Recommendations

Institutional leaders, scholars, librarians, archivists and communities can work together to design, promulgate, and implement new modes of mutually determined and mutually supportive interactions between academic institutions and their geographically and socially adjacent communities.

Cultural communities have never been passive subjects awaiting “discovery” but were typically ignored or left out of institutional efforts. Communities are doing much of the work of actively excavating, documenting, narrating, and owning their stories on their own terms and through their own networks. They are filling long-ignored gaps in societal knowledge. The recent report of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities highlighting the imperative for publicly engaged and publicly impactful research explains the essential mission of serving public interest and lays out an excellent road map for institutions to embark on mission-directed change. The Commission’s work has shown the need to take the concept of public engagement a step further by calling for bidirectional engagement (two-way streets) between institutions of higher education and the communities outside the gates. While faculty and institutional staff bring knowledge and expertise, knowledge and expertise lives elsewhere as well. Academic institutions need to partner with and facilitate the work of scholars who collaborate with communities, and to take a further step and play a role in ensuring enduring access to community-controlled resources in ethical, caring, and non-extractive ways. We need collections jointly built and cared for by communities and institutions of higher education that will be a source of enduring knowledge.

Steps toward implementation:

• Promulgate, and where needed create, guidelines and toolkits that can assist institutions—in research offices, libraries, academic departments, research centers—in reaching out to and working with communities in ways that engender reciprocity and mutual respect. These tools include models for engagement policies, compensation mechanisms and reporting, and draft agreements concerning obligations and responsibilities.

• Implement a series of convenings at which school and discipline deans, university librarians and other senior curators, and active community archivists confront the difficult issues of “non-ownership collecting” and scholar-community partnerships, and work to identify new approaches, seeking wide understanding of issues and developing win/win models.

• Instigate panels and workshops at scholarly societies and higher education organizations—including administrators, librarians, archivists, scholars and community practitioners—to engage wide discussion and joint problem-solving around university-community collection building strategies, policies, and tools. Illustrate these conversations with success stories and recommendations by organizations such as the Society of American Archivists, (SAA), the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM), and the Shift Collective and ensure active participation by community groups.

• Design and issue private and government funding calls targeted to incentivize institutional-community partnerships that are community based and jointly designed.

Institutional leaders—provosts, deans, budget directors, research officers, and department chairs—can recognize and create the kinds of reliable support structures for grants administration, project management, human resources management, and cyberinfrastructure (from data management and technical support to publication and preservation) that are now necessary for much humanities work. Institutions can also work together to build shared support services.

Humanists engaged in digital and community-engaged work need expanded space and increased support for: managing projects with budgetary, administrative, and personnel demands; managing, preserving and enabling access to research data and other digital resources; seeking and administering grant funds; collaborating across departments and disciplines; and, in the case of community-engaged work, collaborating with and employing individuals who are not necessarily official members of the university community. A redesigned infrastructure needs to be accomplished at the institutional level and, especially for smaller institutions, can be advanced by multi-institutional research centers or trans-institutional networks. We recommend actions to incentivize and assist institutions to take this path.

Steps toward implementation:

• Develop a program that would convene a series of meetings designed to change humanities processes that currently create barriers to the team structure of digital scholarship. The aim is to bring together deans, department chairs, active scholars, senior librarians, CIOs, and senior research officers to consider protocols for new collective forms of humanities research and to design and implement restructured budgets and support programs at model institutions. Their program implementation would in turn engage senior budget, administrative, and human resources officers. A cohort of institutions could further create a more formal coalition to demonstrate their commitment to change (e.g., akin to the University Innovation Alliance). This program would be grant supported and include start up awards to incentivize participation and institutional change.

• Develop a report that can inform restructuring efforts by documenting where the structures of scientific teams/labs provide relevant models and where they do not.

• Design and implement targeted funding calls that would strengthen the cross-institutional administrative infrastructures that exist in established research centers (e.g., Black Literature, The Center for Black Digital Research/Colored Conventions, etc.) with an eye to sustainable models for multi-institutional support.

