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Author: Iris

Settling in for ACRL in Seattle

Published by Iris on Thursday, March 12th, 2009

I love Seattle. This is only my second time here, but it’s just such a pretty city. And seriously, the entire down-town area smells of coffee, which strikes me as the perfect smell for a city.

I’m sitting here listening to announcements before the opening keynote and hoping that this conference will strike that tricky balance of being both fun and informative. My last ACRL (which was also my first) wasn’t such a great experience, so I’m on a mission to make this one different. Last time I think I chose my sessions poorly, and I had no idea how to meet up with people, so I ended up feeling like the most anonymous person in a sea of potential friends. This time I hope to choose better sessions to attend, and I’m hoping that I’ll manage to connect with some great people and re-connect with previous acquaintances. Part of this depends on you! If you’re here and see me (mostly recognizable by my olive green back-pack, which complements my jeans nicely) please introduce yourself! As a hint, I’ll probably be near a power outlet, and yes, I’m happy to share my extension cord with you.

So here goes. Keynote, then dinner, then hanging out, then back to the hotel (which is right across the street from the Seattle Public Library!). Here’s hoping for a useful, engaging, and fun conference. See you there!

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Digital Humanities and Digital Collections

Published by Iris on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

If you’ve been following the work and discussion that’s come out of Project Bamboo, you will have noticed a few sticking points: there are the IT folks, there are the humanities faculty, and there is the original proposal, and so far there is not a whole lot of fundamental consensus between the three about an ideal path for this project.

You’ll notice I didn’t include librarians in that list, because for the most part they’ve been marginalized or absent from the discussions I’ve heard. When librarianship does make an appearance, it has mostly been in the context of finding stuff or of bridging the gap between the IT folks and the faculty. (There could be another whole blog post about why I think librarians could play a much larger role and how we do more than find things, but I don’t think that’s actually the fundamental sticking point. At least not yet.) But I digress. As I was saying, I hear one of three distinct voices whenever I hear about Project Bamboo, and this was never more clear to me than yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon one of our three representatives to Project Bamboo, an art historian, explained to a small group of humanities faculty that she wanted to collect their research stories so that she could report back to her subgroup in the Project. She said the IT folks kept talking about building things, but her subgroup was sure that the people who wanted to build things didn’t understand the research practices of humanities faculty well enough to build anything that would suit these practices well. She pointed out that each humanities professor’s practice is quite different because each person’s area of research requires different kinds of evidence, and that she wasn’t sure that “a tool” would help a wide enough group of people to be worth it.

I agree, for the most part. I also agree with Dorothea who has pointed out that there are already good tools out there just waiting to be used. Several times in this meeting yesterday, faculty members would say that they wished for a tool that would do x or y, and I’d think “oh, you need del.icio.us” or “oh, you need a wiki.”

What I hadn’t anticipated, though, and what seemed to surprise most of the people in the room, was the amount of commonality between the research practices of every single faculty member in the room. To a person, they all talked about going somewhere to look at a bunch of related stuff and use this exploration to find connections and draw conclusions. One will go to archives in Italy, another to an art library in the Hague, another to TV broadcast stations in Lebanon, another to a specific library in France… and the list goes on. Each one talked about travel and working within the constraints of the place they visited as their major hurdles. But each and every one of them said that there was no way to know exactly what was there before they got there, no way to predict in advance what insights they would draw, and no way to conduct their better research without this process of going and looking at heaps and heaps of stuff. Each one said that it wouldn’t solve all their problems, but what they really wanted were digital collections from which to work, or comprehensive highly detailed finding aides at the very least.

When I first heard hints, way back before the first workshop last year, that this would be the direction of the project, I was kind of disappointed. “You have all the power and money of the Mellon foundation and these massive groups of skilled people, and you want digital collections?” I screamed silently to myself. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that building the perfect marriage between digital collections of this scope and intuitive interfaces could be a very good goal for this group. If these interfaces could be built on careful metadata and powerful yet flexible indexing, and if they could mimic the best parts of spreading a box of photographs out on a desk while stripping away the clumsiness… that would be a thing of wonder. Just because it’s a thing that people have been trying to build for years doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be a “new” project for by this amalgam of participants. And in fact, this amalgam could possibly move farther toward accomplishing such a goal than any other group I’ve seen.

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Thundersnow!!!!

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 26th, 2009
People said it wouldn’t happen. People said our meteorologists were exaggerating again. But it happened. Right in the middle of a lunch-time presentation, everything we were learning got suddenly upstaged by massive, long, drawn-out rolls of thunder while snow fell at a rate of 4 inches per hour. I’ve never seen anything like it. Four Inches Per Hour! The only people who find this more exciting than I did are those meteorologists. They were practically popping champagne.

I was glad, though, that my sled-car and I only had a couple of miles to drive after work, because the plows couldn’t keep up and there were areas where the snow was still 4 or 5 inches deep on the roads. (I worried about my van-pooling commuter friends all afternoon, but luckily they made it home. Whew.) If we get the inches people think we will overnight, tomorrow morning’s drive could be very exciting.

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Learning to Look, Embracing Complexity

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Today’s LTC Lunch (weekly lunch-time presentations sponsored by our Learning and Teaching Center) featured a panel of professors from five different departments talking about how they use our vast arboretum in their teaching. These lunches are often interesting, sometimes inspiring, and always worth the time (and provide free lunch!), and today’s was definitely inspiring. I now want to take all five of those professors’ classes! The English prof talked about having his Nature Writing class do creative reports on local species in the arb. The stats prof talked about sampling ecological spaces rather than just people. The art prof talked about the work his Observational Drawing class does. The biology prof talked about how the arb functions as his class’ laboratory. And the geology prof talked about how it straddles some geologically interesting land that her students can study in a variety of ways, and how one year her class saved the college a million dollars by studying flood sediment and deciding that the college did not have to stabilize the banks of the river that runs through it.

Not only were these narratives fascinating in themselves, but they each reinforced what one professor said, which was that a huge part of a liberal arts education is “learning to look.” Each of these classes dealt with some aspect of taking in the vastness of the arb and then observing some piece of it closely, learning that piece, and applying it to the broader questions that their classes were tackling.

One professor also pointed out that when you take students into the arb, it’s impossible to escape complexity. They’re no longer dealing with lab samples. They’re no longer isolating geological study, for example, from biology or art. So in addition to the skills they build in their fields, they’re also learning to balance the particular and the general, the details and the gestalt. They’re learning to mentally zoom into and out of their environment, learning to look while immersed in complexity.

I love these ideas. I think this is exactly what I’m trying to teach my students about research. The landscape of possible evidence is vast and complex, and students have to learn to look at pieces of that landscape in ways that they’ve never had to look at them before. How is it that this one article fits into the landscape, or this one reference, or this one paragraph, or this one term? How does that mound of raw, uninterpreted primary source material complement the carefully plotted path of the literature review? What terms are sprinkled here and there in the prairie-like non-homogeneous homogeneity of your potential body of evidence? If you really look, even at something as factual as a report about an experiment, you can learn more than the facts that report aimed to convey; you can gain clues that will lead you to unexplored territories of scholarship.

Too often, I think, I shield my students from the complexity of this new landscape. I focus too much on helping them learn to look at the specific, the clean, the sterilized, the lab example. Too often the lessons I draw out from their active learning experiments are too safe. They are fundamental lessons, to be sure, but sterilized nonetheless.

My next instructional challenge, then, will be to build in healthy chances to encounter complexity, and to use those encounters to help my students learn to look carefully at what they find. A rock can be more interesting because of its placement in a landscape, and there’s more to learn about that rock than its shape and size and even its composition. So also, a single article never stands alone in the body of potential evidence, and if you really look, you can learn more than the facts and figures that article contains.

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