Day of DH 2012 warrants an introduction to my new blog at tanyaclement.org. Hello (again) world.
And I want to introduce this new blog with a post about why I don’t blog and why I don’t tweet and what that has to do, in the wake of Miriam Posner’s post, with my being a woman and a mother.
That said, I do blog and I do tweet. But I don’t like it and I force myself to do it out of a sense of DH obligation. I’ve been blogging since 2003 (on and off), mostly with a fine bunch of folks over at WordHerders including Lisa Rhody, Chuck Tyron, George Williams, Jason Jones, Kari Kraus, Jason Rhody, and Matt Kirschenbaum (among others). Many of these folks were friends (are friends) before they (and I) were followers. And it’s appropriate to salute them and all of the other people with whom I’ve fostered feet-on-the-ground relationships over the last (oh geez) thirteen years I’ve been involved with DH (before it was called DH) because flesh and blood is what has me hooked to the humanities. My DH trajectory began before I was married, before I had kids, before I returned to get a PhD or get that tenure track job, the day I walked into IATH at UVA in 1999 for a 10-hour-a-week GA-ship to do data entry. My first days in DH boded well. Even though I was lowest woman on the totem pole, I distinctly remember sitting at a meeting at a table shoved in a crowded corner of the IATH cubicle suite with John Unsworth, Worthy Martin, and Steve Ramsay and listening in as they talked about what I would now say is my branded area of interest forever more: scholarly information infrastructure development. I was hooked: not only by the prospects of such interesting work, but by the thought of working with (dare I say) some of the nicest and smartest and most generous (woman, they are generous), academics I have still ever yet to meet.
I write about these flesh and blood friends (and there are so many others, many of the Women in DH–Martha Nell Smith, Susan Schreibman, Bethany Nowviskie, Julie Meloni, Rachel Donahue, Kari Kraus) because these friends and supporters, are and have been the best part of this wild ride into academia for me as a woman and a mother. There are more but to go on would be name-dropping ridiculousness and I can’t possibly thank them all for their support in my struggle to do DH. I write about them more specifically because they are and have been flesh and blood friends I value. My problem is that I realize that I am supposed to be garnering some sort of online following–“eye balls” as we used to call it in the 1990s and early 2000’s–for the sake of, ultimately I guess, getting tenure. And I hate that shit. This is why I write this post on the Day of DH in the year I get my “dream” job and all of my babies are out of diapers (and HEALTHY) and I live in a place I really like.
I am a woman and I am a mother and I do DH and I start with talking about my flesh and blood friends and mentors because I want to say it loud: I hate blogging and I hate tweeting. And I feel, in the wake of Miriam Posner’s post, that I want to say why and what that has to do with DH and my being a woman and a mother.
So, a little bit about me personally: I was always good at school, especially math and English, but I went to public high school in Florida and I was the only girl in my advanced math classes and I was the only girl of my friends (ok they were party girls, but I still love party girls; yeah Madonna) who wore the honors metals and took A.P. classes and I was mocked and ridiculed and embarrassed when I got into Harvard. You? They said. Luckily, when I got there I realized there were more and different people in the world and that Florida was a kind of an odd place to grow up (as the current news will show). BUT, the point is, I slunk around as an adolescent trying to make sure no one looked at me, no one noticed that I was smart and “had thoughts” and apparently, was “going places.” Because I had no real model of a smart strong woman who did smart strong things and was proud of it, everything I’ve ever done I figured out myself and I thank from the bottom of my heart the female and male friends I’ve found who have served as awesome examples and have encouraged me in ALL my life choices. BUT, I’ve dreaded (even yesterday) every class and every talk I have ever given for fear that someone will find out all of the ways in which my identifications as a woman, a friend, a mother, and as a DH academic do not follow the way everyone else who has identified themselves as such might define those same identities. Ok. So what? So, that’s the hint of a background (oh there’s so much more) about growing up as a girl who had to figure out (as most of us do) that being different, smart, vocal, obstinate is nothing to be ashamed of. The work in it is that you can’t ever stop reminding yourself of it. Tell a person they’re not worthwhile long enough and it’s hard for them not to believe it.
