Legibility and Community in Digital Studies Captioned
===

Rianna Walcott: [00:00:00] Last panel. Made it through.

Good. Because it's gonna be so polished. We were so ready to.

Kevin Winstead: Somebody please get security to come down and take care of this man, please. Give him the big hooks. That's right. The Apollo hook.

Rianna Walcott: Thanks, oh my god. So this is Legibility and Community in Digital Studies, and I'm going to start us off with a general access statement. As we begin, we want to recognize the space we're inhabiting together. The, we're on a raised platform here. We've got some spots spotlights. We've got CART, and yep, the room is moderately warm. Ventilated 

Please feel invited to use it in whatever way is accessible to you. For example, you might want to move around stand up lie down put your feet up go out and come back in stim engage with another person's by writing notes. Tweet [00:01:00] Yeah, tweet fine. Whatever take notes or any other use of this space that feels right to you 

As junior scholars, the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration and Optimism Network postdoctoral fellows faced unique challenges negotiating the tensions of being legible for academic employment and serving digital studies projects that foster collaboration and community.

So in this panel, we'll be discussing best practices for being young career scholars in critical identity and digital studies. We're also going to be reflecting on the ups and downs, joys and challenges of being part of a unique and truly interdisciplinary cohort of postdocs across multiple institutions over the past few years.

Kevin Winstead: My team we're showing our practice right now of care. Because I need this coffee. I need it. Thank you. Appreciate you. 

Rianna Walcott: Okay, so I'll kick us off. We've got like a We've collaboratively put [00:02:00] together a few questions for us. Do we want to kick this off with intro you've seen us all in various permutations of different panels, so I don't think we really need to do much in the way of introduction.

Kevin Winstead: I do want to acknowledge our colleague who's not here. We affectionately call him our fearless leader, and he's so uncomfortable by that title, and we use it anyway, Jeff Nagy who, has been in many ways a conduit of information for us, particularly our, the offsite postdocs. And in a lot of ways a source of comfort and stability for many of us as we try to navigate, what it meant to be in this project and our day to day what to do.

And even taking some of our ideas that were one offs and, turning them into reality and particularly right around us coming in, being in physical community with each other as those ideas were forming there were just ideas at that moment. And it was really Jeff that and he's the one that went and did a lot of that labor for us, so we appreciate him and shout out if he's watching, shout out to Jeff.

Rianna Walcott: Thank you. Yeah. I [00:03:00] will start us off with a question like from, that we were thinking about, especially, considering our unique position, lots of us on the edge of being grads and then into like our first, career positions. Some of us already started. Some of us are on the cusp of beginning.

And one of the questions we were thinking about was about this notion of mentorship. How, I'm thinking about our future directions, like how to appropriately mentor whilst we're still receiving mentorship ourselves. Maybe we could start out by having a little reflection on what mentorship means to each of us, and particularly due to our different audiences, geographies, institutions and positions.

David Adelman: Oh, I can certainly begin. We all know that I'm terribly loquacious. I will try to remain as concise as possible. So for me I am in a position to be the postdoc for [00:04:00] the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, which is that perhaps most strongly emphasizes disability and disabled joy along with questions of race, gender, sexuality, all of the intertextual messiness that we love.

But personally, for me, the most generative experiences that I have had as a postdoc has been those opportunities where I can mentor up and coming undergraduates, graduate students, things of that nature, or people of that nature, people are not things, people are people. But ultimately for me mentoring is absolutely essential, because sometimes all you need is the permission and the model to do a thing in order to feel confident enough to do that. And so one of the things that this postdoc and this network has provided, and I think very strongly in my case [00:05:00] is as a model of speculative design, a model of doing things differently, a model that embraces both practice and theory in my particular case.

And of course, we all have different experiences based on our institutions, based on our career goals, based on how we see our work. Of course, one of the ongoing arguments that I have with nearly everyone in this group is that I would argue that we are all interdisciplinary. Different people are going to have different responses to that.

However the point for me is that to go back to the question of mentorship, you cannot even begin to do the research often if you do not feel safe enough to have a model and support it enough to do that kind of work. And again, granted, we are in an incredibly, gifted position [00:06:00] where we are very well funded and we have the capacity to do strange and weird and stupid things that are nonetheless important on a pop cultural, political, and economic register And so I will stop talking now and let others take up that question.

Brandy Pettijohn: As I, I think about my experience, one of the things that is a little bit unique about me is that I am about the same age as the people who mentor me. And so even though I'm a junior scholar, I'm I'm a Gen X er very firmly and and I was in academia and I was not in academia.

So I have a perspective of working life and academic life. And so my perspective in those arenas gives me a balanced approach and how I approach people who are in graduate school, still doing their graduate or undergraduate [00:07:00] studies. Because a lot of times I'm like, it's cool. You're going to be all right. Because there's a lot of anxiety. And I feel the younger folks are, the more anxiety they have, and the more I'm going, this shit don't matter. You know what I'm saying?

And and I, so that's the approach that I have, even though I'm a person with high anxiety, and also I'm looking to people who are my mentors going, I don't know what to do. Please help me. Somebody tell me what to do, please. So I'm both in these two lanes and these two positions where I'm, wanting, I need a oracle desperately, but also as somebody who's going yeah, it's fine. Like just write it and you'll be all right. And I very much enjoy pointing people to towards folks that will help them and help them see, where they want to go in the best way.

Unfortunately, I'm not like that to myself, but that's where, that little balances and how I've been able to approach being in this postdoc. [00:08:00] And where, being in Atlanta, at Georgia Tech which is this heavy emphasis on the tech, and giving students like this, these ideas in social justice and feminism, and things that they haven't really considered because they haven't had to. And it's a space that is de emphasized in a lot of ways because they've been told that you don't have to worry about that because you're the smartest kid who knows how to do computer science stuff. 

And so once they get to us and they're asking us these questions, it's Oh, cool. Like I can- here books on books. I got it for you. Articles. What do you need? I got it. Cause I can't code and I don't care about that stuff. And we have so many, robot arms and computer programs. And, I've sat in a space where somebody, said, I don't want to make any more stuff. And the whole room was like, how dare. That there's that feeling, so being able to be the person that can go and help folks on the other side, because I can't do nothing about no coding for you.[00:09:00] 

Kevin Winstead: Mentorship. I guess I'll start a little bit about my backstory to tell you how I see mentorship. So I was not recruited at any level of college education, right? I got in and I got into a regional school on a special admin. Went to a master's program because that school accepts all of their graduates, right?

