Labor in the Academy

“The Stakes of Digital Labor in the 21st Century Academy: The Revolution Will Not Be Turkified.” Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor, edited by Shawna Ross and Andrew Pilsch, Routledge, 2019, pp. 239-247. [Link]

This chapter offers a critique of the use of crowdsourced labor in digital humanities scholarship. From the ethics of collaboration to the exploitation of workers on platforms like CrowdFlower and Amazon Mechanical Turk that pay pennies for piecework, the integrity of scholarship, this essay argues, is compromised by reliance on these labor sources.

“Transforming the Landscape of Labor at Universities through Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships, edited by Robin Kear and Kate Joranson, Chandos, 2018, pp. 3-17. [Link]

Co-authored with Susan Edwards, this chapter outlines common obstacles to librarian-faculty partnerships at regional comprehensive universities, including the lack of models for this digital humanities work and the difficulty of fostering ethical collaboration. It further describes lessons learned and offers suggestions for others undertaking this work.

“Building an Ethical Digital Humanities Community: Librarian, Faculty & Student Collaboration.” College & Undergraduate Libraries, vol. 24, no. 2, 2017, pp. 337-49. [Link]

Co-authored with Justin Snow and Susan Edwards, this article examines the work of building a digital humanities community at Salem State’s library. The article outlines a three-pronged approach: laying the groundwork to build a digital humanities center, focusing on place-based digital scholarship, and launching an undergraduate internship program to explore ethical ways of creating innovative research experiences for students.