Issue Twenty

Conference attendees are pictured from the side, under dramatic Russian Orthodox church windows.
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A Conversation on International Collaboration in Digital Scholarship

Translations

Russian translation by Kseniia Tereshchenko | Russian Translation (PDF).
Arabic translation forthcoming.

Introduction

The conversation published here among three “bridge” figures in global digital humanities took place on January 25, 2021, over Zoom as part of the program of Saint Petersburg Digital Humanities Week (SPbDH) 2021. Each of the speakers has each been instrumental in organizing digital humanities events in their respective communities: NYCDH Week, SPbDH Week and the NYU Abu Dhabi Winter Institute in Digital Humanities (WIDH). They have also cooperated with each other in sharing experiences, expertise, and in some cases programming. They all met in person at a NYCDH Week event hosted in early 2020 by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute entitled “International and Interdisciplinary: Collaborations in DH Research.” SPbDH week has traditionally been a place-based event, as has the NYCDH Week; both events even carry the name of the city in their title. Over time, these events (along with the WIDH in Abu Dhabi) have served a community-building function, making them all the more meaningful. In 2020–2021, the pandemic put this focus on place under a significant amount of stress, making it impossible to convene in person. Yet, as difficult as this period has been, we do believe that it offered a unique opportunity to reflect on questions of international, institutional cooperation among like-minded colleagues, thinking particularly about how dialogue about the internationalization of DH ultimately feeds back to our local communities. The moderator of the panel was Lada Zimina.

Dialogue

Lada: Hello, dear guests and colleagues! I am very happy to welcome you to the opening panel for the third annual Saint Petersburg Digital Humanities (SPbDH) Week. The topic of our discussion today is Think digitally, act humanely: building DH communities locally and globally.” Our speakers are Kimon Keramidas, Associate Professor at Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement, NYU and also co-director of the International DHLab at Informational Technology, Mechanics, and Optics University (ITMO University); David Joseph Wrisley, Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi; and Antonina Puchkovskaia, a director of the DH Center at ITMO University and the founder of SBbDH Week. To begin today, Antonina, I would like to ask you to tell us a bit about your experience in the global DH community and your work consolidating the local DH community in Saint Petersburg? How do DH weeks, both NYC and SPb, fit into your story with DH?

Antonina: Thanks for a very good question. I suppose everyone who is doing DH has their own story about how everything started. With a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, I ended up teaching at a very STEM-based University like ITMO (Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics), and I’d started to think about how I may bridge two different universes—Humanities and Computer Sciences. I did some research and discovered a pretty promising co-location known as Digital Humanities. I dug deeper and was nicely surprised and excited about the manifesto, agenda, and most importantly the community, which from the onset seemed quite open and friendly. I started looking for events that gather DH people together. Within the first lines of my Google search was NYCDH week, the event which later became a model for our SPb DH week. I proposed a workshop on how to turn your Humanities course into a digital one. Not only was I accepted and got to run my very first DH workshop, but I met all those wonderful people (among them was Kimon) who were very supportive and helpful, answering all my questions about the fundamentals of DH.

When I returned to Saint Petersburg, the first thing I did was to talk to our first vice rector about launching a DH lab. Being a great supporter of different interdisciplinary initiatives at the university, she gave the green light to establish a small DH research lab, and Kimon continued to advise me through the whole process. A bit later, our DH lab team was awarded a grant from our university for developing an interactive map of Saint Petersburg with a specific focus on relations between the landmarks and famous people associated with them. This project now exists as a web and mobile application, and it also contributed to building a DH community in Saint Petersburg, especially by integrating the local into the international.

In four years, we have succeeded in launching a Master’s program in Data, Culture, and Visualization (DCV)  with a track in Digital Humanities, and the DH lab grew into an International DH Center co-directed by Kimon. Still having great support from our university, we are now more focused on community development and recruitment for our Master’s program at the intersection of Humanities and Computer Science. We have run the annual SPbDH Week for three years now and the trend is quite convincing: we tripled the number of workshops, lectures and lightning talks within the week (despite the global pandemic) and, most importantly, increased our community fivefold. The geography of the participants is also very impressive: people come from Moscow, Perm, Vladivostok, and other Russian cities either to give or attend a workshop. This year, we went even further and organized an international panel. The DH community is very helpful and friendly and that is why we will continue to develop our local community hand in hand with the international community, dedicating our resources and energy to make more DH projects collaboratively, making more data available, open, and shareable, and creating more interesting discourses around it.

Lada: Thank you, Antonina! Talking about SPbDH Week, I would like to add a small personal observation of my own. As a member of the organizing committee, I noticed that in Russia quite often people who use digital methods in their own area of expertise and who are willing to offer a workshop are not really familiar with the term “DH.” In that perspective, the event is really about community building, because it shows the researchers that they are not alone and that what they do actually has a name and a community behind it. Moreover, we have many cases when speakers or guests stay in touch with the Center or even work with us as lecturers.

Kimon, can you tell us how and why DH week started in New York? What was your motivation as an organizer? And how’s it going?

Kimon: Within New York there are many large institutions: Columbia, NYU, the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, Fordham University, Hofstra University, and Pace University, and all of the cultural heritage organizations as well. Unfortunately, what happens is that these places are big enough to become insular. With NYCDH, we’re trying to foster a really open community outside of those bounds. NYCDH is a non-institutional, inter-institutional organization, so we’re not reliant on any single university or organization as a center. Running NYCDH in this way is based on the recognition that good work in DH often necessitates collaboration between different types of people. David, Antonina, and I all are used to collaborations, whether those collaborations are with other professors, data services, or librarians, and the events we organize are an opening for these kinds of collaborations.

NYCDH Week started because we wanted to share existing workshops at different institutions, but it was complicated by different curricula. So, we decided to create a structure completely outside of that. It began small, but has grown beyond our wildest expectations. In 2020, we had more than forty sessions and over 800 registrations. This year we only had thirty-two sessions—because of COVID—but we ended up with more than 1500 registrations, and included sessions being run both through NYCDH in New York and others organized at NYU Abu Dhabi. We were even thinking of aligning with Saint Petersburg DH Week to create an even greater sense of global simultaneity. People are starving for these kinds of gatherings and look forward to NYCDH week every year.

NYCDH Week is a movement based on the idea that we can change DH work within the academy by developing a community of people who are willing to give their time, be open with their work, share information, and create networks of participation. I know of an enormous amount of connections between colleagues that have been created through NYCDH Week, our graduate student awards, and web platforms.

The next step is figuring out how you manifest those experiences and interests into programmatic changes back at your institution. At ITMO, we’ve made a significant amount of progress, going from virtually nothing to having a successful Master’s program in just a few years. There are further possibilities in Moscow and in Perm to expand this in Russia, and David has been doing this work in the Middle East for twenty years in both Abu Dhabi and Beirut. Our hope is that we can bring together these three places that aren’t often in collaboration in Russia, the Middle East, and in the US or New York.

Lada: Thank you, Kimon! Do you have something to add, David?

David: Thank you for the invitation to join the conversation. As I listen to the two of you speak about the way the community is emerging in Russia, and particularly in the context of ITMO, I am really pleased to see what you have achieved. It’s quite remarkable that the institutionalization of DH has taken place so quickly. It is a testament to the passion and focus with which you have worked, but also to the openness of the future-oriented approach of your institution. In many places in the world, there’s a lot of interest in digital research in the humanities, but not a lot of action. It can be, for many people, a scary jump.

I remember some ten years ago when we had our first event in the Middle East, in Beirut, and then participating in some of the different community models that Kimon brought up: the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) (University of Victoria, Canada), the European Summer University of Digital Humanities (ESUDH) ( Germany), NYCDHweek, and then returning home to think about how to adapt those community models to our local environment. Localization is not an easy process.

You’ll have lots of eyes on Russian DH this year with the European Association of Digital Humanities (EADH) annual conference. So, congratulations on getting this going!

Lada: Thank you, David! We are actually really excited about the upcoming conference in Krasnoyarsk, as our DH Center together with the colleagues from the State Hermitage Museum, the Institute of Russian Literature, and the Museum of the History of Religion are organizing a panel aimed at community building, entitled “Digital Humanities Researchers and Cultural Institutions: Towards Productive Interaction” (see Puchkovskaia et al. 2021). We think it’s important to connect DH researchers from academia and specialists from the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector. I really hope the panel will help to consolidate the local DH community and maybe even some collaborative projects.

David, do you think DH brings people together, or does it create new forms of isolation and specialization? Could you also tell us more about your personal experience with DH research in the field of medieval studies and if the digital methods are welcome in that community?

David: My research interests have been diverse. First, I am trained as a comparative medievalist, but I have also lived and worked in Arab countries for most of my career. In the last decade, it’s not surprising that I have been working on new ways to bring the digital to those two communities: medieval studies and the Arabic-speaking world. Sometimes they overlap for me, but for the most part they do not.