Went to a PhD program on like a non declared status and graduate, right? Once in each of those positions, there was usually someone who did not look like me. Who would say, you're doing good for, you speak well for a black person, right? That kind of thing, right? So for me, mentorship has always been telling the truth.

If this, if the thing I'm working on sucks, just say that so I know how to, I don't take that personally, right? I don't have the time to take that personally. But if it's good, let me know so I can double down on I'm using this as an opportunity to strategize and how, on figuring out how to be better.

[00:10:00] Saying that I also, because I had to hustle to find funding and things of that nature, ended up in a lot of grant funded projects like this one is my third or fourth, right? I find myself, in projects now where, it's like, Oh, I got 10 years experience, but I've only been employed for a year, right?

So these things but it, it It's interesting how the, with many of these projects that start off with really good intentions that sometimes we forget that a very important part of grants is the redistribution of wealth and priority and agenda, right? This DISCO, before this postdoc, I was on another postdoc where a clear Council for Library Information Research had the first cohort of black digital studies postdocs in the country that pretty much got killed because of COVID, [00:11:00] right?

So DISCO really was like the second attempt at that in it, fortunate enough to complete because we're not in the pandemic in the same way. But, and with both of those opportunities the institution justified our positions to our academic communities, right? There are scholars who do not believe that black digital studies should be a thing that have fallen back off of that because DISCO exists, right?

So that's for me is a mentorship. There's a power in that, that goes beyond just, the office hours and what you're saying to your students. If DISCO does not exist, I don't know that we're able to exist in the same way at, in these new institutions. So before we even get to the about us page or what's on the website for DISCO and not like you all doing this, creates opportunities and starts that mentorship process.

And it's so important. I want to double down on that, right? Then again, [00:12:00] as far as providing mentorship to other folks Ngozi has been a victim of this. So I apologize for what I've done to you in the last year, sir. But at every conference and he'll tell you and other people who we've spoken at conferences I try to replicate that.

So I try to tell the truth. And it usually starts with your experience is not going to be like mine. So I can't tell you what I did to get through. But here's where's all the little pockets of money are. Go get the money. Stop playing around with these ideas. They're not yours. And that's a part of the grant process that I think is really hard as post docs to remember, these projects aren't yours. Structurally, they cannot be. 

And there's a thing that all of them do, the good ones and the bad ones do. They have to get a level of emotional buy in from you. Our jobs is to do work, right? They get the buy in from you, but you have to remember, these aren't yours, right? And the ability to name [00:13:00] that and particularly when you have positions of power, being able to name that and say that out loud up front and honestly and letting us adjust to that is mentorship.

Rianna Walcott: Yeah, thank you. So I have a, I think for me being mentored and mentoring as well, I'm very much I feel like I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days on the cusp of the new career situation, especially because I came here four days after defending. So I, I came here and I wasn't, landing here was the first time someone called me Dr. Walcott because it had just happened. And I was like, oh, right oh, okay, that's me now. And I was also coming to a brand new system and suddenly in a position where I had to learn what your PhD system looks like. So I was at the same, both very reliant on the grad students I was around to be like, okay, so how do comps work? That's not something we do. We don't take classes and so on. 

So I was like, really quite in need of mentorship because this wasn't the system I'd come through. And also trying to retain the things that I thought were wonderful about the [00:14:00] system I came from. I'm in this weird position where I'm very much learning on the, was learning on the fly, and it took me a good year and a half to really actually feel like I wasn't a student anymore. I still sometimes lean into, I'm just a baby girl. But I'm working on it. 

But being, coming from a system where the mentorship in the UK is so spotty, like the just you are really, I know I keep rabbiting on about this, but you really are just like launched, like you start the PhD and it's basically like fuck off and write a book, come back when you're done kind of situation. And I know I've been absolutely, I know that Chesca is sick to death of me doing that and not doing this now, but she was like my number one mentor the whole way through because there were so few Black people in the UK doing what we wanted to do. And then Chesca was a couple years ahead of me. And I remember I met her just as I was beginning.

And I was like, oh, thank God there we go. Here's where we're gonna, and very much latched onto her. And that's what, to me a model of mentorship should look like. Like the, a lot of the [00:15:00] times she was always talking me into existence, and I think that most of what I've done and where I am now is something that's been, like, manifested by someone else for me, a lot of the time. A lot of people saw me and went, oh, yeah, no, I think you can do a PhD, and I was like, okay, maybe I can. And, there was a lot of that, and I want to be able to do that for other people, too. 

So that's I'm looking at the mentorship I received and saying, yeah, okay. Sure, like you can talk about the, these things that I thought were just like a silly conversation because I like to talk. I'm a yapper. I thought that this was just like, yapping. And then my supervisors like stopped me and was like, that's a PhD actually. 

And that was the sort of thing that like really pivoted things for me. I think. A lot of that as well is now shifting into understanding some of the peer mentorship I've received because I honestly, again, being like, one of the, I think probably the last one to graduate I was the last, I think I'm the latest PhD out of, no, second last. Second last, but like for the first year of this there was a lot of me going, okay guys, how does the [00:16:00] job market work here? How does this work here? And these guys being so generous with their materials and their time and the information about you know those are stuff like reputational stuff that I didn't know like those are the universities you guys are at. I hadn't even heard of them. 

Like there was so much to get to know and like the peer relationships and the last and being fortunate enough to be treated as a colleague, even before I had the qualifications. So like the whole way through my PhD, I was fortunate enough to be, and this is probably part of the system difference as well, the fact that we're not taking classes, you're not teaching me in that way means that you probably are more comfortable to people are more comfortable to teach, to treat PhD students like that. Meant that we were immediately, doing all the things that you would do in the, and because we have to fight for the right to teach and stuff like that, 'cause we don't automatically teach and things like that.

It meant that if you were in that position, like you were doing it in the same way that anyone else would, so blah, blah, blah. So I think that [00:17:00] everyone is a colleague thing is like the kind of, speaking people into existence for them when they maybe aren't ready to do so themselves.

It's, I think, something that's so valuable for marginalized academics in particular and probably where I'm thinking about my being open to learning from non traditional sources and stuff and also being able to provide that and remind people that there is a world outside. Like the route to these things is not always the same. Like my route into academia was ridiculous. Like the, the things that I did that only make sense altogether. Now I'm looking back on them, and I think, there's so much that you do because Oh, this might be a CV filler, but I don't know how it works. And now I'm like, okay, it all works now.

