Labour Issues in Humanities Computing

Labour Issues in Humanities Computing
Andrea Austin
Queen's University
3aja1@qucdn.queensu.ca
David Halsted
Michigan State University
halsted@h-net.msu.edu
Perry Willett
Indiana University
pwillett@indiana.edu
Keywords: labour, resources, management

Computing humanists often point to the potential of information technologies in academia by citing the emerging roles of scholars as creators and maintainers of vast, digital archives, as facilitators of communication amongst other scholars, and as innovators in the use of technology in the teaching process. A central question remains, however: how exactly is all this work to be accomplished? Labour issues are a key factor in the rate of the integration of information technologies into humanities teaching and research. This series of papers explores three aspects of the managing of labour in humanities computing: the administration of a large, online distributed project involving humanities e-mail lists; the creation of quality electronic texts; and the establishment of professional support for discipline-specific humanities computing. David Halsted details the management strategies effectively used by H-Net, a project consisting of over 75 academic e-mail lists and an official web site, and centrally administrated at Michigan State University. Perry Willett describes the challenges of creating a collection of electronic texts for the Victorian Women Writers Project at Indiana University. Andrea Austin discusses hiring trends and support models that respond to the increasingly specialized computing needs of separate disciplines within the humanities. Particularly in the current climate of fiscal restraint, solutions to problems of labour in humanities computing are critical; these three papers, each from within a different specific context, describe significant labour problems and present possible solutions.