Don't Make Me Think!

DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
Dorothea Salo
Digital Frontiers 2014
So hi, and thank you for having me. When Spencer asked me to do this talk, I replied with the
question I usually ask people who want me to do talks: “what kind of talk are you looking
for?”
And Spencer said a polemic might be good. *PAUSE* Spencer, I love you man, but I am not
convinced of the wisdom of this idea. *PAUSE* But no, I know, if I’m known for anything in
the wide world it’s for polemics, so ﬁne, go with the ﬂow, right?

View Slide

I DO NOT FEEL
WELCOME HERE.
So let me kick this off with a possibly-polemical truth: *CLICK* I DO NOT FEEL WELCOME
HERE, among you, in this context. I do not feel that I belong at this conference at all, never
mind up here at the podium!
Now, Spencer, don’t panic, man, it’s got nothing to do with you, you’re fine. And it’s not this
specific conference, either; Digital Frontiers actually feels a lot MORE hospitable to me than
most digital-humanities conferences. Okay, any digital humanities conferences. Some of that
is in the about statement on the Digital Frontiers home page: Digital Frontiers exists to
“explore innovation and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries in the arena of public
humanities and cultural memory.” Boundary-crossing, yay, I am all about that! *beat* Ask
anybody! I cross a lot of lines! Oh, wait, that’s not quite the same thing. Or maybe it is.
Whatever.
But when I seriously got down to thinking about what I’d say today, I noticed that I was
starting to feel discomfort at the whole thing. And the closer this date got, the worse my
internal discomfort got, and in me, this kind of discomfort plays out as rumination and
insomnia, always has -- so wow, y’all have NO IDEA how glad I am to get this over with
finally!

View Slide

I DO NOT FEEL
WELCOME HERE.
we?
But here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure I am not the only person in this room feeling a little
unwelcome, maybe intimidated, maybe scared. In fact, I can almost guarantee it. And again,
I’m not trying to say anything bad about Digital Frontiers, okay? It’s not about that.

View Slide

Gerald England, “SJ9593: Student collage ,” http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2501004 CC-BY
It’s about a whole collage of weirdness, in the academy generally and in the humanities and
in librarianship, and since humanities faculty and academic librarians form the bulk of the
digital humanities, there’s weirdness in DH too. And some weirdnesses that are really awful
and destructive, all I personally can do is acknowledge them, because I am not the right
person to talk about them. Racism and colonialism in digital humanities, just as one
example? We don’t need any more middle-aged white women like me talking about that like
we’re some kind of authority, right? I’m not an authority on that. Of course I’m not.
So yeah, that’s there, and it absolutely makes people feel unwelcome, and I’m sorry for that
and I bring it up because I don’t want anything I say today to erase it. I’m not going to
emphasize it today, though, not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I’m not a
person who can say much that’s useful about it.

View Slide

Shashi Bellamkonda, “Blog World Expo 2008 ,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/drbeachvacation/2874078655
CC-BY
But some of these weirdnesses that make me personally feel uncomfortable? I CAN
interrogate them, and I thought it might actually be helpful (and at least possibly amusing) to
others who feel like me if I did. Because the academy generally sometimes acts like its own
little hermetically-sealed self-contained world, and so does librarianship, and unless you’re
steeped in them, they look absolutely bizarre from the outside! And sometimes even from the
inside!
So I’m going to try to explain why I don’t feel okay about coming here. I hope it helps.

View Slide

Barbara Eckstein, “TMA,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/beckstei/6123867582/ CC-BY
So as I lay awake at night ruminating... with the cat stomping all over my kidneys, he’s a
great cat but he WILL do that... I kept imagining and reimagining this conversation between a
couple of imaginary conference attendees, you know, Serious Academic Types or Very
Important Librarians, who are both rolling their eyes just like this absolutely priceless bust
here. I mean, total give-me-a-freakin’-break eyerolls. *check audience* Yes, just like that!

View Slide

Oh, her.
Why’d they invite her?
She .
And the conversation these eyerolly people in my head keep having goes like this. They see
my name in the conference program, and one person goes *CLICK* Oh, HER. With that
eyeroll.
*CLICK* And the other person goes, Why’d they invite HER? With a matching eyeroll.
*CLICK* And the first person goes, She -- okay, and there I just fill in the blank, it’s different
every time this conversation unrolls in my head.
*BEAT* Now here’s a thing. A whole lotta people in this room just filled in that blank in their
head. Whether they actually know me, or heard about me from other people, or just read my
bio on the conference website, they filled in that blank. They instantly came up with a reason
I do not belong here!

