Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists
Fall 2021
Note: this syllabus draft was last edited September 19, 2021. It was never fully finalized because the course had no enrollment -- it was the first quarter back on campus in person, and there was no way to advertise with the equivalent of posters in the hallways. So this version of the class never ran. It did become the foundation for the second iteration of the class in winter 2024.
Every single person you encounter -- every instructor, every classmate, every campus worker, every stranger on the bus -- has just been through a life-changing experience during these last 20 months. No one is the same person they were in February 2020 -- not even people for whom this experience has been simply trying rather than traumatic. So many people and institutions are eager to get "back to normal", but things are rarely so simple.
In this class, we'll be learning about project management. Project management is more than a set of processes: doing it well requires you to see and understand networks of relationships and power dynamics. To that end, we'll also be talking about institutions-- primarily the modern US university. How does the university work? How does the university look different to undergrads, grad students, international students, staff of various kinds, and faculty? Who holds power in which contexts, and what other frameworks can one draw upon when collaborating across roles, to ensure everyone's needs are met?
We will watch how these factors play out, and how they intersect with different kinds of pandemic experiences, through engaging in a simulation of an imaginary digital humanities project carried out between March 2020 and February 2021. We will do this in the style of a tabletop role-playing game. Each student will get to create their own character to play over the course of the quarter, and students will get to make choices about how that character lives and works over the course of the imaginary year. How successful each character is in achieving their own goals and working towards completing the imaginary DH project will depend on a combination of your choices, constraints imposed by the pandemic and other real-world events of 2020-2021, and luck as determined by rolling dice.
Learning about project management works best when it's meaningful. Over the course of the quarter, you'll be working on a set of project management plans and tasks for a project that you care about. It can be imaginary (preparing a grant application for your dream project or product) or real (finishing a dissertation, applying for jobs, engaging in activism). Whether or not you carry out the plan in real life, the experience of going through the steps of project planning will make it less daunting to do the same if you ever find yourself in a position where lightweight project management skills are useful.
This course will be offered for between 3-5 credits, and for either a grade or credit/no credit. Students who wish to take it as part of the DH Minor must choose 5 credits and must take it for a letter grade.
The course will use contract grading, where students choose what grade they wish to receive, and write a contract (within defined parameters) at the beginning of the quarter that lays out the requirements for receiving that grade. Individual assignments will receive extensive feedback but will be graded as accept / needs revision. Students will have one week to revise assignments that need revision to fulfill the terms of their contract. If a student is unable to fulfill the terms of their original contract, they will meet with the instructor and sign a new contract for a different grade. Parameters for different level grade contracts for each of the credit levels are included in an appendix to this syllabus.
By university policy, this course will be held in person by default. Everyone will be required to show a green "OnSite access" badge on their phone when they enter the classroom, and to wear a mask for the duration of the class. (If students need a break to have a snack or drink outside, we can take a few minutes between the discussion and the RPG-playing components of the class.) Depending on student preferences, we may hold some of the class outside if weather and smoke permit.
Even if you've recently tested negative for COVID, please don't come to class if you're feeling unwell. In lieu of participating in the in-class discussion, you can send the instructor an email with some thoughts on the readings for that course session in order for it to not count as an absence.
The RPG is designed to be resilient even if one or more character(s) stop participating for a month or two of in-game time, but if you'd like to send instructions about what you want your character to be doing during a class session where you'll be absent, just send instructions (specific or general) to the instructor and someone will play your character for you and update the course RPG Google Doc with details.
Because everyone feels overwhelmed sometimes (especially during a pandemic), all students get two no-questions-asked days that they can invoke when they haven't been able to do the readings in advance, or need to miss class (without making up the work for that session) for any reason.
Who am I? Who are you? Who were we in February 2020? Where do we want to go from here? For the first day of class, we'll get to know one another and cover the basics of how the class, and our simulation of doing a digital humanities project in the first year of COVID-19, will work. We'll also talk about grading contracts and how to prepare yours for Thursday.
Due: Grading contract
We'll talk in greater depth about the simulation, and how it models institutional roles. Students will pick their character types. We'll also get started together on character type customization.
