Pictura invisibilis collegio artium digital

In the 1960s, Derek Price and Diana Crane popularized a description of the informal knowledge sharing of in-groups as “invisible colleges,” professional networks that share unwritten or hard-to-describe ways of working inside a field, a circle of teaching that by its informal nature excludes those outside the network. The concept of an invisible college is the institutional parallel to tacit knowledge, or practical ways of living and work that are not described explicitly…

… well, until they are described explicitly. Part of the work of good teaching is to describe what was previously invisible to students, provide experiences that will lock in that understanding and provide avenues for further exploration. An essential step in spreading a concept is converting it from the property of a small network, the invisible college, converting the concept into something that can be shown or taught explicitly. Part of that process is motivation and grasping the consequence, something Atul Gawande addresses in his recent New Yorker article. But the other essential step is figuring out how to teach it, how to make visible what is otherwise hidden and silent.

If you can figure out how to write it down, how to put it in a drawing, you take an important step in that direction. Books, diagrams, and other fixed works are a powerful tool of inscribing the (previously) invisible. Over the centuries we have learned by reading, by examining, in the quiet of the afternoon sun and by candlelight and lamp. For a whole society there is no more influential teacher than the brilliant writer and the sensitive artist. Sometimes that is by words, sometimes by pictures, and sometimes by sound or video; I would put longtime NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich up there with the great science and economic writers, for there is no better example of powerful teaching than his artistic pieces over the years on the economy and nature.

Beyond Robert Krulwich, beyond his brothers and sisters in the fixed form of the figure and book and radio and movie, there is teaching by interaction, the primary (and original) way that an invisible college is formed and maintained. Anyone who has studied music, dance, or martial arts under the tutelage of a master understands the value of presence and the perceptions and responses of a great teacher. Sometimes that tutelage involves the physical guidance of a bow hand, a foot, an arm.

But what if the inherent skills of an invisible college lie in collaborative practice? For researchers, the tradition of the research group is a common apprenticeship technique, whether it is in a bench science, archaeological fieldwork, or a psychology research group. Here, Robert Rotenberg’s definition of laboratory bears fruit in the sense of a place for apprenticeship in disciplinary techniques. For a scientist, for example, the lab notebook is the result of several generations of accumulated practice, not just an individual record of events in a specified location (lab, fieldsite). The recording of events is something the student’s mentor has done as a student of a previous mentor, and so forth.

What if the practice is new, say in combining the disciplinary sensibilities of the humanities with the coding skills of a developer? Sounds like digital humanities to me and the type of project common at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, or RRCHNM to its fans. A few years ago, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities gave the center money to put on an advanced summer institute (or seminar) that looks like a cross between summer camp and a crash-coding weekend/hackathon.

Normally the type of advanced summer institute sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities looks like a tiny version of an academic conference: a dozen or so scholars talking about papers, or both college and high school teachers focusing on a single subject in history, literature, or something else in the humanities. One Week | One Tool was different, an advanced institute in the collaborative work of digital humanities. In 2010 the first iteration created a WordPress plug-in to convert a collection of blog entries into a book–Anthologize. There are a few tools like it, but I was one of a reasonably largish group of RRCHNM friends who saw Anthologize as an amazing creation as much for its speed as for the embodiment of a tool we could understand and use. One week and we get this??

Three years later and RRCHNM hosted a repeat: One Week | One Tool II, though institute head Tom Scheinfeldt is too sensible (and unpretentious) to use Roman numerals. Again, the weeklong institute gathered a group of diverse people with a good combination of skills and interests, and in a week they created Serendip-o-matic, a tool to grab sort-of-related-and-we hope-serendipitous images from several online catalogs in response to a text input. There is no real way to grasp what it does other than to try it, and understand it is not a search engine like Google or Duck Duck Go. From the intensely practical Anthologize we lean in the other direction to the quirky and flip.

But the intent is still the same: the tool itself is less important than the process of learning how to work in a digital humanities project, a collaborative enterprise that involves specific skills that are difficult to learn by reading a description. Since I have not been a participant in either One Week | One Tool iteration, I don’t have insider knowledge, other than having listened a few times to Scheinfeldt describe RRCHNM project management. It is not individual development of a project (though plenty of digital humanists do that), nor is it a corporate enterprise (you can find a job in many companies for that experience), but a small team trying to accomplish specific ends. Some but not all of that is coding; a good deal of it is understanding how to work together to make the team much better than the skills of its members alone. So we know that at least from the outside, both iterations of One Week | One Tool forged effective teams that invented viable tools in less than a week.

Now the next question: what happens (and has happened) to its participants in digital humanities projects after the institute? If the idea works, it should propagate effective practices in its wake, the proselytization or use of the skills by its participants in other digital humanities projects. I don’t remember who participated in the 2010 iteration or what they’ve done in the past three years. Obviously, we don’t know (yet) what this year’s participants will do in the next five years. But that’s where one should look for evidence of impact–not in the specific tools built in a summer week, however impressive, but in the professional practices of its participants. If Scheinfeldt’s model is correct, an intense summer experience can expand the invisible college of the digital humanities, making it much less invisible through the blogging of its participants and (much more importantly) the propagation of the habits learned in the last week.