Introduction: The Commission in Context
Groundbreaking scholars, vibrant communities, and entrepreneurial archivists are building scholarly works that ask new questions, are informed by different sources, and employ innovative narrative structures. Their work of recovery scholarship brings to light histories and literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that have been ignored, forgotten, or pushed to the margins by established educational and cultural institutions. Their purpose is to diversify the historical and cultural record by recovering, disseminating, and elucidating previously lost or unrecorded stories, thereby shifting and expanding the scholarly conversation and public knowledge. The practitioners of recovery scholarship fill gaps in the archives through methods that range from established practices of archival research to innovative new modes of compiling or analyzing evidence, often including community-based contribution. They actively share resources and encourage new scholarship, taking advantage of digital techniques for collaboration, dissemination, and interpretation.
The practitioners of recovery scholarship work in an environment where digital technology has rapidly changed every aspect of how evidence is compiled, cared for, examined, interpreted, synthetized, and shared as scholarly outputs. Taken together, these developments are creating new ways for the digital humanities to have an impact on the scholarly landscape and on society at large.
Marisa Parham describes why this work is transformative:
The way in which Digital Humanities has forced scholars to think about their work as an enterprise is actually important because it can be very empowering for women and people of color to begin their research from a perspective of first ownership then sharing. To think, “this is my thing and I need to make it happen. I will make it live and grow.” I think this is a really powerful relationship versus only thinking I am a cog in a larger machine and hoping that someone will acknowledge me as fitting in. I think the work being done on African-American history and labor history and queer history through interactive timelines and databases and the sheer work being done on recovering archival voices we’ve forgotten is incredibly important … getting at a deeper history and therefore being able to say more about the future because we understand more about our past. [1]
The work of the Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship reflects on how recovery scholarship and its methods are challenging the frameworks that shape our institutions and how they must evolve. Altering these frameworks, like changing the physical infrastructure of mass transit systems, water pipes, and electrical grids, happens slowly and incrementally, even while the creation and use of vital new content that emerges in these frameworks is highly dynamic. What stories are being captured and legitimized in our existing humanistic infrastructure today? How are those stories that shape societal attitudes and values generated and amplified, and how will they endure? Where and how does our collective infrastructure need to be changed or reworked creatively to open up to the inclusion of other stories and to enable those stories to be shared, sustained, and preserved?
Today, Americans debate the stories taught in our colleges and universities. Many states—more than 50% thus far—have proposed state or local laws that ban certain books or outlaw “divisive topics’’ in the classroom. These debates, including the use of critical race theory as a synecdoche for discussions of America’s racist history, originally focused on K-12 education. More recently, the metaphoric battleground has expanded to include the academic humanities in higher education. PEN America [2] is tracking the rise of what it refers to as “Educational Gag Orders … state legislative efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities in K–12 and higher education.” It notes: “Of the 137 educational gag order bills introduced, 39 percent have targeted colleges and universities.” As historian Joan Scott warns us, “When the state finds itself at odds with critical thinking, we know the search for truth has been shut down; when populist operators decry the elitism of the academic establishment, we know knowledge production is being directed to nefarious ends.” [3] The controversy is not only about what is taught in the classroom; the stories and mythologies that we read and circulate can deeply influence how members of society approach life and death. Hate crimes, from daily confrontations to mass shootings in El Paso, Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo, are the most vivid manifestation of how conflicting narratives about who is allowed to claim a place in American society shapes our lives.
And increasingly over the past 25 years, the circulation of the stories that shape who we have flowed through digital media. Long-standing frameworks—largely textual—for our stories have been surrounded by a swirl of other methods for capturing and conveying life-shaping narratives. As Dr. Kishonna Gray points out, technology is used to capture and represent today’s stories with far less mediation and far more access than was the case when typesetting and printing dominated. [4] This can be as true in biology and psychology as it is in history and literature; within humanistic fields, it is as true for studies of French Renaissance music composition as it is for the civil unrest around the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. The work of scholarship in a digital age grips long-standing social and institutional practices and structures and shakes them, sometimes rapidly. The place of technology is central in the telling of “other stories.”
Even as both the content and conveyance of our essential stories are rapidly evolving, the academic infrastructure for professionally supporting and rewarding recovery scholarship—and digital scholarship in all humanities fields—stands, inadvertently and by its nature, as a bulwark to change. Field building in higher education is both an intellectual and a material activity; the long-standing structures of US colleges and universities were set in place more than a hundred years ago, and the areas of study that were granted primacy then remain in place. While Black studies or other ethnic studies were able to attain a foothold in the academy beginning in the 1960s, the unexamined depths and variation of sources and topics has continued to expand amid the country’s changing demographic and amid social movements that have legitimized the study of people and cultures who were not included in the academic curriculum a century ago. From Indigenous studies to queer studies, immigration and refugee studies to disability studies, from the domains of Black, African, and African diasporic studies to Latino/a studies encompassing different peoples and cultures, humanities teachers and scholars now find or build fields across humanistic disciplines—visual or performing arts, literary or media productions, and realms of belief or political activity. At the same time, these field-building activities and their digital methodologies are encountering a higher education system that is in a state of contraction, particularly in humanistic fields. Tenure lines and funding streams are limited. An environment of competition for diminishing resources is not one that welcomes new players and new needs.