View Slide

I DO NOT FEEL
WELCOME HERE.
So no freakin’ wonder I don’t feel welcome, right? If it’s that trivial to come up with a reason I
don’t belong?

View Slide

I DO NOT FEEL
WELCOME HERE.
we?
And it’s no surprise either that I’m not the only one not feeling welcome.

View Slide

Wilson Bentley, http://snowflakebentley.com/WBsnowflakes.htm. Public domain.
Because I’m not a special snowﬂake! THIS is a special snowﬂake. I am not one. So anything
making me feel uncomfortable or unwelcome or unwanted is also making others feel that
way. Guaranteed. So if you have eyerolly people in your head too, let’s get together! Right?

View Slide

“John Calvin,” attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. Public domain. Via http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:John_Calvin_2.jpg
And part of how this happens is that there’s just something in the way people think, in the
academy AND in librarianship, that’s ineluctably Calvinist, this habit of reflexively classifying
other people into the Elect and the Damned. And unlike Calvin, it can’t be blamed on a deity
or on pre-established fate -- it’s coming from within, it’s everybody, all of us are implicated!
Our treacherous evil little brains do their level best to exclude people! And, you know, am I
immune to this? I only wish I were. I’m trying to be, but I don’t always make it either!
And the academy doesn’t talk about this much. Neither does librarianship. Now, I do talk
about it, but I can only talk about it as much as I do because **I am one of the Damned**,
both in the academy AND in librarianship. They seriously don’t want me any more! And
there’s basically nothing I can do about my damnation, it’s fixed and it’s irrevocable, so I take
advantage of the only useful privilege it confers, which is speaking some of the unspoken
aloud.
So, first question. If we, we all of us, inside AND outside the academy, inside AND outside
librarianship, don’t want this exclusionary Calvinism in our DH, what DO we want?

View Slide

I DO NOT FEEL
WELCOME HERE.
Anyone curious enough to
want to be here should
Here’s how I ended up answering that question for the eyerolly people in my head, so I could
ﬁnally get some sleep. This is what I really desperately want, and what I hope and believe
everybody here also wants. Anyone, anyone at ALL, curious enough to want to be at a DH
gathering in the ﬁrst place, anyone like that should feel welcome at DH gatherings!
Me included! I would like to feel welcome here! That would be great!

View Slide

Oh, her.
She .
But I don’t yet! I’m totally still stuck on this imaginary conversation between the imaginary
eyerolly people in my head!
So let me try to guess how some folks in this room and outside it would ﬁll in this blank, ‘cos
I know that in reality some of them did, and as I guess, I’m going to enlarge the context a bit,
to see how that blank-ﬁlling plays out in who does and doesn’t feel welcome in DH.

View Slide

Oh, her.
She .
is not a theoretician
Here’s one. Now, when I was studying for Ph.D comps in Hispanic philology way back in the day, the hot thing in
Hispanic philology was this guy named Roger Wright, and his big thing was, when do we get to call Spanish
Spanish, as opposed to calling it some kind of Latin.
And I read his book like three times to be sure I could follow and reproduce his dense, highly theory-driven
argument, and when I was done reading? I was all WHO CAAAAAARES?! Who cares about this? It is a stupid useless
argument based purely on definitional hairsplitting that does not usefully expand our understanding of anything!
… Oops. Not supposed to say that about theory in the academy. Not EVER. One of the biggest insults floating
around DH in the academy is that DH is “insufficiently theorized.” Whatever that even MEANS.
So, is this talk I’m giving insufficiently theorized? YOU BET IT IS. Theory is not what I do, it’s not what I teach, and
it is not the world I live in. The world I live in involves
* actively preserving analog and digital materials before entropy claims them,
* coming up with concrete actions in response to new open access and open data policies,
* navigating titanic changes in how libraries and archives describe what they collect, and
* changing the way scholarly communication works so that it’s less broken.
Some of the stuff that I teach and do relies on theory, but it is NOT itself theory. I’m not waving this as a flag or
anything, I know a lot of people live in Theoryworld and I respect that, they’re not all Roger Wright -- but I live in
a world of praxis, and I’m actually basically okay with that.
So when my total uselessness at theory means people don’t find me worth listening to, wow, I don’t even know
where to go with that. Except, oh yeah, this reaction feels amazingly unwelcoming to me.

