Introduction

The Digital Scholarship Craft Workshop (DS Craft Workshop) borrows the model of a creative writing workshop and applies it to the work and practices of digital scholarship. It is an approach that could be incorporated into existing organizational structures that support digital scholarship, or it can be used as a stand-alone model that sparks conversations and creative inquiry among participants at any level of digital scholarship experience. The workshop can develop case studies of on-the-ground digital scholarship practices and enhance the sense-making and institutionalizing processes necessary for long-term, sustainable support of emerging forms of scholarly and pedagogical work. Yet it is also a relatively simple, inexpensive, and effective way to build a community of practice around digital scholarship.

We offer the user's manual of the DS Craft Workshop for these reasons:

To openly share the DS Craft Workshop as a possible generative model for other academic libraries. We have found the workshop to be a particularly helpful organizational model for building community around digital scholarship practice that brings together diverse perspectives across the organization.
To document the basic elements of the DS Craft Workshop for our own future use. This manual grew out of specific context that is experiencing significant growth and change. As new individuals take on leadership, we offer this manual to ensure some continuity. We hope that this document, and the structure of the workshop will evolve over time.
To refine and improve the model of DS Craft Workshop through ongoing revision and iteration. In sharing this model with the wider professional community, we hope that others who take this approach may share their experiences, comments, and critiques. If you adapt or improve on the workshop model, please get in contact Justin Wadland or Elliott Stevens.

The model presented here took shape during 2018-2019 academic year in the UW Libraries Digital Scholarship Collective (DS Collective), a community of practice that supports and advances digital scholarship across the three campus of the University of Washington (Bothell, Seattle, and Tacoma). This manual goes with the presentation Justin Wadland and Elliott Stevens gave at the 2019 Digital Library Federation Forum presentation: "Workshopping the Workshop: Stealing from Creative Writing Pedagogy to Investigate the Craft of Digital Scholarship." The initial draft was prepared by Justin, with Elliott and Erika Bailey offering editing and other suggestions.

It should be noted, however, that this text has not yet been "workshopped' by the larger DS Collective, but it does benefit from on-going support of DS Leads Denise Hattwig and Verletta Kern, as well as all those who have shared their work in this workshop.

Overview

Basic Ingredients

Like a creative writing workshop, the essential elements of the Digital Scholarship Craft Workshop are quite simple:

A small, but committed group of peer participants who are willing to give time, attention, and care to improving others’ work.

A facilitator/organizer who leads the process, setting deadlines, communicating with participants, and guiding conversations of the workshop.

A team or individual who has digital scholarship work in progress to share and who is prepared to listen to the group’s response.

A meeting space and adequate technology to review the work in progress.

These basic ingredients may seem simple, but like a baguette--which also has four ingredients--the results can vary greatly. The workshop has the potential to form a supportive, generative space that inspires the best work of the participants, but it could also be employed to stifle originality, replicate power structures, and reinforce negative group dynamics. To get the best out of workshops, set intentions at the outset and restate them often. Also, debriefing periodically with those who have shared work can help gauge the effectiveness of the workshop and identify areas for improvement. As the group learns from its experiences together, it should adjust the processes and check in with the participants to ensure that norms are explicit.

Establishing the Schedule (and Trust)

Create a regular schedule of the workshop early on.

Timing of the workshop forms the container in which the participants can begin the process of building relationships with each other. Trust is one of the forces that binds the workshop ingredients together, encouraging those sharing work to risk exposing their uncertainty and struggles and enabling them to listen to the perspectives and insights offered in return. While the workshop model could happen once in a pop-up format or occur regularly over a long period of time, we at the UW Libraries have found that holding the workshop once a month provides just enough time between workshops. They typically last for about 45 minutes, roughly split in half between the person sharing work and the group discussion.

Before the first actual workshop, it may be helpful for the group to sketch out what you mean by digital scholarship “work.” An easy place to start is to focus on specific digital scholarship projects that are in development or may need to evolve to the next phase. This is where we started at the UW Libraries. We decided to call this space we were creating the Digital Scholarship Craft Workshop to differentiate this space from other kinds of “training” workshops that librarians and academics are much more familiar with.

Our approach grew out of the broader notation “digital craft” described by David Levy in Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives. In this book, Levy introduces mindfulness practices that help readers increase awareness of their relationship with digital technologies. Levy offers “craft,” or in other words, “making or doing something skillfully,” as a way to improve our effectiveness, agency, and healthy use of commonplace digital tools like social media and email:

When I suggest we think of our online activity as craft, I certainly call attention to the skill involved. But I also mean to highlight three additional dimensions of craftwork, making them four in all: intention, care, skill, and learning. (7)

The notion of craft can be extended to digital scholarship practices that make use of complex digital tools, and it roots the conversations in the intersection of the practices, resources, and communities where those activities reside.

We start with the assumption that everyone is doing good work, and we as a group would like to make it better by giving it care and attention. Through this, we want to learn not just what you are doing but how you are doing it.

As of this writing, the UW Libraries is still in the sense-making phase of defining digital scholarship at institutional level and articulating a Digital Scholarship Program that is relevant and supports work across the entire system. The craft workshop model has enabled us to begin compiling case studies of on-the-ground digital scholarship practices that together will feed the larger process of articulating to ourselves, the university, and the wider professional community our unique approach to digital scholarship.

Optional: Define the Nature and Scope of Digital Scholarship “Work” Under Review

As a possible warm up, workshop a draft template, possibly created from a list of preliminary projects.

Unlike a creative writing workshops, which may separate themselves by literary genre and impose other limits, like page length, on the type and scope of the work, the Digital Scholarship Craft Workshop brings forth a wide array of works of overwhelming complexity, from projects to grant proposals to policies to training programs to designing digital platforms. Really, any digital scholarship activity in-development and needing guidance is fair game. This openness can be a bit unruly, as if artwork, musical compositions, choreography, and all manner of creative work, sprinkled with other things like class curricula and publisher contracts, had suddenly flooded into the creative writing workshop.

In addition, the interconnected nature of digital scholarship work can quickly broaden the scope of the conversation. Discussions of seemingly simple project can quickly veer from questions of pedagogy to infrastructure to institutional culture to policy and back again in the blink of an eye. Some find these conversations instructional; others may be baffled by their meandering quality. They can be fruitful to the extent that they return to the “work” under consideration and the practices or craft necessary to support it. For these reasons, it might be helpful for the group to first develop the template and a preliminary idea of the work under review.

At the UW Libraries we defined the work rather loosely. Anyone can bring a project in development, a policy that might affect system-wide work, a digital scholarship training program, or more recently, chunks of a pilot project to expand digital scholarship tools and infrastructure. In the future, the work could include grant programs, visioning, exercises, programming of spaces, anything in development that could benefit from collective attention.

Even though it has limitations, we are providing our initial template form. One possible starting point for a new group would be to take this form and workshop it so that it fits your own context.

Prepping for the Workshop

Getting the the Digital Scholarship “Work” Ready for Review

Schedule a pre-meeting between the individual or team sharing work and the workshop facilitator.

To get things going, the facilitator takes an active role in preparing for the workshop, overseeing the whole process of the workshop, and communicating among participants. Also, this person ensures that everyone understands the goals, structure, and expectations of the workshop. At the UW Libraries, a single person has filled this role, but it could be shared among a few individuals.

The facilitator first meets with the individual or team sharing work. During this initial planning meeting, we do the following things:

Discuss the workshop structure and goals.
Develop a shared understanding of the work being presented to the group.
Share a template form that participants will fill to provide background information on the project, links for materials to review, and questions being posed to the group.

The person sharing work is expected to have materials ready to review a few days before the workshop so that the group will have time to review it beforehand.

