Digital Humanities at CUNY. Building Communities of Practice in the Public University
10.13125/americacritica/4516
Il saggio presenta una riflessione sulla mia esperienza nelle Digital Humanities al Graduate Center (GC) della City University of New York (CUNY) al fine di confutare il luogo comune secondo cui il punto di intersezione tra le scienze umanistiche e quelle computazionali richieda una robusta infrastruttura tecnologica e sia, di conseguenza, di difficile applicazione nelle istituzioni pubbliche che operano spesso in regimi di austerità. Al contrario, la mia esperienza suggerisce come lo sviluppo di “Comunità di Pratica” orientate allo studio e all’applicazione delle DH possa costituire una risorsa di valore soprattutto per le università pubbliche, grazie all’effetto a cascata che possono generare sia all’interno della comunità accademica sia di quella locale. A prova di ciò, il saggio analizza due progetti che dipendono dalla tecnologia e che interagiscono con essa in modo critico: il CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA), un progetto sviluppato nell’ambito di un seminario in DH al GC, e QC Voices, un’iniziativa pedagogica sistematica presso uno dei CUNY college.
application/pdf
2532-6724
4516
2
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urn:nbn:it:unica-26473
Stefano Morello
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
América Crítica
American studies
Digital Humanities at CUNY. Building Communities of Practice in the Public University
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap
4
Dossier: An Epistemology of Doing. Digital Humanities and American Studies
2020-12-26
2020-12-24
2020-12-30
2020-12-30
113-122
1
Stefano Morello
2020/12/26
10.13125/americacritica/4516
113
The Graduate Center, CUNY, United States
2532-6724
2
American studies
122
urn:nbn:it:unica-26473
Digital Humanities at CUNY. Building Communities of Practice in the Public University
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap/article/download/4516/4612
4
                         América Crítica 4(2), 113–122, 2020, ISSN: 2532-6724, https://doi.org/10.13125/americacritica/4516




                 Digital Humanities at CUNY.
     Building Communities of Practice in the Public University
                                                            Stefano Morello1
                                                1   The Graduate Center, CUNY, United States

                                                              Received: 10/04/2020
                                                              Accepted: 13/11/2020




 Abstract—In this essay, I reflect on my experience working in the field of Digital Humanities at The Graduate
Center (GC) of the City University of New York (CUNY) to refute the misconception that the point of intersection of
humanities and computation is dependent on robust technological infrastructure and, therefore, outside of the reach of
underfunded public institutions. On the contrary, my tenure as a GC Digital Fellow suggests that the development of
DH communities of practice can be an especially valuable asset for public universities, due to the waterfall effect they
can produce for both the academic and the local community. Finally, I present evidence of second and third-order
effects of the GC’s institutional DH culture by briefly introducing two projects developed at CUNY that both rely
on and engage critically with technology: the CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA), a GC class project, and
QC Voices, a structured initiative established at one of the four-year CUNY colleges. — Digital humanities, digital
praxis, critical university studies, community of practice, American studies.

 Abstract—Il saggio presenta una riflessione sulla mia esperienza nelle Digital Humanities al Graduate Center (GC)
della City University of New York (CUNY) al fine di confutare il luogo comune secondo cui il punto di inter-
sezione tra le scienze umanistiche e quelle computazionali richieda una robusta infrastruttura tecnologica e sia, di
conseguenza, di difficile applicazione nelle istituzioni pubbliche che operano spesso in regimi di austerità. Al con-
trario, la mia esperienza suggerisce come lo sviluppo di “Comunità di Pratica” orientate allo studio e all’applicazione
delle DH possa costituire una risorsa di valore soprattutto per le università pubbliche, grazie all’effetto a cascata che
possono generare sia all’interno della comunità accademica sia di quella locale. A prova di ciò, il saggio analizza due
progetti che dipendono dalla tecnologia e che interagiscono con essa in modo critico: il CUNY Distance Learning
Archive (CDLA), un progetto sviluppato nell’ambito di un seminario in DH al GC, e QC Voices, un’iniziativa ped-
agogica sistematica presso uno dei CUNY college. — Digital humanities, digital praxis, critical university studies,
community of practice, American studies.


                                                                           sketched a parallel between the graduate student experi-
                                                                           ence and the quest of the protagonist of P. D. Eastman’s
I NTRODUCTION                                                              children book Are You My Mother? Born in an empty
                                                                           nest, Eastman’s hatchling bird embarks on a journey to
     t a recent open house event for the PhD Program
A      in English at The Graduate Center (GC) of the
City University of New York (CUNY), a faculty member
                                                                           find his missing genitor. The search brings the baby
                                                                           bird to ask a number of animals and animated objects
                                                                           if they are his mother. The hatchling’s quest resonates
                                                                           with that of a graduate student, the then-Deputy Exec-
  Contact data: Stefano Morello, s.morello@me.com                          utive Officer of the program noted: bouncing between
114                                                                                        América Crítica 4(2): 113–122

