project development, we will likely need to reconsider how and when we work with Scholarly Communication librarians.

SUSTAINABLE PROJECT REPOSITORIES

At a minimum, we actively look for ways for our affiliates to manage data they create as part of their digital projects. Depending on the data, some of these content repository options are available through the Libraries. However, digital art and humanities work entails multiple layers of outputs and interpretations beyond the data itself for which there is not system-wide sustainable solution. In those cases, we look to GitHub or cloud-storage for versioning and managing not just the data itself but the many layers of data enrichment and analysis. Our approach to sustainability is very much a patchwork sometimes at odds with our grand commitment to sustainability. We have some work in at least codifying a daisy-chain approach to sustainability not uncommon in the digital arts and humanities. We also face huge gaps in sustainability and digital preservation of fully-digital projects like a Scalar-based digital dissertation or a digital recovery project that uses Omeka. It is not always enough to preserve the data. We need to be proactive in how we capture the digital as a whole especially if that alone embodies the scholarly record.

IDAH aims to strike a balance between digital arts and humanities works emerging from disciplinary contexts and serving as a hub for this kind of work across campus. Historically, digital arts and humanities projects have been diffused. Some of the longer standing projects may not recognize IDAH as a center that can help. Emerging projects are increasingly finding their way through IDAH, but we don’t have the capacity to embed in the scores of disciplinary departments in which this work is taking or could take place. In addition, we’re still grappling with existing expectations and preconceptions about digital arts and humanities from previous generations of IDAH, and how that work has been supported by the Libraries or University Information Technology Services. We have seen improvements over the past three years, but this challenge should be explicitly addressed as we consider ways to improve IDAH messaging and advertising.

Partially due to the Institute’s small size, it can be challenging to stay up-to-date with emerging issues and developing digital technologies, such as 3D modeling, augmented reality, and digital public engagement. While partnerships with other centers can fill some of these gaps, the time investment required to stay on top of emerging techniques poses a significant barrier even when training is readily available.

The Institute currently operates with three half-time graduate assistants, two half-time co-directors, and one full-time administrative coordinator who was hired in late 2019. To support the high-level work IDAH performs, IDAH’s current staffing model requires intensive training for graduate assistants, most of whom leave the Institute after only one or two years. During the first year of each GA’s appointment, the co-directors are responsible for both training and for performing the duties the GAs take on after their training completes. The benefit of such in-depth training is that the graduate students leave IDAH with substantial experience and expertise that will help them with future job placement. While this is valuable service to IU more narrowly and to the academy at large, the overhead of training new assistants every two years while maintaining IDAH’s work at full capacity will become increasingly unsustainable. Funding to hire an additional full-time consultation coordinator and part-time developers would go a long way in providing longer-term stability.

The other challenge we face with the graduate assistant positions is their uncertainty for renewal. These positions are provided by the College, School of Informatics and the Libraries and require renegotiation every few years. IDAH needs multi-year continuity to continue running such a wide range of programs at such a high level.

Many digital-humanities initiatives have extended their purview to the Arts; the Digital Research in the Humanities (DRH) network in the United Kingdom (Digital Research in the Humanities and the Arts) did so in 2006. Like many of these initiatives, IDAH has struggled to bring the arts and humanities together around digital concerns in cohesive ways. On taking on the co-directorship in 2017, the co-directors discussed this weakness and committed to re-centering the digital arts for IDAH. Our Speaker Series was the first site of this commitment. We kicked off our new directorship in IDAH with Making in the Arts and Humanities as a way to very explicitly signal the dedication. Since then, we have endeavored to signal a commitment to the arts through our selection of Fellows, Scholars and Incubator Awardees, and through governance representation. However, IDAH has yet to find a consistent path to support for digital arts in a way that fully lives up to our stated goals. One factor is the appropriation of technology in the arts versus the humanities; the tools leveraged in the arts are often highly complex and specialized. A second factor is IDAH’s historically humanist-oriented leadership; most, like us, have a deep appreciation for the arts, talent and inclination to dive into some of the more complex technology with our artist affiliates, but this history suggests a need to explore more fully how campus demand for digital methods falls along humanist and artistic lines. These leadership structures could change in the future so artists appropriating digital techniques recognize themselves in IDAH, but in the meantime, a digital artist residency may offer a better way to understand the deeper needs artists bring to the digital-methods table.