So that sort of reminder that this has to be so flexible for where different people are at and what they're interested in and that nothing's a waste because we can all just pretend it made sense. And then it does fake it till you make it is the main thing.

Lida Zeitlin Wu: Does this work? [00:18:00] Hello?

It is? It is? Oh, okay. Sorry. Okay. I've been trying to gather my thoughts because I realized that with a lot of these questions that I know you can't see all week, but we have a list of questions that were that we've written up, and I think my mind is instantly jumping to professionalization of the job market. And I hate that my mind is doing that. But that's also what three years of the job market will do to you. 

And so I think as I'm reflecting on I'm actually thinking a lot about what I've learned by being part of DISCO and seeing forms of mentorship that I didn't even know were a thing. And so I think some of the things that I observed are maybe not new to many of people in the audience, I would say, and this is not me trying to dunk on my PhD program. I loved the program. I loved my mentors, but It's [00:19:00] a very white department that kind of continued to sell the idea of meritocracy. 

We got a great deal of professionalization, but it was really about finesse that cover letter, based on your cover letter and your project you can that will be the thing that people are looking at and I continued to find like frustration that it was obviously not the case. I feel naive that I even thought that it could possibly be but I was always actually told that it was a like a bad idea to do any kind of networking or like that.

It could actually be detrimental, right? If you ask your committee member to talk to somebody, another institution like that's actually something you should avoid at all costs. You want to avoid anything that looks like nepotism. And then I come to DISCO. And I should say I snuck, I should say I snuck into DISCO in the sense that I did not believe that I was at all a fit for this.

I didn't even know about it, to be [00:20:00] honest. I applied to a different postdoc at the Digital Studies Institute here, and I believe it was Remi, so I really have Remi to thank, Remi who, saw something in my application and basically rerouted it to Lisa I had a different interview a second interview and I somehow came to this DISCO network thing and I was like I don't really even like work on these topics. I didn't believe, I didn't have, I didn't have the sort of confidence to even identify as like a marginalized academic or somebody who works on race or and I still don't super centrally work on race, but it's it is important to my research.

Anyways, all this is to say that I came in with this cohort of right? Largely academics of color or people who are marginalized in some way, and then watching and learning about the experience of mentorship that they've received, including you know, really finding moments of solidarity with their mentors, [00:21:00] collaboration, being on panels, like I saw people talking. I think networking gets, I don't like the word networking, and I think I still don't know if that's the word I want to be using. But I was like, Oh, it's actually all about the relationships. And I It really blew my mind. 

And I remember, I've still talked to my colleagues from grad school, almost all of whom are white, but they're just like, oh, I didn't know you could do that.

So I think, I don't know, when I think about how I will be as a mentor going forward, I know one of the things we are going to talk about is the kind of service trap that marginalized academics are often in. Especially women of color, expected to do so much more kind of mentor and care work. 

So I want to be mindful of that, but I also, like I'm thinking about all the things that I would do differently, including making it very clear that, the job market is not a meritocracy to, to prepare people for what it might feel like to be tokenized or [00:22:00] how to play this twisted game if they do decide to pursue academia and to really at least have people go in with their eyes open without hopefully being too cynical and providing opportunities for collaboration and mentorship. I'm always so I have so much respect for Lisa and the way that she always finds ways to bring her PhD students into scholarship, into conversation, and we're seeing that here today.

And I do think that in more traditional fields in the humanities, collaboration is still seen as something that's foreign, and that's obviously been such a big part of DISCO. What I will say that I really appreciated about my dissertation committee. And this kind of goes to the question of interdisciplinarity is even though my advisor was like very famous, she never tried to get me to read her work or to write like her.

And I think she actually was more excited that I was writing about something that wasn't really like her [00:23:00] work at all. And nobody on my dissertation committee knew that much about color. So they were like, this is your thing. We can give you broad feedback, but you do your thing. And I think that's, it's so important is, not to have your students be clones of yourselves, but to learn from them and to learn from the things that they're pursuing and you can guide them with the critical frameworks or the tools.

And yeah, I think that's been, I feel like I've gotten much more freedom to, to pursue what I wanted. And I think cause it's coming to DISCO and being able to have better critical vocabulary and tools to think about race in relation to my work, which was not at all part of my dissertation. Like I remember having a conversation with Lisa where I said like I think I said something like I don't I never took a class on race. I can't believe I'm gonna teach a class on race. Like I don't have the credentials. And I think you said something like it doesn't matter because you're already doing it.

And so I think that's part of it is giving people the confidence to say like you might not think this is your expertise and it [00:24:00] might not even be my expertise as your mentor, but I can help you work towards that.

Yeah.

Huan He: So I did one year of the postdoc and then this last year I was I finished my first year on the tenure track, which was an experience. And my response to this, I came in in a kind of privileged position in the sense that I had the postdoc but also deferred the tenure track job, so I wasn't on the market while I was on the postdoc, doing the DISCO postdoc. So I took the postdoc really just with a playful mindset of this is a kind of grant situation that I'll probably never at least in the near future be a part of. And I would love to just be in conversation with people from all these different fields and that's, It was my mentality going in.

I came from a program, an American Studies program that I feel like in a lot of ways prepared me very well. I had really strong mentors, but they were very much by the book kind of mentors. Here's how you do the thing here's how you do the market, [00:25:00] and it was a a department of very high functioning academics of minority academics so I feel like one of the things in terms of mentorship that I've taken away from my time here at DISCO is really just one, it's been such an intergenerational space and getting to see how the sausage is made is I think something that I, have fully, have absorbed really as a postdoc.

I'm thinking most recently I did a kind of early stage workshop of some of my book stuff. And then also a lot of us postdocs or all of us, we did a writing retreat in Chicago to work on some of the book material. And all of the PIs responded to Faith's incessant question survey about their own first book writing experience and we got to see like really just a diverse set of experiences about how people approach their first book. And it was a simple document, but I was just looking at oh my gosh, I've never just seen this, seen [00:26:00] this compilation of like various different experiences and there's not really like a singular way.

And just like people being very honest and I just felt like I learned so much about how these incredible books came to be and that, that was just like a more recent example of just seeing like kind of the what's behind the curtain of this like thing that's looming in the future, which is, the quote the book quotation.

