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Building Pedagogy into Project Development: Making Data Construction Visible in Digital Projects

This essay responds to two questions at the heart of the Invisible Labor in the Digital Humanities 2016 symposium at Florida State University: (1) what is at stake in making unseen work visible, and (2) how can DH projects equally distribute and value the labor involved in their construction? For us, the answer to these questions lies in privileging the pedagogical affordances of data construction by crafting a workflow that included undergraduates as intellectual partners, and using DH methods to visualize and make public this collaborative labor. By drawing on our work with Photogrammar, which visualizes federal New Deal documentary projects including photography and life histories, we highlight three strategies for making labor visible in the digital humanities. First, we discuss how this project served as a tool for teaching undergraduate students key methods in DH by giving them experience with conducting original research with credit on the public site. In this way, we explain how pedagogy can become a part of project development. Second, we argue that DH visualization techniques can make the labor behind DH projects visible. We focus on how Photogrammar uses a timeline and network analysis alongside the traditional “About” page to make visible all participants in the project. Third, we turn to an open discussion of the challenges faced in the politics of attribution when working with university, governmental and private historical organizations, including domain names and the use of organizational logos. In an effort to justify new methods of social documentation, W.T. Couch (1939) declared, “The people, all the people, must be known, they must be heard. Somehow they must be given representation, somehow they must be given a voice and allowed to speak, in their essential character” [Couch 1939, x–xi]. His zeal for a new method of documenting social history reflected his belief in a more democratic vision of American expression, which also starkly contrasted with growing fascism in Europe during the 1930s. In order to give “the people their voice,” he helped to craft the Southern Life Histories Project, which charged Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) workers with interviewing and documenting the lives of everyday people in the American South. The collection is composed of nearly 1200 life histories that are entertaining, insightful, heartbreaking, and, on the whole, say as much, if not more about the writers than the interviewees. Because of the outbreak of WWII and political turmoil within the program, there is not much remaining evidence relating to the interviewees, the writers, the editors, or how precisely these life histories were written. Instead what remains are the stories themselves, while the labor behind them is obscured even rendered invisible. As many Digital Humanities (DH) scholars and workers know, this situation of having a product with little to no knowledge of the labor behind its construction is rather common. We create DH projects for particular audiences, but the decisions and labor behind their construction remain hidden as they are not the end goal of the projects. At the November 2016 Symposium on Invisible Labor in the Digital Humanities at Florida State University, Mark Algee-Hewitt referred to this issue as one of the great paradoxes of DH. In order to better understand this great paradox, the symposium centered on three key themes: (1) divergent expectations, (2) unequal labor, and (3) invisible work. Within each of these themes was a discussion of the core tension in collaborative DH projects about how to distribute and value labor, especially when decisions about the direction of research and allocation of funding are not evenly dispersed, which is often the case in the hierarchical system of the academy.