Provosts, deans, department chairs, and disciplinary societies can adapt appointment, retention, mentoring, tenure and promotion practices in humanities departments to value and reward high quality scholarship manifested in new as well as conventional formats and to appreciate the demanding nature of community-engaged research and scholarship.

Scholarly societies, including the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, have begun laying groundwork by developing guidelines for assessing work in digital humanities and community-engaged scholarship and they provide professional development and mentoring for scholars in these areas. The Association of University Presses has updated its peer review best practices to include guidance on evaluating digital and multi-modal works. This work now needs to be taken further and adopted and adopted widely at institutional levels. More needs to be done to expand the work of mentors, fellowships, and cohorts of peer reviewers, all of which are necessary for the kind of strong support network of human resources that can enable scholarly achievement. It is also urgent to extend this work to disciplines that have not yet developed new guidelines. Institutions should be incentivized to recognize the critical need to make the changes described in the updated guidelines.

Steps to implementation:

• Disciplines can strengthen their support networks for peer review of digital and other non-conventional products of research through the work of scholarly societies and other discipline networks. They can promulgate models of post-hoc review (important for alternative modes of “publishing”) and develop networks and clearing houses of peer reviewers—including community-peer reviewers whose expertise expands that of the academy—who can appreciate and assess digital and community-engaged work. They can encourage publishers to adopt and adapt these new forms of review. Workshops can train outside reviewers to work alongside scholars to assess both method and content of scholarly endeavors. One aim of these networks would be to recognize and relieve the burden on the relatively small number of senior scholars who are available to participate in review processes in a field that is still emerging.

• Design and seek funding for awards and fellowships that will help scholars pursue their digital work in recovery scholarship and to gain recognition for it. For example, build on the model of the Whiting Public Engagement Fellowships. Aim awards not only at R1 institutions, recognizing work conducted at smaller and regional institutions and making awards available to communities. Documentation of these awards should be associated with individual profiles using identifiers such as ORCIDs and incorporated into scholarly portfolios and appropriately tracked in faculty productivity platforms.

• Professional development, and in some cases training, for campus-wide tenure/promotion/faculty advancement committees should become a topic in meetings among like institutions, as provosts and chief academic officers gather in associations like the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU), or the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC). Just as senior administrators have begun to gather to look at open review processes, they should consider the importance of promoting and rewarding innovative and community-engaged work. Academic societies can also play a role in training members who serve on such committees to communicate changing norms to colleagues in different divisions.

Funders, discipline societies, professional associations, and academic institutional leaders can continue to expand and multiply internships, fellowships, mentoring, and other programs that create interpersonal support networks and pipelines for undergraduates, graduate students and faculty at all levels, and community members. There are many excellent model programs, and at the same time there is an enormous demand for more.

Throughout its conversations and outreach, the Commission heard how essential interpersonal connections and support have been to successful careers and projects, and how beneficial project work had been to undergraduate students—not only academically but in gaining job opportunities. At the same time, participants consistently emphasized the need for expanded, purposeful programs of interpersonal support. Even as successful scholars described their own good fortune in connecting to mentors and partners, they emphasized how many others were struggling and lacked opportunities to connect and gain continuing advice. And while there are in place excellent programs sponsored by ATLAM, AUPresses, SAA, ALA, and schools of information (many initiated with the help of valuable funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services), feedback from all sectors urged the creation of more internships, scholarships, and pipeline programs to attract students of color and potential community practitioners to digital archival work in racial and social justice. They urged that internships, scholarships, and mentorships for undergraduate students and community “apprentices” become a normal activity within institutions of all sizes, thus reaching the widest possible number of individuals.

Steps to implementation:

• Disciplinary societies and professional organizations can incentivize and stimulate academic institutions to create internship and apprenticeship pipeline programs for undergraduates and community members. For example, professional and discipline organizations can design and promulgate programs, and can seek financial support for regranting to and giving recognition to institutional initiatives.

• Discipline societies can partner with libraries, archives, and their professional organizations to seek funds (e.g., from IMLS) for recruitment from underrepresented communities to publicly engaged projects that utilize library and archival training.