disciplinary homes, methodologies, formal and informal         found myself in need of what DH had to offer to my dis-
mentors, and para-curricular activities, until they find       sertation project that I went back on my steps. In the fall
their figurative nurturers and with them, their academic       of 2017, I had the opportunity of laying my hands on un-
homes. The metaphor immediately resonated with me.             earthed archival material documenting the punk scenes
While my commitment to American Studies has been               and the subcultural formations at the heart of my disser-
consistent throughout my – yet short – academic career,        tation. Lawrence Livermore, countercultural figure and
both the inherently speculative nature of scholarly re-        co-founder of the Berkeley-based record label Lookout
search and the interdisciplinary anatomy of my work            Records, had made his zine collection and a number of
have pulled me in manifold directions during my time as        artifacts from his days in the East Bay available to me.
a Ph.D. student. In addition to genuine intellectual cu-       With an eye to the increasing institutionalization of punk
riosity and the need to overcome theoretical or practical      (the acquisition of punk ephemera by academic institu-
research challenges, what further prompts graduate stu-        tions that often de-facto prevents non-academic subcul-
dents to pose the proverbial “are you my mother?” ques-        tural participants from accessing the material), I became
tion to different actors, methodologies, and disciplines,      intrigued by the idea of making the content of Liver-
are the unstable nature of the job market that increas-        more’s archive available to both scholars and subcultural
ingly requires applicants to be fluent in multiple fields      participants through an open access digital archive, mir-
and disciplinary areas, and a desire for community in a        roring my commitments to work with and for the com-
context of ever-growing academic alienation.                   munity and to produce public-facing scholarship.
    Since the early stages of one’s graduate career at             My first knock on the door of DH – when I first asked
the GC, students, especially those willing to break out        myself if it were, indeed, my metaphorical mother –
of their disciplinary bubbles, are typically exposed to        was driven by pure utilitarian intentions: I viewed DH
more opportunities than they can chew on. In the fall          as a means (a set of methodologies and tools) to reach
of 2015, when I began my PhD program, I was intro-             an end (curating and publishing Livermore’s digital col-
duced to manifold formal and informal resources to its         lection). However, what I discovered in the process of
students through a number of orientations that kicked          developing the East Bay Punk Digital Archive (EBP-
off the academic year. Such initiatives included student       DA) and through my further involvement with the DH
and faculty-led cross-departmental research groups, cer-       community are otherwise modes of academic engage-
tificate programs, and intra-institutional centers geared      ment: collaborative, praxis-driven, and public-facing.
towards supporting different approaches to academic re-        What follows is an account of my DH history at the GC
search, often through the employment of graduate stu-          (CUNY).1 Rather than producing a self-referential nar-
dents. I was first exposed to the field of Digital Human-      rative of success, I aim to refute the misconception that
ities (DH) in the kinds of overwhelming circumstances          the point of intersection of humanities and computation
that make new student orientations almost disorienting.        is dependent on robust technological infrastructure and,
Completely oblivious to over fifty years of scholarship        therefore, outside of the reach of underfunded public in-
in the field and parroting some of my colleagues’ im-          stitutions. I argue, on the contrary, that DH hubs are not
pressions, I distinctly remember dismissing what was           predominantly dependent on vanguard technology. The
being demoed at the event (distant reading, data visu-         development of DH communities of practice can be an
alization, and mapping projects) as an emphasis of form        especially valuable asset for resource-scarce public uni-
over content. Besides, because of my slight familiar-          versities, due to the waterfall effect they can produce for
ity with computer programming and my confidence in             both the academic and the local community.
my own digital literacy, I did not see the point of fur-
ther investing in learning more digital skills when there      GCDI       AND THE         D IGITAL F ELLOWS P RO -
was so much theory I had to master in my actual field          GRAM
(as a non-literature major in college and first-generation
                                                               The GC is the principal doctoral-granting institution
college student, I was especially affected by impostor
                                                               of the CUNY system, the largest public urban univer-
syndrome).
                                                               sity system in the United States, comprising 25 cam-
    Despite my appreciation for the liveliness of the DH
                                                               puses: eleven senior colleges, seven community col-
community that surrounded me (I had often admired
                                                               leges, one undergraduate honors college, and seven post-
the warm and welcoming environment that character-
ized their events), it was not until two years later, when I   1   See East Bay Punk Digital Archive at www.eastbaypunkda.com.
Stefano Morello, Digital Humanities at CUNY                                                                                            115