Which leads me to tell you about a few experiences being a mother in academia and in DH. I made my choices. I had those babies. I know how they’re made– I love them. I cherish them. And they are, in many ways, my closest and dearest friends. BUT I will also tell you that it I have the same feeling of “embarrassment” at the audacity of being a mother of three in academia that I had as a smart girl in high school. There are a few men have as many children or fewer or are nice and supportive about it. There are a few women who are insanely perfect role models (Nowviskie!), but there are other DH scholars who are blatant mommy bigots: I have been told by a well-esteemed and long-time DH male scholar: “You shouldn’t go on the tenure track because you have young children at home”; I have been told by a woman in a well-esteemed DH group from a long-time DH center that a job for which I was applying “was not the kind of job where you can go home at night and kiss your kids to sleep”. I was told by another DH male when discussing my dismay at the job market and the difficulty of finding an academic position in a place that would not only work for educating and raising my brood but would also work for my partner’s career that his “wife had a job too” which was to take care of their kids (and if you don’t know why that’s a pissy response I’m not the gal to inform you). Clearly, I am still angry about those comments and I hesitate to bring them up now because these are not bad people (which honestly makes it worse because if they were bigotted in any other way, they would be considered bad people!). You? They said. To be sure, I am in a job that I like and I have made these choices and will (perhaps) have to face the consequences if, because I have made these choices, my kids are all hoodlums and/or I don’t get tenure as a DH scholar because (and I’ll get to this in a minute) I don’t “make the time” to blog and I don’t tweet.
So, here’s why I don’t blog and I don’t tweet. I’ll say it: sometimes it’s too out there for me. That’s not how I was raised to behave as a girl. I’m out there when I give talks but these are prepared. I’m out there when I teach but these are flesh and blood people who have a responsibility to respect the community we are building in the classroom. Further, the fast back-and-forth of tweeting isn’t for everyone, for those of us who are inherently convinced that we have to be more careful about what we say. Is that “care” a woman’s thing? I don’t know, but I know it’s this woman’s thing. Honestly, in tweeting and blogging, I struggle against the feeling every day that I should be nice and keep my thoughts to myself because what I have to say doesn’t really matter any way. BTW: I’m not asking for you to tell me I’m important and that my blog and tweets matter (with a little pat on the head). I’m just telling you what goes on this woman’s head. Finally, I don’t blog and I don’t tweet, because I’m a mom. I have all kinds of little shit I have to do from 5:30 in the morning before I go to work to 9:30 at night when I pass out. I don’t go to lunch. I don’t drop by colleagues’ offices. I don’t go to happy hours. Oh yeah, because my “job” is to take care of my three kids too. It’s also their father’s “job,” in our house at least. But, it’s true that even with the kindest and most gentlest of partners, Mommy often takes on the lion’s share of the little things even when it’s figuring who the hell is going to take care of the little buggers (what will they eat, where will they go, what will they do, what will they wear) when mommy is doing DH.
[…] See my Day of DH post at http://tanyaclement.org/2012/03/27/i-am-a-woman-and-i-am-a-mother-and-i-do-dh/ […]
Wow. Just, wow. Required reading as of now for all my students and — if I could assign them reading — my colleagues too.
Only trouble is, this suggests you really *should* blog more, if this is what comes out. (no head-patting intended).
Thanks, Stephen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about motherhood in terms of my #altac career and all the conversations I have with younger women about how to be a scholar and worker and spouse and mother. So thank you for saying this out loud.
love it. you’ve completely explained why I have completely separate mommy academic and professor identities
[…] with Sharon just last night about her terrific blog post on DH work load and being a woman in DH. Tanya Clement’s post this morning also resonated, though I’m not a mom. If I had to sum up a whole lot of […]
[…] their making supper–sweet!), reading and all that bedtime stuff (yes, @tanyaclement, kissing them goodnight), and then here I am back at it again but aiming for bed by midnight, so signing off now to do just […]
Sing it sister. Actually John is the equivalent “DH Daddy”
and is constantly struggling between not just caring for and raising kids but enjoying them while wrangling with teaching and tenure. He lamented just this very thing earlier today.