The template form developed for the first few rounds of the workshop was slanted toward digital scholarship projects. For these, it seemed to work well, but it did not always accommodate the other kinds of digital scholarship activities that came before the group, such as workshops, online publishing platforms, or software user agreements. We offer the initial version of the workshop template, but we anticipate revising it significantly so that it can better be adapted to a wider range of digital scholarship activities. Also, we will likely incorporate a bit more clarity up-front about a range of options that designate type and level of responses expected from the group.

Sharing Background on the Project

Prior to the meeting, the facilitator shares background information with the group

Once the person or team sharing work has completed the template or developed materials to present, the facilitator sends this out to the group at least two days before the workshop. This gives participants time to view the project, read materials, gain an understanding of the questions being posed to the group, and begin to formulate responses.

At the UW Libraries, the workshop has been a regular part of the agenda of our Digital Scholarship Collective, and we devote up to half the meeting to it. While the responses to workshops have been largely positive, some participants presenting their work in progress have pointed out that occasionally there was a misalignment between what they hoped to get from the workshop and the kinds of responses they received from the group. As we refine the workshop in the future, we may formalize the process a bit more, asking the participants sharing work to identify the type of feedback they hope to receive. We have found that people may welcome creative critiques when they are in the early stages of a project or wrestling with the challenges around an existing project.

Also, we are still discovering how to provide people with enough information to give meaningful feedback. Some discussions, such as those around copyright, policy, or technical infrastructure, may require so much background knowledge that a smaller “workshop team” might need to be designated to gain the necessary foundational knowledge to provide substantive feedback. Yet this should be approached with care and perhaps be handled on a case-by-case basis rather than formalized. The real value of the workshop is that it can bring peers together as a learning community that provides a structure and audience where the messy, unfinished quality of digital scholarship work can continually be critically engaged with, situated, and made sense of.

Holding the Workshop

Basic Structure of the Workshop

The digital scholarship craft workshop can be held in-person or online via video conference software. The space where it occurs must be conducive to discussion and enable the person or group sharing the work to be able to adequately display it and allow others to interact with it.

The workshops hosted by the UW Libraries, the Digital Scholarship Collective typically have been about 40 minutes and follow this structure:

Brief introduction from the facilitator (2 min)
Project overview and posing of questions from the person/team sharing work (10-15 minutes)
Discussion of the project and responses (20 minutes)

During the introduction, the facilitator goes over the agenda and reminds people of the goals of the craft workshop:

To help the DS work under discussion evolve to its next stage.
To support good work and make it even better.

This setting of intention reminds participants that while we are providing constructive criticism to the projects, it should be given in the spirit of helping our colleagues succeed and understand the wider context in which their work is occurring.

Then comes the sharing of work. In many cases the participants sharing work have prepared a slide deck that presents the DS work being considered. The presentation should provide background, context, the current state of the work, examples, and questions that the group should take up. For the workshop to be meaningful, the participant must be willing to be vulnerable and take the risk of sharing their own work before the group.

The goal here is not to receive adulation and awe for polished work but to shed some of the rigid mental habits that accrete to our ways of approaching digital scholarship work. We are not giving a training but learning together as we inquire into the issues and complexities of provisional work. The presenter must be open to exposing the places where the craft needs to grow and improve, where the work is rough and provisional, itself emerging and taking shape. This does not mean that the “work” itself should purely be an individual’s craft practices. Often the most fruitful discussions circle around how policies, organizational structures, work cultures, technical infrastructure, staffing, and other factors intersect to challenge and/or advance digital scholarship work.

Facilitating the Discussion

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the experts mind there are few,” the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki famously wrote. In the halls of academia, where expertise is the coin of the realm, this little aphorism may seem a tough sell, and yet within the domain of digital scholarship, where all are beginners in some way, it seems apt and useful guide for steering discussions during the craft workshop.