graduate institutions. As of 2019, the CUNY system                    ity” (Rhody 2019). In other words, by taking a foun-
counted more than 275,000 enrolled students (CUNY                     dational, as opposed to an instrumental approach (i.e.,
2019). Not unlike other institutions, the GC offers                   teaching students how to deploy a particular tool for
training in DH methods through departmental or cross-                 a specific end), the DRI aims to teach its participants
departmental courses (including the Interactive Technol-              a forma mentis, rather than merely a modus operandi.
ogy and Pedagogy certificate, a three-course sequence                 What I found most valuable, aside from being intro-
that offers interdisciplinary training in technology and              duced to a number of tools, was indeed the institute’s
pedagogy), fellowship programs, and para-curricular                   pedagogical model. Instead of relying solely on the ex-
workshops. Within this constellation, GC Digital Ini-                 pertise of the instructor, the Digital Fellows fostered a
tiatives (GCDI) is an intra-institutional initiative led by           kind of learning-in-common by facilitating exchanges,
Lisa Rhody and Matthew K. Gold that offers opportu-                   relationship-building, and skill-sharing among learners
nities to learn, support, and promote digital scholarship.            from across the disciplines. In doing so, the institute
The program is run by a group of graduate fellows, fac-               put into practice a set of common values that digital hu-
ulty, and staff and central to its mission is the aim to              manists aspire to attain in concordance with its goals.
build and sustain a community around the shared idea of               In her popular essay in Debates in Digital Humanities,
a “digital GC,” envisioning and actively devising pro-                Lisa Spiro identified the values that inform DH ethos as
ductive, inclusive, and ethical ways to integrate tech-               openness, collaboration, collegiality and connectedness,
nology in the curriculum and in the research process.                 diversity, and experimentation (2012, 22).
The majority of GCDI’s activities are conducted through                   My positive experience as a DRI participant and the
the Digital Fellows program, “an in-house think-and-do                autodidactic efforts that ensued (and eventually led to
tank for digital projects, connecting Fellows to digital              the development of the EBP-DA, with the support of the
initiatives throughout The Graduate Center” (GC Digi-                 New Media Lab, a vital node of the DH ecosystem at
tal Fellows n.d.). The Digital Fellows team, a diverse                the GC that provides access to technology and various
group of doctoral students, offers events, workshops, of-             forms of support to students and faculty seeking to in-
fice hours, faculty consultations, week-long institutes,              tegrate digital media into traditional academic practice)
and community-based working groups.                                   prompted me, shortly thereafter, to apply for the Dig-
    My first practical encounter with DH took place                   ital Fellows program myself. Whereas the majority of
through GCDI’s Digital Research Institute (DRI), a free               DH graduate fellowships in the United States offer ei-
week-long in-house training course usually held and                   ther formalized training (whereby individual or group
taught the last week of Winter Break by the Digital Fel-              projects are developed, often in response to an artifi-
lows to staff, students, and faculty of the GC. Taking a              cial prompt) or financial and technical support to bring a
foundational approach, the institute introduces its par-              project of one’s own design to realization,3 being a Dig-
ticipants to technical skills and a conceptual vocabu-                ital Fellow is a rather unique employment opportunity
lary that serves as a basis for further learning and en-              that puts graduate students in the position of both re-
gagement in the field.2 As pointed out by Rhody in a                  ceiving from and giving back to their community. Each
blog post on the Digital Humanities Research Institute                fellow joins the program with a specific set of skills and,
(DHRI, a scaled-up version of the DRI aimed at train-                 usually, a DH project that they are developing as part
ing faculty from US universities with the goal of setting             of their academic pursuit. While graduate fellows re-
up similar courses in their home institutions), “know-                ceive training and support towards accomplishing their
ing the underlying technologies will inform that choice               research goals, the fellowship allows them an extraordi-
and help with troubleshooting problems, asking for help               nary amount of freedom: in concert with the team they
on forums, collaborating with programmers and design-                 decide what tools, methods, and outputs are most con-
ers” (Rhody 2019). This pedagogical approach “also                    ducive to their professional formation and desirable to
leads to second and third-order effects as students teach             different constituencies of the GC, as well as how to
themselves and others, builds confidence, and flexibil-               3   As of 2020, some of the distinguished centers that focus primarily
                                                                          on supporting and developing faculty projects include the Mary-
2   The curricula for the 2020 edition included: workshops in Com-        land Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the
    mand Line, Digital Ethics and Data, Git, Python, Text Analysis,       University of Maryland, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for His-
    Introduction to R, Data Manipulation, Data Visualization, Map-        tory and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University,
    ping, Omeka, HTML and CSS and Platforms, and Twitter/API.             and the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (MA-
    See https://gcdri.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ for further information.       TRIX).
116                                                                                          América Crítica 4(2): 113–122

