Thank this panel already. I want to applaud them because they make my life
immensely easy because they have provided their own chair, so I don't have anything to do, but
welcoming you and handing over to the chair of the panel, Hanfret Daller.
Yes, I wasn't actually aware that I'm the chair.
Just about all of the practical work has been done by Patrick Salle. So I have just
the pleasurable task of welcoming you to a very important topic because only if we train
digital humanists, we will actually have them. And recent experience shows that they are harder
to find than one might believe. So our topic of today is how can we make sure that we have them,
if we need them, and what they can be profit from it, even if they should not end up in
the digital humanities as such. Okay, thank you very much. As you have learned already,
the structure of the panel is quite complicated. So we have a chair of the chairs and we have a
chair. I'm the moderator, and these are the actors, let's say, and we will start with a very
fast self-introduction around. My name is Patrick Salle. I'm from Cologne, Cologne Center for E
Humanities, and we are working on curricular issues, for example, in the context of Daria
EU and Daria DE digital research infrastructures for the arts and humanities.
Hi, Elena Pirazzo from King's College London, where I am the chair of teaching
and director on digital humanities. More to go.
I'm Stephen Sinclair from McGill University in Canada, where I teach digital humanities courses.
I'm Jeffrey Rockwell from the University of Alberta. I was formerly at McMaster,
where I developed an undergraduate multimedia program, and at the University of Alberta I was,
this year I'm on sabbatical, but I was a graduate coordinator of an MA in humanities computing.
I'm Tanya Clement. I'm at the University of Texas at Austin in the School of Information there,
the iSchool. I teach digital humanities courses there, but I've also developed an undergraduate
program at the University of Maryland, where I used to be, called Digital Cultures in Creativity.
Manfred Taller, University at Cologne in Germany, where I have a chair for applied computer science
in the humanities.
Oh, sorry, is that better? Ah, Malter Weber University of Würzburg, Germany. We have
implemented a BA program and now also an MA program in digital humanities, which I've run
now for three years. I'm Susan Schreitman. I'm at Trinity College Dublin. I started last year
masters, one-year masters in digital humanities at Trinity, and we also have a newly established,
multi-institutional in Ireland, PhD program in digital arts and humanities.
Okay, thank you very much. Two people seem to be missing, that is Florence Claveau from France,
who announced beforehand that she will not make it, but she provided us with some additional
information on the situation in France, and Domenico Fiomante. I don't know why he's not here,
but maybe he will come later. I don't know. He would report on the situation Italy and Spain.
Okay, we start with our overview on the situation right now. The status quo has been announced
with the question, what's not there? So before asking what's there, we would like to know what's
not there anymore. What about programs and courses that failed and why? And while it looks like the
age is a quite young discipline to many of us, the opposite is true as well. So maybe
those of you that are, for a longer time, active in the field can say something about
things that have been there before and are not there anymore. For example, Mr. Taller, maybe.
Can you say something about what's not there anymore?
Yes, first, I might say something about why we should discuss failures or why we should keep
them back in our mind. Digital humanities has a tendency to develop according to a
wave. There's a particularly enthusiastic stage. And for some strange reasons, if you look back at
the last 40 years, usually after a couple of years, the field contracts considerably.
This is particularly noticeable when it comes to humanities teaching.
I was co-offering a book on what today would be called the Digital Humanities in Europe,
including an education section at the end of the 90s, which identified something like probably
a dozen or two dozen degree courses in Europe of one brand or the other,
which offered something in digital humanities. This, less than three, are still active.
I have to admit that that's something where people from Britain,
in particular, you might comment upon that a couple of years ago, I've been in the UK and
had the feeling that just about every second university was teaching digital humanities.
As far as I know, free of these courses survive. Now, I'm not mentioning that to depress you
but I have a feeling that at the moment, we are again at one of the
hates of the wave. That is, at the moment, digital humanities are very much alive.
Hamburg is a very good example. And the number of degree courses in many countries is rising
to an astonishing number. Germany alone, as far as I see, has about more than a dozen of them,
actually. What can we do to make sure that 10 years from now, the survival rate is considerably
better? Now, why these courses have failed is a difficult topic. I think one of the
most important of many reasons is that we have a tendency not to be all too clearly defined,
so it can become very difficult to know what to do with a digital humanities degree.
That's the reason why the groups I'm connected to try at the moment to work towards a somewhat
clearer definition, what a digital humanities education actually consists of and what it is.
Are there any other observations from the past?
Joffrey, what is your experience on things that have been there and are not there anymore?
My experience is twofold. First of all, there's a class of things that are tied to individual
personalities, and especially courses. I, for example, was lucky to participate in the
non-credit graduate course that Willard McCarty ran in the 80s at the University of Toronto,
but when he left for King's, that folded and nobody replaced him. The second thing is things
that are attached to centres. Centres often, there's a sort of a history of centres that sort
of expand, do really well, and then for various reasons disappear. What seems to me far more
robust and long-lasting are programs as opposed to courses and programs that have tenure-track
faculty, more than one tenure-track faculty member associated with them, and especially
enduring in universities, though no longer enduring forever, are departments.
I, for one, can talk about failures at King's. We had in the past a minor program on digital humanities
on the undergraduate level and a major, so you could do digital humanities together with
English history or whatever. As a minor, as a major, they're both closed, and they closed
a few years ago for lack of students, so we never had more than five students in it, and
the beginning started well, and then it just dropped. In the last year one, two students enrolled.
We have tried to understand why that happened, and I do think and to believe that one, the main
reason was because it was wrongly pitched. It was lots of research involved on that,
so it was preparing young researchers, something that we do at the master level,
but for undergraduate it wasn't really appealing. Students are 18 years old, perhaps
don't know anything about research methodology, and they are not really interested in that. They
couldn't see the reason of doing digital humanities for their career, their development,
but it's true that we haven't done, in my opinion, proper analysis of why this is wrong,
it didn't work. We're actually thinking of now opening a new program on undergraduate level,
which will be completely different, and that's one big topic I would like to discuss with you,
which will not be called digital humanities, because the convention within the faculty,
our faculty, is that you want rich students. Students will not get it because the experience
of the past told us they didn't. I don't agree with this perspective, but I want to share with you,
but we will only allow to have a program if we call it digital culture,
and that is something to bear in mind for our discussion.
Yeah, I think I'd like to talk to that as well. So the program that Matt Kirschenbaum and I
developed at the University of Maryland was also called Digital Cultures and Creativity,
and was an undergraduate program, and I think in terms of failure, if you can think of it like
that, when Matt and I both left, Matt's still at Maryland, but he left the program,
its nature changed from digital humanities more towards probably digital media, because the
professors involved with the program were more in those departments. So that could in some sense
be called failure, but at the same time, the reason that what we developed was able to flourish
in some sense was because the nature of the program in which the, the nature of the department in which
the program sits, it's an honors college, and at its core, it's interdisciplinary in nature.