And I also feel like, a lot of the kind of emphasis on collaboration has been really more and more central to how I've appreciated members mentorship, but also how I'm viewing mentorship in the future as well. And not only across generations, but also I think Rianna was saying, like the peer mentorship and the peer collaboration.

And I immediately think about this the book jam that we did and Technoskepticism. And one of my favorite memories was like being delusional in the kitchen of our writing retreat with Jeff riffing off of this. Section [00:27:00] that ended up being in the digital nostalgia book that actually might be some of my favorite things that I've ever written that also just makes no sense stuff like that I just felt was really fun for me to be a part of.

And right now I've I'm trying to make sense of the intellectual landscape at Vanderbilt's, which I think is a little behind in a lot of DH stuff. Quite frankly they cut slash absorbed the DH center into the library. So DH has, is going through a really interesting moment. And I think I'm trying to bring a lot of this as I'm trying to perhaps build the social infrastructure of what digital studies, DH, whatever we want to call it, looks like at my institution.

I have an RA for the first time and I'm trying to figure out what that means and one thing that we talked about in the last meeting with him was maybe co writing a piece. I don't think I'd be open to that if it weren't for, our co writing experiences. Yeah, so that's a little bit [00:28:00] from me.

Aaron Dial: Yeah, I think everyone here has really hit the nail on the head about mentorships. I'll add I think, three ways that I approach mentorship. so I'll tell a little story about my defense. So how we do it in see state. Obviously after COVID everything became virtual. When we do when we defend we are not in the zoom room as the public were in I guess the waiting room.

So it's me in my chair. He's Hey, you ready? To gimme the pep talk, you got it. I know it's gonna be amazing. And we pop into the waiting room and I see literally 62 screens of family and friends. And I say that not to do any kind of brag or anything, but to say that like Aaron Dial up there by myself.

This performance of Aaron Dial is a product of community, right? It is friends, family, wishers, right? And that's what mentorship is about. And understanding that it is an honor to have people who pour into you even for a moment, right? Like the [00:29:00] mentorship can be a conversation at a conference or it can be like for years. And it's an honor to have that. And it's an honor to be that for someone else and really internalizing that. 

The second thing is I think, one of the, I think the really amazing things about DISCO and this sort of assembly of talent that the PIs have put together and we, and frankly we're all amazing. Is that I genuinely believe that we will all be amazing scholars, right? But this sort of work that we do, and it is work, right? It's not a calling to let anybody fool you. You get a paycheck. It's a job, right? It can be very isolating right in ways that are bad in ways that are good So for example a bad way is my mom really doesn't understand what I do.

She's still telling people I teach English. So and that's fine, right? I had the conversation with her once and she gave me the glassy eyes and I was like, we're not gonna have it again. But also in good ways, right? We get startup packages, we can go to conferences I've been we can get positions [00:30:00] like this, grants to do amazing things, write stuff or whatever, and there's a sort of a faux notion of celebrity around it, people have read my stuff or whatever.

But that is also a, even though it's, I guess it feels good at the time. It's also a kind of trap, right? Like you didn't you are not like, we were not celebrities. We're real people. I got real bills. You know what I'm saying? Like I'd be on a social media, like y'all be on a social media. I'm saying like, like this is not.

But like mentorship grounds us, right? It grounds us not just in the work, right? But it grounds us in the humanness of it, right? So just understanding that mentorship is a grounding. It keeps your feet to the grass, right? And that is really important in this work as we go through these lofty, like institutions.

And the last thing I think that I guess no one's mentioned yet is that and I'll tell another story. I'm at two conversations today after my panel with legends Catherine Knight Steele and Kishonna G [00:31:00] ray . And they both said something to me. They were like, Oh you said something and I want to cite this.

Two, I was honored that I said something that would make it into anything that they've done. But I did that for two reasons. One, for some reason, they thought what I said was smart, but two, they thought it would make their work better. 

And the last thing is really important because mentorship should be selfish, right? Like with the grad students I've taught, I had the pleasure of talking to here Abby, Nisa, Ngozi, right? Like y'all are next up. And like the work y'all do will only make my stuff better. So me pouring into you, it's going to make my stuff better. And that's real. Like when I cite, when I, when y'all stuff come out, Abby they told you to write that article when that comes out and I cite you, they be like, Oh, you cited this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It makes my work better. 

So we should be selfish about mentorship, right? Because we are pouring our energy into someone, like I said, for a moment or for years or whatever, and that really only makes us better.

Kevin Winstead: I think we both said that we were happy to be off the market when Rianna, [00:32:00] before Rianna got there.

Aaron Dial: Yes. 

Kevin Winstead: While we were here, we both said, thank God Ngozi is so young there ain't no way I want that problem, problem.

Aaron Dial: Don't want him, don't want him.

Rianna Walcott: Wow I think our next grounding connective thing for us was to talk about this as a DH project and thinking about institutional legibility. A lot of us have touched on this, particularly Kevin talking about the big grant thing. This, I think, is a really nice moment for us to reflect on that.

I also want to like, if anything comes up, I actually want you guys to speak to us and ask us anything as you go. If I'd like to not do the Q& A at the end and we can respond. Yeah, why not? Ask us anything. Ask us anything. 

But I'll start us off by also thinking about, some of these things about the placing of a DH grant, the interdisciplinarity of DH, the sort of is this service? Is this teaching? Is this research question? How do we make this [00:33:00] legible to us? And then also, as you briefly mentioned before, the, sustainability, the future of a DH project, like the current ability to get funding in this space versus like future abilities to get funding. And then also how we as academics, as people who are not PIs who will one day be PIs, God willing and everything, like how does the, how do we think about labor and like how does the lifespan of a project work with the community of people involved in making the project happen?

Sorry, that was a lot of things. But also, yeah, any questions as well?

Guest: I just want to tag in, it's Aria, to what you were saying because earlier David said and I wrote, or I should say I wrote, not necessarily that you said, but I wrote that all you need is is permission and a model. And I just, I want to, [00:34:00] as somebody who had people on my committee who didn't at the time, it felt like didn't do what I did.

And I felt like I spent a lot of energy and I talked to somebody about this, but I spent a lot of energy just trying to network to find my people who, who are the look going to every single conference losing my voice regularly to just find my people and build my network and try because the whoever I thought I was trying to be didn't exist, right? So I just want to perhaps in talking about institutional legibility. Talking about legacy and how we do this work and mentor and teach other folks. I just want to say that many times what y'all are talking about, there is no model. There isn't somebody to say, hey, I just want to follow behind you. There isn't a pathway already. 