learn them, and how to disseminate the knowledge they         both the classroom and in scholarly research (whereas
produce. In other words, the program offers fellows an        a platform such as Omeka offers an invaluable oppor-
opportunity to learn while producing output for use of        tunity for cultural preservation with little to no institu-
the community (rather than an artificial final product), in   tional funding),4 the workshop has since transcended
the form of workshops, working groups, events, and col-       the DRI setting and has become a staple of the Digi-
laborative projects. Faculty and student consultations,       tal Fellows offerings, along with “Getting Started with
usually hosted in the Digital Scholarship Lab, are fur-       TEI,” “Intro to Python,” “Building Websites with Word-
ther opportunities for the Digital Fellows to work with,      press,” “Data Privacy and Ethics,” and “Introduction to
rather than for the GC population. Through their collab-      Mapping.” Held in the fall and spring semester, GCDI’s
orative approach, the Digital Fellows foster sustainable      workshops are typically accompanied by material dis-
training on anything from theoretical concerns to more        tributed in open access (e.g., web tutorials, PowerPoint
practical issues and technical obstacles with the ultimate    slides, and GitHub repositories), allowing for the scope
goal of putting scholars in the best position possible to     of the Fellows’ work to extend beyond the workshop set-
be the expert of their own projects. If the majority of       ting and the GC. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick has suggested,
funding schemes reproduce the empirical experience of         open access work entails “free access not just in the
institutions with generous funding models and extraor-        sense of gratis, but also in the sense of libre work that,
dinary infrastructural capacity (especially in the form of    subject to appropriate scholarly standards of citation, is
well equipped digital labs and dedicated personnel as-        free to be built upon” (2019, 142). Many of GCDI’s
sisting individual projects), the Digital Fellows program     workshops live in open access GitHub repositories, al-
aims to replicate an organic learning-by-doing process        lowing future Digital Fellows and DH practitioners to
that prepares early career scholars for real-life scenarios   update them, build upon them, or adapt them to their
likely to be found in public universities, community col-     learning settings. As per Fitzpatrick’s understanding of
leges, and even small liberal art colleges.                   free access, GCDI’s approach to knowledge dissemina-
    While the development of the EBP-DA offered me            tion is informed by the same ethos of openness: knowl-
the opportunity to put into practice and expand on some       edge is produced to be distributed to the community and
of the foundational skills I had learned as a DRI par-        to influence more knowledge production at both an intra
ticipant – the command line, HTML and CSS, and Git,           and extra-institutional level.
among others – developing an expertise in Omeka and               As DH practitioners, rather than using the Do-It-
digital archiving led to my becoming an instructor at the     Yourself (DIY) affordances of technology to replace
following iteration of the institute. Omeka is a free Con-    other professional figures, we are interested in work-
tent Management System (CMS) and a web publishing             ing with them to imagine and develop new and better
system built by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History         methodologies. Aside from building a set of technical
and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason Univer-                skills, developing the EBP-DA also involved familiar-
sity (GMU) to create searchable online databases and          izing with archival theory and practice. I engaged in
scholarly online interpretations of digital collections. In   conversation with archivists, librarians, faculty, and fel-
addition to being used by archives, historical societies,     low grad students to learn from their experience on mat-
libraries, and museums, Omeka is also employed by in-         ters such as metadata, file format standards, informa-
dividual researchers and teachers to describe primary         tional architecture (especially its relationship with dis-
sources according to archival standards and publish on-       coverability and accessibility), rights and permissions,
line digital collections, as well as to curate interpretive   and sustainability. Through this process, I realized the
online exhibits from those items. My workshop, built          extraordinary amount of work in and around digital
upon an open-access tutorial developed by DH scholar          archives at the GC as well as the need for a platform
Amanda French, engaged with some of the conceptual            to put different constituencies in conversation.5 After
challenges of digital archives before introducing partic-
                                                              4   See especially projects that seek to preserve the cultural heritage
ipants to the nuts and bolts of the platform. By the
                                                                  of marginalized communities, such as “New Roots: Voices from
end of two 75-minute sessions, participants had cre-              Carolina del Norte!” (https://newroots.lib.unc.edu/), “Dawn-
ated a small digital collection, a short exhibit, and had         land Voices: Writing of Indigenous New England” (https://
been introduced to the resources available at the GC              dawnlandvoices.org/collections/), and “Wearing Gay History”
for those interested in pursuing such projects. Reflect-          (http://wearinggayhistory.com/).
                                                              5   Among these are projects completed by the American Social His-
ing the increasing implementation of digital archives in          tory Project, developed at the New Media Lab, and in the context
Stefano Morello, Digital Humanities at CUNY                                                                                              117

further surveying the community about its needs and de-                 ducing a lasting impact, whereas expertise tends to be
sires, as part of my Digital Fellows duties, I spearheaded              a shared asset and its divulgation a shared responsibil-
the Digital Archive Research Collective (DARC). In the                  ity. This allows for GCDI to extend the longevity of
Fall 2019 semester, the working group, co-lead by Filipa                its communities of practice beyond the tenure of Digital
Calado and supported by Param Ajmera and Di Yoong,                      Fellows with specific skills as well as institutional in-
created a Wiki that contains information about various                  vestment in specific technologies or methodologies.
institutional resources, featured projects by students and                  Tagging the Tower, the blog used by the Digital Fel-
faculty, and overviews of several digital archival meth-                lows to share resources and reflect on their experiences,
ods, approaches, and tools.6                                            abounds with accounts that resonate with mine and espe-
    The WikiMedia platform allows for the repository                    cially emphasize the desire not only to build community
to be developed collaboratively by the community, al-                   around technology-based scholarship, but also to further
lowing any user to add and edit content. In paral-                      build bridges across communities and disciplines. As
lel with other working groups – such as the Python                      early as 2012, former Digital Fellow Laura Keane wrote:
User Group (PUG), the R User’s Group (RUG), and                              The Digital Fellowship program has sharpened my
the GIS/Mapping Working Group – DARC also holds                              programming and web development skills, and has
monthly meetings open to all members of the commu-                           given me a new venue to employ such skills. [...]
nity of all skill levels, disciplines, and backgrounds.                      I’ve found that my work in the Digital Fellows pro-
During working groups meetings, Digital Fellows do                           gram has been based on collaboration and building
not cast themselves as the only experts in the room, but                     a community around technology at the Graduate
                                                                             Center – this is exciting! [...] I’d like to see the Fel-
rather invite those with an interest in specific method-
                                                                             lows working together with representatives from
ologies to congregate to work and learn together. Fi-                        other programs at the Graduate Center to build
nally, in the spring of 2020, DARC held an event se-                         an infrastructure for communication across disci-
ries that included talks by experts in the field and work-                   plines – a ‘Digital GC’ – and I think technology
shops on tools and platforms such as TEI, Tropy, Audac-                      plays a crucial role in realizing that goal. (Keane
ity, and HathiTrust.7 By developing awareness around                         2012)
digital archival work and facilitating access to technical              As illustrated through the examples in edited volumes
and academic support, DARC’s goal, in accordance with                   such as Debates in Digital Humanities and Digital Ped-
GCDI’s mission, is to foster the birth and development                  agogy in the Humanities, as well as in journals like Jour-
of a self-sustained community of practice. As defined by                nal of Digital Humanities (JDH) and Journal of Inter-
Lave and Wenger, communities of practice are groups of                  active Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), DH has often
people who share a concern or a passion for something                   proved to foster successful interdisciplinary work, pro-
they do and learn how to do it better as they interact reg-             duce new types of knowledge production, and devise
ularly (1991). By emphasizing human relationships and                   curricular innovation. I thus urge the skeptical reader
common interests, communities of practice have the ca-                  not to think of technology in higher education solely
pacity to bring constituencies from across the disciplines              through a Marxist lens, i.e., as a means to relegate the
together and to bridge frozen dialectics among different                intellectual worker as an appendage to both the machine
fields. Furthermore, according to Etienne and Beverly                   and the neoliberal university, as part of a perpetual ef-
Wenger-Trayner, fostering two complementary forms of                    fort to extract her fullest productive capacity. On the
participation, competence and knowledgeability, allow                   contrary, as Brian Greenspan has recently argued,
higher education to foster a kind of knowing-in-practice
(2016: vi). Especially in settings with a rapid turnover                     the digital humanities involve a close scrutiny of
                                                                             the affordances and constraints that govern most
(of either students or contingent faculty) communities
                                                                             scholarly work today, whether they are technical
of practice, born and developed through the very acts of                     (relating to media, networks, platforms, interfaces,
learning and doing together, have the potential of pro-                      codes, and databases), social (involving collabo-
                                                                             ration, authorial capital, copyright and IP, censor-
    of the Praxis class of the ITP certificate. For a survey of digi-
    tal archives developed at the GC, see “Projects – DARC (Digi-
                                                                             ship and firewalls, viral memes, the idea of “the
    tal Archive Research Collective),” https://darc.gcdiprojects.org/        book,” audiences, literacies, and competencies), or
    Projects.                                                                labor-related (emphasizing the often-hidden work
6   See “Digital Archive Research Collective (DARC) Wiki” https:             of students, librarians and archivists, program-
    //darc.gcdiprojects.org/                                                 mers, techies, research and teaching assistants, and
7   See https://darc.gcdiprojects.org/DARC_Event_Series                      alt-ac workers). (2019: n.p.)
118                                                                                                    América Crítica 4(2): 113–122

