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Jason Helms deposited The Invisibility of Digital Labor in the group
RCWS Writing Pedagogies on MLA Commons 4 years, 4 months ago
Digital scholarship, particularly with digital monographs, requires a great deal of work that traditional scholarship does not. The presenter has authored a digital monograph (published 2017) and written and co-written web texts on the methodologies of digital scholarship and critical making (both currently under review). While digital tools can streamline collaboration, they can also elide the amount of work authors do. Digital scholarship is typically seen only as a finished product. This paper argues that digital scholarship needs to do recovery work on itself: making its labor visible to readers. Such work enables other scholars to enter into digital labor carefully and helps to make arguments around tenure, hiring, and promotion decisions. The presentation will show examples from multiple projects to make the argue for a better understanding of the kind and amount of work digital scholarship requires. However, that will lead quickly into the real discussion of how do we make the field more equitable and make labor more visible.