Category Archives: Carleton

Digital Humanities Speed Dating

By IRIS Posted on by

The director of our Humanities Center instituted a First Fridays informal gathering at our local pub geared toward people who are interested in digital humanities. It’s only met three or four times so far, and I had to miss the first one, but it’s been really great to sit around and listen to people say what projects they’re working on.

At the December gathering one of the profs there said what I think a lot of people were thinking when she admitted that she wasn’t speaking up because she didn’t know enough about the digital side of things to envision what she might do for a digital humanities project. She’s well aware of great digitization projects in her area, and web archives, but beyond digitizing things, what kinds of questions would she want to ask that computers could help her with? On the other side, the CS types said that they knew that computers could be great thesauri, but they didn’t really know enough about what keeps humanists awake at night to really suggest projects.

This seemed like such a fundamental question that we hatched a plan. We set up a “digital humanities speed dating” session. Humanists would come with some description of their own research, and CS-types would listen with their CS-perspective and would also talk about what they were working on. And maybe the more we knew about each other the more we would be able to see collaboration potential.

So this evening we conducted our Speed Dating session, and whatdyaknow, some CS profs and students had highly humanistic interests, and some humanists got really helpful ideas from the CS profs and students. My favorite moment was when one of our classicists was telling us about a set of fragmentary Roman documents that she is really interested in. They’re documents that record the auction prices of quite a few people’s property (they’d been convicted of something or other, and the proceeds were to be in some way presented to whichever god they’d offended). And people were discussing what she might or might not be able to learn from the fragments she has, and one CS prof said it’d be interesting to see if they could infer something about the data that’s missing. You could use each sale as a kind of user rating of the item, he said, and the missing items would be something like the things in Amazon or Netflix that haven’t yet been rated, and you could infer something about their potential value based on what had been rated/priced already. Well, that blew our humanist minds.

So after the gathering the CS prof went to talk to the Classicist a bit more, and then I happened to be there in the hall when he debriefed another CS prof. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m just going to take her spreadsheet and run a ……” and here he and the other guy went into a dialog that I assume wasn’t actually in Greek, but it might have been.

I love it when I come face to face with expertise I can’t even parse. And also, I think that’s part of the point of this whole thing.

Close but no cigar?

By IRIS Posted on by
Poor Bilal

Poor Bilal

So, apparently our current stapler, Bilal, was kidnapped late Tuesday night, solidified in jello, and a ransom note left saying that he would be returned safely if we switched back to our old print management system.

I laughed so hard.

But then, as it turned out that nobody in the library knew that this had happened, and that only a few student workers in other departments on campus would say “oh, yeah, I heard about that” it became clear that Carleton students are pretty inept ransomers. Shouldn’t they at least made sure that some staff saw a picture of the jello-ed stapler? Or the note?

Clearly our curriculum is lacking in some areas.

———

UPDATE:

A facebook post reveals a picture of the ransom note. Seen here in all of its stunning brilliance:

Ransom Note

Ransom Note

Butch is our heavy-duty stapler. GoPrint is the old print management system.

Holy paper reams, Batman

By IRIS Posted on by

The care and feeding of the library’s public printers takes a lot of our time, both in the library and in ITS. We have a special load-balancing set-up designed to keep individual printers from melting or going up in smoke. We have students who devote the bulk of their time to watching over the printers and emptying case after case of paper into them. A good portion of the meetings I attend and lead have printing somewhere on the agenda. Basically, printing is a big deal.

And now there are graphs to prove it.

libeprinting

There’s a lot of extraneous information in that chart for my purposes since it’s lifted from another report on Fall term printing. But I think the GIGANTIC MOUNTAIN OF PRINTED SHEETS in the middle pretty much speaks for itself.

Where do students print on campus? In the library, that’s where

(p.s. If you’re curious, that’s about 5,300 pages every day of the term, or about 7 pages every minute the library is open, which was a 36% reduction over last year.)

A bunny and a monk and the pope walked into a library…

By IRIS Posted on by

Wait, no, there was no monk or pope, just a little baby bunny.  It ran into the library right through the front door as someone else walked in, spent some quality time eluding near capture, and finally cornered itself under a radiator where the radiator entered the wall at a corner. The archivist with a lab coat at the ready for capturing the bunny moved in. The pregnant social sciences librarian with the box moved in. Another librarian and myself blocked off escape routes.

And then the bunny hopped up into the radiator.

After some rummaging around to see if we could get into the wall from behind, I went to get a mirror from my office, crammed myself under the radiator, and realized that there was no bunny in sight. We weren’t going to be getting it out on our own.

A circulation supervisor called security who called facilities. Two facilities guys and several tools of increasing size and wattage later, a saw-dust-covered bunny was revealed.

It was so shaken up that it even sat still for a picture when we released it.