So it was actually built to have professors coming in from different departments, so that was one
thing that I think worked well for that, but you could think of it as a failure because it has
changed a bit from that initial flavor, but at the same time, that sort of stays. So I wonder the
extent to which in this conversation we'll see that digital humanities, the name, isn't always
as important as what we decide are the skills or the methodologies or the theories that encompass
that work. I think I'm in the happy position not to report on failures, but to report on success.
And as I said earlier, we have a BA program, BA major and a BA minor that has run there for
three years in a row, but this program has sort of a tradition because it is not built up from
scratch, but it's built on a, so to say predecessor program that was then run by Werner Wichstein.
It was called different though, it was called, I can't remember the name, computer philology or
something like that, but in the moment when Werner Wichstein as being responsible for that program
retired, the University of Wützburg, Hayat Fortesianides, who was then responsible to set up a new
program which then was relabeled as digital humanities. But I would like to second Jeffrey's
observation, if the transition between one retired professor to the new one, the new one would not
have such a strong interest in digital humanities, I would anticipate that that tradition would have
died, that legacy would have died in Wützburg as well. So we were very happy that that tradition,
that transition was successful, that we could build upon that tradition and move it into
something new and to move it into something with a broader scope. Okay, so that we now have learned
that failure can mean transition and it's not a failure at all, we may have a look at the situation
as is right now. So what's there, what kind of degrees are in the respective countries and
in the respective cultures, let's say, and is there something like a working taxonomy
for the different kinds of degrees that are there? We had this taxonomy in the abstract, so we might
talk about degree courses which are explicitly labeled digital humanities and maybe that's the
same or something different than digital culture, I don't know, so that are explicitly labeled
digital humanities or is an actual equivalent label like humanities computing or e-humanities.
Are there degree courses which are not explicitly labeled digital humanities but are dedicated to
some form of interdisciplinary study between a humanities subject and the IT tools needed for
the field like IT methods in phonology, linguistics history, like digital history which is an MA that
exists. Are there degree courses which are flavors of library and information science degrees,
directed explicitly at humanities graduates or including in a significant amount of digital
humanities content? Are there maybe degrees courses offered at computer science faculties that are
targeting humanities students with DH flavored degrees, let's call them, and finally are there
programs or courses at the intersection of DH and other emerging fields of study as an example
digital preservation or game studies? Are these real DH programs or are they DH inflected or
do they don't have anything, maybe have anything to do with DH? So what is the situation
in the respective cultures and countries? Maybe Susan will start this time.
That's great. So I thought maybe I'd pick up on what Tanya was talking about because
our master's is called Digital Humanities and Culture and that was a very large negotiation
because they weren't happy with digital humanities even though they thought that might be what it
was. They thought no one would know what it is and the provost had a new initiative on cultural
heritage and Trinity's a city campus so bringing in the cultural heritage organizations into the
campus itself. But having said that it has worked very well because we have that as a mandate now
and so one of the most interesting and I think important aspects of the degree program is an
internship with a digital project or more likely a cultural heritage institutions and we interview
everybody coming in. We ask them what attracted them to this course and most of them say it's the
internship, it's the opportunity to work at that level in these institutions. So it actually
worked very well. Amazingly in Ireland we have two masters in digital humanities, the one I do at
Trinity and also one at Manouth that started a year earlier but also in relation to number five.
So that isn't my masters but I was just going to talk about that. So we do have
the one that you just did put up that was what I was going to talk about for number five.
We had an opportunity in Ireland to go for very big grant funding for multi-institutional PhD
programs and humanities got together and building on other initiatives in Ireland put in for this
digital arts and humanities PhD which is now finishing its first year and just like Patrick
mentioned in some of these there is quite a lot of tension between what is digital arts
and what is digital humanities, what do we have in common and what is different and when we're
doing things like hiring are there people we can find who might meet both briefs or are the two
worlds so far apart that we can. So that's a process we're going through which is actually
quite interesting because sometimes we find commonalities where we didn't expect them
and we find also differences where we didn't expect them. If anybody has PhD students,
sorry, master students interested in the PhD, I know UCC I think, I don't know if Orla's in here
still has some fellowships, some scholarships for PhD students at university too in Cork. So
I think it's closing to 31st July, they're fairly generous so if you have some students send them to
Orla or the UCC website, so that's my plug.
Thank you, Susan. Malte, will you go on for the situation in Germany?
Yeah, I can briefly report on the situation in Germany in general. So starting with my home
university, which is Würzburg, as I said we have to start at that digital humanities program in 2009
as a BA, undergraduate major and minor. So the figures are that roughly two-third of our students
choose the major and one-third the minor and what they do is that they study digital humanities in
combination with a second subject in the humanities like German studies, English studies, history,
political, social studies and so on and so forth. We've roughly 80 students now in our program
covering all three years. The program itself is run by the Institute for German Language which
might explain why the vast majority of our students has German or English but the vast
majority has German as their second or their first subject alongside with digital humanities.
In our program, we have a certain focus on German literature like editing or working with text
text recoppera but we also include offerings from other departments. So we include what the library
offers in terms of digitization, what the computer science department offers in terms of introduction
to computer sciences and so on and so forth. We are also, we've just just started a master which
we also called digital humanities. The situation in Germany in general is quite diverse. Manfred
already mentioned that. There are several universities in Germany running now digital
humanities or digital humanities related programs, all of which has almost all of which have a
different name and a different focus. So there are programs on the undergraduate levels,
there are programs on the graduate levels, so master programs and there's also the concept of,
I think this is Jan-Korsoff Meisser's invention, I'm not quite sure, but the Hamburg model of
embedded digital humanities where the students don't make a degree in digital humanities but
get a kind of digital humanities education within their traditional discipline they study like German
studies for instance. Thanks to the initiative of Manfred and Patrick they have brought all these
together and published this brochure which lists 13 universities, I think 10 or 11 from Germany,
one from Austria and one from the Netherlands also. As I say there's quite a variety, some
of the programs focus more on linguistics, some on philology, someone like the program in Cologne,
more on cultural studies more generally and some come from the computer sciences.
And the activity again initiated by Manfred and Patrick are not really to streamline all these
different programs but to find a common ground, a canonical base so that we can then see what makes
digital humanities which would allow us to be more active on the job market because we can
better explain what future employers would benefit from someone who studied digital humanities.
