A few weeks ago I received news that I was awarded tenure and will be promoted to associate professor, starting this fall. I've said before that I adopted some unorthodox priorities in the course of my six-and-a-half years on the tenure track. Working bounded hours, taking on service that helped structure my life, and, especially, devoting myself to digital scholarship.
These choices were based on a wager that I could manage my personal circumstances as a single dad and still be productive enough to build a reputation in my field. About five years ago I identified my three key scholarly priorities before the tenure application and decision: publishing Building the Ivory Tower, releasing the Congress project, and releasing Mapping Inequality. (I also wanted to manage the editing of my late wife's book, Greek Theater in Ancient Sicily, to bring to publication). My thinking was, these were the three big ideas that I had and that could reach the public and shape the scholarly conversation. Most of the rest was smaller gauge, the kind of stuff that could shape a class or that could help build something in the department, but not the kind of work that could shape a career. The bet was that if I pulled off these three, the leaders in my field would notice and I would have strong external letter writers, such that the department could or would make a strong recommendation to the college, and to the university, for tenure. Especially with a book from a good press, I would have met the requirements for about 90% of history departments in R-1 universities.
A fundamental assumption underlying this was that tenure is unpredictable. However the politics of a department, a university, or a discipline run, I think you have to satisfy yourself first in order to enjoy it and to do a good job. You also have to be OK with the idea that, having satisfied yourself, you might not satisfy others. In my case, I wasn't concerned if I got tenure or not. My ambitions were much higher, and those products of publication and public and scholarly impact were the goals. If tenure went against me, I was OK with that. In fact, I said a couple times that I would have accepted a negative decision with pride, then moved onto the next thing in my life.
A clear sacrifice I made was in travel. Once my son arrived, it was very difficult to get to conferences, first because it was tough, logistically, emotionally, and in terms of equity, to leave my wife solo. Once my wife got sick, I ceased all travel. Then, when it was just me, it was nearly impossible to leave my son for conferences (and also extremely costly to bring him). I mentioned that we made friends with two families who were willing to help me with overnight trips. I did take my son to a couple of conferences. For one, we went up to Toronto and also visited friends. That was very challenging, and was mostly just about trying to show my face at a conference. I presented about blogging, hardly went to another session, and was happy to get out and call it a success. In another, I flew my mother out to Los Angeles so she could spend time with him. That was a success, in that I went to two half-days of the conference, but it was damned expensive. This fall, I got up to Cleveland and Montreal for back-to-back conferences with my son along for the ride, and was aided mightily by family. But these few trips (and one or two others) were hardly adequate for staying in touch with the field, and showcased little of my own work. I know people who traveled 20 to 40 times over the course of their junior years for conferences or talks. Virginia Tech, which has always funded my research and travel fairly well, explicitly forbids support for child care expenses during research or travel. This is retrograde.
Working on digital history projects was a way to make up for this lack of mobility, but came with some tradeoffs. I could manage research assistants from Blacksburg and perform GIS analysis in my office, and could discuss projects over Google hangouts with collaborators. I mentioned that the Mapping Inequality collaboration was a slow process but one that created a bigger, better product. It also helped build momentum for the release of the project and spread its reach.
The issue of credit and reputation was not always clear, however. We created an About page with a proper citation format for those wanting to give credit appropriately to the Mapping Inequality team. Despite that, the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab gets the lion's share of the credit for the project, as the Web home of the project and creator of the American Panorama atlas. This is appropriate, because of the development and visualization work that they do, but does not adequately recognize the other contributions (intellectual and labor/logistical) that other participants made. It is only a very scrupulous journalist (and usually a lax editor) that lists all the participants. This does not bother me in the grand scheme, and is a tradeoff I was quite willing to make, because the overall reach of the project is larger.
It was a bit of an obstacle for tenure, however. My department didn't have a clear idea of what it meant to have worked in a collaborative project, let alone what it meant to be listed as second author. I presented the project to the department, created an exhibit with a class on a part of the project, and worked to make sure it was part of my professional identity and portfolio in all discussions. There was a good deal of scholarly work that went into the historiographical section on HOLC, as well as placing redlining in a longer social science tradition informed by Chicago sociologists and economists, in addition to the development of the interface. Even still, my colleagues' appreciation for the project was not high. Just about the highest plaudit a historian can get, I submit, is a mention in the New York Times. This reflects the bias of the profession as East Coast elites and wannabes. All other press coverage may as well have barely existed. One member of our executive committee told me about my box of supplementary materials for tenure, "Throw everything in there. Everything. Even the mention in National Geographic."
For the public-facing work of digital scholarship for which I was hired, these kinds of write-ups from journalists at NatGeo or Slate or other publications were just as important as a citation in a journal article, but were not recognized as such in my department. Those continuous write-ups have helped introduce the materials to an extended set of audiences both scholarly and public, and have helped shape the conversation nationally about housing segregation, but were low-value throw-ins for my internal evaluators, as far as I could tell. The chair of my department suggested that I write up an explanatory document of a few pages explaining what the ideas, novelty, and impact of the project were, and what my role had been in creating Mapping Inequality -- for internal readers, as well as external. Another of my colleagues also suggested that I would have to do extra work to justify what the project was about, and said I was "naive" to believe that members of the department would, could, or should be able to recognize its impact without interpretation (beyond the typical tenure statement we all write that frames our work ).
UPDATE: I wrote a piece for Perspectives in History called “Getting Tenure with Digital History.”