Thankfully for me the kids are a bit more integrated with doing DH. Of course I inhabit the womanly world of librarianship. I blogged for Day of DH while pumping at work and blogged again while nursing this evening. Don’t be fooled though. My milk-making breasts were subject to a surprising degree of taboo at work (in the library) but that’s another thread altogether.
We are amongst lots of DH mamas and I’m hoping that by bringing our kids as some of us have been doing more recently to conferences, meetings, etc we remind our fellow DHers that we love a great many things and no less of these are our children. I’ve been heartened by the welcome and support we’ve received at these venues and I’m mindful of my children — mood, body language, etc. I don’t feel entitled because of the kids. I am instead humbled by the offers of fellow DHers, some not even life blood friends, who have skipped paper sessions to watch my kid so I can attend without wearing my kid and swaying throughout presentations. What a relief!
All this to say that we are surrounded by DH mamas and papas more than I realized. Because John and I overlap a great deal, we have no other option but to bring the babes. It seems that during conference receptions — when fellow DHers are confronted by the cuteness of our children (or something)– it becomes apparent how many of us are balancing and blending our work and home lives.
I’m from Florida too and I don’t care for blogging though I enjoyed doing so today and reading posts like this one.
Thanks for the great post! I have completely given up on doing any kind of work stuff other than between 8am and 5pm, because I’ve decided that it’s actually quite important for me to have a personal life (for me this includes a growing romantic relationship, in addition to having sole responsibility for a toddler). I don’t blog, and I rarely tweet (unless I’m at a conference or something) because I have work to do. Maybe if I didn’t have so many meetings I could do it (although time not spent in meetings is generally spent trying desperately to do the work I put off because I’m in meetings all the time). I don’t really think about it honestly, I don’t feel a lot of pressure to blog or tweet (even though I like following other people’s blogs, and tweets, and I’ll chime in if I really want to). But then I’m in the library and maybe we’re behind? I might feel different if I were in an academic department.
Serious question though: are P&T committees now really going to deny someone tenure because they *don’t* blog or tweet? Seems like that would be a complete 180 from even a few years ago, and makes about as much sense as denying one tenure for doing the same thing.
Thanks for this great piece of writing. Although I am a dad–we have four children–I think I absolutely understand you. (Even though I know that it is much easier to be a father…) Yes, having children does make life more complicated (logistics, money, lack of sleep), especially in the contest-like situation on the academic labour-market.
BUT every moment of this struggle with time and energy is worth the while: it teaches us perseverance, resourcefulness and thinking in terms of priority lists. And we also learn to appreciate so much the moments of peace, happiness–maybe more than those whose life displays less amplitude. And as far as I can judge from this blog post, you must be a very good student in all these. Congratulations, thus, and thanks again for the post.