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Intro to TTRPGs
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Rachel Mann, "Paid to Do but Not to Think: Reevaluating the Role of Graduate Student Collaborators" in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. (book chapter)
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Postdoctoral Laborers' Bill of Rights (manifesto)
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Academic Tarot Reader's Guide (pamphlet)
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Bethany Nowviskie, "Ten rules for humanities scholars new to project management", 2012.
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Natalia Ermolaev, Rebecca Munson, Meredith Martin "Graduate Students and Project Management: a Humanities Perspective". 2020.
Due: Draft character sheet
We'll go over the draft character sheet you've created and make any necessary modifications reflecting your character's situation as of March 2020 when our game begins. We'll also talk about how to pick a project that's meaningful for you as the basis of some of your work for this class, as well as the big-picture "what", "why", and "how" of project management in a DH context.
We'll begin the game, and will probably get through half the characters' March 2020.
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "Isolation, Mission, Connection" (blog post; March 28, 2020)
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Ravynn K. Stringfield, "Dissertation Check-in #2: Motivation" (blog post; April 12, 2020)
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Travis Chi Wing Lau, "Against the COVID-19 Hot Take" (blog post, December 6, 2020)
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Jim McGrath, Twitter thread on public humanities projects in the wake of current events (March 16, 2020)
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Edin Tabak, "A Hybrid Model for Managing DH Projects". DH Quarterly, 2017, vol. 11, no. 1.
We'll talk about some of the reasons why people collaborate, the value of charters as a way of defining project boundaries and agreements. We'll also talk through how to adapt some of these more formal charters to projects with fewer collaborators, and when charters don't really make sense. We'll discuss the "waterfall" (planning upfront) project management model, how it differs from the "Agile" model
We'll finish playing through March 2020 and possibly start April 2020.
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Rebecca Munson, "How to Endure: Cancer in the Time of Pandemic" (blog post; March 28, 2020)
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Quinn Dombrowski, "Working Conditions" (blog post, March 21, 2020) & "Pandemic, Parenting, Pedagogy" (blog post, March 28, 2020)
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Jennifer Guiliano & Simon Appleford, "Charters, Agreements, and Handshake Deals" slides. DevDH.
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Rebecca Sutton Koeser, "Document ALL the things!", on Princeton CDH's project charters. (Read the post and take a look at the Princeton Prosody Archive charter, warranty, and long-term support agreement.)
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Project Management 4 DH: Defining a Project's Scope. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, 2016.
Due: Project charter for the DH RPG project - version 1
We'll have a guest visit from Josh Schneider, Stanford University Archivist, to discuss the university's efforts to document the pandemic, and how this intersects with DH concerns around project sustainability.
We'll play through April 2020 in the simulation.
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Hannah Alpert-Abrams, "What the Humanities Do in a Crisis" (blog post, April 11, 2020)
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "Your Institution Does Not Deserve to Survive" (blog post, June 26, 2020)
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Amy E. Earhart, "Can We Trust the University? Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities". From Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, ed. Elizabeth Losh & Jacqueline Wernimont, 2018.
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The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, Module A4: What are the project's sustainability priorities? 2018. https://sites.haa.pitt.edu/sustainabilityroadmap/a4-priorities/
We'll discuss the v1 charters you created for the DH RPG project, and choose a new context for re-imagining the v2 charters. We'll also talk about Agile project management in contrast to the planning-first "waterfall" approach.
We'll start playing through May 2020 in the simulation.
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Theo Thesing, Carsten Feldmann, Martin Burchardt, "Agile versus Waterfall Project Management: Decision Model for Selecting the Appropriate Approach to a Project". Procedia Computer Science. Vol. 181, 2021. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050921002702
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Visionary Futures Collective newsletter: [takeover] International Students
Due: Project charter for your own project
Once you have collaborators, how do you acknowledge their work? How do they acknowledge yours? How do context and power affect these choices?
We'll play through May and start June 2020 in the simulation.
Due: Project charter for your own project
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Megan Senseney, Eleanor Dickson Koehl, and Leanne Nay. "Collaboration, Consultation, or Transaction: Modes of Team Research in Humanities Scholarship and Strategies for Library Engagement". C&RL Vol. 80, No. 6, 2019. https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/23528/30837 (Read sections on "In vivo Characterizations of Multiperson Humanities Research" and Table 1)
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Alix Keener, "The Arrival Fallacy: Collaborative Research Relationships in the Digital Humanities". DH Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015.