Open with clarifying questions about the project.

We recommend starting with a basic inquiry into anything that that group needs further explanation.

What terms or technologies do you need to learn more about?
What aspects of this work do you not understand or need more information about?

This is the space to inquire whether the participants understand all aspects of the work under consideration. If this surfaces a lot of questions and discussion of operation and definition of the work, then take the time to discuss them and possibly postpone the workshop discussion until later.

Take up one of the discussion questions raised by the person sharing work.

Taking up a question raised by the person sharing work is often a good place to start, especially if the question is open-ended and surfaces some of the inherent tensions of the work in question. This gives the person sharing the work some agency in guiding the direction of the discussion. The person sharing work should have a few questions prepared for the group, and the facilitator may want to take some role is pulling out a particular question.

Ask contextualizing questions that seek to situate digital scholarship work.

As the discussion begins to take shape, the facilitator can play an active role in guiding the conversation and making sure that everyone present has an opportunity to share. Also, the facilitator should make sure that community norms are followed. The group is critiquing the work but with a spirit of collegiality and generosity, creating a structure in which collective care and attention can be given to activities that can often be disconnected. In doing so, the group should consider the larger implications of the work. Questions might include but not be limited to:

What are the strengths of the work being discussed? How might it be innovative, original, or important?
Where does this work rest with the larger organizational priorities and structures? What does this say about it?
What other kinds of works have the group seen that might serve as models?
Who are the scholarly or professional communities that might support the work?
What resources or help might be available for the work?
What are some unanticipated consequences, opportunities, or risks the work might pose?

Dig deep into the assumptions that all participants bring to the work.

Even as digital scholarship becomes an increasingly accepted and understood term in the academy, it remains open enough that it requires constant articulation within local contexts. At the UW Libraries, digital scholarship often seems itself to be the shared sense-making we do to engage with emerging forms of scholarship that digital tools enable. The craft workshop has been our place to investigate and make visible the unsetting and generative uncertainty around these activities and begin to open conversations around larger organizational changes necessary to sustain this work in the future. Questions might include but not be limited to:

What are the biases or assumptions that are built into the work and what their consequences? Do they support or work against stated goals?
If there are differences of opinion within the group about the work, what does this reveal about the different mental models people bring to digital scholarship work?
Who is the audience of the digital scholarship work and how does this govern decision-making?
How does the project challenge or reinforce organizational and professional norms in the areas of metadata, privacy, preservation, or accessibility? To what extent should it follow or influence these norms?
What is the value of this digital scholarship work to its intended audience, the participants, and the organization? Do these align?

For Future Versions of this Manual

This manual is an attempt to model the very approach it suggests. It is provisional, rough, and remains unfinished. By sharing it early, we hope that it will improve and evolve.

Additional sections that should be added to this manual:

Debriefing after the workshop and how to incorporate feedback or responses.
Situating the workshop within other creative or design process models
Developing community norms around the workshop
Bibliography of sources supporting the workshop

There are also specific documents or resources that might also be developed and added:

Template for structuring responses to working being shared
Articulation of various roles and responsibilities for effective workshops
Best practices for facilitating conversations
Institutional documents that describe the structures around digital scholarship
Examples of workshop through review process

This manual and the associated presentation raised several critical questions that could be prompts to essays that situate this work and perhaps form future research questions. Some of the immediate ones:

Is there a "craft" (or a multiple set of "crafts") to digital scholarship? If so, what are its features? How does one articulate what they might be?
In what ways do the institutionalizing processes of creative writing and digital scholarship reflect larger changes in the academy? Do these parallel histories speak to each other?
What are the organizational metaphors or models employed to situate digital scholarship within an institution? What are their implications?
How might other models that draw from the pedagogy of creative work be integrated into digital scholarship discourse?
How to train professionals to be both creative and critical in their approaches to digital scholarship work?

Materials

Notes

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