Preface

Digital practice has become critical to scholarly inquiry, expression, and preservation, fundamentally reshaping the way knowledge is created and shared. However, the integration of digital work into the fabric of higher education remains inconsistent. Practitioners struggle to ensure that their digital products are understood as integral to teaching and research, and that these works are preserved for future generations. Even in an era where the digital is celebrated for innovating both archival work and humanistic inquiry, higher education often lacks the necessary structures to recognize and sustain this work and its practitioners. How do we support digital work and workers, and how do we sustain that support over time?

The Commission’s recommendations show that these questions demand more than simply adapting existing structures. The pursuit of inclusion and diversity in scholarship often risks seeking change without fully embracing difference as a material outcome. The recursive movement toward and then away from transformation challenges both scholars and the institutions within which they operate. On a practical level, it limits the scope of scholarly work—the questions researchers feel empowered to explore, the archives they build or consult, the methodologies they pursue, and the possible kinds of partnerships they can build with communities outside of academia. Institutionally, it strains the technical and administrative systems responsible for the essential tasks of financial, archival, and existential support for academic research, including assessment and retention.

In this way, the Commission’s work has been about more than just tech and innovation. Solving for difference means identifying intellectual opportunities that are beleaguered by the tension between what institutions claim to want and the problematics of producing flexible yet intellectually robust structures of support for that labor. The creation of new knowledge frameworks shapes our ability to attract and engage wider audiences, and to produce new forms that can better account for the diversity of human experiences. It enables the reimagination of knowledge production itself. The boundaries between bureaucratic processes, digital advancements, and the human elements of academic work frequently merge. Academic assessment, for instance, is often viewed as crucial only to academic careers, but its broader significance cannot be understated. Dismissing community work as unassimilable into scholarly evaluation, for instance, undermines the very knowledge-making potential of the communities that scholars strive to engage with and support.

Indeed, this report highlights numerous challenges and struggles consistent with the realities faced by digital, experimental, and community-facing scholars today. Yet, it also celebrates the many instances where the challenges were met and the problems were solved. Sustainability is a critical frame because it encompasses the emotional, material, and social stakes of academic labor. It highlights the balance between innovation and the human cost of not investing in dynamic support structures, the push and pull of innovation and the human cost of not investing in structure as a dynamic process. Sustainability names the tension between reality and optimism as productively challenging or as a barrier to human and social health, and thus also to intellectual breadth and depth. While digital projects and initiatives often succeed due to the Herculean efforts of committed individuals, this success should serve as both an encouragement and a cautionary tale. Much as it is crucial to avoid transactional relationships where academics merely produce knowledge, we must also produce structures that resist treating communities as mere sources from which valuable resources—such as data, information, credibility, and students—are extracted. Extraction in any form is very seldom sustainable.

To be clear, in most cases, institutions and scholars want the same things. The difference is that institutional support must by definition come in the form of policy and infrastructure that acknowledges new challenges and that commits to finding solutions. The Commission’s work highlights the necessary role that policy plays in the stewardship of intellectual life, community, and production. As we look to the future, the Commission’s work serves as a blueprint for sustaining the momentum we have achieved, while also rethinking new futures for the work. It is a call to action for institutions to invest in the long-term success of digital scholarship, ensuring that the creativity and dedication of today’s scholars can flourish.

Marisa Parham, Professor of English and Digital Studies, University of Maryland
Chair of the Commission on Fostering Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship