So our first presenter is Spencer Keralis,
formerly the Assisstant Professor and

Digital Humanities Librarian at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne,

and very, very soon to be the Director for
Research and Scholarly Initiatives at

Southern Methodist University Library.
Research is the ethics of collaboration

in humanities research and critical
digital pedagogy.

The respondent, Ben Brumfield, 
is a partner of Brumfield Labs LLC

and is a creator of the open source
tool from the page which many of

you might be aware of.

He is a software consultant specializing
in crowdsourcing, textual encoding,

and linked data for the GLAM sector,
and is presenting on the intersection

of technology, crowdsourcing, 
and digitial additions.

So, without any further ado, 
I'll mute myself and hand the floor

over to Spencer.

- Thanks Ryan, and thank you to
Alyssa and Albert for including me

in this event, and thanks to Ben for
agreeing to be the respondent today.

This is a conversaton that Ben and I
have been having for many years in

different settings and I'm really excited
to share some of the ways my thinking

on this has evolved over -- recently, as
I've been exploring some new theoretical

frameworks for the more polemical work
that I've done in the past, and to be

engaged in conversation with this
really vibrant and important community.

I am Dr. Spencer Keralis.
I use they/them pronouns.

I am joining you today from the lands
of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw,

Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa,
Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo,

Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations,
here in rural Illinois.

In this virtual environment,
we must also acknowledge that the

infrastructure necessary for an event
like this crosses the sacred and unseated

lands of many Nations.

This work emerges from long-term
collaborations with Elizabeth Brumbach

and Sarah Potvin, and ongoing
conversations with colleagues, including

Rafia Mirza, Mora Seal, Toniesha
Taylor, and Miriam Posner.

My ideas in this are completely shaped
by my interactions with those colleagues

and they are very present in the work
that I'm sharing today.

This work is also deeply indebted
to Black Womanist thought and

the radical traditions of queer and
trans liberation and labor activism

and I hope that what I share here
today in some way honors my

spiritual and intellectual forebearers
in this work.

Today we'll do a little housekeeping
and the introduction,

which we're already in the middle of.
I'll talk a little about student labor in

the classroom, providing a framework
from my chapter that was mentioned

in the previous session.
And then I'll talk about what does

an inclusive or equitable, ethical
collaboration look like?

And then we'll open it up for
Ben and discussion.

I believe that my remarks will run
about 35 minutes.

Here is a link and a QR code for the
shared notes document, in case

you joined after the link was
shared in the chat.

Anybody can feel free to repaste that
for folks who joined a little bit late.

So, labor.
A couple of years ago,

I was on a campus visit to interview
for a DH gig at the University of

Alabama. As I was being bounced from
job talk to interview to tour,

one of my guides bragged about how
cool it was that professors would write

what he described as the ant work,
which we can unpack how offensive

that term is in a minute, but they would
write the ant work into a course syllabus

and make students do it for them
for free without credit or compensation.

He went on to describe students doing 
data entry, TEI markup, and other tasks

on faculty research projects and websites
which he said saved the researchers from

having to get grant funding and
essentially hid the need for the lab

labor from the institution.
There was no mention of the usual,

sort of, canards like exposure to active
research or practical skills.

This was explicitly the instrumenalization
of student labor to expedite faculty

research without having to pay for it.

My tour guide made it clear that this
was the culture at Alabama and that

everyone was in on it. 
My first though was, "Oh,

"you apparently didn't read my CV."
My second thought was, "Oh,

"you did read my CV and you're putting
me in my place."

After all, in my job talk that morning,
I had discussed the work I'll summarize

here and I'd expressed clearly how I would
not be complicit in the exploitation of

students in the classroom.
I was, in effect, being told that if

I took a job there, 
I would be complicit and I would

like and I'd like liking it.

After another couple of uncomfortable
hours and a meeting with the Dean

that was, frankly, hostile, 
I headed to the airport in

Birmingham.
From a barbeque joint on the concourse,

I sent an email withdrawing from my
candidacy for the position because

after the campus visit and especially
that conversation,

it was clear that this was not going
to be a place where I would be

successful personally or professionally,
where my views and values would not be

respected and where I'd be expected
to contribute to and support the very

practices I had spent my career up to
that point decrying.

It should come as no surprise I think that
faculty might use student labor to their

own ends. This is a common but not
unproblematic practice in the sciences

and the 2020 Ithica SNR report supprorting
research in languages and literature made

explicit that many humanity scholars see
themselves as entitled to the labor

of others, including students, librarians,
archivists, and other contributors to

help conduct and disseminate their
research, even as most scholars do not

perceive these contributions
as collaboration.

This lack of recognition masks a deeper
understanding or an intentional disregard

of the rights of others to recognition
credit and compensation for their

contributions to faculty projects.
When I bring this up,

I have been told that it's just an
neoliberal university and we've all got

to play along in order to get by or
to get tenure and promotion.

So what Richard Grusin has described
as the bottom-line economics and the

need for higher education to train
students for jobs, not to read literature

or study culture.

I reject that premise out of hand,
especially considering what neoliberalism

in the university context denotes.
As Grace Hong describes it,

neoliberalism emerged as a response
to the liberation movements of the

post-World War Two period,
centering economics,

particularly the free market in the
minimal state, against movements

for decolonization, desegregation,
and self-determination.

The implications of neoliberalism
in the university can be seen in the

shifts toward managing higher ed like
a business.

The emphasis on career training over
liberal education and the position of

often false meritocratic hierarchies
empower access and mobility within

and among institutions that privilege
and protect capitalism, white supremacist,

and patriarchal norms. 
So if we're playing along with

neoliberalism, these are the things we're
accepting as normal.

I prefer to challenge these things rather
than being complicit with them.

I believe that if you're not working
toward abolition, you're complicit.

My interest in advocating for student
rights, and especially labor rights in

digital humanities projects,
came early in my career as I heard

over and over at conferences and
other events faculty cheerfully

describe using uncredited and
uncompensated student labor in the

classroom to complete their projects,
often under the rubric of crowdsourcing.

I had to think through why exactly I had
such a visceral response to these

presentations. What exactly was it that
felt wrong to me?

And through that process, I lobbied for
the inclusion of labor as a keyword in the

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities:
Concepts, Models, and Experiments project

and was ultimately invited to curate it
for the final publication.

I was part of the conversation that
produced the student collaborator;s

bill of rights and was later invited
to contribute a longer essay on the

topic to Dorothy Kim and Jesse
Stommels' Dispruting the Digital

Humanities collection.
In that essay, I describe a

few reasons why crowdsourcing as a
model didn't sit well with me in

describing the use of student labor
in the classroom.

Among these is the question of what are
we perhaps inadvertently teaching when

we fail to give credit or compensation
for student labor?

I argue that students learn from us that
their labor is alienable and that it's

okay for them to alienate the labor
of others,

thus we help create the next generation
of labor exploiters.

Secondly, in writing this labor into
a class, we are compelling students

to pay with their tuition dollars,
and likely student debt, for the

privilege of working on these projects.
This is what I described as a defecit

internship and what Jet Jacobs at UCLA
more plainly calls a debt internship.

Unpaid internships in pactica have a
significant negative impact on low-income

students who may already be facing
food and housing insecurity and we

know that students of color and
LGBTQ students are already

disproportionally likely to experience
food and housing insecurity.

So the debt internship increases inequity
for the most vulnerable among

our students.

This practice also effectively hides the
real cost of doing archival transcription

work from the institution and from 
funding agencies, since we effectively

underwrite the cost of these projects
with student debt.

And finally, it bulldozes other
institutional collaborators like

librarians, IT folks, etc, into being
complicit in student exploitation.

Because of their positionality,
librarians in particular often do not

feel empowered to refuse to participate
in projects that deal unethically with

student labor, since faculty entitlement
preys on the vocational awe of librarians

to compel their labor.

But finally, what bothered me about the
invocation of crowdsourcing in this

practice is that crowdsourcing operates
under specific conditions of informed

consent and volunteerism, which labor
in the classroom cannot support.

Crowdsourcing relies on loaded uncost
labor to produce a wide variety

of products.
From computer code to photography,

it deploys an instrumentalist ethic
toward those conducting their labor.

Crowdsourcing dehumanizes individual
contributors, reducing them effectively

and affectively to anonymous components
in a network machine.

And we heard in the previous session,
many strategies for mitigating this

dehumanization, for making sure that
your collaborators, your contributors

are recognized and that their labor
is honored.

But beside these problems, crowdsourcing
relies on a particular social contract,

between labor and organizer, encouraging
the spirit of volunteers

and to produce collaborative
projects at scale.

Crowdsourcing organizers don't have any
power to compel participation

and volunteers either show up,
or they don't,

depending on how the project appeals
to its community.

Conversely, student labor in the classroom
is never not coerced.

Other critics of student labor in the
classroom suggest that alternate

assignments should be offered in lue of
project oriented or public facing work.

And while this may be possible, I believe
that under circumstances where

students are expected to work on a 
professors project

or even given the alternative of working
on a professors project,

students will feel coerced to participate
in the professors project or the students

choosing the alternative
project will be penalized,

or at least have the perception of being
penalized, for not contributing.

The power dynamic of the classroom is 
such that student choice in this situation

cannot be unequivocal and that faculty
objectivity will always be suspect.

In response to specific
student concerns about labor

exploitation at her institution,
Miriam Posner

collaborated with her students at UCLA to
develop a students collaborator's

bill of rights which articulates these
principles quite clearly.

"It's important to recognize that students
and more senior scholars don't operate

"from positions of equal power in the
academic hierarchy.

"In particular, students DH mentors may be
the same people who give them grades,

"recommend them for jobs, and hold
other kinds of power over their futures."

So, this relationship is never going to
be balanced or uneqivocal.

While my goal of this work has never been
to name names or to point fingers,

some of you might uncomfortably recognize
yourself in what I'm describing,

or if you're a librarian or in other
resource support roles,

you may have been compelled to contribute
to projects like these.

And I suppose it's entirely possible that
your ethical framework sees using

unaccredited and uncompensated labor

of students as something
you're entitled to do.

In that case, you can just feel free to
tune out now.

I don't have much to say to that person.

But, as the collective wisdom handbook, 
which I was delighted to see shared

in the previous session, describes,
"Doing nothing is a decision

"that is likely to support the status quo,
including existing power structures."

So, if we're reproducing the hierarchies
inequities and injustices of higher ed

like student labor exploitation, privacy
violations, misogyny, racism,

queer and trans phobia, algorithmic bias,
and what Jeffery Marrow describes as

"cop shit" in our collaborations, we fail 
to fulfill the radical potential of

community inclusive archival projects.

How then can we recreate collaborations
that are inclusive by design?

The best way I can imagine is to practice
abolition, that is to not

use student labor in the classroom.

Find other ways to teach these skills and
to meet the learning outcomes of a course

that does not contribute directly
to a faculty project.

Rather, invite students and wider publics
to participate in a truly crowdsourced

experience.
Online volunteer opportunities with

clear boundaries and informed consent,
maybe with a transcribe-athon

in which groups can partcipate in specific
task in a structured event.

But, if there's a clear learning goal
involved in bringing this work into the

classroom, how can we mitigate the harm
done to students?

How do we not inadvertently
teach them to devalue their labor?

In what follows, I invite us to envision
together a model of collaboration

with students and others that acknowledges
the diverse perspectives of participants

and uses design justice principles to,
as Sasha Costanza-Chock describes it,

quote "dismantle the matrix of domination
and challenge intersectional,

"structural inequality." I'm positive that
we can intentionally create spaces of

equity and inclusion where
collaborative communities can emerge.

Victor Papanek argues that design is basic
to all human activities.

The planning and patterning of any act
toward a desire to foreseeable end,

constitutes the design process.

Emerging from this fundamental principle
design thinking also referred to as

human centered design is a relatively
recent development

from its origins in product development,
design thinking has evolved to touch on

many different fields from architecture to
computing, from big business to higher ed.

My interests here focus on design thinking
as articulated by IDEO,

one of the primary organizations
responsible for the current

conception of design thinking
as a term of art.

In IDEO's model design thinking is
understood as a process and a mindset

geared toward problem solving based not
just on technology,

but on empathy and creativity because
design thinking has historically been

centered in STEM fileds like computer
science and engineering

and because of the strong association of
design thinking with big business

and neo-liberal institutions,

academics might be reluctant to adopt
design thinking principles

or to see the payoff of these methods
for human--

or not to see the payoffs of these methods
for humanistic knowledge creation.

IDEO frames design thinking around a
non-linear collaborative process of

inspiration, ideation, and implementation
which in some ways mirrors methods

of incritical pedagogy under the rubrics
of prototyping, scaffolding and iteration.

While these are key components of design
thinking, they're not the full range of

methods encompassed by
the design thinking process.

But what I imagine here is an intentional
adaptation of the design thinking

principles pioneered by IDEO in the
field guide to human centered design

for a scholarly context.
So inspiration,

is when we learn how to better
understand the challeneges

that our work is confronting.

Ideation is where we learn to generate
ideas, identify opportunities,

and to try out and polish solutions.

This is where the values of constructive
failure and iteration happen

as we learn together and adapt.

And finally implementation, participants
learn how to meet their challenge

by bringing the ideas to fruition.

This might be a publication, a product,
a lesson plan, or assignment,

an artwork or performance
or any other creative output

or mode of scholarly communication.

Drawing from Patricia Hill Collins,
Costanza-Cholk

invokes a new form of design that
addresses the intersectional forces of

oppression and challenges designers to
think about how good intentions are not

necessarily enough to ensure that design
processes and practices

become tools for liberation.

I argue that applying the same principles
of design justice to the development

and implementation of crowdsourced
collaborative opportunities

has the potential to create collaborations
that are non or at least less hierarchical

non-redirectional and more holistically
experiential.

Establishing equitable collaboration is
the bed rock of our common practice

for project development and community
building is essential to manifesting

collaboration is grounded in justice.

The design justice priniciples articulated
by the design justice network

provide a conceptual scaffolding for this
work.

Like any manifesto the principles are
broad enough to be adapted to many

situations and we may find opportunities
to use these principles

and articulate these values in our
research, in our workplaces,

and our service work, as well as in our
classrooms.

A few of the principles that seem
particularly germane to the present

conversation include that we use design
to sustain, heal, and empower

our communities as well as to seek
liberation from exploitative

and oppresive systems.

We center the voices
of those who are directly

impacted by the outcomes
of the design process.

We work towards sustainable community
lead and controlled outcomes.

And we work toward non-exploitative
solutions that reconnect us to the Earth

and to each other.

I already heard some of these principles,
resonances with some of these principles,

in the preceding session.

These are things that we're-- that you in 
this field are already thinking about

in ways and my suggestion is that we let
the design justice principles provide some

framework or a scaffolding for us to 
proceed intentionally

toward implementing these things as part
pf the bed rock of what we do together.

So this is preaching to the crowd in some
ways, for some of you, but

for some these principles might
feel revelatory.

These conceptual frameworks can feel
daunting especially consider the prospect

of retrofitting existing projects to
experiment with these ideas.

In this case, the principles of design
thinking can come in handy

because the processes of inspiration,
ideation, and implementation

are necessarily non-linear.

In this context you can give yourself
permission to try things out

and abandon them if they fail
you, your students,

or your wider community of collaborators.

So how do we move from the conceptual to
the practical?

What are some strategies for implementing
inclusive collaborations

based on this framework?

First and foremost, I have to say informed
consent must be a design fundamental.

And this will involve a significant degree
of transparency, especially if you are

going to choose to intergrate this labor 
into the classroom.

So you need to be clear about students
labor and intellectual property rights,

provide them perhaps an opportunity to
opt out and participate in an equivalent

assignment that still provides 
the same learning outcomes.

Provide some transparency and mechanism
around how you will be evaluating them

in an equitable way if they choose to not
contribute to your project.

And finally, how they'll be credited on
the final project.

The thing to remember and I think I put --
I point this out very strongly in the

chapter, is that a grade is neither credit
nor compensation.

A grade is something arbitrary that's
assigned for institutional reasons that

doesn't necessarily have any reflection on
the quality of student learning.

Finally, and then secondly, respecting
students rights at every level.

Informed consent, again, is a design
fundamental.

In terms of privacy, FERPA should be level
zero for how we think about student

privacy.
It's the absolute bare minimum.

Just like ADA compliance is not inclusive
practice, it's just the bare minimum

that's required by law.

And so you complied with the law, 
do you want a cookie?

Like, that should be the bare minimum that
you do in order to make your class

inclusive and to respect
students privacy rights.

You need to know and limit if you're able
what data is being collected about your

students and especially from third party 
vendors and platforms.

And this is something, we've got some
folks here who are on the vendor side

think really intentionally about what data
you're collecting from your folks

that are participating with your platform.

And be really transparent
about that with everyone,

and that doesn't mean burrying it
in the legal language of a U-lab.

If you are -- your vendor are using data
on student workers, go through IRB first.

Make sure that it's -- you get an exempt
ruling or a not-human subjects research

ruling from IRB in order to mitigate
the risk,

not just of institutional liability, which
is really what IRb is there to protect,

but they are actually genuinely
approaching IRB process in the spirit of

protecting your collaborators.

Finally, or not finally, give students
mechanisms to own their labor and

intellectual property.

What does authorship look like?

What does -- how can they describe their
contribution?

Can you provide them with language to 
include on their CD that describes skills

that they're learning in this project.

And that's for students who are just
volunteering, but also especially for

students in the classroom or for paid
student workers.

When I work with paid student workers,
I always provide them language

specifically to their CB that describes
what they're doing

in terms of tranferable skills and not
merely tasks.

And finally, no "cop shit," borrowing 
from, again, from Jerrery Marrow.

This means abolishing any pedagogical
technique or technology that

presumes and adversarial realtionship
between students and teachers.

And the link is in the citations list in
the shared notes document as well as

on the screen for that 
really important post.

So, is tranformative justice a lot to
ask of collaborative projects?

Absolutely. And is it a lot to ask of
folks, especially librarians, who's

positionality frequently subjects them to
demands, and often unreasonable demands

for their time, expertise, and emotional
labor, and whose positionality

often disempowers them from pushing back
on unethical practices

by people with significantly more
institutional power in their systems?

Absoluetly. But recall, empathy is a key
principle of design thinking.

So extend yourselves and your
collaborators the same grace

that you have been extending to others,
especially throughout the last few years

of the pandemic, and take seriously the
permission that iteration and ideation

gives us to experiment and implement
at our own pace.

So, as you consider to adapting -- 
consider adapting your existing project

to a design justice framework,
begin by changing just one thing.

For exmaple, implement a process of
informed consent, if you don't

already have one, especially when
working with students in the classsroom.

Be transparent about their roles, the
goals of the project,

and what they can expect.

Be clear that you know they are paying
to contribute to your project.

Take the time to engage them in dialouge
about this and if possible or appropriate,

offer them an alternative assignment that
meets the learning outcomes of the class,

but for which their labor is their own.

Then, next time, do just one more thing.

Give yourself permission to try things
out and abandon them

if they fail you or your collaborators.

Design justice offers one means of
developing an emergent mode of

collaboration based on liberation.

I'm inspired by the tradition of critical
digital pedagogy, long advocated

by the editors of hybrid pedagogy and 
articulated by the editors

and contributors to the modern language
association publication,

"Digital Pedagogy and the Humanities:
Concepts, Models, and Experiments."

I see critical pedagogue as a gateway to
the type of collaboration I advocate here.

If our intention is to create equitable
and sustainable spaces that then,

to use the words of Adrieene Maree Brown,

"turn complex systems like the neo-liberal
university into spaces where we do less

"harm and generate more freedom,"

then our intention must be to dismantle
inequity within those systems.

I therefore propose that a model of
collaboration grounded in design justice

could be the germ for immergent
communities in which equitable human

connections are both the means and the
result of collaborative research,

teaching, and learning.

Thank you.