Labor, Service, & Digitization Projects

deadline for submissions: 
September 20, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies
contact email: 

The roundtable addresses the field of 18th-century-centered digital humanities and digitization projects through the lens of labor, service, and alt-ac career prospects. Extending out of previous ASECS panels on Transkribus-a-thons, challenges in digitization, and collaborative work in DH, this roundtable proposes to focus more closely on these issues in specifically graduate and early career contexts, to ask questions such as “What are the skills required for digitization projects?” and “Do networking/alt-ac skills building opportunities in digitization outweigh the labor demands?

This roundtable seeks to have discussions surrounding digitization projects, and the nature of labor in such service-oriented projects, and welcomes topics ranging from but not limited to:

  • The rise of meta-data and digitization projects in eighteenth-century studies
  • Opportunities for alt-ac career paths and skills development
  • DH projects that pave the future for academia
  • Questions of labor, service requirements, and care when it comes to inputting metadata, interfacing, and digitizing for larger grant-funded projects
  • The problems of crowd-sourcing free labor in DH projects (for example, with the Bentham Project)
  • “Publish or Perish” mindset versus collaborative, student-centered engagement with DH tools and project “publications”

Keywords: Alt-ac/Academic Adjacent, Digital Humanities, Labor/Business, Service

 

 https://asecs.org/sessions2025/#PanelAbstracts