A personal observation from me for some reason which I haven't understood really, the institutions
in Germany that have a very strong or consolidated track record in digital humanities research such
as the universities of Trier, Göttingen or Leipzig, they have not yet established a curriculum but I guess
they are all about to at least from Göttingen and at least Trier I know that. Situation in Austria
and Switzerland Patrick asked me to report briefly on that although I don't know very much about the
other German speaking countries in this context maybe it's just the reason because there isn't
that much there. So at the University of Graz there is the Center for Information Modeling in
the Humanities and they offer an IT certificate in information modeling in the humanities which
follows this idea of embedding the digital humanities within the traditional study programs.
They participate also in something on a cross-European master program, Euromax not really in
position to report on that. Maybe Patrick knows more about that because Cologne is involved also.
Situation in Switzerland, I haven't found anything really substantial from there but I know that
things are developing in Switzerland, they're opening new positions for professorships in
digital humanities, things are about to start there as well. I would just briefly pick up
question Manfred asked in the very beginning, how do we make sure that we get people when we need
them? The program in Würzburg was quite a success or is quite a success and we are really surprised
by that. When we started that program in 2009 we had a vote among the lectures. How many students
will register for that program? I think the highest vote was for 12. We ended up with roughly 60
registrations for a program that was completely new, well not completely new but under the label
of digital humanities it was really new and for something that is a digital humanities very
specialized field where you need prerequisites from two disciplines from the humanities and from
the computer science and we didn't expect a good number of students just finishing their high
school to go and to register for such a program. So but now overall we have roughly 80 students in
the program and this shows good success and maybe we don't need to worry too much about the question,
how we get new students into such programs. Thank you very much Malte, I'm very happy to have
Domenico Fiomante here right now and it will not be difficult for you to catch up.
The only thing you missed is the self-introduction round so if you could just simply introduce
yourself and then we talked about pest failure so curses that are not there anymore. I'm sure you
could tell a story about Italy but if you could keep that short and then come to the situation
right now in Italy that would be great, thank you. Apologies for my being late, I got lost
outside and inside the building so I was back from lunch with Alan Rainier so it's all his fault,
I don't know if he's here but so I can put this on me and then I got completely lost inside the
building so sorry about this and yes well I've been organizing conferences, editing books etc in
the field of digital humanities for the last almost 15 years and I founded a conference which
is right now dead, it is computer literature and philology, it was organized the first time in
Edinburgh in 1998 and then it lasted until 2006, last session was in London. It was mainly focused
on roman's languages, the age, which is I think something we should recover and I also recently
together with an Italian group of digital humanists we founded the Digital Humanities
Italian Association, it's a national decision, the name is Informaticoministica
so humanities computing and digital culture was founded two years ago and then I also founded
together with a Spanish group, it was recently launched, it's not official yet but it will be
officially launched in September or October, a Spanish national association of digital humanities
so that's more or less my CV and about you wanting me to say something about Italian
and Spanish situation in just Italian, both okay please, of course you know I can speak especially
about Italy and of course I'm not representing Spain, I'm just here for what I knew about Spain
for being a scholar in also in spanish studies, well in Italy with the the present situation is
not so good in spite of the fact that we had the first humanities computing courses in the late
80s, first years of the 90s and I don't know if you know one thing that really makes the difference
between Italy and the rest of Europe is that all freshmen in the faculty of arts or humanities or
letters etc they must take one course in computer science, so all students regardless of their
curriculum must take one not digital humanities but computer science course, so in several
universities I would say most of the Italian universities these computer science courses which
are or can be between six or twelve European credits, the ACT, I run the ACUS I think it's the
European credit system, university system, it's between so six and twelve credits means 30 hours
or 70 hours course every year, so they must stay between between six and twelve, so I would say
that most of these of the Italian university do offer something that we could call a course
in humanities computing or digital humanities but not 100%, I would say an average of 70-80%.
So we that's the situation as far as courses are concerned, I'm not speaking about degrees,
the situation of the degrees is different, we had unfortunately we went under a number of
different university reforms as you probably know or some of you know in the last 10 years there
were at least three university reforms, so this has caused a big chaos in reorganizing and
restructuring courses and degrees in Italy and the result for digital humanities was not a good one.
The reason is very complicated I can summarize it,
basically it's a bureaucratic thing because before it was possible to make joint degrees
between different faculties, for example the faculty of computer science could join the
faculty of arts and make a joint degree in informatic homonistica like humanities computing
or digital humanities, this is not longer possible for many reasons that I'm not going to tell you.
So now what is, before we had several programs, several postgraduate programs,
several progress programs in several big universities like Florence, like a pizza,
like Venice, now what is surviving is I can tell you about the two main degrees, it's the
you know according to the Bologna system we have three years plus two, so there is a biennial,
so a first degree in informatic homonistica in pizza, which is you know was one of the
Italian hub to digital humanities and there is another flourishing master in informatica
vistuale, so it's like digital textual studies something like that, which is in at the University
of Arcena Aritzo, so that's more or less the main degree programs that are left. Then there are
other degrees which can be, I wouldn't call degrees in digital humanities but they have something in
common like ITs and languages, IT and multimedia, IT and digital culture, things like that, so we
have a number of degrees spread in different places. Right, that's the master of, another last
thing I would like to just to clarify is that master, the master degree, this master degree is
not the same thing of the master university degree which is offered within the academic
framework of the Bologna process, we call them the plus the two plus the three plus two, we call it
first level is laurea trenale and second level is laurea magistrale, master degrees are one
year or two years long and they are offered independently by universities or universities,
so virtually any university can offer a master outside the academic framework,
but these masters are mainly focused to professional training or sort of professional
training, so it's not, they do not prepare for academic post-graduate jobs or PhDs etc,
they are kind of you know offered to all kind of audience regardless of people even coming from
the industry or from the public administration for example, so that's quite a difference in
Italy, so when you hear about mastery in Italy it doesn't necessarily mean that it's within the
academic framework. So what about Spain? What about Spain? Spain, as far as I know there are,
the last degree in Spain was the humanitarian digitalis which is not anymore,
yeah the master in Maria is digitalis but this is, yeah it is suspended, it is not anymore working
at the moment, I collaborated, I contributed to this master for a couple of years, I know it
quite well, it was the first master in digital humanities in Spain, it's not anymore working at
all, it is for also for bureaucratic reasons, there are a number of courses offered in Spain,
there is a strong, for example there are summer schools offered in Spain every year
in the field of digital humanities, I'm going to participate one of them now in Malaga about
digital culture, but the problem with Spain is that the situation is very fragmented, well
even in Italy but there is a stronger tradition with the community, within the community,
so right now they are trying to make links, you know, to connect between them
through this association I was telling you before, my dad is digitalis his plan, so
there are courses offered in Universa di Deusto in Basque, Basque country, there are courses offered
in Galicia, there are courses offered at Madrid Complutense, but they are not degrees
as far as I know, thank you very much. Tanya can we go on with United States?
