HDA at PSU

I distinctly remember a workshop that Matt and I did for other graduate students in the English department on the subject of electronic dissemination of work in progress, and electronic publishing of work from dissertation research. Most of these students were extremely skeptical of our encouragement to do these things, which they clearly regarded as extremely risky. What did they fear? They were worried that this kind of publication wouldn't count. They were worried that learning how to do this would be a distraction from their real work. They were worried that someone would steal their ideas. We argued that the only way to protect one's claim to an idea was to publish it, but to no avail: they were receiving advice to avoid the web from at least some of my colleagues in the department, particularly (at that time) those responsible for counseling students on how to navigate the job market

Getting her work out of the pile is helped enormously by having done something more than what was expected

You must support her in doing the risky thing. Insist that she defend her experimental work, and then, in turn, defend her choice to anyone who doesn't understand her deviation from the road ordinarily traveled.

Scholars doing digital work require kinds of support that many more traditionally oriented humanists do not: access to technical resources for both their teaching and scholarship, as well as help maintaining those resources.

we run the risk of breaking the innovative spirit that we've hoped to bring to our departments

And where that spirit isn't broken, untenured digital scholars run the risk of burnout from having to produce twice as much—traditional scholarship and digital projects—as their counterparts do