• Recognizing the value to students of community-engaged digital practices, foundations supporting undergraduate education can incentivize curriculum development that includes active student participation in community-based digital humanities projects. Funding through regranting organizations could reach a diverse group of institutions, including community colleges.

• Disciplinary societies and ACLS can design and sponsor mentoring programs and networks.

• Institutions can create paid internships for work in all aspects of digital humanities and community-engaged archiving as a learning experience for diverse students and a workforce for a wide range of projects.

Chief academic officers and other institutional leaders, funders, and professional organizations can create new structures and opportunities for interaction across fields of expertise within institutions and across institutional, organizational, and community environments, enabling established networks to collide, learn, and collaborate in new ways to produce innovative digital work in racial and social justice and to enable sustainable models.

Energetic and innovative scholars are typically collaborative and well connected to others in their domain. But for their work to thrive, be sustained, and reach wide exposure, it needs cross fertilization with expertise from other disciplinary scholars and practitioners, including technologists, data scientists, publishers and librarians, along with scientists and social scientists experienced in creating research data sets and maintaining digital projects. A number of important and stellar success stories shared with the Commission have benefitted from chance cross-sector, cross-institutional encounters, and these successes illustrate what can be gained from enabling these connections. Too many worthy projects lacking such encounters are short-lived and do not find a sustaining home. And experts in other fields are not gaining the benefit of new perspectives revealed by new recovery scholarship.

Steps to implementation:

• Through grant funding and collaborative initiatives, increase support for backbone organizations, such as the Association of Computers and the Humanities and Reviews in Digital Humanities, and institutional/cross community research centers, such as the Center for Black Digital Research/Colored Conventions Project and the US Latino Digital Humanities Center, to incentivize and enable their capacity for trans-institutional infrastructure.

• Strengthen the emerging field-building infrastructure provided by scholarly associations in recovery fields (such as Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Society for Disability Studies, African American Intellectual History Society). These organizations offer support to critical new fields and lack the benefit of long-established structures and financial support. In particular, they can be supported in their core operations and for workshops spreading digital scholarship skills.

• Create a venue where scholars across recovery disciplines interact with technologists, data scientists, research data curators, librarians, publishers, and community archivists to explore challenges and opportunities in sustaining digital scholarship. HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) is a model of a venue aiming for creative synergy and shared learning. A model that illustrates the how such a gathering over time solves problems, builds fields, and stimulates new approaches is the Coalition of Networked Information. Travel support and fellowships for attendance to a well-designed venue could bring the benefits to scholars from more kinds of institutions than typically attend existing conferences.

• Funding calls to create events and to establish cross-expertise networks could incentivize efforts to shape new and strengthened collaborative opportunities.

Librarians, technologists, scholarly publishers, and peer reviewers have successfully transformed the long-standing publishing and knowledge cycle from print to digital, but it is now time for them to muster their purpose, collaboration, and innovation to adapt the infrastructure of scholarly communication to new kinds of born digital work.

The digital humanities community has tackled some of its many access and publishing challenges, from guidelines for sustainable website creation, to emerging repositories, and important new platforms for digital publishing. But gaps are everywhere across the infrastructure, and—likely because there is no profitable commercial incentive—there is no overarching effort to fill those gaps. While not every project website need enter the permanent scholarly record, too much valuable content goes unrecognized and little used, with faint likelihood of access to it even five or ten years into the future. Connecting established scholarly publication to its supporting evidence base of research data has recently become a recognized challenge, one that is now receiving well-supported and well-coordinated innovation and implementation. It is time to stimulate a similar set of activities to bring the products of digital humanities scholarship to its audience and to ensure that the eye-opening primary resources surfaced by recovery scholars and by community-driven initiatives are widely available and permanently stewarded and preserved.

Steps to implementation:

• Extending work in research data curation, initiate a coordinated effort to fill technical and process gaps in the access, publishing and preservation infrastructure for the primary resources created in the course of digital humanities projects and the applications that are created to access and make use of these collections. This work might be accomplished through a coalition of lead institutions and organizations, working together with funding agencies, such as IMLS, NEH and NSF, to articulate and prioritize needs and instigate solutions. There are no simple answers, but, as demonstrated by the creation of digital infrastructure for standard publications, much can be accomplished through energized, coordinated initiatives.