I have experienced both an expansion of my community and some forms of isolation in my career. Integrating the digital into one’s speciality subfields is an entirely different endeavor than working to build a transdisciplinary DH community. There is a vibrant community of digital medievalists in the world, but they are still somewhat marginalized within medieval studies. I believe that the situation is slowly changing, and we may be less isolated post-pandemic, but it is fair to say that most medievalists are not involved in digital research. In specific specializations—say, digital medieval studies in Arabic, French, or Latin—the percentage drops significantly. What this means is that if you are doing digital humanities community building aimed at a larger audience, then your audience is much wider than it would be in a specialized field.

Shared methodologies most certainly bring people together. Imagine that a medievalist’s daily interlocutors could be Americanists, art historians, computer scientists, or linguists working in entirely different languages. It is often said that in universities, the digital is increasingly providing common vocabularies for a wide variety of research and community building amongst researchers. There’s a commonality in the challenges that we face—in the ways we produce our data and manage our research—which is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Working simultaneously in a transdisciplinary space, where our colleagues have very different ways of working, and in a specialist subdomain, interacting with domains close to us in the organization of knowledge, can be both challenging and very rewarding.

Lada: Thank you, David, for setting such an encouraging tone to the discussion. As for Saint Petersburg, and maybe even Russia in general, I feel that we are not quite there either. Hopefully big events, like EADH2021, will promote DH in Russia and boost the community-building process. Kimon, being a New Yorker, what are your thoughts on the same question? Does DH unite us, or does it separate us?

Kimon: I’ve learned a lot watching David because he has reached out internationally, building coalitions and relationships in what can sometimes be a provincial community. New York is large enough that people can often find enough relationships to stay working within that community. The same can be said for DH communities around Washington, D.C., and Virginia, and Southern California, where there are enough people that a kind of regional DH identity even begins to take shape. But as you begin looking at the situation globally, with DHSI in Canada, in Leipzig in Germany, and of course David’s work across the Middle East, you realize that it takes different textures of collaboration to work with different people in different communities. This is particularly important in this continuing period of transition, as people doing DH are still facing resistance in traditional disciplinary environments. That’s where occasions like SPbDH Week, NYCDH Week, and WIDH are so valuable, because they highlight that there are networks you can tap into to find like-minded people.

One thing Antonina and I talk a lot about with regards to ITMO is that the path to growth here is from the technical to the humanities. It’s the reverse from how it occurs predominantly in the US at least, and it is an intriguing challenge as you determine how best to transmit these ideas to an unfamiliar audience and how to engineer these collaborations.

What I appreciate about DH communities is how different people can come together and look for balance. You can engage with someone and say, “You do something completely different than I do but we probably have some common thoughts and make each other’s work better.” I think that that eagerness is probably a global trend that still benefits a lot of people. And the people who are eager to put that foot forward tend to be slightly more gregarious and open to the conversation rather than resisting. It takes that kind of nature, so it creates a good community right now.

Antonina: I would like to add something about how at ITMO we are trying to complement our skillset with the competencies we lack. Our institution is very STEM-based and we lack a strong Humanities faculty, so our way of bridging the gap between Humanities and digital technologies was to engage with the GLAM sector in Saint Petersburg. Luckily, we have plenty of cultural institutions in our city and they have shown a willingness to collaborate on questions of common interest, such as database architecture for collecting and storing data, building user-friendly interfaces, expanding a user base through digital storytelling, etc. The additional benefit is that we have also found a great number of people who are motivated and encouraged to learn more and to collaborate on DH projects. I would also like to highlight that establishing these relationships is an ongoing process, and it is very time- and energy-consuming. But it is really worth it. And in our case, working with such wonderful institutions as the Museum of the History of Religion, Mayakovsky Central Public Library, the Institute of Russian Literature, and many others, helps us both to build and develop the DH community and to represent cultural heritage and memory in digital environments. Furthermore, these cultural institutions become places for our students to do internships. It is a win-win for both academia and the GLAM sector.

Lada: Antonina, you mentioned the Master’s program that you run at ITMO. What are the challenges that you face while designing and running a Master’s program in DH? How do you explain digital humanities to your administration and other faculty at ITMO and how do you teach the field to students who may be completely unfamiliar with its methodologies and terminology?

Antonina: That’s a very good question and I believe an open one. I would like to answer it from two perspectives, both from the position of an academic leader of our Master’s program in Data, Culture, and Visualization and from the role of a DH educator. Designing a two-year Master’s program at the intersection of Humanities and Computer Sciences, I had to take a lot into consideration. First of all, I meant to build such a program for students with various backgrounds. So, developing a curriculum I focused on including more project-based modules, which allow students to work collaboratively and complement each other’s skill sets. Second of all, I tried to design a curriculum around fundamentals of digital technologies adapted to students’ varied skill levels, such as the most popular programming languages (Python and R), database development, data mining, UX/UI, visualization, text analysis, project management, etc. Moreover, I always wanted to introduce our students to a vibrant, multidimensional, and multilingual world of DH, by regularly inviting colleagues to participate in various hands-on workshops, guest lectures, reading groups, and summer schools.

Starting from the second semester, our students choose from two tracks provided at the program: one is in Digital Humanities taught in Russian, and the other is Cultural Analytics taught in English. Beyond the difference in the language of instruction, these two tracks also differ given the nature of the data students work with. In the first case, it is digitized data and in the second, born-digital data. So, choosing from these two options students are basically choosing between working with cultural heritage or digitized literary texts, in the former, or content found in the media, in the latter. Depending on the track, students are likely to learn about OCR (optical character recognition) and NLP (natural language processing), or digital storytelling and network analysis. As an academic leader of the DCV program I do believe that diversity is key, but this is especially true with DH education. So, my goal is to provide as many options as possible, so every student will be able to build an individualized educational trajectory, thereby fully realizing their potential. Teaching and co-teaching various DH courses at ITMO and Tartu University and giving lots of guest lecturers has allowed me to expand my teaching philosophy in DH. Most of my teaching has been focused around developing and curating DH projects. This includes not only acquiring necessary practical skills in data mining, data analysis, and visualization, but also in building a strong argument by asking research questions and analyzing what particular digital technologies are needed in each case and why. I call it “critical DH thinking” and usually highlight that, even though the applied skills are also very important, developing critical thinking will help to build more sustainable DH projects. To sum it up, the more I teach or do DH, the more I discover what is still to be learned and redesigned.

Lada: Thank you, Antonina! It is, indeed, so wonderful that we have three professional educators in DH at the table today. David, what are your thoughts on how to teach DH?

David: I love the topic of how the digital is changing the way that we teach and learn! One answer to your question of how to teach DH lies in the values embraced by your institution and how they are evolving. To give you an example from my own position: I arrived at NYU Abu Dhabi having worked for a long time in relative isolation on my digital projects at my previous institution, the American University of Beirut. There wasn’t institutional momentum there to create new courses and to imagine teaching as integrative and connected to faculty research. In my current position, there are multiple stimuli that have encouraged me to bring my research into the classroom. I have benefitted from the presence of an Arabic natural language processing (NLP) group, a vibrant Art Center with projects and commissions in digital or data-driven art, an active interactive media program, as well as the research center of the nearby Louvre Abu Dhabi. Those partners in and around my institution have most definitely contributed to my growth as a teacher-scholar.

There are lots of DH syllabi that you can find on the web and copy, and there are lots of methods that can be transferred to most parts of the world. I certainly did this for a certain phase of my teaching. But teaching DH has become less of a methodological checklist and more of an engagement with the common values of my institution and communities as they grow. When your DH courses align with those higher goals, there is much more room for DH to contribute, and to be valued, at home.

Antonina: I totally agree with that point that cooperation with other departments at ITMO, in particular Computer Science, helps us a lot, not only in teaching various courses at the DCV program but also working together on projects. We also collaborate and co-teach some DH courses together with colleagues from other DH centres in Russia bringing together students and cherishing diversity and openness. Moreover, as I have mentioned previously, we are closely connected with our partners from cultural institutions in Saint Petersburg and these collaborations have resulted in student internships, paid internships, and the expansion of student portfolios. This enlarging network is what makes us a community and allows us to make DH projects more meaningful and widely publicly available.

Lada: I would also like to jump in and add a little from the perspective of both a student and aspiring young researcher who is making her first steps in the field. First, when it comes to collaboration and education in DH, I think that in the program my fellow students and I have a lot to teach each other. Given that we come from different backgrounds, some of us are better at coding and others are better at finding good research questions and have a deeper understanding of cultural data. DH taught me that it’s ok not to know something—and for someone with an A-student complex, that was quite a discovery. I really love how helpful the community is, because really when you dive into DH, you push yourself far out of your comfort zone, no matter what background you come from.

And Kimon, I suspect you have something to add to this discussion.

Kimon: I’ve been working on these questions since I started my PhD program at the City University of New York in 2001, before the term “digital humanities” entered popular use. As a theater history PhD candidate, I noticed that we were for the most part studying play scripts because that’s what’s left from a production, and this ephemerality is one of the reasons it is hard to study the history of theatre. I began working in CUNY’s Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate program to consider ways to gather all the artifacts from a performance to bring them to public history. Many of the faculty in that program were involved in creating the textbook Who Built America, which tracks the history of America from a labor perspective, rather than following the traditional “great white men” narrative. Along with the printed book version, this textbook was available as an interactive CD-ROM in the late 80s. So here we can see—decades before we even started using the term DH—that academics were doing work  driven by the idea of expanding education and the reach of academic discourse.

So my perspective has always been to get information into people’s hands, using the new media we have to best contextualize the knowledge we produce. In building my DH syllabi, I wanted to avoid saying, “Here are the big names and tools in DH that you have to learn about,” and instead focus on how living in a complex world is intrinsically affected by the digital, and how do we understand that through method. So every time we talk about databases for the humanities, we also consider that our personal and health records are also somewhere in a database—and what does that structure mean to the way you are viewed by systems as a series of data points? How does the setup of that information affect you in your daily life? The goal therefore is to continually keep everything in a larger context and perspective.

Lada: Thank you, it’s really fascinating to follow your discussion, so let’s keep on talking about education and dissemination of DH. In light of the digital having become an integral part of our everyday lives, how do mixed methodologies in DH open the possibilities for scholarship that are more public, open, and designed to engage with the larger audiences?

Kimon: In the last decade in the US, we’ve seen how profoundly digital media can affect daily life, as social media has expanded and everything has been consumed by the internet. In my teaching and research I have been trying to figure out how the digital landscape affects us daily, how it affects the culture of consumerism, and how as academics and producers of knowledge we can bring all those points together. To these conceptual methodologies I would add visualization and website development, to reveal the potential of design in creating more engaging modes of narrative and storytelling. Because, in the end, we are all living some part of our lives in these public digital spaces, which, despite the problems they are creating, massively open up our ability to create innovative teaching platforms, share information, and build communities.

My connection with the theater, material culture, and web design has put me in a place where I want students to know how they can reach audiences through web development and design, which has arguably a lower threshold than more complicated analytical techniques. To do very advanced text analysis you really need to understand the fundamentals of statistics and the algorithms, but to do web development, you start to understand the discursive and aesthetic challenges and possibilities that come into play for presenting your work for a broader range of audiences. I teach a course on the American Hardcore Punk movement, and we focus on understanding one particular cultural moment to better understand how we use different modes of expression to generate activism, critique society, and carve out a space for our voices today. With that kind of platform, we can then look at subsequent related movements like Queercore and Riot Grrrl as well as reflecting on current flows in art and activism to understand their historical progenitors and the uniqueness of movements of the moment.

I ask students to think about how they can use the ethos of Hardcore to reach out and tell their own story. The most recent iteration of the course developed an amazing website, which was an experimental product of creative ingenuity that far exceeded what a stack of research papers alone would have accomplished.

Lada: We have a little bit of time to talk about our current concerns, and I would like to address the next question to David. So, David, how did the pandemic influence the global academic community and what perspectives do you see for international collaboration under the current circumstances?

David: Thank you for the question. Pre-pandemic, there were many DH events taking place in local environments around the world. An example of one such event we have heard about is NYCDH Week. Now, in New York it’s easy enough to move around the city from institution to institution for a week to experience this co-learning, co-teaching event. Not all cities have such a large community, however. In places like the UAE or Lebanon, where I have spent the majority of my professional life, the number of DH practitioners is very limited and we often rely upon international relationships to grow our projects and our community. The advice that I got a decade ago from a senior practitioner in the field when I asked how to start working in DH was to do three things: attend a THATCamp, enroll in a DH summer school like DHSI, and attend the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) annual conference. Back then, to attend such a faraway event required many months of advance planning. I imagine that we could do oral histories about the DH week-like events that have taken place around the world, focusing on how they played a transformative role in introducing researchers to digital methods.

The pandemic did not bring about a total shift in the ways that people have accessed training in digital methods—there were certainly some events taking place online before—but it has accelerated the process, and there has been a marked increase in people who want to engage in such learning. Over the course of 2020, with the large-scale adoption of remotely broadcasted events, I have witnessed a rapid opening up of local environments to global audiences. There have been all kinds of opportunities to listen in on many different conversations in different parts of the world now —far too many for a single person to follow. An interesting question to ask ourselves is which of these learning opportunities will remain virtual and which will pivot back to in person meetings? I believe that a professor of digital humanities should not only do research of their own, but also model new forms of research for their local environment, and in this respect, like Antonina, I spend quite a lot of time learning about what is going on in the world of DH in order to bring it back home. In 2020, the sheer abundance of conversations going on in digital humanities research and their connectedness has been challenging, but also exciting, to follow. As I do so, I am always asking myself how to match what a growing local community wants and needs and how to match it with global research trends. It’s a process of connecting the dots.

Another interesting question for me is what will a world of scholarly communication look like post-pandemic? There are so many people envisaging, and even prototyping, different modes of communicating or different modes of scholarly dissemination and communication. Even if we have not been traveling for this last year, we will no doubt get back on planes to go to professional meetings. I do wonder how we are going to spend our time and how we are going to manage the very new kinds of access that we have experienced. I think there’s a lot to be said about this last topic of post-pandemic scholarly communication, which stretches beyond the topic of today’s panel, but which will impact the ways that international collaborations continue to be founded and sustained. I guess that the way forward for research that I imagine, especially in remote places where there are smaller numbers of local researchers, will be fewer in-person conferences and meetings, replaced instead by longer stays or exchanges abroad for teaching, team building, or intensive exchange. Synchronous video conversation platforms like Zoom are, after all, great for exchanging ideas, in pick-up conversations with people you already know, coming to consensus through team discussion, or for certain kinds of scholarly dissemination, but what about all the other ways we communicate and do scholarship?

I don’t think we have fully considered what it will mean to be in person anymore, what the added value of being in the same space will be, let alone how connected to the rest of the world we will be when we are back in person in our local environments. I’m sure that there will continue to be great value in teaching in person, but for research, we still have to figure that out. Will we be able to have hackathons and sprints online with the same results? Will we meet in person for more reflective activities, such as ideation, planning, and writing? Or simply to foster the social bonds that support collaboration? What will happen to our colleagues who joined in the conversation during the pandemic for whom passport privilege and crossing borders are not a given?

During the pandemic I experienced so many interesting new kinds of interactions and experimental engagements. Obviously, not all of them will continue as we transition back to our offices and campuses. It is worth thinking, however, about how we will do digital humanities when we are together as opposed to when we are apart, as well as the role of the international collaborator in the local area. New forms of hybrid collaboration are certainly on the horizon beyond our current circumstances.

Kimon: I think the sprints are a good point. Sometimes when you really want to accomplish a significant amount, you need to be around your colleagues for three days in a row, eight hours a day working, including in-person time over dinners. So it’ll be interesting to see now that we’ve had this extended experience with telecommuting, how we will move forward. We haven’t gone through something like this trauma in the world for over a hundred years and we’re going through it now in a very different kind of time with specific technical, socio-economic, and pedagogical challenges. There has been a lot gained from this period in getting things working in a short timeframe, but we also need to sit back and consider which changes have been for the better and which really shouldn’t be repeated.

It’s hard to teach workshops in general using teleconferencing tools; some such as photogrammetry were extremely difficult to do. When I teach a workshop I move a lot around the room. I’m looking at everyone’s screens troubleshooting problems, showing students what they might have in common and how they can share knowledge, and making the learning environment engaged and participatory. On the flip side, while we had fewer sessions for NYCDH Week 2021, we had hundreds of more people register for workshops. So there is a new interesting mix of variables that we have to consider and that we will have to adapt to. Hopefully, we’ll find a really fruitful middle ground that balances all of these things. As David notes, a lot of us are thinking about it already: what’s the best way to transition things. We are fortunate in our positions that we have already looked to transcend geographical challenges, and now we are armed with better tools and more familiarity with approaches to closing the gap between these three locations: Saint Petersburg, Abu Dhabi, and New York. So trying to find ways to mitigate those distances while remembering the benefits of locality and presence is going to be the trick.

Antonina: Yeah, and I would like to add a little on that topic. I agree completely that professional networking is the most valuable thing that happens at a conference. In the end, this scholarly network is the most valuable thing you have. What you pay for when you travel is to build these relationships, and from there you can develop them through these digital tools and means like email and Zoom, but it’s really hard to establish strong relationships and community by only communicating online.

You can just work using emails, Zooms, Microsoft Teams, but I think that this is a very good lesson the pandemic taught us, that not all the things can be shifted online. We still have this “humanities” impact. We even have in Russia this funny word for “madness”— безумие/безZOOMие (a madness created by Zoom)—which has been in the media for a while. That’s true, it’s madness, it’s too many Zooms, all the calendars are packed, and people can call you at nine in the morning and that’s fine because they live far away.

I like that we’re finishing up this discussion before we move on to questions thinking about the future because DH is also about the future. We try to preserve things, we try to make them available and that’s an important part of our work as well. We want to preserve our community and chart a path for the future as well.

Lada: Dear colleagues, thank you so much for such an interesting and insightful discussion—we covered some perennial issues of DH as well as some current challenges and concerns. Now we have a little bit of time left to open our discussion and attend some questions from the audience.

Question from Nadezhda Povroznik, Head of the Center for Digital Humanities, Perm State University: When it comes to DH, is it possible to be only a medieval scholar or just a historian focusing on a narrow topic, or is it more encouraged to find the solutions for a wider range of questions? If so, how does this impact the way that we think about the focus on tools? 

David: Your question reminds me of the question I received earlier where I was asked to reflect on how DH supports either integration or isolation, or perhaps both, in scholarship, and whether it only makes an intervention in a field of speciality or instead it builds some kind of larger community. For me, the way that I responded to a changing world of digital humanities around me depended on the moment of my career (I am currently Associate Professor). When I launched my first independent digital research, I made the strategic decision to work on a project on my own. I wanted to build my skills, make a first foray into digital humanities, and to be able to link the conclusions to the scholarly field that I knew so well. I started in digital humanities without an active community in my immediate surroundings; my collaborative research began with faraway scholars. There’s this very interesting shift in my publications that took place around 2013/2014 when I began to co-publish. It’s not that I abandoned single-authored research, but since this particular work was collective, it made sense to publish together. With colleagues in computer science we now tend to publish a variety of articles on the same project for different audiences, highlighting the multidisciplinary contribution that our work makes. It’s tricky to straddle knowledge cultures, but it has become the way that I balance my career now. You can do that when you’re a little bit more advanced in your career. When you’re younger, it’s harder to do, for sure.

In the end, it is about taking risks that your institution is willing to support. One of the key things in North America we have been witnessing is how, increasingly, professional organizations are creating guidelines for review that include digital scholarship in the evaluation process. This effort really relies on senior colleagues, because they sit on the boards of those professional organizations and on the editorial boards of journals. Mid-career faculty who value digital scholarship have an important role to play also in mentorship and advocacy.

Question from Larisa Krayeva, PhD, Assistant Professor at the faculty of Technological Management and Innovation, ITMO University: It’s more of an observation than a question and I’m not sure if it’s relevant…. Well, you see, I teach philosophy to students from all sorts of technical backgrounds at ITMO, and during your discussion it occured to me how my personal experience applying different approaches teaching philosophy to different groups of students—like engineers, chemists, medical student etc.—can be similar to your experience, finding the common ground with scholars from other humanities backgrounds in DH.

David: I have something to say about the different kinds of students who are not necessarily specialized in questions of the humanities. I am lucky to have my position in the Arts and Humanities Division, but I don’t teach students exclusively who are concentrating in topics in the humanities. There is definitely an advantage to this model, namely that you are able as you say to “build common ground” across disciplines and tap into very different interests and skillsets for a truly interdisciplinary experience. In fact, I have heard over and over from students who are not majoring in humanities subjects that they never knew that such a field of inquiry existed, and that it was amazing to be able to think across and between fields. Of course, one of the minor disadvantages of having only individual courses offered in a “standalone” fashion is that they are not developmental or sequential, allowing students to build skills over time as you would want if you had students specializing in the domain.

Question from the audience: What is the most important thing when you get into the DH? What should you focus on first?

Kimon: It’s very important to inspect the tools and to critically evaluate the methodologies before starting. Many of these tools have hidden processes that you need to understand the implications of in order to do competent research. You can’t just download an NLP package and start throwing stuff into it. You can download topic modeling tools and you can run them over the web or locally and then you can start trying to figure out what those words mean, but topic modeling is a complex statistical process that does very specific things to text to create a certain kind of output. If you don’t know what it does to create that output, you may arrive at incorrect or ill-informed conclusions. That’s why it doesn’t hurt to have technical knowledge. It doesn’t hurt to understand what an algorithm is; it doesn’t hurt to have some programming language. We don’t just start using a database. So becoming aware of the texture of the tools and methodologies and establishing a critical sensibility is the strongest foundation you can have.

David: Working with data, and working with the digital more generally, takes us outside of our comfort zone. So my suggestion might be to work to create some data about something that you know well and do so in familiar surroundings, and then try to evaluate as a group how well those data represent the thing that you think you know. It’s important to recognize that in the digital world we necessarily distort things by representing them as abstraction or by formalization. So I think it’s worth thinking at that level about the relationship between the digital objects that we’re creating and that which we know.

Afterword

The ongoing phases of the pandemic have affected different parts of the world in different ways and at different times, exposing inequalities and different states of readiness and ability for communities to mobilize in moments of crisis and necessity. In the digital humanities, we have also listened with a critical ear to changes discussed within the academy: maintaining certain types of hybrid learning, alternative delivery of content, and even remote education as a means of expanding markets for higher education. These proposed initiatives suggest both change and instability in the years to come.

Our conversation about the practice of international collaboration was carried out in a period of flux where there was not as much time for reflection as we would have liked. Obvious points of discussion arising from this roundtable discussion which deserve further attention include the future of the digital humanities community event as national or regional scholarly cultures expand from basic training toward more specialized work, as well as the potential of hybridization of in-person events both to increase access in the scholarly community and to reduce the carbon footprint of our academic endeavors. On the other hand, we feel that it would be unfortunate if local digital scholarship were the only sort to prevail in the coming years. We hope that our thoughts published here will keep the discussion of international collaboration in digital scholarship moving forward, encouraging others to explore what kinds of new roles it might play.

We recognize that collaborative international dialogue takes a lot of energy and labor, as well as a certain kind of personality and commitment which the academy does not often support. The speakers at this panel are quite proud of their cooperation, and of how their efforts have influenced communities of practice far away from the location of their academic positions. For this reason, we have decided to publish the text of this conversation along with Arabic and Russian translations of it to foster critical discussion with JITP’s readership and the new worlds of digital scholarship coming into focus in these languages and cultures. We trust that this translingual initiative will further the goal of transnational dialogue in global digital humanities and will inspire others to build such bridges.

References

Puchkovskaia, Antonina, Lada Zimina, Pavel Aleksandrovich Tugarinov, and Maria Sergeevna Bakhteeva. 2021. “Digital Humanists and Cultural Institutions: Achieving Efficient Collaboration.” Panel session. European Association of Digital Humanities 2021, Krasnoyarsk, 23 September 2021.

About the Authors

Antonina Puchkovskaia is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at ITMO University (Saint Petersburg, Russia), where she teaches various Digital Humanities courses. Her research interests include cultural heritage representation and visualization, spatial humanities, and digital infrastructures. She is a director of the International Digital Humanities Center and also a program leader of ITMO’s MSc in Digital Humanities, which aims at creating well-rounded data professionals who have strong statistical and technical skills combined with strengths in research, communication, and design. Antonina is one of the 2018–2019 Willard McCarty Fellowship holders at the DH Department at King’s College London. She is a founder of Saint Petersburg DH week and has been organizing it for four years.

Kimon Keramidas is Clinical Associate Professor of Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement and Affiliated Faculty in International Relations at New York University. He is also Co-Director of the International Digital Humanities Center at ITMO University. Kimon’s research and pedagogy take place at the intersection of media and technology studies, cultural history, sociology of culture, and experimental humanities. Kimon’s work includes cultural heritage and public history initiatives with international organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution, the State Hermitage, Rubin Museum, Zayed University in Dubai, and the University of Leicester. He is a co-founder of New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH) and has been organizing NYCDH Week for eight years.

David Joseph Wrisley is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research interests include comparative approaches to medieval literature in European languages and Arabic, digital spatial approaches to corpora, neural methods for handwritten text recognition across writing systems, and open knowledge community building in the Middle East, where he has lived and researched since 2002. He co-founded the Arab world’s first two digital humanities training events: the Digital Humanities Institute Beirut (dhibeirut.wordpress.com) in Beirut in 2015 and the NYU Abu Dhabi Winter Institute in Digital Humanities (wp.nyu.edu/widh) in Abu Dhabi in 2020.

Lada Zimina is an Assistant Professor at the International DH Center at ITMO University (Saint Petersburg, Russia). She has recently graduated from the masters program in Digital Humanities that enabled her to apply IT onto her Bachelor background in Museology and Heritage Management. Her research interests include memory studies, cultural heritage representation, and digital collections. She is a co-founder of a biennial conference on Digital Local Studies.

A young person, in shadow and profile, gazes at their own video feed as they take a class online from home, faced with a webcam.
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Introduction

We are now nearing the two-year mark of a global pandemic that has had such a profound effect on every aspect of our lives. As students, educators, administrators, and researchers, we have had to adapt our academic practice in ways that blurred the lines between our public personas and our private lives. We have had to learn about and embrace various forms of technology in order to enable remote teaching, learning, and collaborations, all with little control over the scale and extent of the invasiveness made possible by these technologies. It is at this crucial conjuncture that we offer this Themed Issue of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy on surveillance and educational technologies.

As we said in the call for papers for this issue: “The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a magnifying glass, revealing all the ways our systems are broken.” Indeed, social fault lines have not only been exposed and exacerbated in the harsh light of the pandemic response, but even more so through the ways many institutions chose to ignore it while hoping to continue with some version of business as usual. But, just as a magnifying glass reveals faults, it shows us opportunities for repair: we cannot simply fix what is broken, but also must work toward eliminating systems that are not “broken” but working as designed—to the detriment of marginalized and vulnerable populations. Thus, while we develop counternarratives and critiques, we can also draw on more expansive visions of abolition, which demand “that we change one thing, which is everything” (Gilmore 2018).

Bluntly, many of these surveillance systems and computational tools shouldn’t exist. While the emergency circumstances under which people and institutions have adopted them during the pandemic make such developments somewhat understandable, now that we have a better understanding of the concrete consequences in our pedagogy and in our students’ lives, we really have no justification to continue using these tools in these ways. We must change not only the punitive technology we use, but the educational mindset and broader world that rationalizes it.

This issue is not the first, nor will it be the last, collection of such critical work, but as we spend more time within this pandemic paradigm, we are accumulating clearer and stronger evidence and narratives of the harms surveillance-oriented educational technology brings, making it much less understandable for justice-oriented educators to excuse their use. The pandemic has crucially highlighted the need for consent, compassion, and care, and one of the striking things about many of the pieces in this issue is that they are self-reflective rather than analytical. Many of the authors situate themselves in a fraught system of monitoring and punishment and analyze or question their roles in bringing potentially harmful surveillance to bear on others, especially the students they are meant to nurture. It’s also notable how many of these projects address remote proctoring and Learning Management Systems (LMSs). For many institutions, the pandemic supercharged the already pervasive use of LMSs and proctoring systems in the transition to remote instruction. As the uptake of these tools and protocols increased, so did the outcry around the invasiveness and consequences of their use. Consider these pieces both as scholarly research, and as a call to action for justice, within and beyond education.

In “Toward Abolishing Online Proctoring: Counter-Narratives, Deep Change, and Pedagogies of Educational Dignity,” Charles Logan invokes Audrey Watters’ notion of the “edtech imaginary” as a way of exploring how remote-proctoring companies develop powerful narratives about the necessity and usefulness of their products, and how we might establish counternarratives that move us closer to the abolition of these discriminatory technologies and their effects.

In “Back Doors, Trap Doors, and Fourth-Party Deals: How You End up with Harmful Academic Surveillance Technology on Your Campus without Even Knowing,” Autumm Caines and Sarah Silverman alert us to the dangers and complications of allowing fourth-party vendors access to institutional data through backdoors created by third-party relationships. With Proctorio as the primary example, they unpack these relationships in an accessible and clear way, while outlining the different kinds of fourth-party partnerships that institutions might unknowingly find themselves in. Caines and Silverman also lay out a harm index, a useful framework to measure the levels and scale of harms that remote proctoring services can cause. The authors include an example of their collaborative autoethnographic reflection, which provides a glimpse into the tedious but necessary steps needed to thwart corporate control over faculty and student data.

Jessica Kester and Joel Schneier’s “Soft Surveillance: Social Media Filter Bubbles as an Invitation to Critical Digital Literacies” discusses having students engage with the surveillance-derived filter bubbles of their own social media feeds in order to develop critical digital literacies—a way for students to “critically look at their digital practices through their own digital practices.”

In “Resisting Surveillance, Practicing/Imagining the End of Grading,” Marianne Madoré, Anna Zeemont, Joaly Burgos, Jane Guskin, Hailey Lam, and Andréa Stella assert that grading systems are an element of larger systems of surveillance at educational institutions and that grading is incompatible with antiracist pedagogies. They offer a variety of experiences where they either individually or collectively operated against or outside the schema of grading, and push us to “reimagine the purpose of schooling” in light of these struggles.

For Issue 20, we also wanted to create space to explore issues around educational surveillance that wasn’t constrained by the formality of more traditional journal articles, so we invited submissions to our Views from the Field section. We are very pleased to present five thought-provoking pieces that critically engage with the experience of being surveilled by educational technology and the potential consequences of this surveillance on our collective wellbeing.

We start off with “Why Don’t You Trust Us?”, a compelling piece from undergraduate student Sinéad Doyle, who generously shares her own experience of being subjected to additional surveillance during the pandemic and how this sort of invasive surveillance can blur the lines between public and private in counterproductive ways. Lance Eaton’s “The New LMS Rule: Transparency Working Both Ways” imagines what it would look like if we turned the tables and gave students the same level of access to instructor activity on LMSs as these platforms give instructors to student activity, noting the power imbalances built into conventional LMSs. In “Pedagogy and the Expansion of Surveillance at the City University of New York,” Marc Kagan continues the exploration of the potentially insidious nature of LMSs by pointing out the dangers of allowing unfettered and unregulated administrative access to online courses, highlighting the potential role of labor organizations in challenging this threat. “Black Mirror Pedagogy: Dystopian Stories for Technoskeptical Imaginations,” by Daniel G. Krutka, Autumm Caines, Marie K. Heath, and K. Bret Staudt Willet, provides a way to help students interrogate their own techno-optimism through the use of Black Mirror-inspired speculative-fiction narrative building. And finally, Chris Miciek’s creative text, “Field Notes from the Education to Employment Pipeline: A Career Development Perspective,” gives us a bird’s-eye view history of the contested imbrication of education and labor-market requirements, highlighting the historical and ongoing processes wherein students are inured to the use of technological surveillance in readiness for workplace surveillance.

In addition to the pieces on surveillance in education, we are pleased to include two general-interest articles before we pause publication for our migration to a new publishing platform.

The first, “Authoring an Open-Source Game for a Faculty Open Educational Resources Workshop: A Case Study” by Katherine Foshko Tsan, is an excellent piece on using Twine, an open-source interactive narrative building tool, for faculty development focused on OER. This piece highlights how using these sorts of narrative tools can be a compelling way to engage with faculty while opening new space for them to learn about OER.

Our second general-interest article, “Poetry in Your Pocket: Streaming Playlists and the Pedagogy of Poetic Interpretation” by Stephen Grandchamp, shares how the use of Spotify playlists made poetry more accessible to students and helped to recontextualize poetry in a more contemporary setting. This approach helped students understand and participate in the shifting meaning and significance of poetry, and gives hope for those of us who find interpreting poetry a little intimidating.

We want to acknowledge the patient and incredible work that managing editor, Patrick DeDauw, and editorial assistant, Chanta Palmer, have done to keep us on track and wrangle the many moving pieces that needed to come together to produce this issue. Our deep gratitude to the members of the JITP editorial collective for all their behind-the-scenes work and support. We also want to acknowledge the reviewers who took time out of their busy schedules to provide valuable feedback to our authors and note that it has been a privilege to be able to work with the authors to bring you Issue 20. We are deeply grateful that we were all able to come together during this pandemic to give shape and space to this important conversation, and we hope you will join us in doing what we can to ensure an equitable and surveillance-free educational future.

References

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2018. “Making Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley.” Interview with Léopold Lambert. The Funambulist 21. https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/21-space-activism/interview-making-abolition-geography-california-central-valley-ruth-wilson-gilmore.

About the Editors

Chris Gilliard is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. His ideas have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Vice Magazine. He is a member of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Scholars Council, and a member of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project community advisory board.

sava saheli singh is an independent researcher who just completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the eQuality Project and the AI + Society Initiative, both at the University of Ottawa. She created the award-winning Screening Surveillance, a series of short, near-future speculative fiction films. This public education and knowledge translation project calls attention to the potential human consequences of big data surveillance. She co-produced the first three films as a postdoctoral fellow with the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and is currently in post-production on the fourth film in the series which she also co-wrote and co-produced. sava received her PhD from New York University’s Educational Communication and Technology program. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her current research interests include educational surveillance; digital labour and surveillance capitalism; restorative justice and abolition; speculative fiction; and critically examining the effects of technology and techno-utopianism on society.

A telephone poll in black and white at night has a poster on it that reads 'Big Data is Watching You.'
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Table of Contents

Introduction
Chris Gilliard and sava saheli singh

Themed Articles

Toward Abolishing Online Proctoring: Counter-Narratives, Deep Change, and Pedagogies of Educational Dignity
Charles Logan

Back Doors, Trap Doors, and Fourth-Party Deals: How You End up with Harmful Academic Surveillance Technology on Your Campus without Even Knowing
Autumm Caines and Sarah Silverman

Soft Surveillance: Social Media Filter Bubbles as an Invitation to Critical Digital Literacies
Jessica Kester and Joel Schneier

Resisting Surveillance, Practicing/Imagining the End of Grading
Marianne Madoré, Anna Zeemont, Joaly Burgos, Jane Guskin, Hailey Lam, and Andréa Stella

Themed Views from the Field

Why Don’t You Trust Us?
Sinéad Doyle

The New LMS Rule: Transparency Working Both Ways
Lance Eaton

Pedagogy and the Expansion of Surveillance at the City University of New York
Marc Kagan

Black Mirror Pedagogy: Dystopian Stories for Technoskeptical Imaginations
Daniel G. Krutka, Autumm Caines, Marie K. Heath, and K. Bret Staudt Willet

Field Notes from the Education to Employment Pipeline: A Career Development Perspective
Chris Miciek

General Articles

Authoring an Open-Source Game for a Faculty Open Educational Resources Workshop: A Case Study
Katherine Foshko Tsan

Poetry in Your Pocket: Streaming Playlists and the Pedagogy of Poetic Interpretation
Stephen Grandchamp

Issue Twenty Masthead

Issue Editors
Chris Gilliard
sava saheli singh

Editorial Assistant
Chanta Shenell Palmer

Managing Editor
Patrick DeDauw

Copyeditors
Param Ajmera
Patrick DeDauw
Kelly Hammond
Jojo Karlin
Benjamin Miller
Brandon Walsh
Nicole Zeftel
Dominique Zino

Staging Editors
Inés Vañó García
Jojo Karlin
Anne Donlon
Kelly Hammond
Laura Wildemann Kane
Teresa Ober
Danica Savonick
Luke Waltzer

A faceless figure taking a picture is reflected in the convex lens of the camera they're photographing.
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Toward Abolishing Online Proctoring: Counter-Narratives, Deep Change, and Pedagogies of Educational Dignity

Abstract

A future with ubiquitous academic surveillance is not sealed, not yet. In this essay, I discuss how online proctoring companies sell their technology with stories inspired by the edtech imaginary. Higher education institutions, in turn, often repeat these narratives, as evidenced by the ways institutions frame the technology as neutral, convenient tools for facilitating assessments. I propose a possible path toward abolishing online proctoring by authoring counter-narratives. I identify two spaces for constructing counter-narratives. First, we can apply a cognitive perspective to policy implementation to shift individual educators’ understanding of online proctoring through dissonance-producing institutional resources. Second, we can build collective partnerships between administrators, staff, faculty, and students to achieve deep change in our assessment practices. This potential path forward is guided by dual commitments: to reject online proctoring and the intersectional harms endured by students forced to use the technology; and to uproot the underlying pedagogies of policing and punishment that support online proctoring and replace them with pedagogies of educational dignity. I end my essay with a call to adopt an abolitionist approach to ridding education of online proctoring. By exercising abolitionist principles of refusal and care, along with a rejection of reform as an acceptable middle ground, we can move closer to creating the kinds of learning environments and relationships that cultivate students’ educational dignity.

The story of online proctoring is difficult to disentangle from surveillance and policing. Companies with names like Honorlock and Respondus Monitor conjure images of a patriarchal panopticon. Then there’s Proctortrack’s origin story. The chief technology officer for Verificient Technologies, the company that developed Proctortrack, arrived at the idea for the online proctoring technology after working on a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) project that included searching video footage for facial expressions deemed abnormal (Singer 2015). A version of the TSA’s security theater, online proctoring is further evidence of Sasha Costanza-Chock’s observation that “The same cisnormative, racist, and ableist approach that is used to train the models of the millimeter wave scanners [used by the TSA] is now being used to develop AI in nearly every domain” (2020, 5). I worry that the mechanized dehumanization experienced by individuals from nondominant groups at airport security is now being normalized in education due to online proctoring.

The attempts to make prejudiced technology prosaic are facilitated by online proctoring companies and their commitment to an edtech imaginary and its powerful storytelling. Audrey Watters describes the edtech imaginary as a collection of “stories we invent to explain the necessity of technology, the promises of technology; the stories we use to describe how we got here and where we are headed” (2020). Read the statements from online proctoring CEOs and the claims made by companies on their websites, and you can see the edtech imaginary at work. Online proctoring is supposedly necessary because, in the words of ProctorU’s CEO, without it, cheating will increase and pose “a severe threat to all higher education’” (Feathers and Rose 2020). The hollowness of the edtech imaginary is further illustrated in the diminishing story sold by Proctorio. Beginning in January 2019, the company promised institutions their “software eliminates human error [and] bias” (Proctorio 2019). The company’s homepage declared their software’s impressive capability until April 2021. On April 19, 2021, the Federal Trade Commission warned companies not to claim their algorithms can erase bias (Jillson 2021). Within days Proctorio’s promise of unbiased technology shrank to “Our software attempts to remove human bias and error” (Proctorio 2021). Visit the company website today, and you will find the edited sentence has disappeared. The edtech imaginary features many such revisionist narrators.

I want to consider the other elements of the edtech imaginary described by Watters: how we got here and where we might go. I’m trying to understand how institutions and people in power too often come to believe edtech’s glossy narratives about the past, present, and future. I’m also searching for the sites where we can share our counter-narratives. Alongside counter-narratives, I’m seeking ways we might uproot the pedagogies of policing and punishment that make online proctoring possible and replace them with pedagogies of educational dignity.

Educational dignity is critical for enacting a just present and future (Espinoza and Vossoughi 2014; Espinoza et al. 2020). Educational dignity is “the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one’s mind, humanity, and potential” (Espinoza et al. 2020, 326). Online proctoring and its shallow definitions of learning are incompatible with educational dignity because of the technology’s hostility toward every individual forced beneath a webcam’s glare. The technology can harden internalized oppression, especially for nondominant students (Bali 2021), through its built-in racism and ableism. Further, online proctoring positions educators as police officers and students as criminals, straining inter-personal learning experiences. Online proctoring, I should note, is not the sole source of negative intra-personal and inter-personal learning experiences. Acknowledging its encoded opposition to educational dignity, however, can encourage us to view its abolishment as a part of a larger project to help educators develop and practice pedagogies of educational dignity.

I turn now to possible ways of conducting that larger project. I will review the institutionalization of online proctoring; describe the importance of how institutional resources frame online proctoring; offer a case for how to create deep change in the ways educators understand online proctoring and its alternatives; and conclude with a call to take an abolitionist approach to ridding online proctoring from education.

A future with ubiquitous academic surveillance is not sealed, not yet.

How Did We Get Here?

The critiques of online proctoring are numerous. Online proctoring replicates inadequate assessment methods (Leafstadt 2017). Online proctoring can exacerbate a student’s anxiety, particularly a student with high anxiety (Woldeab and Brothen 2019), which in turn can have a negative impact on students’ ability to demonstrate their learning (Eyler 2018). Online proctoring technology is racist (Feathers 2021; Swauger 2020); ableist (Brown 2020; Zhu 2021); and it invades students’ privacy (Cahn et al. 2020; Germain 2020). Put another way, online proctoring not only reinforces ineffective, harmful pedagogies; it’s also a deeply unethical technology.

Joining these critiques are the thousands of students who have documented and shared their experiences with online proctoring:

I know that I’m going to have to try a couple times before the camera recognizes me…I have a light beaming into my eyes for the entire exam…That’s hard when you’re actively trying not to look away, which could make it look like you’re cheating…[The software] is just not accurate. So I don’t know if it’s seeing things that aren’t there because of the pigment of my skin.
—Femi Yemi-Ese, student at the University of Texas at Austin (quoted in Caplan-Bricker 2021)

I’ve despised using this software…. On one occasion, I was “flagged” for movement and obscuring my eyes. I have trichotillomania triggered by my anxiety, which is why my hand was near my face. Explaining this to my professor was nightmarish.
—Bea, student at Tarrant County College (quoted in Retta 2020)

It’s really cruel to have students come to class and expect to learn, and then treat them, essentially, like criminals and make them install programs that look for all their information and force them to give tours of their home.
—Anonymous, student at the University of Washington (quoted in Hipolito 2020)

The chorus of student criticism has apparently not done enough to slow institutions and faculty from deploying the technology against students. For example, Proctorio’s CEO claimed his company helped to proctor 25 million exams at 1,000 institutions in 2020 (Harwell 2020).

To help to explain the growth of such an apparently toxic technology, it’s important to note that institutional use of online proctoring predates the coronavirus pandemic. The existing institutional knowledge and resource infrastructure, combined with the coronavirus pandemic’s demands for quick and cheap solutions to complex teaching and learning problems, meant online proctoring could take root farther and faster than might otherwise have been the case. The upheaval also presented educational technology companies an opportunity to activate the edtech imaginary and present themselves as partners ready and able to assist institutions’ pivot to remote emergency teaching. In some cases, non-online proctoring companies joined together with online proctoring companies, marketing their wares directly to educators for free (Top Hat 2020). The companies’ beneficence can be understood as an attempt to deepen their connections to institutions as well as to circumscribe what we imagine when we envision online learning and its possibilities.

Once a technology becomes well-established at an institution, it can be difficult to uproot (Arthur 1994). As a consequence of the pandemic, institutions have made substantial financial investments in online proctoring technology. The University of California at Santa Cruz, for instance, spent $200,000 for online proctoring in 2020–2021, and the institution’s leadership plans to continue to fund online proctoring (Harwood 2021). In addition to the monetary cost, institutions and their employees incurred a labor cost, too. Staff members had to learn how to use and support the technology. Faculty who decided to use the technology learned enough to do so, or they may have relied on staff and graduate students to troubleshoot technical problems, which meant any staff member or graduate student called upon to troubleshoot must have known how to fix the problems, and if not, they may have turned to the companies themselves for help. And finally, students, who rarely have a say in the matter, learned how to use the technology if they wanted to pass a class.

The money and labor sunk into online proctoring moves the institution, its employees, and its students further down the online proctoring path in a process of increasing returns (Pierson 2000) and software sedimentation (Weller 2020) so that change is difficult to contemplate let alone implement. As we’ve seen, the edtech imaginary is invested in software sedimentation. In response to criticism, online proctoring CEOs have promised friendlier interfaces and faster loading times (Deighton 2021), design “upgrades” presumably meant to make online proctoring more acceptable and ready for further sedimentation.

Another sedimentation tactic used by online proctoring’s defenders is to argue students have long been surveilled (Global Silicon Valley 2021). Since surveilling students is not new, these advocates observe, then contemporary warnings about academic surveillance are unfair. I read this argument as an attempt to make online proctoring more palatable—and thus more profitable—by conflating the technology with in-person proctoring. However, online proctoring is invasive in ways in-person proctoring is not (Fitzgerald 2021).

An in-person proctor does not demand to view a student’s bedroom. An in-person proctor is not an unflinching gaze trained to interpret students’ behavior through the singular lens of suspicion. When online proctoring executives and other adherents of online proctoring collapse the differences between in-person and online proctoring, they are reaching into the edtech imaginary. The story that emerges is a history of assessment practices meant to make their technology appear to be an uncontroversial extension of how students have always completed homework, quizzes, and tests. Do not trust online proctoring companies to be credible narrators. Their business depends on selling a specific tale of how we got here and where we should be going, and if nothing else, their public relations version of education history should be met with profound skepticism.

Elsewhere, online proctoring has been equated with older online learning technologies like “poorly recorded video lectures [and] inactive LMS discussion boards” (Selwyn et al. 2021, 13). I am concerned about the ways the edtech imaginary is succeeding to shape the discourse and frame online proctoring as a misunderstood, humdrum technology. I do not want racist, ableist academic surveillance to be a practice educators and students shrug off as an unfortunate but necessary part of learning. I do agree with Selwyn et al. (2021) that online proctoring demands we “develop counter-narratives that push back against the imagining of public education as simply a ‘tech issue’” (14). Where and how these counter-narratives emerge is an urgent question.

From Neutrality to Dissonance

Before exploring online proctoring counter-narratives, I want to consider how higher education institutions normalize online proctoring. Of 100 randomly selected US and Canadian college and university websites chosen from a sample of 2,155, “none took a critical stance toward proctoring tools or addressed the ethics of student surveillance” (Kimmons and Veletsianos 2021). Official institutional policy appears to treat online proctoring tools as neutral educational technology. The finding is perhaps unsurprising. While exceptions do exist (e.g., “Proctoring and Equity” from the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana University Bloomington), institutions that have invested money and labor into bringing online proctoring to campus may be hesitant or unwilling to criticize the same technology on public-facing websites. Neutrality is therefore a strategic choice. And because education is politics (Nieto 1999; Shor & Freire 1987), neutrality is a political choice too, one that aligns institutions with online proctoring companies.

Disrupting this neutrality becomes even more difficult because educators and institutions, perhaps unaware of the technology’s harms, often provide students with guiding language written by the online proctoring companies themselves. For example, Respondus Monitor offers instructors a template titled “Using LockDown Browser and a Webcam for Online Exams,” which instructors can copy and paste into a syllabus (Respondus n.d.). The syllabus template suggests to students that they “[t]ake the exam in a well-lit room and avoid backlighting, such as sitting with your back to a window” (Respondus n.d.). Missing from this recommendation and others like it is the reason why students must be in a well-lit room, sometimes having to resort to shining a bright light directly into their faces (Chin 2021): because many online proctoring companies use facial recognition technology. Not only do these technologies struggle to detect dark skin (Simonite 2019), they are built using biased datasets, leading to racialization and dehumanization (Stevens and Keyes 2021).

Online proctoring companies also shape the perception of their harmful technology at the institutional level. Just as individual educators might depend on the companies for ways to describe to students how to use the technology, so too do institutional how-to resources and websites. Institutional support pages are too often little more than hyperlinks to help guides and video tutorials created by the companies. In addition, an institutional resource page might repackage a company’s recommendations to students, such as one example when the Respondus Monitor syllabus language about lighting reappears on an institutional resource page warning students, “You may need to add more lighting to your workspace when using Respondus Monitor to ensure the program can recognize your face during the assessment” (Northwestern University n.d.). Once more, the reason why students need to add more lighting is glaringly absent. Online proctoring companies can continue to control the narrative about their technology as long as institutional resource pages are indistinguishable from the frequently asked questions websites produced by online proctoring companies. Thus, online proctoring companies have succeeded in making their technology appear benign by attempting to collapse the distinct differences between in-person and online proctoring. Companies have also benefited from instructors and institutions who frame the technology as neutral, often parroting company copy on syllabi and how-to webpages.

Taking lessons from a cognitive approach to learning and policy implementation can help explain why changing people’s understanding about online proctoring might be especially hard when the technology is presented in such a way that its functionality appears both commonplace and unambiguously advantageous.

We draw on prior knowledge and existing beliefs when interpreting new information (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000). A problem arises because “New ideas either are understood as familiar ones, without sufficient attention to aspects that diverge from the familiar, or are integrated without restructuring of existing knowledge and beliefs, resulting in piecemeal changes in existing practice” (Spillane et al. 2002, 398). What does this mean for educators encountering online proctoring for the first (or fifth) time? When neutral or positive language masks the technology’s harms, then online proctoring can appear not to be so much a new idea but instead a logical, if imperfect, extension of an educator’s existing beliefs and practices.

That online proctoring can either be an outgrowth of, or seem an outgrowth of, existing beliefs and practices is evidence of a larger problem: the beliefs and practices themselves. Pedagogies of policing and punishment are the soil sustaining online proctoring. It’s not enough to weed out online proctoring. Instead, what we could use is a controlled burn.

To light a fire that removes online proctoring from higher education, start by revising institutional websites and resources to explicitly name and describe online proctoring’s harms. These revisions—these counter-narratives—need to produce cognitive dissonance in educators in order to disrupt the narrative of online proctoring as a necessary, innocuous technology. This dissonance can force educators to confront both the technology itself and the underlying beliefs about learning that help educators rationalize deploying academic surveillance against their students. A goal is to help educators “recognize an existing model as problematic and, then, to focus resources and support on attempts to make sense of the novel idea, restructuring existing beliefs and knowledge” (Spillane et al. 2002, 418). In other words, sparking a shift in a person’s thinking begins with illuminating the ways online proctoring is a problem both as a technical solution and as a pedagogical practice. A dissonance-producing institutional resource about online proctoring might look like Figure 1:

A hypothetical institution webpage introduces educators to online proctoring. The upper left of the page contains a quote from an anonymous student that reads: “‘It’s really cruel to have students come to class and expect to learn, and then treat them, essentially, like criminals and make them install programs that look for all their information and force them to give tours of their home.’” The upper right of the page contains an image of a camera's lens. The middle of the page contains the words: “Online proctoring is racist, ableist, and privacy-invading.” Beneath these words, appears a quote which reads: “‘If we understand teaching as consisting primarily of social relationships and as a political commitment rather than a technical activity, then it is unquestionable that what educators need to pay most attention to are their own growth and transformation and the lives, realities and dreams of their students.’ - Sonia Nieto”. Beneath the quote from Sonia Nieto appears the words: “How might we abandon pedagogies of policing and commit to pedagogies of educational dignity for ourselves and our students?” followed by a bullet-pointed list with the items: “Embrace a more holistic view of learning. Develop authentic assessments. Adopt ungrading practices. Foster partnerships between administrators, staff, faculty, and students.” At the page's bottom, two sentences read: “Read more about the harms of online proctoring and how to transition away from the technology.” and “Make an appointment with the Center for Teaching and Learning, an instructional designer, and/or an educational technologist.” The word “References” is at the bottom of the page, followed by two references. The first citation is: Hipolito, Matthew. 2020. “‘Going Through Your Things’: Remote Proctoring Software ‘Demeaning’ and ‘Cruel,’ Students Say.” The Daily, October 29, 2020. https://www.dailyuw.com/news/article_8b14f13e-197a-11eb-8730-c7459eeb446a.html. The second citation is: Nieto, Sonia. 1999. The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities. New York: Teachers College Press.
Figure 1. A hypothetical institutional webpage that uses a critical framing when introducing educators to online proctoring.

I recognize it’s unlikely the above resource will be adopted by institutions of higher education across the land. So I have another suggestion. Before providing a reader with installation directions and other troubleshooting tips, which is what many institutional resources do, the resource could prompt an educator to reflect on the technology and its effects by asking:

  • Do you believe students with dark skin should have to shine a bright light on their faces to be recognized as having a face by the online proctoring technology?
  • Do you believe diabetic students should be too afraid to check their blood sugar levels or eat a snack for fear of being labeled suspicious by the online proctoring technology?
  • Do you believe students should allow a stranger to have remote access to their personal computer?
  • Would you want to show a stranger your office or bedroom before an exam begins or while taking an exam?
  • Is your pedagogy founded on distrust, policing, and punishment?

Institutional resources about online proctoring may appear to play a seemingly small role in the larger conversation about the technology and its impacts on teaching and learning. However, understanding the resources as a vehicle the edtech imaginary uses to influence teaching and teachers themselves emphasizes the need to attend to how the resources frame online proctoring. Institutional resources about online proctoring can be understood as a policy technology—a technology about technology, if you will—or a means designed to implement policy. Other policy technologies include curricula and assessments (Spillane et al. 2019). The problem with institutional resources adopting a neutral or positive framing of online proctoring is thus twofold. First, as previously discussed, uncritical resources can produce, reinforce, and normalize academic surveillance and pedagogies of distrust, policing, and punishment by being assimilated into educators’ preexisting beliefs and practices.

A second damaging consequence exists. When an educator’s pedagogy is pushed toward policing and punishment, practices enabled in part by uncritical resources, their sense of themselves as a teacher risks being corrupted. Here Stephen Ball’s observation that “we do not do policy, policy does us” (2015, 307) helps to articulate why focusing on the resources’ language is so important. Because if our pedagogy is an outgrowth of our identities as educators, and policy shapes our sense of self, then a pedagogy of punishment wants us to become punishers. The policy “does us” by defining who we can be as teachers and who our students can be as learners. Recall a student forced to submit to online proctoring felt like a criminal because the technology positions students as inherently suspicious. And if a policy of online proctoring transforms students into criminals, then it turns teachers into police officers—and cops, I believe, should be banned from campuses.

A Story of Reform

Overcoming online proctoring and the pedagogies that maintain its use might begin with the individual, but we improve the chances of abolishing the technology when we join together to unlearn harmful pedagogies and replace them with pedagogies of educational dignity. To grow pedagogies of educational dignity, we can couple a cognitive approach to policy implementation with a stance toward learning as a fundamentally social experience (Lave and Wenger 1991; Vygotsky 1978). Many educators concerned about online proctoring have realized the social nature of learning by organizing events to learn with and from one another. Examples of collective meaning making include the Teach-In #AgainstSurveillance (Gray 2020) and the #AnnotateEdTech events (Logan and Caines 2021). These online gatherings, while vital for building community and solidarity, may nonetheless struggle to bring about the systemic change at institutions many of us seek.

To accomplish change at scale—a favorite word, I know, of the edtech imaginary—the movement against online proctoring can address the depth of educators’ beliefs and practices; the sustainability of changes over time; the spread of changes throughout an institution; and a shift in ownership over the new ideas from external to internal sources (Coburn 2003). Remember that changing an individual’s understanding requires resources and support (Spillane et al. 2002). Combine these additional resources and support with the elements for achieving deep change at scale (Coburn 2003), and the project of ridding online proctoring from campuses appears daunting.

Nonetheless, we can turn to the efforts of a coalition of administrators and staff at the University of Michigan-Dearborn for an example of institutional change at scale. In March 2020, the University shifted to remote emergency teaching. At the same time, the Office of the Provost and deans decided to publicly oppose online proctoring, and though the administrators did not ban the technology, they did strongly recommend faculty not use it (Silverman et al. 2021). In the months that followed, the staff at the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources (the Hub) worked to implement the reform through a combination of depth, sustainability, spread, and shift (Coburn 2003). See Table 1 for how the University tried to accomplish the different dimensions of reform implementation.

Dimension of Reform Implementation How Administrators and the Hub’s Staff at the University of Michigan-Dearborn Tried to Accomplish the Dimension of Reform Implementation
Depth

Changes to educators’ beliefs, educators’ interactions with students, and educators’ pedagogies.

  • provided individual consultations to faculty new to online teaching.
  • assisted faculty to develop authentic assessments.
  • hosted a virtual guest speaker, an expert in authentic assessments with a speciality in the STEM disciplines.
  • organized multiple faculty development programs throughout the year.
Sustainability

A long-term commitment to nurturing educators’ development over time.

  • hired two additional instructional designers on two-year contracts.
  • hired graders to aid faculty in high-enrollment courses to grade and provide feedback on more time-intensive authentic assessments.
Spread

The diffusion of reform-related pedagogical principles within a course, department, and institution.

  • provided individual or group email responses from the Hub, the Office of Digital Education, and the Office of the Provost with a consistent message that the decision to avoid online proctoring was due to student privacy and equity concerns.
  • Silverman et al. (2021) acknowledge communications with faculty “could have been better wrapped into a cohesive, campus-wide message” (121) to improve spread.
Shift

Ownership of the reform transitions from an external reform to an internal reform with authority for maintaining the change left to groups and individuals.

  • Silverman et al. (2021) recommend designing experiences to “develop a shared critical digital literacy between instructors and students by discussing the ethical problems associated with remote proctoring and building a shared understanding of academic integrity in the digital age” (126).
Table 1. Applying Coburn’s (2003) concept of scale to the University of Michigan-Deaborn’s approach to shifting educators’ beliefs and practices regarding online proctoring.

We need counter-narratives. However, a strategy for abolishing online proctoring built only on counter-narratives risks ceding the terms of the debate to those set by the online proctoring companies. For this reason, we also need stories that aren’t defined solely in opposition to the likes of online proctoring CEOs and the edtech imaginary they’re entranced by. The coalition against online proctoring that emerged at the University of Michigan-Dearborn is an instructive example of one such alternative narrative, a story of how we might achieve deep change by developing a partnership organization founded on relationships (Logan 2020). What started as co-authoring a counter-narrative about online proctoring at the University became, over time, a new narrative about partnerships between administrators, staff, faculty, and students to develop equitable, authentic assessments.[1]

The example set by the University of Michigan-Dearborn demonstrates that when administrators offer support and financial resources to reimagine teaching and learning, trusting staff and faculty along the way, resistance to and refusal of online proctoring can generate a community that rejects pedagogies of policing and embraces people and our immutable educational dignity.

Where Might We Go from Here?

The future of online proctoring is still being written. Appealing to institutions’ and students’ fears, online proctoring CEOs tell their tales of worthless coronavirus diplomas (Harwell 2020) tarnishing an institution’s brand and raising questions about a student’s employability. The narrative belongs to the larger playbook drawn up by the corporate education movement and its vision of learning as human capital development (Williamson 2017). I believe learning cannot be reduced to a datapoint to be quantified, a credential to be protected at all costs.

Online proctoring companies possess a paltry view of education that produces and reinforces pedagogies of punishment. When confronted with the intersectional damages inflicted upon students by their technology, online proctoring companies insist their products are necessary, claiming the technology is an engine of equity (Norris 2021). Yet as Chris Gilliard argues, “A better remote proctoring system isn’t on the way—it can’t be—because they are all built on the same faulty and invasive ideas…about pedagogy, surveillance, and control” (@hypervisible, April 6, 2021).

Online proctoring is not like in-person proctoring. Online proctoring is not like a badly lit lecture video or an underused discussion board. Online proctoring is a manifestation of what Ruha Benjamin calls the New Jim Code, or “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (2019, 5–6). When institutions and educators frame online proctoring with market-based stories and their boogeymen, they risk being duped by online proctoring companies and their unreliable narrators selling dubious promises of objectivity and equity as evidence the technology works. In contrast, when the story of online proctoring is framed as the instantiation of the New Jim Code and its racist, ableist surveillance, then those who experience the technology’s inequities—students—emerge as trustworthy narrators with heartbreaking accounts of the humiliations they’ve had to endure. Their stories should be part of the evidence we use as we seek to rid online proctoring from schools.

Including online proctoring as part of the New Jim Code offers another possibility: that of the abolitionist imaginary. Abolitionist practices, suggested sava saheli singh (Pasquini 2021), can be a generative source of imagination, politics, organizing, and action in the struggle against online proctoring and other problematic educational technologies. Abolitionism’s emphasis on refusal alongside care and collectivity (Kaba 2021), for example, is essential if we are to develop pedagogies of educational dignity.

In addition, the fight against online proctoring takes on greater urgency when we understand online proctoring as the latest example of white supremaist surveillance technologies designed and deployed to police and punish. Like previous racializing information technologies used to surveil and control people (Browne 2015), online proctoring’s harms are experienced disproportionately by Black people as well as other nondominant populations. This longview of online proctoring is vital, for as Bettina Love notes, “An ahistorical understanding of oppression leads folx to believe that quick fixes to the system, such as more surveillance, more testing, and more punishment, will solve the issues of injustice and inequality” (2019, 92). It also means adopting the abolitionist stance that reform, even at the scale accomplished by the University of Michigan-Dearborn, cannot be where the story of online proctoring ends.

If the story of online proctoring is to end in freedom, we can start by telling counter-narratives and fashioning new narratives altogether. I am hopeful these stories will include accounts of honest institutional resources and websites. Of administrators who abandon online proctoring, despite paying for its false promises, and invest instead in providing support and funding for faculty and staff to develop authentic assessments. And I am hopeful we will share stories of lasting partnerships between educators and students, coalitions that accomplish deep change and grow pedagogies of educational dignity.

Notes

[1] An emphasis on authentic assessment is an essential element for building pedagogies of educational dignity. Authentic assessments are characterized by self-reflection and collaboration with others (Conrad and Openo 2018). Prioritizing self-reflection and embracing individuals’ genuine, complex selves can support educational dignity through intra-personal learning. Authentic assessment can also help students experience educational dignity through its frequent use of learning with and from other people, a crucial design choice upon which educational dignity relies (Espinoza et al. 2020).

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About the Author

Charles Logan is a PhD student in learning sciences at Northwestern University. A former high school English teacher and university educational technologist, his research interests include critical digital pedagogy, co-authoring counter-narratives to oppose sociotechnical and edtech imaginaries, and designing learning experiences to support educational dignity. He is on Twitter @charleswlogan.

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