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Tanya Clement and Doug Reside, Collaborator's Bill of Rights (2011, part of Off the Tracks)
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Haley Di Pressi, Stephanie Gorman, Miriam Posner, Raphael Sasayama, and Tori Schmitt, with contributions from Roderic Crooks, Megan Driscoll, Amy Earhart, Spencer Keralis, Tiffany Naiman, and Todd Presner; Student Collaborator's Bill of Rights (2015)
Due: Project charter for the DH RPG project - version 2
We'll discuss your v2 project charters for the DH RPG project, and how to transform a charter into a set of project milestones and goals. We'll also talk about how coming up with a plan intersects with the reality of engaging in "Research Witchcraft", as well as the labor conditions of academia. We'll play through June and July 2020 in the simulation.
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Jennifer Guiliano & Simon Appleford. "Building Your First Work Plan" slides. DevDH.
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Shawn Graham, "Research Witchcraft". In Failing Gloriously and Other Essays, 2019.
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Katina Rogers, "The Academic Workforce: Expectations and Realities". In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, 2020.
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Ravynn K. Stringfield. "Dissertation Check-In #5: Rejecting 'Business as Usual'". January 10, 2021.
Due: Project plan for the DH RPG project - version 1
We'll have a guest visit from Dinah Handel, Digitization Services Manager at Stanford Libraries, who will talk about the realities of digitization and labor, especially during the pandemic. We'll play through July and August in the simulation.
- Readings TBD from Dinah Handel
Due: DH RPG project milestones & goals v1
We'll discuss your project plans for the DH RPG and consider what would change in a different set of circumstances. As a step towards doing this, we'll compare reflections on the tenure process from two DH scholars at very different institutions, as well as concrete steps graduate students can take to decide on the right next steps for them. We'll play through August and September in the simulation.
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Ryan Cordell, "A DH Dossier", May 14, 2018 + "Statements", 2017
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Katherine Harris, "Explaining Digital Humanities in Promotion Documents", Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 4, fall 2012
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Katherine Harris, "Using Promotion Dossier as a Platform?", February 18, 2018
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Katherine Harris, "What is (the value of) Digital Humanities (again, again, again, again...sigh)", October 25, 2017.
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Katina Rogers, "Students: How to Put your PhD to Work", in Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, 2020.
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Lee Skallerup-Bessette, "Can You Teach a 'Transformative' Humanities Course Online?". Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2020.
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Cait S. Kirby. September 7th, 2020 (play through the simulation).
Due: DH RPG project milestones & goals v2
We'll talk about how to come up with a budget for a project, and how budgets influence project plans (and vice versa). We'll play through September and October in the simulation.
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Gregory Lord, Angel David Nieves, and Janet Simons. DHQuest (Play through the game once)
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Project Management 4 DH, "Budgets". Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, 2016.
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Hannah Alpert-Abrams. "Planning Your Digital Humanities Advancement Grant 2: Activities, People, & Costs for Doing the Work". NEH blog post. 2019.
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Dean Irvine, "From Angel to Agile: The Business of the Digital Humanities", Scholarly and Research Communication, vol. 6, no. 4, 2015
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Spencer Keralis, "Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities; or, The Classroom is Not Your Crowd". Disrupting the Digital Humanities, 2018.
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Lee Skallerup-Bessette. "The Staff are Not OK". Chronicle of Higher Education; October 30, 2020.
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Visionary Futures Collective newsletter, "Think of the Children", September 8, 2020
Due: Project plan for your project
We'll talk about the differences between managing a project, and managing people (whose job may include doing projects), along with common working conditions in libraries and even tenure-track positions. We'll play through October and November in the simulation.
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Bethany Nowviskie, "A Skunk in the Library". 2011.
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Bethany Nowviskie, "Lazy Consensus". 2012.
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Fobazi Ettarh. "Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves". 2018.
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Katherine Harris, "Let's Get Real with Numbers: The Financial Reality of Being a Tenured Professor". June 24, 2013.