View Slide

doesn’t even have a PhD
Oh, her.
She .
But that one’s minor. I’m guessing this one was about half the room, give or take.
I mean, it don’t take but three seconds on a search engine to ﬁnd somebody with a Ph.D
dissing librarians in public online. Am I right, librarians? I am so right. Try it. Or, you know,
just read comments on the Chronicle of Higher Ed for a while. *beat* No, actually, don’t do
that, don’t read comments at the Chronk, it’s bad and you will feel bad.
But you can’t TELL me this isn’t a thing in DH. I mean, DH is part of the academy, and this is
TOTALLY a thing in the academy. Me, like I said, I’m a Ph.D dropout, I didn’t even make it to
comps -- Roger Wright just broke me, y’all -- and when I dropped out, my own father the
Ph.D anthropologist made a huge point of TELLING ME how much of a thing this is! So, if
anybody here is squirming right about now? I am not sorry, because this dismissiveness and
bullyragging is not okay.
There are a whole lot of people without Ph.Ds, librarians and students and IT pros and others,
interested in and actually doing digital-humanities work who deserve better.

View Slide

Paula Rey, “Space war at sonar 2008” https://www.flickr.com/photos/pulguita/2663404167/ CC-BY-SA
One place this mode of thought that only values Ph.Ds and writes off everybody else, one place this hits DH really
hard is what I call the Academic Library Space Wars. It’s like clockwork, right? Every month or so another story in
the Chronk or a retweet frenzy because another tiny branch humanities library is being merged into the main
library at another university, and humanities faculty are up in arms about it.
First, this is incredibly insulting to professional librarians, who somehow never get mentioned, much less heard
from, in Academic Library Space Wars. Usually it’s US, us librarians, making the closure decision, and faculty who
protest that decision without even TALKING to their librarians about why it was made are undermining those
librarians, consciously or not.
Second, you know what’s invariably missing from these faculty protests? I mean, always. Any concern at ALL about
library staff, that’s what. It’s ALWAYS about the books. And I dig books, and I dig library spaces, but when I see
these protests that don’t even INCLUDE the word “librarian,” it tells me loud and clear that I am invisible to
humanities faculty, they do not have my back as a librarian, much less a digitally-focused librarian. They will not
defend me; they’ll only defend the books. Is that part of why I feel unwelcome here in DH? Oh, you BET it is. I’m
not necessarily among friends and I know it.
And don’t get smug, librarians, because faculty get away with this nonsense when we don’t stand up for one
another and our decisions. And we. Do not. Stand up for one another. When faculty attack us. We duck and cover
and are all “oh, whew, at least they’re not mad at ME.” Not cool, folks.
Third, libraries are not plentifully endowed with space OR money OR staff these days, so any space dedicated
solely to books is space that can’t do anything else at all for DH. And any book-only space that is kept open
despite low usage? Means a library staff complement that could be doing DH work but isn’t, because keeping a
space open even if nobody’s USING it takes work.
So yeah, if you sense a kind of friction sometimes between librarians and faculty, you’re not imagining things, it’s
really real!

View Slide

Paul J Everett, “childrens museum tug of war” https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_everett82/331343031/ CC-BY
Another site of Ph.D-or-not friction, of course, is the DH Labor Wars, who actually gets DH jobs, especially in
libraries. Which, I won’t lie, I have a dog in this hunt. I teach library school, and some of my library-school
students want to do DH work in libraries, or want other library jobs that DH skills will give them a leg up on. Of
that group, some of them have humanities Ph.Ds, and some don’t.
And it’s really unclear to me how I’m supposed to explain their options to them. Am I supposed to say “You can’t
do library DH work if you don’t have a humanities Ph.D?” I don’t want to say that. I’m pretty sure it’s not true. I
don’t even think that DH wants it to be true, though I could be wrong.
But gosh, that sure is the message a lot of DH employment announcements are giving me. Ph.Ds only! MLSes need
not apply! There are grant agencies like CLIR and ACLS who will fund Ph.Ds but not MLSes, for example. And
here’s where I plant my ﬂag: I believe some of my students without Ph.Ds are legitimately competitive for library
DH jobs, and excluding them solely on the basis of degree is unfair. And I’m not even convinced it helps the Ph.Ds
sometimes, because librarians aren’t stupid, librarians know what the score is, librarians know this is unfair and
librarians know that Ph.Ds do not automatically have the competencies that libraries need. And look, if I’m wrong
and my non-Ph.D students AREN’T competitive, they just won’t get the jobs, right? But if I’m right, that’s bad for
DH. DH isn’t getting the best people because it’s excluding some and as Miriam alluded to yesterday, it’s giving
libraries excuses to be suspicious of those Ph.Ds and treat them really badly and set them up to fail.
Which, as a sometime academic librarian, I wish we wouldn’t do that! It’s not those Ph.Ds’ fault that grant agencies
are trying to sell out academic librarianship for a mess of pottage! I don’t like that either, I won’t lie, but librarians
who take out that frustration on the Ph.Ds are bullies, and I don’t want to train people to enter a profession full of
bullies, okay?