Like Sarah Ahmed talks about there's the gravel and there's the paved and then there's just mud over here. Like people just run this grass path to the ground, but it's not an actual path. And I just want to be [00:35:00] clear that you can definitely have a model and you can definitely get permission, but most of the times it's not the model of what exactly you think you need.

And it's not permission really. It's just, I guess you should do it, right? It's not even like excited permission, right? It's just I can, you said you're doing it go off. But there's a lot of rejection and I just want to, I think institutional legibility and mentorship, we need to sit with the fact that what we're talking about, especially as marginalized people in these institutions, doesn't fucking exist, right? And they purposefully don't exist. 

So what does it mean to take up space, to be legible, to get money from these grants, to do this work, and then to mentor people to do it too, when what we're talking about doesn't exist, or there isn't a model to pull from? I just want to add that to the question that's on the table.

Thank you. 

Kevin Winstead: Some of that is one of the things that I have been spending a bit of time on is trying to trace this history as it's [00:36:00] developing of whatever we're calling black digital studies, right? And I think I have my early notebooks is, man, it's black digital humanities, black computational different words. And we're saying the same thing.

In a lot of ways I think this moment talking about mentorship is also acknowledging that this is the we're in the growth and birth and growth of a field, right? Understanding the histories of development of black studies and other kind of disciplines and seeing, multi generational. I'm not going through the same things that Catherine did. And Adam Banks did. So like that, that the ways that those in the field are able to replicate, even if it's, that, there's three of us now is a big deal when there was only one, a year ago. 

So I think at least in my experience, I think we still, we, you, what year did you come to Maryland? 2016, right? What the projects that Catherine has been a part of since 2016, [00:37:00] we have seen the impact of our labor grow. A field where even on the margins, we passed each other and oh, that person is now 10 year track in the and then also because it is a digital humanities project, I'm literally putting pins on maps to figure out where people are like digital studies is still very coastal, right?

It's West Coast, East Coast. And then the exception would be like Michigan and [INAUDIBLE}. And I think what that is showing us, though, that people have taking that responsibility of once you get there, put on to, right? So I agree with you, like the experiences, no one is experienced is going to be, the model per se, but I have to give the roses to the community of, it seems overwhelmingly that people understand the responsibility of replication.

And also, again, that meant for me end of the day, all these words, mentorship is about telling the truth on how, this is all the information you need to survive. [00:38:00] You figure it out, because that's all I can do. 

Rianna Walcott: Yeah, it's one of those rare moments where I think I feel quite optimistic. It's I'm aware that the I don't, I feel like quite it's like the rich possibility that's that citation is possible right now. That I don't have to do the boring proof of presence work that, people like Catherine and Francesca were doing, saying, hey, by the way, we're here, we did do, all of the PIs, it's like we're here, we do exist, and black people use technology. I don't have to waste time, the the Toni Morrison quote the real tiring bit of racism is having to say having to disprove all this stuff, and that opens up this really rich area of possibility for us that, you know, yes, of course, it's there's no one size fits all answer and everything, but there's an opportunity here and I'm very rarely like this optimistic about things, it, it, I think has been an opportunity to let me say what I actually care about saying rather than saying the obvious.

And I think that's only going to get better, because eventually so [00:39:00] someone, the next person will be able to cite me and start to get even more niche and weird about stuff. And that's just really nice, like you don't have to do the ground level paving stuff. 

David Adelman: So I would just like to jump in here and very quickly. So address some of the threads, not all of the threads. My apologies for this being partial, but to pick up on what Rianna's just put down in terms of citation, and not having to cite, and getting to choose what to cite.

From my perspective, right? Citation is not always a love language, but it is often a love language.

The choice of being able to choose who you cite to demonstrate a particular genealogy for a particular purpose, right? And one of the things that has been really wonderful and gratifying for me as a postdoc and as an emerging professional is getting to meet the people whom you cite who are [00:40:00] often in this room or not.

And for me, it's people like Mara Mills, and Amy Cameron and Elizabeth Althusser, and all of these people who I am now networking with and everything else. To answer the question very pragmatically, yes, often when you are having your head down and doing the dissertation work, it can feel like there is no model or no idea of how to move forward, but one of the answers that I have is or that I am comfortable with, or that gives me a sense of peace, is that when you are writing, and when you choose to cite someone who has been fundamental to your work, and is essential to your work, send them an email. Let them know that you are citing them, because the reality is that is a way to one, produce a network, that is a way to de isolate our work from one another, [00:41:00] and that is a way of making yourself legible. Even if it is as a fan boy or girl or them or they, the point is that the only way that knowledge is reproduced is if we let one another know that we're citing one another because there is no way to read the thousands of works that emerge every single day. 

And so that is not a complete answer for how you make a model. But the reality is that sometimes for particularly those of us who are in a marginalized position, you have to make your own networks of support. And in order to do that, it often is reaching out and saying hello. I see you exist. I exist. You're fantastic. Blah blah blah and that is something that I have learned both as a practice for myself and something that Remi also [00:42:00] advocates. 

Rianna Walcott: I really like turning that sort of network of from a digital disparate thing into the human part. The, oh, I'm a person, not just a node here.

I just, before you start, I just wanted to remind us of one part of this question as well, which was about the DH project and the interdisciplinarity aspect that I want us to make sure we're speaking to. 

Aaron Dial: Yeah, no, I think maybe my response is maybe starting to touch on this. Ari, I think what you said is right. I think, maybe the word, obviously the word path, but maybe model, maybe connotes a kind of like linearity to this, right? And, but I guess I would push back a bit, right? Cause, so for example, I'm just meeting you at this conference, and I think, you have already become, I guess if model, I can't think of another word if models the wrong word. And simply by, by the fact that you're doing your thing, like you got the the first book, the by black book, and you have the Nicki Minaj book coming out. And I'm like, Oh, that doesn't mean I can do your thing. [00:43:00] That gives me the confidence to imagine my thing, right?

And then I can, and then if I have an issue, a problem, I can send you an email. Hey, how'd you navigate this? That the third and you won't get, and you won't get, you can't give me the sort of advice for my specific institution, but you can get, Oh, this is how I did it or whatever, maybe your university got that. And I think that for, in, in the kind of work we do, that's gold, right?

