DH Grad Students! What Do You Want?

Seriously now, tell me. I'm currently a Member at Large on the executive of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, and I've decided to do some work to help grad students.

I'm not, actually, a grad student, and I haven't been since, err, 2004. But I was a grad student in Digital Humanities (or "Humanities Computing" as we used to call it when I was a youngster) from 1997-2004, over two degrees and in two universities. From the wonderful, invigorating panel discussion on graduate issues in DH at last year's Congress in Waterloo, I learned that ... much has changed since my time, but also, depressingly, other things have not changed at all.

Some issues I discern:

• Alt-ac: is it really a thing? A desirable thing? How to plan for this career path? How to advocate for this work as "alternatively academic" rather than "alternative to academic"?
• Dissertations: Should dissertation or completion requirements devised, in my discipline, for literature students investigating their ideas in prose be the same ones we use to assess or train digital humanists? What is the role of the built object in capstone work for DH PhDs? How about programming? Or soldering? 
• Double-disciplining: It is still true that digital humanists, particularly students, have to do twice the work for half the credit--not just in the dissertation, but in everything. We are expected to have full knowledge of the primary discipline that house and credentials us, as well as full knowledge of the emerging canon of thinking and range of practice of DH.
• Can you fix my printer / build the department website / manage our Facebook page / explain the cloud to the department? Even DHers hired into academic positions may find themselves being asked to do kinds and numbers of tasks other professors or students are not asked to do.
• RA work: how is being a research assistant in DH different from standard RA positions? Are there some best practices here? How to explain to others the value or scope of this work, and the skills unique to these positions? (Like project managment, collaboration, technical work, etc.)
• Unreasonable job ads: "Department of Something seeks expert in Medieval Whatsit, an expertise in composition theory, and a funded multimillion dollar research project in DH." Many hiring departments do not seem to know quite how to hire a DHer into the tenure track, and what it is reasonable to expect. Needs some advocacy?
• Access to research equipment, datasets, etc. This work often requires high-power tech, beyond the index cards (or Scrivener) that other humanist grad students need to get their work done. How to fund this?
• Training: Nuff said.
• Grad programs in DH: what should these look like? Are they a good idea? In what ways and for whom?

What do YOU think needs addressing. And how can I (and by extension, CSDH) help?

Drop some comments; tweet this and share with your network; beat the bushes from some ideas and some interested parties.

Give it your best shot, and I'll give it mine.

What makes a great conference?

I'm not yet home from Theorizing the Web 2011, just sitting in the Starbucks at the Marriott wondering what it is that made this conference so awesome. Because it was awesome: I ran out of paper in my notebook from writing so much down.

I'm thinking it's the grad students.

I go to a lot of conferences and, if I may be frank, was rapidly becoming disenchanted, nay, jaded, about the whole system.

What makes me jaded about conferences:

- The panels are unfocused, so usually there's only one paper of the three--or, god help me, four--that I actually want to see
- There are way, way too many concurrent panels, so that the conference has 400 people at it, but each session has 4 people presenting to 7 other people
- The panels start and finish late, throwing off my eating / peeing / time management
- The papers run overtime
- The speakers read excerpts from an article, so it's too dense and too long, and hard to decipher
- The speakers have prepared their presentations on the plane, and it shows
- The panel chair won't actually stop papers that run too long, so at the end, there's no time at all for questions
- There's never enough break time to actually talk to people and network
- There's no food, so when there are breaks, everyone scatters to the wind: no time to actually talk to people and network
- Sometimes, people won't talk to you if they don't already know you
- Often, people skip out on vast chunks of the conference to do the meeting and networking they otherwise have no time for

What was awesome about TTW2011

- The panels were very focused
- People actually attended panels, and the keynotes, for the whole day. My paper was in the last session of the day, right before the keynote, at 5pm, and there were 40 people attending.
- All the panel rooms were in one hallway, leading to group cohesion and chance conversations
- It was one day long.
- People were very friendly: I suspect this might be because of Twitter, which breaks the ice. If we follow each other online, I'm more likely to walk up and introduce myself, because you've already indicated some sort of interest in my acquaintance, or my work.
- There was food in the morning, and food at night. And a party with a live band and beer in Rubbermaid-bucket coolers.
- Most importantly, perhaps: people put a lot of effort into their presentations, with the result that they were professional, and clear, and on point. Some even managed *funny*.

I am impressed at the level of smarts, research, and preparation of all the talks I went to. Did some people learn the hard way that 42 slides take more than 15 minutes to discuss? Probably. But the slides were really, really good, so I assume that's a rookie mistake of over-ambition, which I'm kinda inclined to forgive readily.

(It's very easy for me to tell other people they went overtime: we only had two speakers on my panel, so co-panelist and I had the luxury of 25-30 minute presentations, with still lots of time for questions--and what great questions!)

So. The upshot is this: I'm going to go to more conferences where graduate students predominate on the program. In new media studies, where something new in the tech or theory or cultural realm pops up on the radar almost faster than the speed of scholarship, it makes sense already to see what the kids are up to. Beyond that, though, I think grad students just put more effort into their papers. As a result, they present better work that's more valuable to me in my own research, and that's the point, right?

Professors, do you think we can step up our game?