View Slide

Oh, her.
She .
isn’t even a librarian
So, it turns out that academic librarians have their own version of the you-don’t-have-a-Ph.D thing. And
librarians totally do this to technologists and Ph.Ds who work in libraries, but they even do it to other librarians
too! And this makes no rational sense whatever, so I feel like I have to explain it -- it’s based partly on whether
the work a librarian does is relatively new to libraries or not, partly on whether a librarian actually works in
libraries. And I gravitated to new-to-libraries work right out of library school, so I’ve been getting this since
practically the day I graduated! A whole lotta librarians have taken considerable pains to make me unwelcome in
librarianship… and I am SO not alone in that.
And you know what? Cheers, those librarians won. I’m not a librarian -- not in the sense that I don’t have the
degree, because I do, but in the sense that I don’t work in a library and probably never will again, not because I
don’t want to, but because I am one of the Calvinist Damned -- no library anywhere will take a chance on me.
And jobs aside, I never know when that’s going to jump out and bite me. Could be anywhere, including here. I DO
know that a lot of really sharp, bright, skilled librarians and technologists and other DHers I know have fallen
afoul of librarianship’s amazingly weird rules about what you can and can’t say, and about what is “acceptable”
expertise and “acceptable” library work, and what is “acceptable” public exposure. And if you leave libraries for
that or any other reason, suddenly you’re not a librarian any more and you’re absolutely supposed to feel
uncomfortable in librarian gatherings.
And this is another thing that just really bothers me and I hope that saying it out loud helps us stop it! Not even
for me, I’m a lost cause, but for my students, some of whom have been badly hurt by it.

View Slide

Oh, her.
She .
teaches library school
But here’s the real kicker, for librarians. That horrible woman teaches library school. EYEROLL! What business does
she have talking to ANYONE about ANYTHING?
And this? Is just a librarian THING. If there’s anyone in this WORLD that librarians HATE MORE than library-school
instructors, I do not know who it is! We are WORTHLESS! We are the living embodiment of fail! And I’m saying, how
am I supposed to help defend libraries’ and librarians’ value to DH when librarians constantly undercut me and my
teaching work like this?! A shred of retained credibility, that’s all I ask!
And the Ph.Ds totally add to the weirdness! Oh, library school, that’s just PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL, it isn’t real grad
school. Frankly, given my experience with so-called “real grad school,” I consider that a feature, not a bug. And
oh, say the Ph.Ds, they let PRACTITIONERS teach, people who don’t even have Ph.Ds, clearly library schools aren’t
SERIOUS about graduate education. Ahem.
I hear and read this stuff constantly, I cannot escape it, though I try. If you happen to follow me on Twitter, you
might have seen one of the times I just boiled over about it, because wow, I am trying so hard to be good at what I
do, and to DO GOOD with what I do, and the absolutely constant stream of negging I get back, it just HURTS. And
I shouldn’t have boiled over on Twitter, and I know that, and these days I just mute tweeps who make me feel like
boiling over so I don’t do it again. But wow, this is so unwelcoming.

View Slide

From http://www.slis.wisc.edu/diglibres.htm
And this is especially problematic because digital humanities has still not resolved its internal
question of how DH professionals get praxis training. And it just blows my mind, how library
schools get left out of that discussion, because a lot of the stuff we teach, fun nerdy stuff like
metadata, digital preservation, online digital libraries, XML, linked data, database design,
project management, scholarly communication and copyright -- all this is stuff DHers often
need to learn, and that’s just the stuff I personally teach, it’s not even everything on this
slide, it’s not even CLOSE to everything library schools have to offer DH! But it feels to me like
DH hasn’t noticed that, much less welcomed it. I feel like I’ve been written off in favor of DH
education reinventing wheels, and yeah, that makes me feel unwelcome.