And then for the sort of, I guess the sort of DH legibility part of it I think this is really, I think, a testament to DISCO, is that we have these sort of satellite labs, of course, but every lab is very different. So at the BCaT Lab, the HAT L ab that worked with Ray, they're very different labs at very different work products or whatever.

But what that showed me is that there's no one way to do this, and to think of, and thinking about legibility as doing work [00:44:00] that matters and not thinking about legibility as being beholden to an institution. I don't necessarily need everyone at Colgate for that matter, for example, to understand what I do, I've done good work, right? The field will understand what I do. And then if they don't get it, they'll get it later. Or I'll get another job. And I and I've gotten one job, so that means I can get another one. 

And but this goes back to the work, but I got that from you though, because you told me that yesterday, right? And that's, and I guess, and that's the sort of reality for me, and the sort of, the, having having folks, and being in contact with folks like you all, and these group of people up here I am always empowered, right? To say, hey, like I can do my work. And I can do it in a way that makes me feel good. 

That sort of makes me feel seen, and all this sort of ego stuff that comes with it. Cause we all have egos. But I can also do it in a way that is chasing, institutional, read: white, validation, [00:45:00] right? Because that's the thing that is people like, have people like in years and years of therapy and going down I'm like, that's we're not trying to do that.

And so for me, legibility is about finding systems to allow you to do the work that you do and the mentorship is a part of that. So I would say you are a model for me, but yeah. 

Brandy Pettijohn: Thinking about the institution that I was at. is that the D in DH was like, Oh, we know that. And we're very antagonistic towards this H part. Which is, I think, a little bit different for liberal arts institutions because the digital is very sexy. And, ooh, I don't know a lot about it, but tell me more. I might not really do much to bring you to where you want to go, but I'm at least, I'm going to play like I'm giving you ear service because it's sexy.

Versus being at the institution where I was at, which was like, Humanities? We're trying to defund the hell out of that. You know what I'm saying? It's all [00:46:00] about STEM, baby. You know what I'm saying? As somebody who's trying to bring these conversations into, what do these two things have to do with each other, and why they're important.

Then that's the kind of like the hard work of like legibility, and then one of the things that we were doing at the lab was bringing, people in we're at varying stages of the process of their work, which was helpful for students because you might've had a Sarah Florini who's written a book or whatever, who was talking about a very new work and wrapping ideas of federation from a what is that? Blue Sky, whatever from that technical aspect, but then also considering it in a political like we really went from like this idea of this list, this social media kind of site to like thinking of a grand idea of what does this mean this federation and thinking about this federated idea as we're in this political moment where the federated, these federated groups are like trying to impose their [00:47:00] ideals on to this political process that we're in.

So it's wrapping these like ideas and up because they don't really exist in segmented ways, right? We just don't, we're not like floating in the digital space and it, we're not like getting affected by the politics of this stuff, even the things that people think that they're doing that is new, and sexy or whatever. And we're not affected by this other stuff, which is something that tech likes to do, right? They like to say that we're, this is objective and we're separate from all this emotional, turmoil stuff we're just doing tech. And that's where the humanities part and the legibility towards different people come in and how that at least helps.

But then, like on the liberal arts side, that there's just things that they might not be prepared to fully wrap their arms around because it's too abstract or it feels scary or whatever or even like it's surveillance or whatever. These different ideals around [00:48:00] tech. That could be true and not true or both at the same time and thinking about these things and trying to get them legible in a different way.

Lida Zeitlin Wu: Could I just add, so I think this is interesting because I think my institutional experience has maybe been the polar opposite in the sense that it's it's all about the age, and I think in some ways I am a bit of an old school humanist in the sense, like I don't know that I'll ever have a lab.

I want to write paper books and things like that, but I think it's also maybe important to mention that the whole idea of digital humanities is a really contested term, and that even between some of us, we don't necessarily agree on what that means. David will fight me on this when I say that I don't do digital humanities. He says what do you mean? Yes, you do. And I'm very aware that I have certain, biases towards a very early moment. Like I cannot get Franco Moretti and distant reading out of my head because I came from a lit background and actually Slavic specifically. And it was like [00:49:00] mapping character networks and Dostoevsky and of course I think very few, probably none of us here are doing that, but I think there, there's so many different ways to think about DH and some of them are like using computational methods to look at artworks or literature, but then it can also be right using humanistic methods and bringing them to bear upon digital artifacts, which I think is what many of us do. 

I think where I find myself I think it's good because I'm being pushed on some of these maybe more traditional ideas I have, but I think for legibility, it does seem like the way to get grants and to be legible beyond the humanities is to borrow the terms of the sciences, right? It's to say you have a lab or to use terms like PIs. I still thought that was private investigator when I came here. So I think there's like some interesting tension just in terms of even that term or when we talk about DH or digital studies, that may mean different things to different people even [00:50:00] on the same panel.

Kevin Winstead: If I could talk a little bit about Western knowledge production for a minute, that encourages you all to identify, to justify on behalf of the institution why you're not a thing, right? Quick backstory. I went to University of Maryland for my PhD, worked under Catherine. And before coming here and that feels like a lifetime ago now.

But I say that to say in something I wrote, I was trying to, I didn't say it directly and she would disagree with me, but I remember a time where digital humanities did not count social media in online communities, particularly the ways that our black students imagined what digital studies was, as part of broader digital humanities, right?

That didn't change, it changed, but it didn't change because someone made a theoretical justification. What changed was, Catherine got a job, doing a digital humanities project and all the white folks was in the room like how we gonna make this work, right? [00:51:00] Because she said this is what I do and I'm here and what you're gonna do about it the entire field changed, was like it we can't just wholeheartedly dismiss it, right?

She disagrees. But guess what? That's exactly what I say. I do and people be like all so it mattered right? And these projects give that kind of power where I don't think someone writing a piece justifying that makes the system change, right? Somebody got a grant, gave some power to somebody else. Somebody hired somebody, gave them that power. And then all of a sudden you see the system change and the same discipline, sociology, that told me two years ago that this ain't a thing to do, is all of a sudden changing their position because we want that money too. 

That's what it was. It was no theory. It was, I want access to resources that I didn't think you were capable of [00:52:00] getting, right? So again, what are the power of grants and building structure? Why take on this labor that sucks, and at least I know the labor sucks, like I know the labor sucks, but what's important about it is you standing in the river fighting against that current allowed me to walk through the river, right?