Despite these challenges, the Commission’s prevailing ethos has been one of pragmatic optimism. The report’s title draws upon the guiding definition of Afrofuturism shared by Alondra Nelson as part of a group that coalesced around the optimistic hopes for technology in the 1990s. [5] “Afrofuturism,” Nelson noted, “can be broadly defined as ‘African American voices’ with ‘other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come.’” As Jose Estaban writes, looking to the future is “an invitation to desire differently, desire more, desire better.” [6] [7] The recommendations of this report reflect the Commission’s desired future and map a way forward to arrive there.
THE WORK OF THE COMMISSION
The Commission’s process explored a complex landscape of academic and community-based digital projects and spaces that work toward racial and social justice and the multifaceted, many-layered contexts in which this work is created and shared. The Commission drew on the extensive and diverse knowledge of its 21 members—who met in various configurations both online and in person—along with the focus group and interview contributions of more than 120 scholars, librarians, technologists, publishers, academic administrators, funders, community archivists, and many others engaged in the work of digital humanities, reparative scholarship, and all aspects of scholarly communication, from publication to access to preservation. Each conversation added new ideas and understandings of challenges, barriers, and some inspiring successes in the current environment. The conversations enabled the Commission to identify the points for action described in the recommendations.
Gaining the informed perspectives of so many focus group participants enabled the Commission to surface, probe, and unpack the many complex barriers to illuminating new knowledge, recovering buried histories, and creating transformative scholarship that brings to light these alternative ways of seeing. We saw that digital recovery scholarship faces structural impediments that have also limited the support and preservation of much digital humanities scholarship in the last decade. We were able to see places where ingrained, conventional practices and organizational structures are no longer serving a knowledge environment that now relies on digital methodologies, encompasses a wide and diverse universe of higher education institutions, includes community-based initiatives, and serves a student body representing the nation’s diverse population. We were able to see that while there have been notable successes, those achievements required surmounting systemic obstacles that must be removed to make such success reproducible and to ensure that its results endure for future generations.
This report offers seven strategic objectives that we believe can set a course for essential and urgent change. Its recommendations lay out a road map and initial implementation steps toward reframing and updating aspects of academic and scholarly infrastructure that are not now well supporting 21st-century humanities work. The objectives describe and propose (1) new modes of interaction between academic institutions and knowledge-creating communities; (2) redesigned academic organizational structures that recognize the new nature of team-/project-/digital-based humanities work; (3) appointment, mentoring, and reward structures that appreciate new kinds of digital and community-engaged scholarship; (4) expanded opportunities for collaborations and pipeline development that are critical to field building, community-based research, and student success; (5) new structures and opportunities for creative collision across areas of expertise that do not currently but could profitably interact and learn from each other; (6) concerted, coordinated initiatives to fill critical gaps in the scholarly communication infrastructure for new digital forms; and (7) enhanced and new collaborations and service structures that address support needs across a wide variety of types of institutions and knowledge creators. We urge that this last set of collaborations include a network of funders that will value and support the work of recovery scholarship in the context of their goals for advancing equity and inclusion across and throughout the education environment.
The Commission’s recommendations incorporate and expand initiatives underway in a variety of sectors and build on existing successful academic enterprises. At the same time, we sharpen the focus where current structures are not yet recognizing and supporting powerful and essential new work, and where new approaches can have potent and urgently needed impact. The Commission, ACLS, and collaborating organizations will use our recommendations as next steps in a continuing process of change.
The work the Commission’s recommendations set out to do is vital and feasible. The plastic and pluralistic system of public and private institutions of higher education in the US have fostered inventive new methods and modes of scholarship and brought mind-opening new knowledge into being. Take, for example, the national commission assembled in 1951. Upon receiving a copy of the first volume of Thomas Jefferson’s papers, President Harry Truman expressed the hope that the publication would “inspire educational institutions, learned societies, and civic-minded groups to plan the publication of other great national figures.” He requested that the General Services Administration convene a National Historical Publications Commission to submit a report to him on “what can be done—and should be done—to make available to our people the public and private writings of men whose contributions to our history are now inadequately represented by published works.” [8] The 1951 Commission created a map that prioritized the preparation of the papers of 66 figures; many were politicians (such as Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, and Calhoun), but the list was, in certain ways, wide-ranging, with inventors such as Edison, industrialists such as Carnegie and Firestone, and more than a sprinkling of academics (the physicists Joseph Henry and Albert Michaelson), architects (Bullfinch and Latrobe), and a sculptor (Saint-Gaudens). But, of course, the priorities of scholarship then were different than they would be today. Three of the 66 were women (Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Clara Barton). One, Booker T. Washington, was Black.
That Commission was, in many ways, effective. Various public and private forces were marshaled in support of publishing efforts such as The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, launched with substantial financial support from Life magazine ($4 million in current dollars); the curation and publishing effort was then taken up by the American Philosophical Society and Yale. Today, 40 volumes of Franklin’s writings and correspondence are available for free online. And we can see the Commission’s influence playing out with wider resonance as preservation and access of primary source materials fosters future scholarship. Today, a search for “the papers of Benjamin Franklin” on JSTOR produces 63,947 results—articles and books that explicitly cite work that the 1951 Commission urged society to come together to fund, edit, and publish.