View Slide

Sarah Stierch (Wikimedia Foundation), “Program Evaluation and Design Workshop Breakout Session 2 Logic
Model GLAM Content Donations” http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/11/finding-out-what-works-first-
workshop-program-evaluation/ CC-BY
And here’s where I admit that I, yes I, have contributed to my own Calvinist damnation. How
have I done that? Miriam nailed it yesterday: by teaching workshops. And I’m even going to
go beyond Miriam to extend that to the two-day or one-week-bootcamp variety of workshop.
I hereby declare that I’m done with that. I’m just done. Because when I let people think that a
one-week bootcamp is enough to teach anybody, Ph.D or no Ph.D, the library-schoolish parts
of DH praxis… well, one, that impression is just wrong, and two, it totally sells short the
complexity and the perceived value of what I teach, and the school I teach it in, and the
students I teach it to. If it only takes a week to learn, how important can it be, right? It takes
seven to ten years to get a typical Ph.D! So weeklong workshops are practically begging
people to disrespect and undermine me and my students, and make us feel unwelcome.
I can’t ethically do that. I love my students, and I owe them better than that. No more
workshops, no more bootcamps, my checkbook is crying because they actually make me
money, but forget the money, I’m done. If people want me to teach them, they need to make
more of a commitment than that. The kind of commitment my library-school students make.
A week is not enough.

View Slide

Oh, her.
She .
isn’t a REAL librarian
professional
DHer
humanist
person
And ultimately, what all these imaginary conversations between the eyerolly people in my
head boil down to is, whatever it is I am, I’m not a REAL... something. *CLICK* Not a real
librarian, not a real humanist, not a real DHer, not a real professional, sometimes I get to
wondering *CLICK* if I’m actually even a real person! Maybe I’m imaginary, I don’t even know
any more!
And that probably makes me sound like a total conspiracy theorist, what with all the weird
voices in my head, right? But I don’t believe anybody much is actually out to get me, and I
know I can’t trust what goes on in my head in the middle of the night when the cat is
tenderizing my kidneys.
So if all these very real, very real-world phenomena I’ve just talked about are NOT a
conspiracy to belittle and dismiss me, what are they? I think it’s an uninterrogated thought
pattern that repeats over and over and over again just like the eyerolly people in my head.
And it’s a thought pattern that I absolutely believe that you, you people here, you who use
the products of digital librarianship and the digital humanities, can help interrupt.

View Slide

And this is the thought pattern. Don’t Make Me Think. (This is the actual talk title, you were
probably wondering when I’d get to it, right?)
If web usability is your thing, you might have recognized the phrase already, because I stole
it from my favorite web-usability book, Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. The title is just a
fabulous summation of good usability. When I’m just trying to ﬁnd information, or buy
something, or ask a friend a question, don’t make me think about how to do that! It should
be obvious. Perfect guiding principle for usability in design.
But it doesn’t work outside that context.

View Slide

I DO NOT FEEL
WELCOME HERE.
we?
It completely doesn’t work if this is our problem. “I don’t feel welcome here!” I say, “and
neither do a fair few other people.”

View Slide

“Don’t make me think!” say the eyerolly people in my head. Yeah, no, that totally doesn’t
work.

View Slide

I DO NOT FEEL
WELCOME HERE.
Anyone curious enough to
want to be here should
Don’t Make Me Think will not get us to this place we want to be in, where anybody with
curiosity feels welcome. It won’t help us ﬁx the frictions I’ve laid out for you, ﬁx the
underlying cultural weirdnesses that lead to those frictions.

View Slide

DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
But my sense is that this exact principle -- don’t make me think! -- guides much too much
of the academy, much too much of librarianship, much too much of DH. Got a hard problem?
Like ﬁxing scholarly publishing so everybody everywhere can have access to scholarly work,
or weighing credentials fairly in the DH labor market, or allocating library space and staff so
digital projects get a fair chance at them? Talk to the hand, DON’T MAKE ME THINK!
So, for example.