[…] I got home around 7:30. Chad had given the kids their dinner and Nora had already had her bath — so, ’50s sitcom dad-style, I got to breeze in for the fun part: playtime. This included the requisite admiration for an honestly kind-of startlingly creative world my son has made in Minecraft (another kid was playing on the server with him, so I also had the pleasure of seeing Vic type, “my mom’s home brb” before I got my kiss) and some enumeration and lining-up and name-games played with my daughter and her My Little Ponies. (“Who is the most wonderful of all the ponies?” you might ask. “Why, Princess Celestia, silly!”) This went on for an hour with both of the kids and was, frankly, the best part of my Day of DH. (PS, #dayofDH crew: we could probably use a “family life” category option for these blog posts. We are, after all, human.) […]
Thanks Sarah and Both Michelle’s (and Susan over on the DH blog) and Stephen. Michelle D. is so right. I’ve completely forgotten about all the DH moms and dads (Stefan, Stan, Susan, Laura, etc.) plus all the others that have been a help to me over the years. Folks were very kind at a job interview that was my first day away from my newborn, at which I pumped every 1.5 hours for 15 minutes. The problem for me is this forgetting–being a parent is even more isolating when our communications and our community moves online to twitter and blogs, when our friends become our followers and vice versa. It’s, quite frankly, harder for me to participate in that conversation. I never participated in mommy groups because I didn’t want to talk about dirty socks, peanut butter sandwiches and chicken nuggets, wiping butts and noses and the daily search for the shoes. I wanted to talk about DH. Now, my life is filled with DH activities during the day and the “space” in which I’d love to synthesize that, discuss it, or round out my thinking (or just banter!) in such great DH online conversations is inevitably filled with the kid details that I have put to the side to teach my classes, do my projects, and write about them. And, when that space creeps in my head is filled with the things no one else wants to hear about either: dirty socks, peanut butter sandwiches and chicken nuggets, wiping butts and noses and the daily search for the shoes–that’s where my head is before I get to the office and after I leave. All of this is not to say that I have more right to complain than any other working person with or without kids. Everyone has a life outside of DH that gets shirked. I’m simply adding a voice in here that does not often get expressed because:
1. being a parent makes it hard to be involved in online communities because many of these conversations happen in “off ” or “down” hours when kid responsibilities inevitably creep in;
2. flesh and blood interactions with all of these wonderful folks I’ve mentioned are primarily limited to the DH conference and no one talks about this “stuff” (yet) there. There are no mommy/daddy groups there, much less “Women in DH” groups or “Sexuality in DH” groups or “Race in DH” groups.
3. you’re not allowed to whine and say “But this is so hard!” ever, but especially when you have kids and especially when you’re the mom. Sorry, everyone else, but that’s my truth. Women sound incapable; Men sound unlucky (to not have a wife who can take it on for them).
This was a good post. As a father of two toddlers, I completely understand the lack of downtime and brain space to engage in DH out of the office. I don’t fully agree with the slack you perceive we fathers get (for example, I’ve been told that I won’t be able to manage a full-time job, kids, and a dissertation at the same time), but I imagine it’s unique in different settings.
What really struck me was this quote:
I haven’t read anything so delusional in a really long time. Perhaps this DH center provides vital support to an emergency room? Or maybe they are the DH arm of the White House? Because I can’t imagine how anyone could attach so much self-importance to any of the things we do. That is completely insane.
[…] Since posting this I read Tanya Clement’s spot-on post on being a woman, mother and DHer and I lament glossing over some of the hurdles and joys of raising a family when both mom and dad […]
This is a lovely and much-needed post. It’s certainly true that academic blogging in particular is gendered, in that the right to speak is gendered masculine, and when a woman claims the right to speak she is pushing against something long and old.
That’s why, as fascinated as I am by recent attempts to effect postpublication review (notably at DH Now) I’m not altogether surprised that they have so far resulted in absurdly skewed gender ratios. There is indeed something terrifying about putting words out there without two blind peer reviewers letting you know it’s okay; this has been a consistently gendered problem at Arcade, for instance. Perhaps the only reason we haven’t noticed this feature of postpublication review before is that the practice has mainly flourished in fields that themselves suffer from absurdly skewed gender ratios.
I’ve very self-consciously trained myself to write in public and do it a lot, but I’ve heard the comments about mothers that you mention here, and I’ve seen women with small children be denied tenure on the grounds of an “uneven rate of productivity” (not insufficient productivity, just “uneven”). I’ve decided to fight one of those battles, in other words, and not the other. All people have to pick their battles, and for women in academia there are a lot of them to choose among. Thanks for illuminating some of them.