It made that current for me a little less. I still have enough energy and pep in my step where I'm willing to go back in the river and let you walk out, right? Alright, now it's time for me to do it, right? There's something that's deeply spiritual in that for me. I ain't gonna start sinking weight in the water, but y'all understand, right?

There is there's something deeply emotional and like super serious. I do have a suit on let me tell you, let me all seriousness at every opportunity if your project, when you write your application, and you may put your graduate student in and not do it. If [00:53:00] you got an opportunity to put some postdocs, do it, right? Cause that shifted a field, not anybody's paper on a theory. Straight up. 

David Adelman: I just want to quickly acknowledge that we only have a couple minutes left, so I don't want us to get cut off. But, ultimately-

Guest: Should I go? Okay. Hi, I'm Pruneah. This is Pruneah speaking. In there's a lot on the table now, but I was wondering if anyone, also to everyone here, in terms of thinking about mentorship, I'm thinking there's a lot of different ways that I feel like the panelists are approaching mentorship, especially because just like Aria said, like there is no model or there's a lot of energy that a lot of us have to spend to even just be like, this is me and this is why I'm doing this work.

And so a lot of us I think are trying to seek people who at least get it. But I think a huge part of what I'm finding as a Ph. D. student is that the relationships in this university space, there's a lot of different [00:54:00] different hats that people wear in terms of what you're looking for in terms of mentorship. And I know that, Aaron is like, it's a job, but it's also there are other things, right? And sometimes you look for mentorship in terms of intellectual you, you get it, and so we can start from there, or you're like, I'm an anxious person and I don't know how to exist in a seminar. There's different things. 

And I'm thinking about how a lot of the time the mentorship is shaped by our own experiences of who mentored us and what we find helpful. And I was thinking about, I was wondering if there was, if there were any what are the things, I think Kevin was like, I just need someone to tell me the truth, but how do you know who is the person who's going to tell you that truth without I think sometimes you have gut feeling, or there are certain things that you are looking for. And I was wondering if you have any practical things that you're like, this is somewhat these are some good signs that I look for in terms of a mentor, and also what happens when you find someone and they're not giving you. Like, there are different hats that you're wearing and like, how do you what are some practical skills about like [00:55:00] navigating those different hats?

Aaron Dial: I'll start this conversation. One, thank you so much, Pruneah, for asking it. I think this is to me, gets that to some of the unwritten rules of academia I was talking to Cat about this is that I think when grad students are seeking mentorship, I think you have to realize that the professors, the scholars that you are trying to engage with, they are not just their work, right? And a no does not mean a yes, I don't like you, right? 

And so I'll give you, I'll give you, I'll give you a perfect example, right? So let's say you were at Colgate or whatever and you said, Aaron, I want you to be my mentor. Let's say my wife just had a baby. I'm going to say Pruneah, no. I can't do it. And I might not tell you that my wife had a baby. And what that means is and thinking about the sort of kinds of mentors that you have to find, I think the intellectual mentorship is important. It's not [00:56:00] everything though. Like the stuff we've been talking about, not, very little of it has been about the research, right?

It's about how you professionalize, how you engage. It's about giving you the game. And that can come from so for example, if you're in a com department, it might be a technical communication scholar who works on climate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you might be doing hard media studies looking at film. And that person is, oh, yeah, I can tell you how this works, blah, blah, blah. And I don't know anything about your research, but I'm invested in you. And the investment in you as a person is way more important, at least to me, than, Oh, I think your work is good. 

Because I think your work is good. That can change with the next paper you write or the next draft. You can read that and be like, Oh, it's not as good as I thought it was. And so you want to try to find people right and it's tough there are people I mean you're gonna talk to a bunch of people in grad school like something like and it's I think, maybe a [00:57:00] little reductive, and I don't mean like this to say, you'll know, but you'll know, right?

And you have to be on a, especially in the, because, what year are you? What year, okay. And so I would say you probably know now, probably, you probably found some of those people, right? And what you'll do as a mentor when that first year comes to you. And you can set me because grad students talk, I wouldn't talk to Dr. such and such, he kinda da, she kinda da, but Dr. what's what, she really cares, or whatever, and that's how the network is formed, and how the stuff is passed. I think you have to I tell grad students that, especially people who are applying to grad school, never go for a person, never go for, never go because somebody who's doing great work, you don't know their job situation, you don't know if they're unhappy, you don't know if they're an asshole, you don't know if they are a criminal, right?

And, yeah, and so like you don't know none of that stuff. All you know is you read some papers and they sounded smart in that paper, right? You go and you [00:58:00] find people who support you and are willing to invest in you and are willing to challenge you and push you. You want the person who says, Oh, this is good. Have you thought about this? How are you doing today?

Kevin Winstead: I want to share something. I'm going to have to, I have to explain navigating the institution as a black man first to explain what, how to, how I go through the process of vetting. Being black and higher being a black man in higher education is typically, and we, those of us who have, we know folks who are not good for this particular reason because they never get challenged, right?

They have friends in their cohort that does the work for them, their work is mid, then the faculty say, Oh, this is good, cause you, this, for you, right? I'm one of the last students of Patricia Hill Collins before she went emeritus, right? She was the first, in year three, she was the first person that looked like she made me write an application to get into her class because the way things she you know she Collins right [00:59:00] but the first, she pulls me in her office And she's the first person to say this to me, and I knew it. No one would say it to me, right? I- you smart, but I don't know that you can read and write. I'm gonna fix it though, right? right 

The problem was I was in year three of my PhD program and I'm, and I know it right. Like I know I know what I'm reading and I know what I'm writing and it don't look like that. I'm trying to figure out how to get there, but everybody else is saying it's cool. So I, okay. She was the first person that was like, no, this is trash. But I also in a place, and this is where I argue with Ray, I argue with Ray all the time because that's what I do. But, okay. 

We already established, that's the moment I trusted her, right? Cause it wasn't like, this is trash, get out. You don't deserve to be in my class. It was this trash you come in, now I'm giving you the stamp to come in my class. Right now I'm going to put you through it to be able to be a better scholar on the way [01:00:00] out. And to this day, I still have it. She sent me a text message right now.

I have to send it to show it to somebody else and have them read it to me. Cause I got that much anxiety around, but at no point, there's not a single word that she says to me that is not about making me better as a thinker, right? That's the friction, right? 