• As institutions consider their support structures for humanities research (Recommendation 2) support to meet new infrastructure requirements (such as PID assignment and repository deposit) should be built in, along with training for scholars to determine their realistic expectations for sustainability of their projects and how to implement those expectations through digital infrastructure.

• Guidelines and charters that set out goals and understanding of project aims and anticipated life cycles should be shared and provided as templates. These help to foster the use of standards and good practices in project creation and help to set expectations about a project’s duration among all involved parties, including active discussion about sunsetting and the ending of projects or their preservation.

• The publishing process, with its elements of quality review, dissemination, and connection to indexing and libraries, needs support for efforts to accommodate new forms and links to primary source content. Innovative centers (such as Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship) enable experimentation by presses without the presses having to take on all the risk. Platforms such as SCALAR, Manifold, and Fulcrum now represent sector wide investments and continue to need support as they become better established. Grant funding has moved innovation forward at selected presses; a broader initiative (a “Commonwealth Fund”) to expand this work and encourage more partnerships and participation could enable scholarly book and journal publishers to tackle challenges—including in the review processes—to disseminating new digital work in racial and social justice.

• Digital work in recovery scholarship shares the access and preservation problems inherent in “gray literature,” which now is typically embodied in websites. Innovative harvesting and collection approaches, such as those provided by Coherent Digital, are necessary in a new generation of lighter touch and lower investment preservation and access.

• Libraries can collaborate to collect important digital work in recovery scholarship, modeling their efforts on shared area studies collecting and other digital archiving initiatives. Work that does not enter library collections in some manner faces a dubious preservation future.

Funders and professional and academic leaders can collaborate to design and initiate new organizations, collaboratives, and service structures that can extend technical, administrative, and advisory capacities to all types of institutions and community initiatives. Leaders of existing collaborative organizations can reshape or expand their services to support a more diverse base.

Exciting findings and new resources are emerging across a wide range of institutions and communities; the diverse range of sources and interest in the humanities can often be more compelling outside of the best-resourced institutions, enabling digital scholarship with different perspectives in different contexts. But beyond R1s and other well-resourced, predominantly white institutions—and not infrequently within them—scholars and archivists struggle to cobble together the means to achieve their goals. The Commission saw pressing needs for: administrative support to obtain grant funds and manage projects; sustainable and robust technology platforms, especially for repositories and web management; “help line” advice not only for technology use but in all phases of bringing work to dissemination. An equitable and diverse community of intellectual contribution requires a new support infrastructure.

Steps to implementation:

• Use targeted funding calls to stimulate and incentivize institutions, consortia, associations, and other groups to plan and create new service organizations, or reshape and expand existing organizations, for scholars and archivists creating digital projects in reparative fields.

• Convene leaders of existing programs that connect smaller as well as larger institutions (e.g., I-CHASS, Lyrasis, ITHAKA) to explore potential ways to expand, replicate, and innovate the kinds of support they offer. Successful campus based hubs that have demonstrated particular capacities to support recovery scholarship (such as I-CHASS and I-Open) should be supported in providing office hours and help lines for less well-funded institutions.

• Convene leaders of regional institutional consortia to explore new service models they might offer in support of digital research, publishing, and preservation. These should include grant-writing support for scholars and staff who are endeavoring to craft strong proposals without the development offices more often found at R1 universities. Shared capacities could enable access to platforms, tools, and dissemination outlets for scholars across many types of organizations.

• Create a focused network of funders that seeks to advance equity and inclusion across all academic disciplines and that recognizes how the work of recovery scholarship in the humanities has lessons for equity across the academic spectrum. Growing interest can be seen among funders in related but different movements that span the biological sciences, physical science, health, social sciences, and humanities, such as “community -engaged scholarship,” “experiential learning,” “publicly accessible scholarship,” and “open access/open knowledge.” The Pew Transforming Evidence Funders Network and the MacArthur-led Press Forward are examples of how a pluralistic group of funders can address pressing, complex, big-picture issues by finding leverage points in common.