In many obvious ways, the country, higher education, and the humanities have changed in the 70 years since Truman’s National Historical Publications Commission. The list of which 66 people to foreground by gathering and publishing their documents would certainly be different and longer today. But even with its narrow lens of its time, that Commission knew that the work of assembling, editing, and disseminating primary source material is far more than a scholarly endeavor. It is an act that shapes the world:
Our knowledge of these things, our knowledge of the contributions to the development of the United States that many men and women have made in numerous and widely varied fields of activity, is incomplete. It is incomplete—to specify one major reason—because much important information is hidden away in letters, diaries, reports and other papers that have never been published. [9]
How the humanities are researched, studied, and taught in US colleges and universities today is the result of hundreds of years of decisions about library holdings, curriculum requirements, and disciplinary norms that have led to the inclusion and validation of the works of particular creators and particular cultures and the exclusion of others. The scholarly record and society’s knowledge of and views concerning Ben Franklin have been shaped by the priorities of governmental funding agencies and private funders, the choices of university faculty members, and the priorities of college and university administrators. The scholarly record and popular opinions of tomorrow are being formed by the interests and modes of collection building and information dissemination of today’s funders, scholars, and decision-makers. Our Commission’s recommendations are aimed at those many individuals and organizations that are shaping that future.
The Commission has seen how new resources and digital methods can expand perspectives and change our understanding of the world.
As a graduate student, Maryemma Graham often sat on the floor of the Schomberg Center of the New York Public Library perusing boxes of little-known books. After joining the faculty at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and loaded with photocopies, she created the Computer Assisted Analysis of Black Literature (CAABL) in 1983. The ever-expanding digital archive is now central to the History of Black Writing (HBW), based at the University of Kansas since 1998. HBW is a research center designed to expose students, instructors, and audiences to literature by Black authors. It works through a wide variety of public-facing events and programs, curates exhibits, produces and supports innovative scholarship, and builds partnerships with educators, libraries, institutions, and donors. Hundreds of US and international scholars have participated in HBW workshops or training.
In 2009, professor Maria Cotera enlisted the collaboration of filmmaker Linda Merchant to preserve imperiled Chicana and Latina histories of the long civil rights era. Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective (CPMR) is a group of researchers, educators, students, archivists, and technologists who have traveled to more than a dozen states to collect hundreds of hours of oral histories with notable Chicanas, Latinas, and allies, and scanned personal archives for preservation and access. Using largely volunteer and student labor, CPMR offers a model for grassroots digital history that encourages further research into understudied aspects of the American experience. It has collected and processed some 10,000 archival items, with 3,000 more awaiting digitizing, description, and uploading.
In 2007, members of the Warumungu community in Australia collaborated with Washington State University professors Kim Christen and Craig Dietrich to produce the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive. Mukurtu is a Warumungu word meaning “dilly bag,” or a safe place to keep sacred materials. Warumungu elder Michael Jampin Jones chose Mukurtu as the name for the community archive to remind users that the archive, too, is a safe keeping place where Warumungu people can share stories, knowledge, and cultural materials properly using their own protocols. Growing from this community need, the Mukurtu collection management system is now an open source platform flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse communities who are managing and sharing their digital cultural heritage on their own terms.
The Valley of the Shadow Project began with a proposal written by Edward L. Ayers in September 1991. It was originally conceived as a traditional book, and Ayers wanted to deal with a comparative story of the Civil War by examining two places close to the border between the North and the South, including the full range of people in both places, Black and white, free and enslaved, soldier and civilian, male and female, Unionist and secessionist. Ayers wove together the small details of life in the communities during the Civil War using letters, diaries, memoirs, census records, church records, government records, battle reports, speeches, and newspapers. Those records became a then-unprecedented online database that has since been used by many thousands of scholars, teachers, and students. The Valley of the Shadow Project became one of two founding projects that established the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia, a seminal research center in digital humanities.
Joanne Salas at the police brutality march. Photo by Nancy de los Santos. Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collective (CPMR). Marsha P. Johnson and other Gay Liberation Front members walking at New York City Hall. Digital Transgender Archive. In 2013, K.J. Rawson began development of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, at Northeastern University, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than 70 colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections, a collaboration that forms a horizontal institution, cutting across many different types of cultural heritage institutions. The DTA is an archival project designed to address archival gaps and enable community/contributor ownership.
These groundbreaking collection building efforts and others like them—gathered, curated, and made available through digital methods—are shaping scholarship and expanding public knowledge. Their success demonstrates what is possible. But even these well-known initiatives face significant challenges to sustain their online presence—often a presence that many other scholars and teachers rely upon—and to preserve the results of their work for the future. And, as the Commission learned, many more valuable projects are struggling to accomplish their work and to make it accessible. This report takes a deep look into the barriers holding back access to a world of new knowledge and identifies where change can enable digital recovery scholarship to thrive and be sustained.