No, am I off? It's very empowering having a mic, I'm not on, I am on, just talking
from a distance, yes, so the United States is very big and diverse,
so I won't be doing that, well actually in truth, a couple years ago when I was developing this
undergraduate program I tried to do some research on digital humanities programs in the United States
and it's fairly unwieldy and becomes more and more unwieldy all of the time, primarily because
it's not always called digital humanities as we've already discussed, and so I was looking
around for updates to that conversation and found something on DH answers which I actually linked,
if you want to pull up, oh, did you refresh it? Can you refresh it please?
So and I just tweeted this link to this blog post, so it should be on Twitter if you've got access,
so if you go to the little link that says here,
sorry, down in the very bottom, yeah, and DH answers there was a discussion that I think is
really interesting because someone was looking for information on graduate studies and it became
a conversation about graduate studies and masters and basically everybody brought up the things that
I was going to consider talking about, including you know Matt Kirsh and Baum put together a list
of graduate programs, so if you scroll down, Matt posted a list of graduate programs that he wrote
five years ago, Loyola has an MA in digital humanities, I think at this time it's the only
actual MA on record in the United States in digital humanities, I'm happy to be corrected
if that's wrong. John Unsworth mentioned iSchools and library schools, Melissa Terrace brought up,
you know, you don't have to do it in the US, there's a link there that I've actually
refreshed in the blog post to the list of undergraduate programs that I had started
collecting a couple years ago and it goes on, but the point being Lisa Sparrow has a really
great list, so I'm not going to list everything for you now, I'm showing you where the lists are
and what I did though is I did actually make a new kind of list, there's some stuff going on
on its internet, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, if you go down that page, but what I did do in my own
blog post is I was, I'm in a library school now, an iSchool at the University of Texas Austin,
and one of the things I was interested in is how many of us, whether we're in centers or the
work that we're doing, we're actually in libraries or in archives or we're working very closely with
those institutions and that's what brought me to an iSchool, but so what I became interested in is
what are those programs out there that look like digital humanities as I perceive of it and in part
I was interested not only for this discussion but because we're trying to do a joint MSIS
masters in English at the University of Texas at Austin, so I was curious to see what other people
had done and I found that there's actually, regardless of the fact that in the library
science field there's a deep history of history of the book classes, there's also a deep history
in preparing students for work in special collections and archives, a lot of that is
usually enveloped within a library science degree, but what's been emerging lately is
are these joint degree programs with either English or history or the arts and the language
around those programs I think is actually quite interesting because it sounds a lot like the
digital humanities with the sort of joint disciplinary perspectives of either computer
science and English of archival or library science and English or history or the arts
and so I compiled this list and the other thing that I did was I put the various kinds of degrees
you might get an MLS, an MLIS, an MSIS, I think library science is also in this
state of flux where they're trying to figure out what are the actual
degree requirements that you need in order to be professionalized in this field and then
the other thing I included on the list was the number of credit hours because in some of the
places it's really just two degrees tacked on to each other and then there's some conversation,
but in a few of the places it's actually interdisciplinary work, the degree, the number of
hours seems to be less because they're actually doing that work together, so the work of library
science, the work of English or the work of history, etc., is inflecting the other. So that
was kind of what I wanted to offer to this conversation is this area of work that I think
corresponds also well with the ALT Act conversation with the professionalization of students that may
not end up being academics per se in the traditional sense of having tenured positions
as faculty but are doing academic work in other spaces within the university.
So those are kind of the things that I wanted to contribute to the conversation.
Thank you very much. So what about Canada?
So at the University of Alberta we have a joint MA, MLIS, which I saw on your list,
and it's proven very popular. The students are extremely strong. It is three years
and given how some people take a little bit more time, it sometimes is four years, but what they
come out with is both a professional degree if they decide they don't want to continue in the
academy and want to get a job, and at least in Alberta someone with good digital skills and a
library degree tends to get a job, or, and, they come out with an, they have an academic degree,
the MA, which allows them to continue academically. There are at least three of them here at this
conference, so you can grab them and ask them what they think about this and why they chose to do a
three-year degree, but it's, from our perspective and the library school, this is very successful,
the students are very strong, and they all seem to get alternative academic jobs without a lot of,
a lot of trouble. You mentioned game studies, and that is an area that has become very,
is the area we are moving into. We just, we just got through Faculty Council a certificate,
and we are hoping to have an undergraduate interactive arts degree. The reason why game
studies works very well for us is that we have a very strong group in computer science who are
interested in games, and games and game studies is one of the areas where computer scientists
understand and want to work with us, because they, they know that, you know, game design involves all
sorts of things that, all sorts of skills that the arts bring, whether it's drama, writing,
graphic design, and something like that. This, we've had a fantastic collaboration with computer
science around gaming in a way that when we take XML problems to them, they just are not interested,
or they're happy to help us, but it's a courtesy.
So, I was, I think it would be fairly safe to say that digital humanities in Canada has never
been healthier, which doesn't mean that there aren't weaknesses that I think will come up
later in the conversation, but it's important to note again that none of the programs is called
digital humanities. It's all something else. One of the things that was interesting to me about
participating in this panel that I wanted to hear more about was sort of how the bureaucratic
realities of making a program into reality may also influence their long-term sustainability
and their form and so on. In Canada, education is a provincial jurisdiction, so things change
according to, to province, but generally speaking undergraduate programs are more or less at the,
at the pleasure of the department, sometimes the faculty with rubber stamping, usually at the
institutional level. Graduate programs are much more onerous to get through. You need to prepare,
you know, an environmental scan, a market assessment essentially of what the chances of jobs are,
full CVs for all the faculty who are going to be teaching, resources, libraries. I suspect this is
similar for a lot of programs. I'm not saying that that's more onerous than what's elsewhere,
but I think it's also meant that the programs that we do have have been fairly successful in
sustaining themselves because there's a lot of planning that went into their creation.
So for instance, there's the multimedia undergraduate program at McMaster. It didn't go
through the same loops at the provincial level, but there was a substantial grant that meant that
some of that same research and rhetoric had to be developed and Geoffrey Rockwell was instrumental
in creating that. The MA in Humane Computing at the University of Alberta that Geoffrey mentioned
that I was involved in creating in 2001 and that has certainly morphed over time, but that has
remained fairly stable. There are a lot of other programs in Canada. Maybe after I put the mic
down, I'll tweet a link to a page that lists something like 30 programs that have some
thing that looks like digital humanities under a variety of names. One of the things that may or
may not come up later, so I want to be sure to mention it now, is that there have been good
examples of alternate non-degree forms of training and education. The Digital Humanities Summer
Institute, the Ray Siemens leads is a shining example, and one that I think it's important
to recognize has grown gradually and incrementally. It didn't necessarily start off as an enormous
success, but there was enough momentum to keep it going, and of course things like that camp
that are more localized, more less formal as modes of learning and training have been really
useful in the Canadian context and elsewhere in the world I know. Thank you very much.
