Prompts and Templates

Advocacy for digital scholarship itself forms a large and necessary, for now, part of digital scholarship work. It is also hard to do well. In our work on this, we take guidance from Risam et al.’s “Creative and Critical Precepts for Digital Humanities Projects.” We’ve found the questions that resource asks around issues of access, materiality, method, and ontology and epistemology to be a good format for creating compelling narratives within our own local contexts.

DiScontent builds on the model of guiding question sets by expanding it here to cover digital scholarly infrastructure work. Below are some examples. Please add to these in comments. We will pull information from them up into the main text of the page and add your name to the credits below, unless you choose to comment anonymously.

Policies relating to digital scholarship support staff

  1. Is digital scholarship support the primary duty of the staff member(s) under consideration, or a secondary responsibility?
  2. For a given position: are its specific responsibilities clearly defined? Is there a list of responsibilities that are out of the position’s scope?
  3. Do the administrative reporting lines align with the realities of the work? If not, what informal or formal channels exist to supplement reporting lines?
  4. Are there staff supporting digital scholarship across the institution, who would benefit from more explicit collaboration and/or mutual referrals? What lines of communication need to be tapped to make this happen?
  5. What professional development opportunities, within and outside the institution, exist for digital scholarship support staff? What professional development opportunities do the particular digital scholarship support staff available present to their colleagues / what venues for knowledge sharing are there?
  6. What issues around diversity, inclusion, and justice exist at the institution? How do they hinder or promote the recruitment and retention of new staff? When is the next opportunity to do something differently, and what will be done differently?

MOUs regarding collaboration on digital scholarly projects

  1. Has the project under consideration addressed the questions around labor posed by CriticalDH?
    1. To their question around the relationship between project collaborators, we’d add more specifically: who gets to make decisions about the project, on what scale, and on what timeline? Does decision-making agency expire?
  2. What precepts apply to every digital scholarly project in a given collaborative context, if applicable? What questions should be addressed by each project on a case by case basis?
    1. For ideas, see Collaborators’ Bill of Rights, Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights

Advocating for new digital scholarship support infrastructure at a higher ed institution

  1. What is the size and nature (research, teaching) of the institution in question? What are its peer institutions? Do any of these peer institutions already have digital scholarship support units? How did those come about? What services do they offer? Is their work satisfactory to the larger community? To themselves? What do they see is missing?
  2. How would the institution in question adapt information in 1 above to its own context?
  3. What unique opportunity does investing in new digital scholarship support infrastructure present to this institution?
  4. Who at the institution is already doing digital scholarly work, and what is that work? What digital research and/or teaching would community members like to pursue, that needs support?
  5. What do you want this particular institution’s digital scholarship support infrastructure to do, and on what timeline?
  6. What are the major organizational stakeholders on campus? (Examples: humanities center, IT, ed tech, teaching and learning centers.) How can their existing expertise and resources be combined to support digital scholarship without diminishing their existing activities?
    1. Once there is a clear picture of the above: what resources necessary to accomplish 4 and 5 above are missing?

Organizing events

  1. Does the DLF Social Event Checklist suggest opportunities for advocacy with respect to the event under consideration?
  2. What groups might be vulnerable to abuse or endangerment in the place/context where the event is being organized? What will the organizer(s) do to mitigate this?

The resource on this page was built by Purdom Lindblad and Vika Zafrin, with contribution from Alex Gil. It was last updated on 11 June 2018.