As DH practitioners, we object to technological essen-                    established at one of the four-year CUNY colleges.
tialism (technology as having an inherently good or bad
nature) in favor of a praxis that uses digital means to-                  O N S ECOND -       AND    T HIRD -O RDER E FFECTS
wards building academic practices that are better than                    In the spring of 2020, Gold, faculty in the English and
the ones we have, more conducive of ethical and col-                      Digital Humanities programs, led a graduate seminar
laborative work. In other words, as we think of “the                      on Knowledge Infrastructures that required, as a final
digital” as a catalyst for research in the humanities, our                project, “an intervention [...] into the knowledge infras-
technological praxis can and must be informed by new                      tructures at the GC or in CUNY” (Gold 2020). The
and better standards of humanity and care. Furthermore,                   global COVID-19 pandemic urged the class to make a
as DH work often enables work geared towards non-                         commitment to a cause much earlier than anticipated.
academic publics, communities of practice can have a                      On March 11, the news of CUNY’s switch to distance
pivotal role in creating synergetic connections with non-                 learning to mitigate the health risks posed by the pan-
academic communities and in promoting dialogues and                       demic broke just a few minutes before our last in-person
collaborations across boundaries, emphasizing the pub-                    class of the semester. Over the course of two hours, the
lic research agenda of city and state colleges.8                          students in the class unanimously decided that the inter-
    Especially in institutional contexts with limited fi-                 vention would have to be related to the unique moment
nancial, technological, and human resources, diverse                      we were experiencing as students and teachers. Over
communities of practice can thus be building blocks for                   the rest of the semester, under Gold’s supervision and
a thriving DH hub. Despite its wide range of activi-                      through the extraordinary involvement of the students in
ties, GCDI can rely on a rather limited budget, the im-                   the class,9 the CDLA was developed as
pact of which has been extended through its community-
oriented approach. For instance, the initial funding that                       a crowdsourced archive that allows students, fac-
supported the training materials built for the DRI came                         ulty, and staff from across the CUNY system’s 25
from a one-time Strategic Investment Initiative award,                          campuses to submit personal narratives about the
a state grant offered to CUNY for particular projects                           experience of moving online, emails, and com-
based on strategic infrastructure building. The impact                          munications related to the decisions to move on-
of the grant was scaled up through the Digital Fellows                          line, documentation of online learning experiences
                                                                                (e.g., photos, narratives, screenshots), and links to
program, sustained through funding from the Provost’s                           digital media artifacts that capture the event in real
Office, often in the context of the overall support pack-                       time. (CUNY Distance Learning Archive, 2020)
ages offered to PhD students. Whereas at many other
(especially private) institutions, graduate funding pack-                 Furthermore, the CDLA also sought to preserve social
ages often come with lower (or no) work requirements,                     media posts and reactions (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook,
being a Digital Fellow – as most GC fellowships do – re-                  and Instagram) of the CUNY community to both the cri-
quires a service commitment of 15 hours per week. Fur-                    sis and the shift to remote learning.
thermore, as argued by Rhody (2019) and demonstrated                          Since the archive’s initial conception, the class
by and through my personal experience, training pro-                      quickly moved forward, under pressure of the need to
vided through a foundational approach and developed                       capture the moment. Within the first week of CUNY’s
through communities of practice often produces second                     transition to online instruction, the team developed a
and third-order effects. In the next section, I will pro-                 website through the CUNY Academic Commons (an
vide two examples of such effects by briefly introducing                  academic social network created by and for the CUNY
two projects developed at CUNY that rely on and engage                    that include a customised installation of WordPress),
critically with technology: the CUNY Distance Learn-                      an online submission system, and a social media pres-
ing Archive (CDLA), a GC class projects that outgrew                      ence via major digital platforms. Over the following
its original scope and QC Voices, a structured initiative                 weeks, Gold’s class partnered with the Core Interac-
                                                                          tive Technology and Pedagogy class of the ITP Pro-
8   On extending DH communities of practice beyond                        gram, whose students devised a number of suggested
    academia, see also Joan Fragaszy Troyano and Lisa M.                  writing prompts for CDLA contributors. While moving
    Rhody, “Expanding Communities of Practice” in Jour-
    nal of Digital Humanities, Vol. 2, No. 2 Spring 2013                  9   The founding members of the CDLA team are Matthew K. Gold,
    accessed online http : / / journalofdigitalhumanities . org / 2-2 /       Travis Bartley, Nicole Cote, Jean Hyemin Kim, Charlie Markbre-
    expanding-communities-of-practice/                                        iter, Zach Muhlbauer, Michael Gossett, and myself.
Stefano Morello, Digital Humanities at CUNY                                                                         119