View Slide

Just let me
pontificate!
DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
Don’t make me THINK about hard problems! Just let me pontiﬁcate about ‘em! This, I ﬁrmly
believe, explains a lot about comments on the Chronicle of Higher Ed. But it also explains
waaaaay too much about faculty behavior in the Academic Library Space Wars, right?
So, I mean, I don’t actually think it’s hard to make people stop and think, when they’re just
spouting off. Sometimes it just takes one question. Like for the Library Space Wars, asking an
outraged faculty member, “Did you talk to the librarians?” No, seriously, say it with me, “Did
you talk to the librarians?” Did you, you know, treat them as fellow professionals who don’t
make arbitrary decisions.
Librarians, when was the last time you talked to a library-school instructor? Not lectured, not
dissed, not yelled at, not talked AT, I mean, talked TO. Maybe-just-maybe that would be a
productive thing to do?
There. Not hard. Right?

View Slide

... that someone
not like me might
know something I
don’t.
Much less that
it might be an
important thing.
DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
*read slide* And I’m sure a lot of you in this room have felt this. Maybe from Ph.Ds, maybe
from librarians, maybe both. And it’s not cool, and I encourage you to stand up to it.
Where I get this is facultysplaining about open access to the scholarly literature. Good lord.
Faculty have shopped their dissertation to university presses and maybe done a few reviews,
and whoa, check them out, they’re scholarly publishing experts. I used to mark up and
typeset scholarly books and work on ebook content standards, I’ve been an author AND
editor AND reviewer AND six years an institutional repository librarian AND run a journal-
hosting service AND watched events closely for a decade AND written about them AND talked
about them AND taught a course for three years about various book and journal economies,
but guess who’s the expert on scholarly publishing and open access? It ain’t me.
And I absolutely think this plays into why library schools don’t appear more often in DH
education discussions. An august doctoral candidate might have to learn something from a
MERE totally untheorized LIBRARIAN, let’s all have the vapors!
And I don’t know how to ﬁx this except to encourage us all not to just accept it. We all bring
something useful to DH, every single one of us in this room, EVEN ME sometimes, and we all
deserve to have that respected. Even me.

View Slide

Just let me do
what I do!
Just let me do
what I’ve
always done!
DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
And sometimes it’s, don’t make me THINK about this hard problem! Just let me go right on
doing what I do because I’ve always done it. ‘Cos that has to be totally okay, right? And
anyway you aren’t the boss of me, you can’t make me. You can’t make me think, and you
can’t make me change.
And this explains waaaaaaay too much about theory-theory-theory as well as coding-
coding-coding, and it helps explain why nobody shows up to workshops. And while I’m at it
this also explains way too much about library approaches to new service models and new
collaborations. You know, I’ve learned not to reﬂexively refer faculty I meet at conferences
who are interested in DH to their libraries, okay? Because I don’t know what response they’re
gonna get from their librarians. It might be great! Or it might totally be -- don’t make me
think.
And what the heck is that, librarians? Thinking is only for other people?! Lifelong learning,
which we talk about a lot as a central part of the library mission, lifelong learning is only for
other people?! Come on, we call ourselves information professionals, we gotta do better than
this. It’s our example to set, right?

View Slide

Make somebody
else think!
Especially if it’s
somebody I don’t
value!
DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
Or sometimes it’s don’t make ME think! Make somebody else do that! Even better? If it’s somebody I don’t actually
care about as a fellow professional, or worse, a fellow human being. If it’s somebody I force into supplying what
Miriam called “hope labor” yesterday, no credit, no pay, no nothing. So if you’ve been on the wrong end of that?
You are not alone.
A few years back I sat in on early DH discussions at an Institution That Will Remain Nameless to protect the guilty
and also myself. And during the initial faculty-only focus group, this idea came up of a group of people who were
going to do all the work of bridging faculty theory with technologist and librarian praxis. These people would
know it all, the theory AND the praxis, and they’d mediate between people who sometimes have a hard time
communicating across those boundaries.
And the faculty just LOVED this idea, and they gleefully volunteered -- NOT themselves, of course not, they
volunteered their graduate students to do it. And having been a grad student myself, I kind of felt danger signs
there, and it turned out that I was completely right. A week later, we had their grad students in for a focus group.
And of course a lot of them were already doing that translation work, not exactly by choice, along with a giant
wodge of the actual tech work. And I don’t even need to tell you what those grad students said about how these
same faculty treated them and compensated their work, do I? I didn’t think so, no.
Librarians, we do this too. It’s TOTALLY part of the Calvinist damnation thing for us, and also part of how we treat
library school instructors. It also fuels hope labor in libraries and ESPECIALLY in archives, and the staffing anti-
pattern that both Miriam and I have talked and written about, where the library hires one person, usually a new
MLS or a grant-funded Ph.D postdoc, as Digital Humanities Coordinator and then it dumps that person in a dusty
corner with no authority and no budget and no support or community whatsoever, and then it proudly proclaims
that Now The Library Does DH! Um, no. Whatever that library is doing, it is not DH. This conference shows that DH
is in large part community, and one person stuck in a dusty corner is not community.
And it’s not okay, I have been railing about this it feels like my whole career and I’ll keep railing about it UNTIL IT
STOPS. And I do believe that a lot of times when this comes up, it comes from all kinds of make-somebody-else-
think-so-I-don’t-have-to places.

