The Many Shapes of Your Digital Diss

UVA’s Librarian for the Arts Erin Dickey asked me to participate in a session for early-program art history graduate students working on their dissertation proposals. As a part of that session, I joined my Scholars’ Lab colleagues Will Rourk and Drew MacQueen to hear about their work with art history scholars and teachers.

Erin asked me to talk about how digital humanities work might be incorporated in the dissertation. After some discussion with Erin, I decided my contribution would be to share some thoughts about all the different ways in which a digital project might intersect with your dissertation. After all, when you’re a student planning out how to approach your dissertation your imagination can feel limited by what you have seen out there. It might be tempting to think that the only option is a big, experimental project that replaces the more traditional print monograph, but there are actually many different structures for including digital humanities work in a dissertation.

What I’ll be sharing here is a short, annotated series of models for what that integration might look like. I’m calling it “the many shapes of your digital diss.” Before I begin, I wanted to shout out the “starter kit for considering a DH dissertation” put together by Amanda Visconti as a part of the MLA Committee on Info Tech. That post contains a range of great resources including examples, discussions, things to think through, and more. Much of what I’m discussing is lifted from those examples.

In what follows we’re going to move from least to most digital. What I mean by that is that we’re going to move from those dissertations where the digital work is most separate towards those dissertations where digital work is more essential to the structure of the project itself. And one last caveat: I’ll be using specific examples of digital work for particular categories, but digital humanists contain multitudes and often float between the systems I lay out here. For example, many people who include DH work in their dissertations also blog. So my apologies if I mischaracterize anyone’s work or mislabel things.

Process Blog

The first and least intrusive way in which you might incorporate digital work into your dissertation is to document the process of your research on a blog. Depending on how you’re consuming this material, you might already be living the first broad category. I tend to share as much material publicly as I can, and I wrote up these remarks both for the in-person talk and to post online (if we really want to get technical my first step was dictating them into an app on my phone). I use public writing to share my work, to offer reflections on research and teaching in public, and to hold myself accountable to the progress I want to make on writing projects. As I’ve talked about numerous times in this space, I see blogging as an attempt to reclaim the publishing process, to write into being the kind of scholar you want to see in the world separate from the gatekeeping mechanisms of the peer review academic process. In that sense blogging can be as flexible as you want it to be.

Another example of this from the world of art history is Matthew Lincoln. Matt works at JSTOR labs right now, but he blogged throughout his graduate degree. This background is in art history.

If you look at his blog history, you can get a sense of all the different kinds of things Matt wrote about. From Matt’s CV we can learn that he started his PhD in 2014 and took his first DH job in 2016. In that time he posted about everything from topics related to his research on Dutch and Flemish print production networks to working with Twitter data to theoretical pieces on DH. Whether or not your digital work makes it into the actual writing of your dissertation, engaging in spaces like these that you own can carry a lot of benefits. Writing is a muscle, just like any other. The more you exercise it, the stronger and more flexible it will be. And it can bring a lot of professionally legible benefits that I would be happy to discuss further with you.

Dissertation Sidecar

Next up are those instances when a digital project takes place parallel to the dissertation but the digital work is not necessarily essential to the structure of the writing project.

I’m thinking here of Janet Dunkelbarger’s work with us on garden spaces in Pompeii. Janet was a DH Fellow in the Scholars’ Lab and used that time to develop a virtual reality experience where users could see, feel, and hear what it was like to exist in one of these spaces with all the research elements from her dissertation layered on top. The project is absolutely a reflection and deepening of her dissertation, but the print project stands on its own. I double checked! Janet’s work with us was transformative for her own career (she works in technical writing for a software company now), and I am sure the project informed her writing. But the project as such doesn’t inform the structure and texture of her dissertation project. In this model, you might write or publish about digital humanities in a way related to your research, but the writing itself looks fairly traditional. There are drawbacks to this approach, of course, as all of this takes time. But I can imagine this sort of dissertation sidecar as being more amenable committees who might be skeptical of digital humanities in general. It could be an easier sell if the final outcome presented to the committee has a shape they’re familiar with.

Project-Chapter

Next up is I’m going to call the “project-chapter.” In this category we have work in which the digital project is deeply integral to a single chapter, but the rest of the dissertation stands on its own and apart from digital methods. In my own dissertation I had a chapter on Virginia Woolf that relied on digital text analysis, but that method wasn’t used anywhere else in my project.

Another example is Joanna Swafford’s English on music and Victorian poetry. She built a substantial digital project with us in the Scholars’ Lab that helped readers to visualize the relationship between sound and that formed the basis of a single chapter.

Maximalist

Finally, we have what I am cheekily calling the maximalist approach to DH in graduate work, those dissertations that are themselves digital projects. In this category, the dissertation has digital work so deeply ingrained throughout the project that it is impossible to conceive of the work without digital methods. Often the structure winds up becoming experimental, as was the case with Scholars’ Lab Director Amanda Visconti’s digital humanities dissertation. They developed a participatory digital edition called Infinite Ulysses. While Amanda did wind up composing a shorter writeup for the purposes of graduation requirements the real dissertation project was the digital edition.

One more example. Anne Williams’ podcast dissertation called My Gothic Dissertation. Is it a podcast? Yes. Is it her dissertation? Also yes.

I could offer more examples, but I’ll leave off there. Hopefully these different examples can illustrate the many different shapes and scales at which digital humanities work can take place in the dissertation. And hopefully these examples give some tools for discussions with your committee about how you might integrate DH with your dissertation project. After all, some of these shapes are harder sells than others and require your mentors to be more open to experimental approaches to the research and writing process. Others lead to a result not all that different from a traditional monograph. Figure out with your committee which one can work for you. Keeping these models in mind can also help when trying to organize the dissertation prospectus. These documents, after all, are a blueprint for the work to come. Incorporating DH into the structure of dissertation requires planning and care, and it can help tremendously to know how that work will be scoped, when it will take place, and how it will be shaped.