The Consequences of Success: Acknowledging, Valuing, and Compensating Digital Scholarship Labor

As part of a panel at the Digital Library Federation Forum in 2018, colleagues and I from multiple institutions proposed the following presentation:

Digital scholarship projects provide undergraduates and graduate students with unique opportunities to engage in deep scholarly research while using contemporary digital tools and methods. Bryn Mawr College, Grinnell College, and Wesleyan University all endeavour to contribute to the student-centered mission of their respective institutions by creating an infrastructure to provide its students with these opportunities both inside and out of the classroom. Through its Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows program at Bryn Mawr, a paid, full-time summer fellowship, students work on a public-facing digital scholarship project related to the history of women in science at Bryn Mawr. At Grinnell, students in Vivero Digital Scholarship Fellows program, commit to a two-year training and mentorship program that seeks to grow the diversity of the digital liberal arts community at Grinnell and beyond. Student opportunities to collaborate on digital scholarship projects at Wesleyan are more ad-hoc, but, like its peer institutions, Wesleyan is seeking to develop an undergraduate digital scholarship fellows program.

What all three institutions share in common through their student digital projects, is that they involve collaboration not just with faculty, but also with librarians, technologists, and other staff. This constellation of labor necessitates a reimagining of relationships, expectations, and project management that often is at odds with traditional hierarchies of power within a university. For example, how can meaningful and fairly compensated research experiences for students be created and sustained? How can the time and resources of the professional collaborators be accommodated within the demands of faculty expectations and timelines? What is the value of invisible and emotional labor, and how is it acknowledged and compensated? How and who is responsible for sustaining digital projects when not just students but also often faculty and professional staff are not permanent residents of a college?

For this discussion, we propose a two part session: 1) A roundtable “lightning round” in which panel participants introduce the opportunities and challenges faced at their institutions; 2) Moderated, open discussion around questions prepared in advance that address concerns of ethical labor relations that affect panel participants and audience members. Our goal out of this discussion is, using a Google Doc, to create a list of actionable steps that audience members can take back to their home institutions. Both readings and questions could be made available via the Google Doc to the DLF community prior to the panel.