Dot,
Thanks–I know you’re in the “trenches” with this. I don’t think P&T committees will deny anyone for not blogging or tweeting just as in the corporate world, you’re not fired for not playing golf. That said, a lot of bidness happens on the golf course and a lot of bidness happens on twitter. Being out of the loop means fewer opportunities to collaborate, to publish, and ultimately, to do the work required to get tenure. If the unspoken expectation is that you will make and solidify these kinds of relationships in online communities, it needs to be pointed out that some of us aren’t there. True, if I believe this to be the case, I should make a concerted effort (which I try to do), but my point is just to express how this space is geared to a certain kind of lifestyle that, IMHO, is not mine.
Tanya
yes, yes! I agree that there are advantages to being a parent. I’m not denying that. In fact, I’ve got few reasons to “complain” — my life could be a lot worse. My objective here is to point this out so that the conversation is out there. Others are (or feel) shut out completely.
I think folks do work hard in DH (as in many areas of labor). Sharon Leon has written a wonderful post about what that work is and how demanding it can be. My issue with the comment about kissing your kids at night was somewhat about the self-importance you mention, but it was more personal to me than that. I took it as a comment on my lifestyle, on my choices. What if I were a heavy person and someone said “you can’t go home and eat ice cream all night long when you have this job” or I were “marked” in another way by skin color or class or dressed in a way that made my sexual preferences marked to someone . . . there are so many bad ways to imagine a scenario in which someone else comments on your lifestyle based on your “markings” and their own assumptions about whether you can or cannot do a job. How I raise my children, first of all, is my business. Maybe I don’t kiss them at night. Maybe their father or their other mother does. Maybe no one does because we’ve trained our kids to put themselves to bed on beds of nails. I don’t care. It wasn’t an appropriate comment at an interview and it was “allowed” because parenting is seen as the kind of life choice against which people can be prejudiced in academia. That was the origin of my comment.
[…] mean I stop working. I hope you had a chance to read what Tanya Clement had to say today about parenting and DH. Aeolus-like, I pick up Henry at day care, stop at the bank, the supermarket, dash on home, […]
Mostly just another vote-up for this post and another voice from a working father. In fact, to be a little trite about it, I’ve got two jobs: that thing I do that’s salaried, and the thing I do that isn’t. Our family includes my wife with a chronic health issue and one disabled MIL living in our house, and when I am home, my second job is in full effect. As with you, I’m not looking for pity or slack — these are choices we’ve made in creating and being a family. We’ve made choices that map onto traditional gender norms and are, of course, shaped by them, but we’ve done our best to try to make them real choices just the same. My life is generally liberated of guilt and self-doubt, but the place it tiptoes in is trying to balance growing into the DH world and growing as or being the father my family (or the world) needs.
[…] also experienced, while working on Bibliopedia, the pressures Tanya Clement noted about being a mother and doing DH. I’m a father and, until very recently, was the primary care-giver for my two boys. My wife […]
[…] on a range of issues surrounding the DH community, such as Tanya Clement’s evocative post “I am a woman and I am a mother and I do DH” and Melanie Kohnen’s post on #transformdh. Many online conversations also stemmed from […]
[…] post I am referring to is titled I am a woman and I am a mother and I do DH. (Here is the link: http://tanyaclement.org/2012/03/27/i-am-a-woman-and-i-am-a-mother-and-i-do-dh/ ). From her title alone you may be able to tell that she has faced prejudices in her career. […]
[…] the break, I ran into a couple of articles about Digital Humanities and coding, both by women. They both address issues with […]
[…] post I am referring to is titled I am a woman and I am a mother and I do DH. (Here is the link: http://tanyaclement.org/2012/03/27/i-am-a-woman-and-i-am-a-mother-and-i-do-dh/ ). From her title alone you may be able to tell that she has faced prejudices in her career. […]
[…] have a new sense of appreciation for Tanya Clement’s excellent “I am a woman and I am a mother and I do DH” post from Day of DH 2012. Right now, her sense of the “audacity” of being a […]