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Cait S. Kirby. October 5th, 2020. (Play through both grad student characters)
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Cait S. Kirby. October 12, 2020. (Play through both staff characters)
Due: DH RPG project budget
We'll discuss what happens when the plan you've developed and budgeted for encounters major obstacles, including staff turnover, as well as what project management looks like over the whole life cycle of a project. We'll play through November and December in the simulation.
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Ashley Reed, "Managing an Established Digital Humanities Project: Principles and Practices from the Twentieth Year of the William Blake Archive". Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014.
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James Smithies et al. "Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King's Digital Lab". DH Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1, 2019
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Project Management 4 DH: Making Changes and Confronting Problems. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, 2016. (Based on Simon Appleford and Jennifer Guiliano. "All About the Problems". DevDH.org, 2013. http://devdh.org/lectures/evaluation/allabout/)
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Matthew Lincoln. "Dating when the world is on fire (and so are you): Remembering Rebecca Munson". August 15, 2021
Due: Budget for your project
We'll have a guest lecture from someone with experience creating projects in a business context, about how they frame projects for the company board and get buy-in. We'll play through December 2020 and January 2021 in the simulation.
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Lee Skallerup-Bessette. "Same Covid Stress, Different Benefits". Chronicle of Higher Education, January 20, 2021.
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Cait S. Kirby. "October 1, 2020". (Play through both faculty characters)
We'll talk about what goes into wrapping up a project successfully, and circumstances where you have to settle for a less ideal conclusion. We'll also cover data management plans as one component of that wrap-up. We'll play through January 2021 in the simulation.
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The Socio-Technical Sustainability Roadmap, Module A2: How long do you want the project to last? 2018.
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Simon Appleford and Jennifer Guiliano. "Writing a Data Management Plan". DevDH.org, 2013. http://devdh.org/lectures/thinkingdata/datamanagement/
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Shawn Graham. "How I Lost the Crowd" in Failing Gloriously and Other Essays, 2019.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum, "Done: Finishing Projects in the Digital Humanities". DH Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 2, 2009.
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Susan Brown et al. "Published Yet Never Done: The Tension Between Projection and Completion in Digital Humanities Research". DH Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 2, 2009.
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Kelly J. Baker. "All Over Again". August 31, 2021.
Due: DH RPG project data management plan
We'll talk about public humanities, career changes, and how people pursue the big-picture work of "the humanities" outside tenure-track jobs. We'll play through February 2021 in the simulation.
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Sabrina Orah Mark, "Fuck the Bread, the Bread is Over". (The Paris Review; May 7, 2020)
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Amanda Henrichs, "Anger, 2021". (Blog post, February 18, 2021)
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Beth Seltzer. "Evaluating Digital Humanities Beyond the Tenure Track Part 1: For Employees". 2018.
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Beth Seltzer. "Evaluating Digital Humanities Beyond the Tenure Track Part 2: For Employers". 2018.
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Katina Rogers, "Expanding Definitions of Scholarly Success", in Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, 2020.
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William Pannapacker, "On Why I'm Leaving Academe". The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2021.
Due: Data management plan for your project
We'll talk about where we find ourselves now, towards the end of fall quarter 2021. How is the current state of the world more broadly affecting higher education writ large? How is it affecting your own plans for the future? What steps can you take to build a support community for yourself? We'll have a guest visit from Ravynn K. Stringfield. We'll play through March 2021 in the simulation.
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Ravynn K. Stringfield, "Dissertation Check-In #4: The Council of Superfriends". (blog post; October 20, 2020)
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Shawn Graham, "I Don't Know How to Do This", in Failing Gloriously and Other Essays, 2019.
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Sarah E. Smith. "Response to Student Evaluations, Sarah E. Smith". July 26, 2021.
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Avery Blankenship. "Between My Disease and Me". August 25, 2021
It's always good project management to plan in some buffer time because things often take longer than we plan. This is that day, for catching up on anything we didn't get to in the discussion or simulation.
We'll talk about what we learned this quarter and will wrap up class with a special academic tarot reading from the Visionary Futures Collective.
All remaining work due, including "Project obstacles" response for your own project.