the project forward allowed the team to learn-by-doing,          The case of the CDLA and its ongoing development,
students also studied technical, ethical, and theoretical    from class assignment to public resource, is not only fur-
challenges faced by similar ‘crisis archives’ (such as       ther proof of the indissoluble relationship between DH
The September 11 Digital Archive and Our Marathon)           practice and theory in both research and classroom set-
and learned from experts in the field (including Jim Mc-     tings, whereby community-oriented projects offer out-
Grath, former project director for Our Marathon, Ed          standing opportunities to develop a praxis that acts on
Summers, Technical Lead for Documenting the Now,             the theoretical underpinnings of the field. It also allows
and Johnathan Thayer, assistant professor at the Queens      me to emphasize the pivotal role of a human infrastruc-
College’s Graduate School of Library and Information         ture – the result of a synergetic approach to building
Studies) invited as (remote) guest speakers in the re-       DH communities of practice that comprises both cur-
maining sessions of Gold’s class. As of September 2020,      ricular and para-curricular activities – that relies on a
without any funding and relying mostly on its origi-         set of foundational skills to approach, devise, and de-
nal team’s labour, the CDLA has collected dozens of          velop a DH project and contributes, on the one hand,
contributions (in the form of personal narratives, cor-      to overcome financial and technological scarcity, and on
respondence, official email communications, and learn-       the other hand, to the development of a “digital GC.”
ing resources) and its social media collection efforts re-
sulted in scraping close to a hundred thousand posts.        QC VOICES : A C OLLABORATIVE W RITING
If the goal of the CDLA is to “document this moment          P LATFORM
of crisis response from a critical approach to educa-        Third order effects of the presence of a community com-
tional technology,” collecting different forms of data       mitted to integrating technology in their scholarship also
from a wide range of sources is aimed at producing a         percolate beyond the R1 settings of the GC and into
multi-perspective narrative that includes both the insti-    undergraduate pedagogy. Benefits of the GC’s digital
tutional and the lived experiences of multiple actors oc-    knowledge infrastructure also extend to other CUNY
cupying different positionalities and identities. Through    campuses and their population, where funding of dig-
their juxtaposition, the CDLA team hopes to enable re-       ital initiatives is not as robust. For once, as graduate
searchers, students, and members of the community to         students and alumni develop a sensibility to DH tools
understand, learn from, and engage critically with this      and methods during their graduate career, they often
moment.                                                      carry it with them to the CUNY community and four-
    As Travis Bartley, one of the members of the team,       year colleges, where many of them find employment as
noted:                                                       faculty, teaching fellows, adjunct teachers, and staff. If
     With this archive, we hope to better understand the     the use of course sites and blogs has become somewhat
     particular means through which the accommoda-           widespread, digital tools such as digital archives or data
     tion of distance learning has in some ways troubled     visualization software are also making their way in un-
     educational instruction. Further, given the possi-      dergraduate’s teaching pedagogies.
     bility that distance learning practices may become          As an example of this growing tendency, I want
     instituted as the norm for higher education, we         to bring to your attention some initiatives promoted at
     hope to maintain a collection that acknowledges
                                                             Queens College (QC), to which I have been affiliated for
     the human cost of such practices, assisting in the
     development of pedagogy that truly meets student        several years in different capacities. Over the past three
     needs through the digital medium. (2020)                years, as part of its efforts to further integrate technol-
                                                             ogy in English courses, Writing at Queens (the program
Moving forward, the CDLA team hopes to find institu-         that supports and administers the college’s writing cur-
tional backing to ensure the longevity of its archiving      riculum) has run several faculty development workshops
efforts, either through merging its collection with an es-   to encourage writing instructors to further implement
tablished repository or through the provision of funds       multimodal assignments in their courses. As posited
for the migration of data to a secure storage platform.      by Cynthia Selfe, “multimodal writing” extends tradi-
It is also currently seeking external funding for the next   tional classroom composition work into “visual, audio,
stages of the project, geared towards curation and preser-   gestural, spatial, or linguistic means of creating mean-
vation solutions, metadata standardization, ethical prac-    ing” beyond what is traditionally considered literature
tices to handle social media datasets, as well as creating   and allows teachers to foster their students’ multilitera-
an archive front-end to ensure accessibility.                cies (Selfe 2007, 195). A number of para-curricular
120                                                                                     América Crítica 4(2): 113–122