In the UK there is not many universities at the moment offering, but there is a lot of movement
toward offering digital humanities somehow. One of the more larger programs are King's,
with 3MA, one in digital humanities, digital culture and society, and digital asset management.
Perhaps this is one of those you were mentioning, which is in between with library studies and
infrastructure studies, we do offer within our department though. There is Southampton that is
offering an MA and some BA as well, minor I think. We have specific modules.
Specific modules, as we do at the BA level, we do offer modules, we don't offer any program,
so we are solving modules for students to pick it up. We mostly have Erasmus students,
very interesting. We don't have many UK students within King's taking the modules, which is
extraordinary I think. At the UCL there is the main digital humanities and information studies,
and at Glasgow there is a master in, which is again on archives and infrastructures.
A digital culture, we do offer the MA at King's, but there is also at Goldsmith,
there is the University of the Arts, there is something that is in between digital culture
and digital economy at the London School of Economics. There is much more and seems to be
extremely successful. Also for us, in the 3MA we have, the MA that has more students is the one
in digital culture and society, in the ratio 2 to 1 at the moment and respect 3 to 1 next year
with respect to the digital humanities one. I think that should make a think a lot, and the fact that
the label digital humanities seems to be discouraging students more than anything
else, so it's something that we might think about it. The program we have to open a BA in digital
culture, as I said, is a controversial one within our department. The people in the department are
kicking against this idea because we find out that all what we do in the department is not what
we'll be taught in the SBA, so we're wondering what will happen if we're just changing,
completing the nature of what we're doing or we change, or we change the department and change
the people, what happened, we don't know. But it seems that is where the students are more likely to
go. So what is the content of that? Perhaps we are again in another wave, as Manfred was talking
before, the new wave will be much more culture and social studies than it is on cultural heritage,
and the question is, is there anything in between or that can put together cultural studies,
digital studies, and humanities? Where are we? I think it is a very delicate moment to this one,
and another area that seems to be a lot of very success is digital arts. I mentioned the
University of the Arts, where that is actually happening a lot, there is a lot of interest in
digital arts. We have also a very lively PhD programme at King's, and at the moment we have
20 students enrolled, plus at least 20 that will start within one year, we think, because they are
in a very state of progression, and many of the PhDs I know that are entering the UCL and on
digital humanities, especially with a label, and the same for the University of the Arts, there is
a lot of digital component on PhD. In spite of this problem I mentioned and the failure of the
past, actually at the moment in London, I think there is more concentration of digital humanities
than ever been in any other place, because we have at least three or four universities offering
various levels, and when we do any event in London, like the Code in Digital Humanities London,
is really very very lively, so what, lights and shades are everywhere. Okay, thank you very much.
For the quick overview of the situation right now, we had a delegate from France,
originally on our panel, and she didn't make it to here, but she provided us with in summary
other situation, from which I took off just the list of masters that are there, or the list of
degrees that are there, that she named, that would be in France, for example, five degrees, which
Florence would call digital humanities degrees, and if when you take a quick glance at it,
you can see it's always a master, so we don't have a BA here, and none of these masters is
called digital humanities, or something of that kind, but they are all kind of specialization
from another field, let's say, but I just wanted to show you that to you, to have a first impression
on the situation in France. So when we go on with our systematically structured discussion on the
field, one question that is pressing to me is, what is the age degree when we work towards
a brochure? We had to face that question, what degree is in the age degree? And we found a very
simple solution when we said, if you call it in the age degree, we call it in the age degree. So
if you want to be part of that brochure on the age degrees, and your degree is called the age
degree by you, then it's okay for us. But the question, of course, is, can we stick to that
strategy when we have a second edition of that brochure? Because, of course, there are, for example,
degrees in here, where I would say, hmm, I would have to think about whether I would call it in the
age degree, but it's in, and then the next degree comes and says, well, we are something like that,
which is in the brochure, but we are something different, and then I would ask myself again,
is this still the age? So what would be a viable answer to the question,
when we call a degree the age degree? Does anybody have to offer a good solution to that?
What must be in there to call it the age degree?
Please, just go ahead.
Well, I'm going to try to be polemical and first talk about what doesn't need to be there.
And, you know, when I think of what, I'm going to talk about graduate programs. When I think about
what a graduate program, when you're designing a graduate program, what you want to think about is
you want to design a program that prepares students to do the types of activities that
digital humanists are doing. And some of the things that they don't necessarily,
I stress necessarily before you all throw things at me, some of the things they don't necessarily
do is teach credit courses, write books, critique new media, and all sorts of activities that we end
up mapping onto graduate programs, because that's what we did. We did comps. Therefore,
we have to put people through a comprehensive exam on a canon that doesn't exist. We wrote
theses, so we have to, you know, they have to write big books, so on and so on. So I would say,
and I think Lynn Siemens in this morning, this morning in a paper she gave, began to
address and point at some of the things that digital humanists, especially in the ALT
Act track, are doing. I would say there's a series of skills that should be in DH programs,
like knowing how to work in a team, knowing about project management, how to fit into
a managed project, and eventually manage it yourself, how to work across disciplinary lines,
how to learn to learn technology. There's a series of things that should be in DH programs
that are often left out or considered sort of the fluff, the acculturation that will somehow
magically happen on the side. And I get really annoyed when I see these, you know, philosophy
PhDs where they've just changed the reading list. Thank you. Anybody else comment on that?
On that question.
I would just like to say that I didn't mention, of course, programs within faculty of pedagogy,
which is educational. As you mentioned in your notes, the educational technology,
it's full of programs using IT for distance learning, or it's a master, for example,
in my university offered by the faculty of pedagogy in distance learning. And of course,
they don't use the level of digital humanities, but they do a lot of digital humanities work.
I don't know if I should include or not include these kind of programs in a survey, in an
ideal survey. Well, to say precisely, which is closer in a degree is always very difficult.
