“Badging”
Badging
Emily Christina Murphy and Karis Shearer
Like any good Girl Scouts, we at the AMP Lab love a good badge. Badges in our childhood imaginary are small, physical reminders of an event and an induction into a long-standing community of knowledge, pinned to a sash and displayed proudly. While the training models of the Girl Scouts are an unlikely inspiration for a research lab, the AMP Lab, a humanities lab that focuses on digitized cultural heritage research at The University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, has used “badged microcredentials” as a primary means of training in research skills and lab culture since 2019. Micro-credential environments are often designed with self-directed, choose-your-own-adventure pathways. While there is a complex, recent history of badged microcredentials in the corporatized university that we are not fully exempt from, in our lab, badges have allowed us to develop technique in the sense that Ben Spatz defines it: “Technique is knowledge that structures practice.”1 Badging is for us a technique of creating, documenting and sharing knowledge-informed practice within a research lab and at its porous boundaries with publics, other university bodies, and classrooms. Rather than seeking to reproduce results, as scientific method would demand, we as a research community hope to achieve reproducibility—as well as adaptation—of techniques. At the same time, we recognize that some of the practices we document and assess through badged microcredentials will themselves become obsolete as the platforms, tools, and theory that underpin the techniques change. Others, however, do not, as the orientation of the lab is towards historical technologies and legacy media. Therefore our place within this shifting technological landscape attends to the ways that obsolescence happens in the relationships among technologies, techniques, and their users.
The AMP Lab has created a badging structure that seeks to capture forms of knowledge that are factual or informational, forms that are built on practical expertise, and forms that require evaluation by researchers and other experts (see Figure 1). The AMP Lab is a research space that finds resonances with other, hybrid labs across universities. To borrow Janelle Jenstad and Joseph Takeda’s words, the AMP Lab is located “somewhere between a DH center, maker lab, program, and classroom,”2 drawing practices and values from across these relational models within universities. The AMP Lab houses discrete research projects of various scales, almost all of which place an emphasis on collaborative labour and hire students across undergraduate and graduate levels of instruction. The challenge in the lab, therefore, is to provide meaningful training for the shared space and the practices deployed within and across research projects. We know, however, from Katrina Anderson et al that student researchers in such projects have “report[ed] that the most significant challenge they face is a lack of formal training to use the tools and technologies required of them.”3 It’s not enough, however, to simply provide online or digital training divorced from the context of their use: “striking a balance between both is a major factor for the success of DH projects.”4 How, then, might a badging system meet these needs?
Figure 1. The AMP Lab badging landscape. Badges with icons have been completed; grey icons are under construction.
Figure Description
The focal point of this infographic is a circular badge labeled “The Amp Lab.” From that badge arrows extend in all directions to nine different nodes. Moving from the top around in a clockwise orientation, they read: Orientation, Activities, SpokenWeb, UBCO Library Archive, Darc, General Historia, Exeter DH Projects, MOD Remediation, Equipment Methods, and Orientation. Each of those nodes branch further, except for Darc, General Historia and MOD Remediation, which appear at the bottom of the graphic.
Orientation is associated with a badge bearing the same name, which itself branches to two other nodes: Safety and Community. Safety has badge showing a traffic safety cone. The badge for Community is under construction.
Activities does not have a badge itself and branches directly to Workshops and Techtalk, both of which have badges denoted as being under construction.
SpokenWeb has no badge itself and branches to Podcasts, which has a badge showing headphones and a microphone.
UBCO Library Archive has not badge and is linked to BCRDH, which has a badge noted as being under construction.
Exeter DH Projects has no badge and is linked to Famine & Death and Cotton Famine, both of which have badges under construction.
Last, Equipment Methods has no badge but is related to four different nodes. Directly linked to it from above is Design Basics, which has an under-construction badge. Branching off to the left of the main Equipment Methods node are TEI, Audio Digitalization, and DIY. TEI has a badge that reads “TEI 2” and Audio Digitalization has a badge showing three concentric circles in an aqua color, save for the lower right quadrant, where the circles change to red. DIY has no badge but branches further to the left, connecting to Button Maker, Cricut, Book scanner, and Zines & Chapbooks. Of those, only Button Maker has a badge that is not in progress, showing an image of a button press.
Badging Structure
Each AMP Lab badge is devised to have three levels. In level 1, trainees go through and are assessed on approximately 2 hours of pre-recorded audio and/or textual material fully online that addresses factual and introductory information. Level 2 entails 60 minutes of in-person, hands-on practice supervised by a project lead or student trainee who has completed all three levels of the badge. The final level is a cumulative 24-hour practicum supervised by project leads that demonstrates a high competency in a single research practice. To administer the badges, we use a platform called Canvas Badges (formerly Badgr), which provides a pleasing and skeuomorphic echo of earned physical badges tied to credentials.5
In the lab setting, we have awarded a total of 46 badges, and up to 70 additional badges through courses.6 Although the lab is our primary audience, labs and classrooms have porous boundaries,7 and we don’t anticipate that trainees will always progress to the practicum level. The Level 1 badge for Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup language, for instance, has been integrated into three classes at UBC Okanagan on digital editions. These students do not require further badging tied to a lab environment, but are still learning skills used in research projects in the lab. TEI in particular is a technology with a wealth of teaching resources. Using a badged microcredential nevertheless has some distinct advantages: the badge is integrated into an institutional learning management system; the lab and its researchers can keep track of how widely the resource is used; and the connection between the technology and existing research projects is legible for students.
