The Digital Humanities Certificate Option: What's At Stake?

This short paper will trace the roots of the digital humanities certificate option as it is now most commonly conceived, beginning with Lisa Spiro’s 2010 post "Opening Up Digital Humanities Education" and then summarizing how her ideas were developed by scholars such as Lynne Siemens and Kara Kennedy in journal papers. It will then move on to examining how these ideas were put into different kinds of practice at institutions like Texas A & M University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Virginia, and finally it will turn to the author's own experiences as the developer of a digital humanities workshop series who then participated in an attempt to standardize it for university accreditation as part of a certificate program. Issues explored along the way will include faculty collaboration and labor equity, fair intellectual representation, the complexity that conversations about these assume, and conditions for librarians and campus partners to agree to when developing curricula together.

Bibliography

Antonijević, S. (2015).
Amongst Digital Humanists. An Ethnographic Study of Digital Knowledge Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Flanders, J. (2012). Time, Labor, and “Alternate Careers” in Digital Humanities Knowledge Work. In Gold, M. K. (ed.),
Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 292-308.

Jones, H. S. (2007).
Intellect and Character in Victorian England. Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, K. (2017). A Long-Belated Welcome: Accepting Digital Humanities Methods into Non-DH Classrooms.
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 11(3).

Siemens, L. (2013). Developing Academic Capacity in Digital Humanities: Thoughts from the Canadian Community.
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 7(1).

Siemens, L., Cunningham, R., Duff, W., and Warwick, C. (2011). A Tale of Two Cities: Implications of the Similarities and Differences in Collaborative Approaches within the Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities Communities.
Literary and Linguistic Computing, 26(3): 335-48.

Spiro, L. (2010). Opening Up Digital Humanities Education. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, published September 8, 2010. https://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/opening-up-digital-humanities-education/ (accessed May 5, 2019).