Catherine has said, my work is trash. You need to, this is where you need to make it better. And I love her for it, right? She holds out the A when she says trash.

So in that vetting, I would say, we're all sensitive about our work, but you're looking for the person that's pushing you to make you better. Now, what does pushing look like? Show me where the holes are. Show me how to, don't tell me the answer, but show me that pathway. And for so many black male scholars, they'll either get the pass or somebody will do the work for them.

Cherice Chan: Hello, this is Cherice in the back. Hi! It's my time to [01:01:00] ask a question. Okay. So I just know throughout the whole day, y'all been talking a lot about infrastructure and funding and friction. Just like these, I think these key words just keep coming up throughout the day and like how it gets such how those kind of get this project and all these amazing people in this room right now, which is like so exciting.

But I'm curious, because you're talking about like how different it is for this model to be in the humanities compared to, for example, the sciences. I personally come from a social science kind of background, which is interesting being with this group because it's so different. 

And I'm curious because compared to other projects I've worked on in which kind of the structure is set up to be, to be like, you get these grants, you get the funding, we make a collaborative project, we do a study, we publish it, and then and we keep doing every rinse and repeat all over again, but DISCO is really unique because in comparison we have such a huge number of staff like also, you know here working on this project. Like we have 12 staff members here so I'm just curious like you [01:02:00] mentioned like friction and like how DISCO I feel like that kind of represents that is we're trying to merge these models and make the humanities more collaborative, but also that friction also required a bunch of staff labor as well, which I think maybe in, I don't know how grant funding necessarily works. I wasn't part of that, but just like also accounting for that in that we're trying to make that model work, but yet it also requires maybe a little more staff labor than maybe what people might expect. 

So I'm just curious if y'all can talk a little about that. That was really long. Sorry. Okay. 

David Adelman: I can perhaps, which is to say that, so that is one of the frictions of this quarantine period. It's not just that it's a large staff, but that there has been a lot of staff churn. And we obviously support people moving on to better positions and building out the network in that way. But that [01:03:00] is, I think, part of what it, at least coming from my perspective as someone who is a postdoc for lab and also a co PI for Mozilla and so has worked with multiple staff and multiple positions that often it requires you to come in with a degree of intellectual generosity that can feel uncomfortable, but is absolutely necessary. 

And sometimes there will be miscommunication. And it's absolutely important to be upfront and honest, which is hard and difficult. And to a great degree, the the academy is not built for honesty or for vulnerability.

But I'm lucky in the sense that it's one of those things that DAF Lab has tried to model sometimes successfully, sometimes less than successfully. But the [01:04:00] reality is that when we're talking about infrastructure as we just were, we do have to acknowledge the human infrastructure that allows for things to get done. And that staff is not always acknowledged. We try our best, I think, to acknowledge staff here at DISCO. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes it is uncomfortable. 

But you have to lean into that discomfort. And you have to be willing to have hard conversations. And I would hope that anyone here who wants to have a hard conversation feels safe and comfortable enough to have that. Because there's multiple layers here. Because you also have to think about power dynamics and things of that nature. Anyway.

Kevin Winstead: I think you got Okay, no, okay, I got it, no I would say part of telling those true truths. Something I learned from my grandmother [01:05:00] and something that I've seen over and over in grant projects is that we don't tell the truth about how community happens.

We don't. Right? And we're, academics are especially bad about it, right? Everybody comes in with the idea, we should just do the thing and it's but I have a nine to five, I don't have the time to do that, I might have kids on top. Where am I supposed to be, right? And it's so much of it is, somebody has an idea that you should do with the thing, right? And not, we know that story, right? We are really bad at it, right? Aaron and I had an idea because it was like, oh, we gonna put a proposal together for a writing retreat. We did that labor and the whole application is and we really hope that the admins is gonna help us put, get the hotels and the thing and the thing cause I ain't got the time to do it, right?

You all have created community for us in a way that is very familiar to how I've seen community happen in my own [01:06:00] family. Community didn't happen because my entire family did their fair share of the work, right? My grandmother was in the, in, in the kitchen and with with the wives of all of her sons because doing the work of putting the food together and applying the peer pressure on the ones that don't usually show up unless you guilt them into it, right? Community happens that way and tell them the true truth about it is community always happens that way, right? So if we know that and we acknowledge that in public, then we're obligated to one, honor that, right? And also find ways to build the the restorative aspects of that labor into the infrastructure.

And a lot of projects that I've seen that they're ready to kill each other by the end, typically it's because at the beginning they undersold the resources it was going to take care of the infrastructure, right, to get the grant. And by the end, [01:07:00] no matter how much justice was said in the beginning of those documents, they didn't write the justice into taking care of the infrastructure, right?

Aaron Dial: I just want to add one more thing real quick about staff, right? And this is for the grad students, right? I'm I got my undergrad master's from HBCU, North Carolina Central University. Go Eagles. And one thing at HBCU is for, hopefully there are a few other HBCU grads in the room, is that we learn the importance of staff people, right?

And staff is essential, right? I'm telling these, I'm telling grad students. Learn who your staff people are and not just learn who they are like this is who you are right get to know them right Miss such and such Mr. such and such. That is how the stuff happens, right? It is somebody who has sent an email on your behalf and they have said Pruneah needs a thing. Can we get the thing or whatever? And they, somebody says yes or no, or maybe, and maybe the staff person is friendly with the person who said no hold on now. Pruneah is very nice. 

And this stuff [01:08:00] with DISCO is not possible without the staff. So I think of for example, it's been tons of Cherice, you've sent me tons of emails. I'm horrible about responding to emails, I'm so sorry it's late, Cherice. We need you, Aaron, we need you to send a thing. Thank you. That's love and that's care. When Veronica responded to my emails about graphic design stuff, like that's love and that's care, right?

And that's how we have to understand sort of the relationship, I think, between staff and faculty. It is not a sort of hierarchy, right? They do a different kind of intellectual labor. It is still labor, right? And it's important, right? If the people you send it, the email's just not going in the ether.

Or if the people you send the email to, they not reading the email, it's the staff person, Hey, have you read this email? Ngozi's trying to get on your calendar, Dr. Such and Such. And then, oh I don't know about Ngozi. Ngozi is awesome. You know what I'm saying? That's all I'll say, but yes, no, it is not a hierarchical, it's a symbiotic relationship that I really strongly support.