activities also rely on the affordances of technology to      Through writing workshops, a professional editorial
promote otherwise pedagogies and modes of engage-             process, and one-on-one mentoring, writers learn about
ment with writing. A particularly interesting case is         the distinctive elements of writing online, including vi-
that of QC Voices, a program that uses a local installa-      sual rhetoric, savvy linking, and media integration. The
tion of WordPress (QWriting) as a platform for a collec-      workshops are hosted every few weeks during free hour,
tive blog featuring student writers. Currently on hiatus      when classes aren’t in session, in the Digital Writing
due to the budget cuts that resulted from the COVID-19        Studio, a lab built through a grant earned by Kevin Fer-
emergency, QC Voices was spearheaded in 2009 by GC            guson (GC alumnus and faculty in English at QC and in
alumni Jason Tougaw (faculty in the QC English depart-        MA program in Digital Humanities at the GC), equipped
ment) and Boone Gorges (QC’s Educational Technolo-            with five round-tables with dedicated screens and a lap-
gist and PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the GC, at the        top cart, primarily used to promote multimodal writing
time).                                                        in composition courses. Workshop topics included pod-
    The project’s generative questions were: first, since     casting, digital editorial practices, visual rhetoric, online
the domains of writing and information technology are         pitching, developing an online presence, online collab-
increasingly intertwined, how is the former influencing       oration, and building a community of writers. The in-
the purposes of writing, the genres of written communi-       vestment in technology of the program is thus especially
cation, and the nature of audience and author? Second,        geared towards learning outcomes such as cooperation,
at a time when citizens are bombarded by media mes-           discussion, and community-building. As per the col-
sages and information is delivered mostly through dig-        laborative ethos that informs the program, while writ-
ital platforms, how can we further develop and channel        ers benefit from one-on-one mentoring, peer networks
digital writing fluency towards critical thinking, effec-     were also often born out of the workshops. The QC
tive communication, and active citizenship? (Tougaw           Voices website still gets thousands of visits each month,
2018). Rather than achieving proficiency with specific        making it both a public forum for members of the QC
software packages and technological devices, the goal         community and a highly visible online representation of
of the program was to effectively collaborate, asyn-          some of the college’s most outstanding students, speak-
chronously and synchronously, across spatial barriers,        ing their minds through a range of styles (from poetic
to produce, analyze, and share information on a digital       prose to journalism, from creative non-fiction to a digi-
platform. Every semester, with these pedagogical goals        tal exhibits) on a plethora of topics (recent columns have
in mind, QC Voices hired a diverse cohort of a dozen          focused on environmental activism, prison reform, nerd
graduate and undergraduate students, selected from a          culture, immigrant life, local food culture, Afrocentric-
large pool of applicants from across the disciplines, to      ity, theater, hip hop, and Muslim-American identity).
each publish six non-fictional thematic columns. In ad-       The initiative can thus be framed as laying at the inter-
dition to a stipend of $600 per semester, student partic-     section of digital and public humanities, whereas stu-
ipation was driven by the opportunity of being part of a      dents produce public content pertinent to their lived ex-
program run like a professional public publication, with      perience and their community. In addition, it also oper-
the support of Tougaw, in the role of faculty mentor, and     ated as a kind of professional development, with alumni
two remunerated editors (usually an adjunct professor         of the program working as professional writers, or us-
with experience as a professional content editor and an       ing the digital literacy, communication skills, and col-
early career DH scholar in the role of multimedia edi-        laborative approach to writing they developed through
tor). As explained by Tougaw in a recent interview:           QC Voices in their professional work. In light of the
                                                              CUNY-wide mass budget cuts under the COVID-19 cri-
                                                              sis, Queens College has deemed QC Voices too expen-
      We try to structure it like a literary-magazine edit-
      ing experience [...] We do all the steps that I would   sive to run. The emphasis college administrators put
      go through if I was publishing something. They          on the cost of the editing fellows is further proof of a
      submit the first draft, we give them notes, it usu-     peculiar kind of shortsightedness in sustaining digital
      ally takes them another week or so to revise, and       infrastructures (and computational humanities) through
      then we do a round of more sentence level, detail-      massive investments in technology – including million
      oriented editing. In the meantime, one of the tech-     dollar contracts to purchase licenses for platforms de-
      nology fellows works with them on assembling the        veloped with little regards to ethics by for-profit corpo-
      visual elements and doing layout. (“Sharing Stu-
      dent Perspectives” 2020)
                                                              rations, including CUNYFirst, Blackboard, G Suite for
Stefano Morello, Digital Humanities at CUNY                                                                                   121

Education, and the like – rather than in human capital.        informal inter-institutional networks of practice.