But I think there's an abstract definition and the discussions we had on Monday in the workshop
we had on a similar topic seem to confirm that. If you look at what we expect of a digital humanist
to do, a digital humanist who has a degree which claims for somebody trained him to be a digital
humanist would abstractly be first of all to understand a humanities problem,
understand the sources or data which are needed to solve it, find an appropriate technology or
tool to assist in resolution of that problem, and actually also be fluent enough either to apply
that tool or to learn without assistance of anybody else how to apply it. So that I think
is a relatively abstract definition, which on the other hand I would like to qualify slightly
by two parameters. I'm talking exclusively about degrees now. A degree usually takes something
between two and three years of your life and the qualification in the skill spectrum which I just
described should be on both shoulders, both understanding the humanities problem and also
being technically able to solve it. And the complexity or the strength of the qualification
should take into account that you seriously believe that somebody needs two or three years
to learn what he has at the end or she.
Difficult in describing what a DH degree is, is that we still don't have a good definition of what
is digital humanities. And as some of you might know we're going to be working on a second edition
of the companion to digital humanities and part of that exercise in figuring out what goes into
new companion is how is digital humanities different from over a decade ago when we started
that project. But Jeffrey I think it's not just what digital humanists are doing that we should
be teaching but what they may be doing, preparing people for the things that we don't quite know
are coming up yet. And how do you do that? One of the things we realized as I said we interview all
our students actually did weed out oddly enough the technophobic from the master's program and
one of the potential students asked us what software we teach and my colleague and I, I don't know if
he's in here, Owen Conlin, he's here at the conference, he's in computer science, we looked
at each other and thought and thought we don't teach any software. And it kind of took the question
to give us that realization that what we do is teach about methods and theories but not particularly
about software. And so it seems to me one of the things that might be an interesting exercise and
Manfred and I talked about this the other day. I have a poster in the next session on another project
on teaching or coming up with a curriculum, a framework to develop a curriculum to teach
digital curation. And one of the things that seemed a very interesting exercise for the community
might be to come up with that framework about what is important to teach, what does it represent to
our discipline and some of the things that you mentioned Jeffrey, I suspect they should be in
there so not the particular skills, teach TEI, although of course we all know that that should
be there. But the more generalized some of the things that you were talking about, about working
in teams, things that you may not have a course on but might be embedded in the way that you go
about teaching some of the more substantive as it were methodological skills.
Sorry, the microphone was just here. Sorry, I just wanted to second what Susan said.
Although we have this discussion in Würzburg as well and thinking I'd like to think from the other
way around just think of from the perspective of future employers and from the job market
and what would they expect from graduate and digital humanities, what sort of skills does he
or she need to have, what sort of techniques and modeling and etc and so on and so forth.
So I totally agree with that we need to train skills and one of the most important skills I
would say is the process of transforming what we call culture into something computational,
something digital, so this transcoding process which involves modeling and so on.
But there's also a certain set of standards for instance, not necessarily software tools but
standards like text and coding initiatives or things like that, maybe entity relationship
modeling for more structured data and stuff like that and we're really discussing to what extent
shall we how do we say canonize that word, create a canon of these not necessarily software tools
because they don't live along but of that sort of standard methods, standards as such and
whether it wouldn't be a good idea and also helpful in the question of what is a digital
humanities degree if we could agree on such a set of standards.
As I was saying before, we're having a big discussion about what is digital humanities
and what is to teach digital humanities in our department. It seems that the discussion is dividing
digital humanities from digital cultural studies by saying digital humanities everything that is old.
In a sense we deal with past stuff, literature, stones, buildings, stuff that have been done in
the past that we're trying to digitize for digital consumption otherwise what is not is something that
is produced nowadays, so for instance the role of social media in our societies or computer games
and these kind of things. So it seems that could be a definition, we don't like that definition
because it's definitely of course simplistic and but you you may want to find interesting to think
about that. I think that's a last year the team of the digital humanities conference was the big tent
so we're trying to say okay digital humanities is what you think it is so if you think you're doing
it you're doing it and so if you it's like happiness nobody can define happiness if you
think you're happy then you are so if you think you're a digital humanities person then you probably
are and so what is a digital humanities degrees and what it should include it it's not very easy
to answer the moment which is one of the reasons you may so different with respect any traditional
discipline because if you are part of english studies you normally know you are and someone
else's will know you are it's something much more defined the borders are much more stable
even if there are borders in which you know there is always a new discipline that is created as I
know offside of that. It isn't that this definition so we don't know what it is
we know what it is but not what it isn't or where it's the borders exactly where you put
the boundaries around it and it is a problem it's nothing to say about that it is a problem because
we if we cannot be safe until at 17 18 years old what digital humanities is it's difficult to buy
for them to buy it and that's why perhaps some other label is much more recognizable for them
it's an open question I've done no it's not an affirmation line I'm reflecting along this
this line what is actually digital humanities true that we are just doing old stuff.
I had another thought is I think one thing that's essential to teach is the history of
digital humanities as a as a community that actually has a history and has some weight
behind it there's been a lot of you know in recent years just sort of this explosion of
what is being defined as digital humanities or how people are defining it but the
the tendrils that for the roots that that sort of brought that conversation to flower are
deeply embedded in this community and have a lot to say with why we're asking these questions and
the way we're asking them why the technologies we choose are the technologies we choose and the
standards etc so actually looking at the history of digital humanities as such is I think vital.
I would actually have a question particularly.
It's still off. Could you take the microphone from Tanya?
I would have a question particularly to Tanya, Stefan and Geoffrey because you described being
surrounded by many courses but also to panel in general I very much think in generic definitions
of a digital humanities that's why I gave a definition I used and I totally agree
that I mean in my own teaching it extends from design of games particularly serious games to
coding problems but I'm wondering do we not need a slightly harder definition for two purposes
at least in Europe and I thought it was following the lead of the U.S. in that regard
there's more and more tendency that you have to get your courses certified
that is 20 years ago if a university decided to teach a course on
ecology of non-existing wildlife it would have been totally allowed to do so.
Today it's supposed to undergo a formal process of accrediting which tends to become
stricter and stricter and expects that you refer to some types of standards.
Actually I think the Italian situation which Domenico described is partially related to a
similar phenomenon because in Italy as far as I understand it's rather difficult to establish
a degree course unless somebody once told me that actually the Italian parliament is
ultimately involved if you want to establish a new degree course
which can only be done if there are some standards to refer to.
And the second thing is all of us are very idealistic and enthusiastic about teaching
the digital humanities and particularly if you have the idea to teach a new course at your
university you're willing to do enormous things to make that possible but at the end of the day
you can't teach more than 24 hours a day and to set up a serious degree course which fills
the student's life for two or three years for the whole week you need a certain minimum number of
staff. So if you go to your vice principal, resident, rector, grand dragon or whatsoever
he may be called in a specific university environment they usually raise the question
wonderful if you want to do that how many resources do you need to do it seriously
and where I'm also not quite sure whether we may not need harder definitions than the ones which
are currently afloat to give productive answers to that question.
