I wrote this at the end of my 2025-2026 round-up of what I did at work, before splitting it off into its own blog post. In some sense, it's the earnest, honest performance evaluation that the HR form has no space for me to write.

I've been at Stanford for 7 academic years. In winter 2020, right before the pandemic shutdowns, I gave a talk at the Scholars' Lab at UVA called "The 2040 Plan", reflecting on what I'd learned so far at Stanford, with an imagined retirement date of 2040.

If that actually ends up being the plan, I'm 1/3 of the way there.

This has not been a particularly good academic year for me. I don't have much by way of shining, stand-out, amazing things I can point to. There's been some satisfying maintenance/repair work on a project that's been with me since the start of my job. There's been incremental progress on some of my long-term infrastructure-like activities, like corpus-building. I opened a second textile-themed makerspace that a lot of people enjoy! But I've been preoccupied with some awful kid-related stuff at home, and I've had to step back from a lot of things for now. What surprised me, though, was how useful that ended up being. There are people who build things in such a way that they can't get out of the role of load-bearing pillar. If they step away, the whole thing crumbles. But, albeit not through my own choice, this year I really discovered which of the things I've built over the first 7 years of my job are standing and growing on their won.

#DHmakes

With a small amount of funding for student staffing, the makerspaces I run get busy. With people making creating things that make them happy. There's also been multiple staff crafting lunches out of the History department, organized by Kai Dowding -- and those are packed. I was taking time off attending to family things during Love Data Week this year, but there was a textile data visualization event anyway... and I had nothing to do with organizing it. A friend also texted me a picture last week from the second annual Building Book Labs Symposium with a big quote from the article I co-authored with Amanda Visconti and Claudia Berger about the origins of the #DHmakes movement, which involved trawling through my old Twitter history from the pandemic.

Multilingual DH

Meanwhile, there are multiple groups doing things around #MultilingualDH, and it feels like there's been real progress in getting more of the Anglophone DH world to think about language. It feels like more of a given now, and not exclusively in language departments like mine. People should think about language. Of course. I was hardly the first to be yelling at people about this, but I spent the first few years of my job banging loudly on that drum and trying to create community and infrastructure and resources and... here we are, and what I hoped for happened.

ACH

I entirely missed the ACH election this year with everything else I had going on in my life, only hearing about who was running when the results were announced, because somehow my membership had lapsed. But it is beautiful to see that elections are competitive and people want to be involved in doing the work of this organization. ACH isn't the same organization that Roopika Risam and I took over as co-Presidents in 2022. The work of making it this was more hers than mine (I did more on the ADHO side), but those changes have endured and spread and grown in beautiful ways. "We changed a thing and it kept growing in that direction" means a lot more to me than just "We changed a thing."

SUCHO's legacy

The Internet Archive's Information Stewardship Forum was another such moment this year. SUCHO only began four years ago, but there were talks about two generations of descendants (the Data Rescue Project, and then projects inspired by / built on that). It is a bizarre experience to get shout-outs throughout a conference as a project that served as inspiration for so many downstream things.

What do I do now?

Having seen all this, I'm left reflecting on:

  • What are the things that matter to me that can only exist or persist if I reliably push on them? (My corpus-building work comes to mind here, yet I remain committed to it.)

  • What things have taken on lives entirely of their own? (The descendants of SUCHO are such a bright light.)

  • What things are flourishing independently but there is still work that realistically falls to me? (My makerspaces and maybe some of #DHmakes more broadly.)

It's strange reflecting on some of those past projects and work and acknowledging that while I was able to do it at the time, that depended on a certain set of unhappy conditions in my personal life that I don't think I'd be willing to put up with now. It's part of why I'm disinclined to try to update my name on all those past publications: a lot of them, and the projects associated with them, are very precisely things that Quinn Dombrowski (my married name) did and could do, but Quinn Daedal (the name I chose for myself afterwards) could and would not.

So I'm left musing about what I do now since it can't be more of what I've already done, at least not in the same way.

There are, of course, things that don't change. Every new year, students and faculty show up with interesting projects and I'm enthusiastic about helping them sort it all out in a way that's realistic, sustainable, and ideally more of a delight than a burden. I am good at my job, in large part because I've gone and tried a bunch of things and made a lot of mistakes and spent some time reflecting on those mistakes. Honestly, a lot of the time people have to make those mistakes for themselves in order to learn these lessons, but I can help with harm reduction.

Even though I now have a semblance of what might be called "a life" and don't feel like I need to spend every possible waking minute working, I still need meaningful challenges in the mix of things I'm working on. I still believe in infrastructure (very broadly scoped, in Meg Smith's sense of "something we owe to one another"), and one area of work ahead of me is trying to write things down, create resources for people so they don't have to start from scratch. This will probably look like returning to projects like HPC for Humanists, and the series of zines with bite-sized takeaways from SUCHO, and writing more guides for the Data-Sitters Club.

My meandering paths have also taken me into the realm of standards work, both through participating in the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group (much as the schedule hasn't aligned well with my life over the last few months), and being invited to workshops related to programmatic access to the web (e.g. for web scraping and such). I've had a brief break because of the multi-year cyclic nature of DMCA exemptions, but that will be returning before long, too. At its essence: there are all kinds of groups out there making decisions that have a material impact on the kinds of work that are easy (or even legally possible) for scholars to do, but it's all very inside-baseball and generally nobody remembers that academics are even players in this landscape, and the scholars themselves are way too busy with other things to be reading all the tedious documents and following along as proposals are made and revised. But it's the kind of work that I'm pretty good at, and it probably makes sense for me to give it more attention than I have. It's a privilege to be in a position where it's possible to take that approach to supporting scholars, even though it's slow and frustrating work, at times with no reward other than knowing that you played a part in preventing bad things from happening.

I've been thinking back to Natalia Cecire's "Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities" a lot lately (and, in fact, have a little scholarly text analysis project going based on that). Her list of alternative metaphors for "doing DH" include the culinary and textile crafts, as well as "raising / nurturing". The metaphor that's been coming to mind recently, though, is gardening. I struggle with gardening, the same way I struggle with housework. It's not really something that works well if you do it in a big binge and then forget about it for a while, as I am inclined to do. But maybe I need to try to take up this next phase of work as a garden, where the challenge isn't even a what but a how. Attend to it with no less enthusiasm, but perhaps a little more gentleness.

Maybe I'll try that and see where it takes me.