The Rice Digital Humanities group is pleased to present:

Spencer Keralis
Disrupting Student Labor in the Digital Humanities Classroom
Friday, March 11
11 a.m.- 12 p.m.
Fondren 410

Abstract: Crowdsourcing labor and crowdfunding capital are two pillars of the new innovation economy. While these models have worked well for projects ranging from citizen science to music production, bringing crowd-think into the academy, and particularly the classroom, can be ethically fraught. Digital humanities pedagogy involving students contributing to faculty projects or producing durable work products is particularly vulnerable to abuse and misuse. Based on my contribution to the forthcoming Disrupting the Digital Humanities collection, I will offer a critique of these practices and offer ideas on how to avoid ethical pitfalls.

Bio: Spencer D. C. Keralis is Research Associate Professor and Digital Humanities Coordinator with the Public Services Division of the University of North Texas Libraries. Spencer KeralisSpencer is the Founding Director of Digital Frontiers, a conference and community that brings together the makers and users of digital resources for humanities research, teaching, and learning. Spencer is Principal Investigator for the TX-Gender Project for Libraries, which seeks to improve library services for transgender patrons, and he is currently chair of the Texas Library Association GLBT Roundtable. His work has appeared in Book History, American Periodicals, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) reports The Problem of Data (2012) and Research Data Management: Principles, Practices, and Prospects (2013). His recent research on labor ethics in digital humanities pedagogy is forthcoming in the Punctum Books collection Disrupting the Digital Humanities (2016), and he is curating the keyword “Labor” for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments (MLA, 2016). He has held a Mellon Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a Legacy Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, and served as a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Academic Libraries with the University of North Texas Libraries.