C ONCLUSION                                                    R EFERENCES
Even within public universities, I am aware of the GC’s        Bartley, Travis. Personal Interview. August 15, 2020.
privileged position in terms of human and intellectual
                                                               CUNY. 2019. “Total Enrollment by Undergraduate and Grad-
capital, as well as resources available to its affiliates          uate Level, Full-time/Part-time Attendance, and College,
through the ecosystem to which it belongs. Despite its             Fall 2019” Accessed July 2, 2020. https://www.cuny.edu/
pathological austerity blues – to quote Michael Fabri-             irdatabook/rpts2_AY_current/ENRL_0001_UGGR_FTPT.
                                                                   rpt.pdf.
cant and Stephen Brier (2016) – CUNY is the largest
public urban university system in the nation, located in       CUNY Distance Learning Archive. 2020. “About.” Accessed
one of the largest urban technology hubs in the world.             September 2, 2020. https : / / cdla . commons . gc . cuny. edu /
However, scaling up training in DH research methods                about/.
is a desirable goal for both public institutions and the
                                                               Fabricant Michael, and Stephen Brier. 2016. Austerity Blues: Fight-
DH community itself. On the one hand, a true diverse                 ing for the Soul of Public Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns
DH community – to this day still extremely white and                 Hopkins University Press.
male-dominated – can only coalesce when training in
                                                               Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2019. Generous Thinking: A Radical Ap-
the field reaches higher education’s largest pools of di-            proach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
verse resources: community colleges and public univer-               University Press.
sity systems. On the other hand, public institutions can
benefit from DH’s ability to promote horizontal collabo-       Fragaszy Troyano, Joan and Lisa M. Rhody. 2013.
                                                                     “Expanding    Communities       of     Practice.”     Jour-
rative research practices that foster mentorship and non-            nal of Digital Humanities 2(2). Accessed July
hierarchical relationships among diverse perspectives,               1, 2020. http : / / journalofdigitalhumanities . org / 2-2 /
training, and fields of expertise to de silo knowledge cre-          expanding-communities-of-practice/.
ation and public impact.
                                                               GC Digital Fellows. “ABOUT.” Accessed July 2, 2020. https://
    In an institutional context steeped in DH, such as             digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about/.
that of the GC, the Digital Fellows program represents
a sustainable funding scheme aimed to employ and train         Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legiti-
graduate students, while also producing output for the               mate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
                                                                     versity Press.
community in the form of support for DH scholarship.
Initiatives like the DRI and DHRI, aimed at teaching not       Kane, Laura. 2012. “A Fresh Perspective.” Tagging the Tower. Ac-
only computational foundational skills, but also at scal-            cessed August 30, 2020. https://digitalfellows.commons.gc.
ing up the pedagogical philosophy that informs GCDI’s                cuny.edu/2012/11/12/am-i-an-author/.
work, are another example of sustainable professional          Gold, Matthew K. 2020. “Knowledge Infrastructure.” Syllabus, The
development that can produce a waterfall effect for the              Graduate Center, CUNY. Accessed July 2, 2020. https://
community. If DH practitioners at better funded univer-              kinfrastructures.commons.gc.cuny.edu/syllabus/.
sities are more likely to have access to the newest tech-
                                                               Greenspan, Brian. 2019. “The Scandal of Digital Human-
nology and to professional assistance than those who are            ities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by
not, public universities can and must promote an institu-           Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis:
tional culture that aims at nurturing graduate students,            University of Minnesota Press. Accessed Novem-
                                                                    ber 5, 2020. https : / / dhdebates . gc . cuny . edu / read /
staff, and faculty computational skills and devise oppor-
                                                                    untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60 / section /
tunities for them to join forces across disciplines and hi-         4b6be68c-802c-41f4-a2a5-284187ec0a5c#ch09.
erarchies. Whereas communities of practice coalesce by
doing together, they do not necessarily come nor stay          Rhody, Lisa. 2019. “DHRI: Notes Toward Our Pedagogical Ap-
                                                                    proach.” Accessed July 2, 2020. http://www.lisarhody.com/
together spontaneously. Public institutions need to ac-             dhri-notes-toward-our-pedagogical-approach/.
tively stimulate, facilitate, or formalize such initiatives.
Investing in human, rather than merely technological,          Selfe, Cynthia L., ed. 2007. Multimodal Composition. New York:
infrastructure is essential to build communities of prac-             Hampton.
tice and spark a virtuous circle that can lead to further
                                                               “Sharing Student Perspectives.” 2020. The QView, 77. Accessed
infrastructural development, larger scope of operations,             August 31, 2020 https://www.qc.cuny.edu/communications/
an institutional DH culture, and eventually to formal and            Documents/QView/QView77.pdf.
122                                                                                                    América Crítica 4(2): 113–122

Spiro, Lisa. 2012. “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the                   Wenger-Trayner, Etienne and Beverly. 2016. “Foreword.” Imple-
      Values of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the                         menting Communities of Practice in Higher Education, edited
      Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold,                            by Jacquie McDonald and Aileen Cater-Steel, v-viii. Singa-
      16-34. Minneapolis:    University of Minnesota Press.                     pore: Springer.
      Also accessible at https : / / dhdebates . gc . cuny. edu / read /
      untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e / section /
      9e014167-c688-43ab-8b12-0f6746095335#ch03.

Tougaw, Jason. Personal Interview. September, 25, 2018.
