The Invisible Work of the Digital Humanities Lab: Preparing Graduate Students for Emergent Intellectual and Professional Work

This article illuminates the ways that digital humanities labs might foster experiences for graduate students that fulfill what Alexander Reid (2002) postulates as the “central task” of the digital humanities graduate education. We argue that while the digital humanities lab as an institutional economic model does not necessarily promote a focus on graduate student professionalization, it uniquely has the capacity to push back against competing discourses of neoliberal vocationalism, funding and labor precarity on one hand, and technological utopianism and tool fetishization on the other, to train students agile, contextual, and rhetorical mindsets with which to enter technologically-mediated workplaces and lives. To begin, we review the discussion of digital humanities labs in the literature: digital humanities institutional models, how these models are practiced, lab funding, and the resultant position of labs as sites of training for graduate students. From there, we offer a teaching case from the Lab’s fall 2015 “Stories from Data” workshop in order to render visible a set of principles to guide professionalization of graduate students in the digital humanities lab. We conclude with reflections on how these principles might alter current discussions of the success or failure of the Mellon Foundation and NEH ODH digital humanities funding initiatives in the United States.