Do you want to answer? You've put your finger on one of the political realities right now far too
many programs that I've seen actually and this goes back for 10 to 15 years are hacked out of
existing stuff we had in Canada we have a college system that is different from the universities
and homeless universities the way they got new media programs is they took two years from the
local college that had web design courses and then they took two years of courses from philosophy
and sociology and they sort of mashed them together when the profs weren't talking in fact
they were in different types of unions you know somebody you know the college profs are more
hired sort of like high school teachers and so on like that those were disasters you know the
cultural differences between the colleges and the universities and then of course the provinces gave
the colleges the ability to give university degrees and so they said well forget you you know
and I still see within the university and this is exactly what you know the the dean will say
I would love an interactive arts program can you do it with all the courses we have already
so let's say the English department sociology something like that have enough courses then you
got to go and dicker with them you know in the chair of English the first thing he says is well
the dean can share my courses but they're packed because he has you know I lost five people and
he only gave me two replacements and so no way and so people are trying to do stuff on the cheap
and you get programs that uh frankly your students if they don't figure it out before they come into
the program somewhere in second year they figure out that this is being done on the cheap
that profs have no idea what's happening in other classes uh that in fact they have no idea of the
program that this class has been mashed into and uh so the political reality is you have to make
programs that way how can you minimize the damage um and how can you get to the point where the
program establishes that it is successful and the dean starts giving you those tenure track lines
and eventually maybe even a department something like that and it is uh I'd say at the end it's
it's a sort of there isn't a trick it's about talking to a lot of people going for coffee over
and over and over again and and being very nice uh Stefan has had experience with this too yeah I
mean I would say that um I'm I have a split personality on that um I think institutionally
and sort of at an organizational level um although less stringent than what it sounds like you're
talking about you know there are important reasons for defining what things are uh and what
the value is and with how how we're being uh how the integrity of of the humanities are being is
being uh respected and so on and I think that I took that very seriously when we were developing
the uh humanities computing ma at Alberta in 2001 because it seemed that there were other programs
doing some things but it seemed so significant at the time that we were developing we were we were
in a sense choosing a canon you know with all the problems that the word canon has but we were
choosing what was and what what was what should be studied by students who would be coming out with
humanities computing um but I have to say that since then I I've I've um adopted a much more
pragmatic uh laissez-faire attitude and I you know it may be um part of a trait that is one of the
genes of digital humanists that you know at least some of us are you know just prefer to do things
rather than um uh endlessly um talk and theorize things and and I have to say that in my own
teaching now in digital humanities I say that I'm teaching digital humanities but I'm I'm not
concerned about um about uh matching a bunch of different things I'm concerned about um teaching
an interesting um useful um um fruitful course for for students and and that's it so you know
personally I have probably a different opinion than um at a at an institutional level where
things were there other um factors to consider thank you very much so in our logic we have
talked about the past we have talked about the present so now it's up for the future
maybe we can be very very short about that because we have addressed I think most of the
questions already before uh so what's coming up who of you is actually working on the creation
of a degree can I see some hands there's a lot of people actually working on degrees that's what I
expected to summarize for example just give an example in in german situation would be like that
as far as I can see that we have two tendencies one and tendency is to create extremely specialized
MA programs like uh digital scholarly editing or something like that on the other hand I can see
at least three or four universities that are going to create full-flavored complete BA MA
programs that are called digital humanities that would be the tendencies in german than I see
what about the other countries and cultures
and the question is it a good tendency and a bad or bad tendency that you see
but please be short about it yes as far as I see you describe uh visit creation uh
but completely correctly uh where I should point out particularly to American and British friends
that uh there's been a frequent misunderstanding in Europe uh we moved to the BA we and that
includes germany portugal and a couple of countries in between and a couple in the other direction
we moved from different university systems to some misunderstanding the BA MA model uh which
is called the colonia model and uh the traditional assumption as I learned in the UK is that a BA by
definition is a very broad program which leads to many many different specializations uh while
at least in Portugal and uh Germany where for some reasons I know the situation very well
both BA's uh all most of the BA's became so specialized that it's actually very difficult
to continue it with anything but the MA at the same university and at the moment we are in a
situation where that changes where the MA's are and become increasingly specialized but are open
to students from very different uh BA's I think that uh the tendency to include uh to
strengthen fully fledged BA's in the field of digital humanities
may be relatively specific to germany uh and the second specificity in germany is
of the four BA programs which called themselves some variant of digital humanities
over of the four universities which support at least one BA program which could be summarized
under digital humanities two of them support them in the uh in in the computer science faculty
Anybody else?
Yeah I still I still wonder whether we asked the question from the from the correct direction
and uh to give you an example we made a survey um among our students in Würzburg and uh that
like 880 students answered that question uh would you know a potential employer and only 37 could
say yes I would know the company or institution or someone who would employ me with that
qualification so uh leaving 62 of the students totally unknown about yeah the chances and the
possibility of a digital humanities gradiate on the job market and I think we really should
start thinking from that direction also and not think too much about and I've got this impression
creating little clones of ourselves who support us in our research but think a little bit more
about the the perspective and the chances of of our students in the job market
I would like to answer to this point particularly because personally I agree with you on the other
hand though I was in March I was invited to um workshop in Brown University and I actually
say the same thing on a panel about education and um there was one piece I think that answered to
me well why nobody when students enroll in faculty like I don't know in English in history
they don't ask which is the job they will do after because the reason they they enroll is
not for the job is for gaining more cultural awareness to learn more about a subject they
will think about the job later why is us that have to justify our existence by producing
someone that is spendable immediately on the market it's a provocation and it made me think
a lot of to say um on the other hand I do think we have a responsibility toward the students that
we teach to give them something that will provide them an occupation and I feel a moral uh compelling
reason to do that on the other hand it is true that perhaps we should um be less concerned that
on that and more about on the content on the awareness on the capability evaluation of a
society that is going digital and all this beautiful fantastic stuff but it's a provocation of course
my question is how we should proceed in the last 10 minutes there are three
possibilities either we go on with our guiding questions where we would have questions on
structures questions on education below the explicit degrees and questions on curricula
and content that would be a possibility one then we would have the possibility to focus on what has
been raised lately the question why what what for and what about the job market and the search
opportunity would be to to open the discussion to the audience you are voting for number three
there's another vote okay so if there are any questions or remarks from the audience
we would happily take them up and if not the panel will go on discussing do we have a mobile
microphone
okay now and this is i'll start off by saying this is a thought exercise i'm not sure that i'm
going to advance the argument that i'm about to lay out or even that it should be advanced but
i was sparked partially when tanya was showing the list of of uh programs kind of the the the
hybrid programs that she has been discovering uh and and also there at the end with with Elena's
