In December 2021, librarian and technologist Andromeda Yelton published “’Just a few files’: technical labor, academe, and care” in response to an academic article that dismissed the work required to host digital humanities projects. “…[T]he labor conditions of your techies’ work lives are an important part of that [project] plan” she argues, after breaking down the actual time, knowledge, and equipment needed to host project files. Yelton’s argument is part of a growing conversation about the (in)visibility of people who do digital labor and the corollary demand to no longer ignore the people who keep academia, including the DH world, running. The 2022 DSSN Symposium takes this argument and conversation as its topic. For this symposium, we’ve invited scholars who have advocated for a focus on the labor required to implement and sustain many of the projects that live in the digital world. Join us as we discuss how this “invisible” labor has been there all along.

Please register for this event here. 

Speakers:

Quinn Dombrowski (non-binary, any pronouns are fine) is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2018, Quinn’s many DH adventures included supporting the high-performance computing cluster at UC Berkeley, running the DiRT tool directory with support from the Mellon Foundation, writing books on Drupal for Humanists and University of Chicago library graffiti, and working on the program staff of Project Bamboo, a failed digital humanities cyberinfrastructure initiative.

Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since coming to Stanford, Quinn has supported numerous non-English DH projects, taught courses on non-English DH, developed a tabletop roleplaying game to teach DH project management, explored trends in multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and started the Data-Sitters Club, a feminist DH pedagogy and research group focused on Ann M. Martin’s 90’s girls series “The Baby-Sitters Club”. Quinn is currently co-president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities along with Roopika Risam, and advocates for better support for DH in languages other than English.

Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He served as President of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2019 to 2022. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway and was a professor in the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. His research areas are electronic literature, with a focus on digital poetry, and the history and strategic growth of the field. He’s known for I ♥ E-Poetry, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, “Third Generation Electronic Literature” and the Antología Lit(e)Lat, Volume 1. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.

Opening remarks and moderation by

Natalia Estrada (she/they), Digital Scholarship Librarian, Co-Director, Digital Scholarship Studio & Network, University at Buffalo