View Slide

Shashi Bellamkonda, “Blog World Expo 2008 ,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/drbeachvacation/2874078655
CC-BY
So why is don’t-make-me-think a thing in DH, and what can we do about it? I really believe
that this isn’t usually actual conscious evil, just unconsidered reﬂex. Librarians, faculty, me
myself, everybody, we just DO NOT THINK about it before it comes out of our mouths. And
it’s that not-thinking, as much as the responses themselves, that causes a lot of the
unwelcomeness that I and maybe some of you, and certainly others like me feel in DH.

View Slide

DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
If we got into this mess by not thinking, we get out by thinking, yeah? So I’ll just say, I don’t
know that I have all the answers here. I’m not even sure I’m always asking the right
questions. So make me think! Seriously, make me! And think along with me! Because from
the bottom of my heart, I don’t believe DH has to be this way, and I believe thinking, and
making one another think, is what ﬁxes it.
So I’m going to close with a few things I think we can all do to deal with this unspoken
baggage that makes me and others like me feel unwelcome in DH. And they’re pretty small
actions, which I like because in my way I’m a pretty small person. *look at self* Not
physically, obviously. But seriously, I’m no good at making big things happen, I know this
about myself because I’ve tried -- really, I’m just useless at it.
So keeping it small...

View Slide

Craig Howell, “Jeff says talk to the hand” https://www.flickr.com/photos/seat850/6074365885/ CC-BY.
NO MORE
“TALK TO THE HAND”
CONVO ENDERS
Can we all, all of us, just not with the immediate talk-to-the-hand conversation-enders? The ﬂat statements that
don’t allow for discussion?
“Open access will never work in the humanities.” That’s one. Wow, I’m not sure where to go with that. When
somebody puts it that way, they’re making it clear that it doesn’t matter what I say. So I shut up and feel
unwelcome.
“Library school sucks.” Wow, I’m not sure where to go with that either. The sllllllightly less blunt version in which
Ph.D education is automatically and forever better than library school isn’t really any better. Nor is some of the
wagon-circling I see in librarianship about the MLS. We’re a mongrel profession, we always have been, I consider it
a strength rather than a weakness, and it’s on us to negotiate that properly!
“No DH without theory” is just as bad as “no DH without coding.” It’s more complicated than both of those, right?
So why shut down the discussion of what we all have to contribute?
“I can’t because tenure and promotion,” tenure-track folks. “I can’t because I have no time,” librarians. “I can’t
because, I can’t because.” I get that a lot, I know what it really means. It really means “I don’t want to talk to you, I
don’t want to help you, I don’t want to know anything about you, I don’t even want to admit that what you do
might be important, so go away.” And that’s profoundly unwelcoming.

View Slide

Craig Howell, “Jeff says talk to the hand” https://www.flickr.com/photos/seat850/6074365885/ CC-BY.
NO MORE
“TALK TO THE HAND”
CONVO ENDERS
And one way to deal with this is to have a standard response that politely points to how hurtful that is, and asks
for a little conversational space. You’ve heard mine already, and you’re totally welcome to steal it, mine is “Wow,
I’m not sure where to go with that.” Yeah, say it with me, “Wow, I’m not sure where to go with that.”
But there’s an even better way. Last week I was in a meeting where I nerded out brieﬂy, I admit it, it was really bad
of me, and a colleague who, tech isn’t her thing, she said, “I didn’t understand a single word you just said.” And if
she’d stopped there, that would have been EXACTLY the kind of conversation-ender I’m talking about, right? But
she didn’t stop there. That’s the key. The next words out of her mouth were, “Could you back up and explain?”
And I apologized, backed up, and explained. And THAT is how it’s done, folks. I love where I work with all my
heart, and you just found out one reason why.
We can all do what my colleague did. We can all reach across gaps in knowledge, from both directions, and teach
each other, and learn from each other.