This process makes student onboarding efficient and training consistent. It also brings students into the training process itself, and allows badged students to contribute to the mentorship of their peers.8 To a certain extent, we at the AMP Lab are shaped by the federal funding landscape of Canadian academia, which places a strong emphasis on student training as part of research projects.9 Within a similar context, Jenstad and Takeda theorize the RA as an “interface.”10 They posit that instead of a project director as a “‘place of interaction between two systems,’. . . a scholarly-professional system on the one hand, and a pedagogical system on the other,”11 RAs increasingly take on these roles, recognizing the “flat” organizational structure of hybrid research and pedagogy lab spaces. Anderson et al nuance this view. They demonstrate that meaningful mentorship results in students themselves becoming mentors, but this exchange “rarely receives the notice and reward it deserves.”12 That reward, moreover, must take into account the power structures of student involvement in DH research, which Emily Christina Murphy and Shannon R. Smith argue operate within distinct models of engagement like the “digital native,” the apprentice, or the scholar-citizen.13 As intersectional feminist scholars, we seek to recognize how such metaphors have consequences for how labs conceive of the power structures of student research and how they develop their approach to training.
From our perspective, rather than RAs or students acting as this interface, the badged microcredentials themselves become a key point of interaction. Crucially, that interaction acknowledges many of the ways that hierarchies remain in hybrid lab spaces. Expertise itself becomes a scaffolded way of recognizing hierarchies within research teams. The realities of pedagogical evaluation, paid employment, and broader hierarchies of university funding are not simply structures that we work against, but are foundational dimensions of power that we must acknowledge and work within in order to find equitable and alternative ways of operating as a hybrid lab community.
Authorship Statement
This Lab Book entry is the co-authorship of Emily Christina Murphy and Karis Shearer. Murphy and Shearer are equal co-authors whose work focused on the theorization of the badged microcredentials and their location within a body of theoretical and practical knowledge on lab techniques. The badged microcredentials themselves emerge from collaborative work first undertaken with research collaborators at the University of Exeter and UBC Okanagan, including student researchers. In the collaborative, iterative process, we wish in particular to acknowledge the intellectual contribution of Marjorie Mitchell and Ahlam Bavi, especially for their expertise on best practices at a national and international level.
Dr. Emily Christina Murphy and Dr. Karis Shearer are collaborators at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Murphy is Assistant Professor, Digital Humanities, former Assistant Director of the AMP Lab and PI of the ReMedia Research Infrastructure. Her research appears in Digital Humanities Quarterly, English Studies in Canada, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Doing More DH. She is principal investigator of the federally funded Modernist Remediations project. Shearer is Principal’s Research Chair in Digital Arts & Humanities and Director of the AMP Lab. She is the lead UBCO researcher on the federally funded SpokenWeb project and researches literary audio, the literary event, book history, and women’s labour in poetry communities. Together, Murphy and Shearer research remediation and digital humanities pedagogy.
Notes
Ben Spatz, What a Body Can Do: Technique As Knowledge, Practice as Research (Routledge, 2015), 1.
Janelle Jenstad and Joseph Takeda, “Making the RA Matter: Pedagogy, Interface, and Practices” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 71–85, 72.
Katrina Anderson, Lindsey Bannister, Janey Dodd, Deanna Fong, Michelle Levy, and Lindsey Seatter, “Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2016). http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/10/1/000233/000233.html.
Anderson et al. See also Lynne Siemens, “It’s a Team if You Use ‘Reply All’: an Exploration of Research Teams in Digital Humanities Environments,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 24, no.2 (2009): 225–33.
Before the acquisition of Badgr by Instructure, the parent company of the Canvas LMS, the platform used a “backpack” as a way of collecting earned badges and displaying them in a given Girl Scout’s account.
As badged microcredentials were not historically easily tracked within the Canvas LMS, a complete sense of the badges awarded through courses is more difficult to account for.
Jenstad and Takeda, 73.
We acknowledge the makerspace@UBCO as an earlier local model of scaffolded student-to-student mentorship: https://makerspace.ok.ubc.ca/.
Insight Grants, the cornerstone funding opportunity from the federal Social Science and Humanities Research Council, mandate that all funded projects “provide a high-quality research training experience for students.” “Insight Program,” Social Science and Humanities Research Council. https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/umbrella_programs-programme_cadre/insight-savoir-eng.aspx.
Jenstad and Takeda, 76.
Jenstad and Takeda, 76.
Anderson et al.
Emily Christina Murphy and Shannon R. Smith, “Undergraduate Students and Digital Humanities Belonging: Metaphors and Methods for Including Undergraduate Research in DH Communities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2017). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/3/000305/000305.html.
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