comment uh the i know many of you on the panel and i know that none of you came from dh programs
and i dare say that the vast majority of people at the conference didn't come out of dh programs
uh so how might we effectively respond to the argument that we don't need dh programs
but that instead the humanities programs need to integrate dh kind of piecemeal maybe modularly
in the things that they're already doing and even uh to those students who eventually won't end up
in academic it also not even the alt act but the non-act can they benefit from us kind of getting
outside of the idea of having dh programs as a whole so that would have been what we would
have been discussing on that slide if i get your point so who wants to comment on that i have a
possibly controversial thing to say um i don't know if you need to do dh
so i we're proposing this program uh this joint degree with the english department and um
um one of the associate dean on my side said well we should make this a digital humanities
program it should be an ma msis focus on digital humanities and my english department compatriot
and and i decided well there are people that might want to do this work that don't want to do digital
humanities so we didn't want to call it that um i can also imagine people going through and getting
an english degree where they don't necessarily have to do what what i think is digital humanities on
the other hand there are literacies that possibly everybody should have so that would be my response
i was going to say something very small which is that um
we don't actually come from dh programs if that's if that's the first part of what you're saying
okay
i mean
well i would offer two questions why we would train them
on the one hand simply because there are people needing them
i mean uh if you are involved in recruiting processes of projects who want to apply
it in a very broad sense at the humanities institutes it's usually a disaster you get the
strangest people turning up who have heard about interesting things and it's extraordinarily
difficult to get anybody qualified for a even remotely challenging problem a project and
we don't have the time that in each institution who wants to apply it people can train themselves
over five to six years when while they are supposed to work against the deadlines of
uh funded projects i mean there's a very serious problem the other problem is that i really think
we are losing extraordinarily much uh by being unable to build up some canon of knowledge
i mean my favorite example is uh as you all know uh dates as in calendar date
in the humanities are very frequently intervals uh i have never counted them but i'm absolutely
sure that i've listened over the last 40 years to 200 conference papers who gave the interesting
fact that this was a problem and how to overcome it in a certain situation and i'm very much afraid
that at the moment there are five or six people working on that problem again
until we are able to establish a canon which can be handed from on this repetition will
be going on and on and on and on i have a slightly different answer which is passion
i really really am fascinated by these questions and if i can find a way and if i can connect with
the desires of students who want to study these then i think that is good i think they will learn
from it and i will learn from it um and i i just find myself far more passionate to teach
uh we don't we don't as stephan said we we don't call it digital humanities it's not the name of
the program it's not like that but uh we still do that sort of stuff if i can if i can uh connect
with the students and convey that passion um i think that is a benefit to society and is something
that i'm willing to make the case to deans and so on like that i'm willing to be audited by everyone
i'm willing to sort of fit within the rules but i do feel passionate about this and i've seen
students get passionate about it and uh and that should be good enough
there is also the argument that the discipline is not a discipline if it cannot there isn't a
program uh at university so there's also a self-definition of what we do and this may be an absurd
argument but in the meantime it's true that to do what we do we move down from our disciplines
for our background and we have created a discipline which while we feel at home
my discipline is italian renaissance studies um but it was now it is digital humanities it's
true that i don't i haven't studied at a university but i moved and contribute to create that that's
why i want to teach that i want to teach what i've learned in the process and i do think students
like that um and the passion that is in this question as as Geoffrey mentioned is what is
leading these programs i think okay i think there is still time for one last panel triggering
input of any kind as a question remark statement
okay uh it's a really short question because you already raised it about cultural heritage
and game studies how far as a digital humanities and there was some comments on that uh cultural
heritage is quite clear for me uh but i was wondering i was talking with somebody from the
university of homburg on monday where is actually taught the story in the game studies i mean the
informatics behind this is quite clear but the story like a drama is something really of
digital humanities and i was wondering where it is taught thank you
well um the interesting thing i was part of a project that uh interviewed a lot of game designers
and so on like that about the relationship they wanted with uh what sort of what sort of skills
they wanted in students the relationship they wanted with for universities and so on that
one of the things that comes out is they do not think of the humanities they will tell you that
there are three types of jobs and two of them should be jobs that humanists should be prepared
for in some fashion other level designers and writers and then they'll tell you that we do not
take students from creative writing programs because they cannot we take they don't know how
to write for games they're trained they're trained on a sort of renaissance genius writing model of
you go away somewhere and you come up with some great statement they take technical writers out
of colleges apparently for their writing i don't know if this is quite answering your question but
there is a there's a mismatch between what in theory we should be our students should be
prepared if they want to to do and what the games uh the game industry is is looking for i think
that is changing it used to be that game companies would only hire people who had written their own
games so some guy out of high school didn't even go to college wrote something for the cinclaire
whatever that's who they hired now they were all telling us we want university especially in french
canada they want people of university degrees they want a certain amount of breadth they also
of course want people to know the uh to know the skills now i know i've not answered your question
i've just wandered off topic there but uh the the the intersection with the game studies community
is very interesting uh and uh you look at the game the types of jobs you talk to the designers
about the types of jobs and programming is only part of it if you talk about them the cycle
typically a game company they'll hire a lot of programmers to build the engine
then they'll fire them by the way game design is going the way of film which is not big companies
but it's lots of subcontracting so then they fire them then they start hiring the writers and then
they fire them once they've got a good story but it's more than it's not really a story the writing
covers a lot of other things and then they hire then they hire the level designers and the graphic
designers and then of course the marketers and so on so and so on and uh and companies sort of
beef up and then get smaller like architecture firms uh which then means of course our students
need to be really good at essentially being freelancers as if you were in the film industry
and were a camera person you know you've got a job for six months or three months and then you're
without a job and then you've got to pitch yourself or something like that
thank you very much uh does somebody on the panel want to give a concluding statement since
the time is theoretically over but i think we would have the time for concluding statements
if that's not the case then we will stay in time oh one thing uh while during the panel there was
a couple of tweets that came and i saw that one was about phd who is the phd in digital humanities
how he works does he has to come from a ma ba in digital humanities or from another discipline
and do it and that that was a question um i don't have an answer to that but at king's we have both
so um it works either way i don't know if there is anything else but for sure phd and research
teaching research in digital humanities should be another panel next year perhaps
for the phd in ireland which which i mentioned is cross institutional we don't expect the students
to have a a master's in digital humanities or ba but but if they do that would be grand
but since there would be very much in the minority we don't expect them to pray the same
i'd like to just close with saying i appreciate and on twitter have seen there's another
appreciation for um jeffrey's comment about the passion for digital humanities and how that drives
all of us even though we're not we're coming at it from different directions so i think
um that would be a nice thing to leave on i would agree to that so i would like to thank you all
for being here and thank you thanks the audience and i would close it now thank you