View Slide

Wilson Bentley, http://snowflakebentley.com/WBsnowflakes.htm. Public domain.
REDUCE THE EXCUSE SPACE
Another thing I think we can do is work together to do what I call “reducing the excuse
space,” inside and outside the various communities we’re part of. Reduce the rhetorical space
people think they have to make excuses about why they are special snowﬂakes who don’t
have to think. Or learn. Or listen. Or have some basic consideration for people who are not
exactly like them.
And to be honest, I think the conversation after Miriam’s keynote yesterday about training-
by-video is partly about that. Because we throw workshops that nobody comes to, but
everybody still yells and screams about how they need training, so we put together an online
video and say HA, WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE NOW -- and the thing is, they’ll still have one.
They’ll still have one! So what do you do?
I actually think the video strategy still has merit, because reducing the excuse space bit by bit
really is useful, slowly and cumulatively over time.

View Slide

http://expandingskills.dsalo.info/
And here’s one way I’m personally reducing excuse spaces, because that thing in
librarianship where lifelong learning is only for other people, I just cannot with that any more.
And some librarians put up a bazillion excuses for why they can’t learn things -- things like
DH skills! -- and a lot of those excuses are bogus, and some of them are not bogus but still
ARE surmountable with some thought and effort, so I’m writing this book to reduce some of
that excuse space.
Now, you don’t have to write a book to reduce excuse spaces. Thank goodness. All you have
to do is not let people stand pat on excuses. Instead, sympathize and suggest. “I can’t
because tenure and promotion.” Yeah, tenure and promotion’s rough, have you considered
self-archiving or blogging to raise your professional proﬁle? “I can’t because time.” Yeah,
time’s short, I ﬁnd that a newsreader helps me keep current efficiently. It’s not even about
whether they follow through, really. It’s about quietly making clear that threadbare excuses
do not cut it with us. Sympathize and suggest.
Because once we all strip ourselves and each other of the excuses, we’ll stop turning away
people that those excuses devalue.

View Slide

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
DOCUMENT
PATTERNS
Another thing we can do, that I think DH particularly is really good at, is documenting and
analyzing patterns, especially rhetorical patterns, speech patterns. If we apply this skill to
some of the things I’ve talked about today, it should reduce some more excuse spaces,
maybe even make some people think instead of falling back on their usual don’t-make-me-
think behaviors.
This here is the Timeline of Incidents from the Geek Feminism wiki, and it’s a great example
of what I mean, because before there was this, there was unbelievable amounts of “psh, you
gals, you’re just Making Things Up” about sexism in info technology and computer science
and fandom cultures, and while the sexism is emphatically not gone yet, the Making Things
Up excuse pretty much IS gone. Because the wiki has gathered a whacking lot of evidence in
one place, which both enables analysis of -- and to some extent forces recognition of -- the
problematic patterns.
So, some homework for y’all, just by way of example. Go document and analyze the
Rhetorical Absence of Librarians from the Library Space Wars, as they’re fought in the higher-
ed trade press and on Twitter and in blogs. This is totally a DH kind of thing, right? Go for it!

View Slide

WHERE
THERE
IS
ACTION
... it is
in DH!
Because for all the shade I’ve been throwing this whole talk, here’s one more thing I believe:
where there’s real thought and action about practical issues in the humanities, not to
mention real thought and action about exclusionary patterns in the academy? It’s in DH.
DHers are doing this work, here at Digital Frontiers and on Twitter and in blogs and in open-
access scholarly venues. And I think that’s hugely necessary, and I personally, from the weird
kind of liminal position I’m in, I’m deeply grateful for it.
So I’m turning everybody loose now to do more of it!

View Slide

DON’T
MAKE
ME
THINK
Thank you!
⡋ 2014 Dorothea Salo.
This presentation is
available under a
Creative Commons 4.0
International license.
Please respect licenses on
included content.
Thank you!

View Slide

Don't Make Me Think!

Don't Make Me Think!

Dorothea Salo

More Decks by Dorothea Salo

Other Decks in Education

Featured

Transcript