In December 2021, librarian and technologist Andromeda Yelton published “’Just a few files’: technical labor, academe, and care” in response to an academic article that dismissed the work required to host digital humanities projects. “...[T]he labor conditions of your techies’ work lives are an important part of that [project] plan” she argues, after breaking down the actual time, knowledge, and equipment needed to host project files. Yelton’s argument is part of a growing conversation about the (in)visibility of people who do digital labor and the corollary demand to no longer ignore the people who keep academia, including the DH world, running. The 2022 DSSN Symposium takes this argument and conversation as its topic. For this symposium, we’ve invited scholars who have advocated for a focus on the labor required to implement and sustain many of the projects that live in the digital world. Join us as we discuss how this “invisible” labor has been there all along.

 

Speakers:

Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University, and has been involved with the international digital humanities community since 2007. Quinn currently serves as the co-President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), and is the co-founder of numerous digital humanities groups, including the Data-Sitters Club, a multilingual, feminist pedagogical project; DH-WoGeM for women and gender minorities in DH; and Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), an emergency web and data archiving initiative in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Professor Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He served as President of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2019 to 2022. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway and was a professor in the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. His research areas are electronic literature, with a focus on digital poetry, and the history and strategic growth of the field. He’s known for I ♥ E-Poetry, the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, “Third Generation Electronic Literature” and the Antología Lit(e)Lat, Volume 1. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.
 
Opening remarks and moderation by Natalia Estrada (she/they), Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Co-Director, Digital Scholarship Studio and Network (DSSN), University at Buffalo