Category: Digital Humanities

Boats and Ferries and Bridges, Oh My!: Digital Humanities support models

Published by Iris on Sunday, June 12th, 2016

This morning my coworker Sarah Calhoun and I presented again at the Oberlin Digital Scholarship conference, “Building a Distributed Collaborative Model for Digital Scholarship Support at Liberal Arts Institutions: A Mixed Metaphor Salad.” Our other co-presenter, Austin Mason, couldn’t make it to the session, but he gets the credit for finding and bringing to us the metaphor that drove the session. He’d attended a session by Liz Milewicz of Duke University and gotten permission to reuse her metaphor. And the metaphor in question? Various methods of crossing water from one shore to another. Here’s how we used it.

“Automobile crossing rope bridge. 1923.” Photograph made accessible by the Field Museum Library. http://www.flickr.com/photos/field_museum_library/4462494439/

On occasion, supporting the digital humanities can feel an awful lot like trying to drive a car across a rope bridge. Either the infrastructure is inadequate for the project, or the project chose the wrong infrastructure to use to get across the river.

In an attempt to avoid this unfortunately pairing of project and infrastructure as much as possible, we propose thinking carefully about the infrastructure we put into place, and also about how to communicate clearly with researchers and with ourselves. We want researchers to find and use the right resources for the job, and we want to prevent siloed services that may duplicate effort or cause turf wars. And one way to think through these issues is to map out what’s happening on your campus.

Most campuses will have brave DIY-ers, who cross the river in daring ways using found objects (fallen logs) or special skill/access (base jumpers). These are important parts of creative research on our campuses, but they are not very repeatable or scaleable. They are not a great plan for a support model.

"Simple cable ferry, Gee's Bend, Alabama, 1939" by Marion Post Wolcott. — “Simple cable ferry, Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 1939” by Marion Post Wolcott. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_ferry#/media/File:Marion_Post_Wolcott_- _Old_cable_ferry_between_Camden_and_Gees_Bend,_Alabama.jpg

One of the low-barrier, low-overhead, repeatable methods of crossing might be a rope ferry. These work quite well either solo or with a ferryman, but they may not be terribly stable over time. Perhaps various semi-ephemeral things like free blogs or social media fit here, where researchers can get information up online, but it may not be stable over time if the researcher or the service move in new directions.

"Venezia - Ferry-boat Lido di Venezia" — “Venezia – Ferry-boat Lido di Venezia” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venezia_-_Ferry-boat_Lido_di_Venezia.jpg

Or perhaps there are more modern ferries available. These are larger, more powerful, and require less effort on the part of the researcher. Maybe something like an institutional subscription to Omeka or WordPress fit here. They were for a lot of people interested in doing a lot of different kinds of things, and support can be pretty standard on campus.

"Brooklyn Bridge Manhattan" — “Brooklyn Bridge Manhattan” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brooklyn_Bridge_Manhattan.jpg

But if you have a ferry running the same route over and over and over, and if you also have some money and staff for new construction, maybe it’s time to build a bridge. Some schools, for example, have a whole unit or a Center dedicated to supporting digital humanities. Some of these Centers are even iconic, like the Brooklyn Bridge. And I think that depending on the school, a massive, multi-lane bridge with tons of on-ramps and off-ramps might be a wonderful thing.

However, bridges really do require upkeep, they can become bottlenecks, they often have height and weight restrictions, and they may not serve all needs. Researchers are creative beings who may need to start in a different spot, end in a different spot, or get across in unusual ways. So at this point it becomes a matter of project portfolio management.

Vinopal, Jennifer, and Monica McCormick. 'Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability.' Journal of Library Administration 53, no.1 (January 1, 2013): 27-42. doi:10.1080/01930826.2013.756689. — Vinopal, Jennifer, and Monica McCormick. ‘Supporting Digital Scholarship
in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability.’ Journal of
Library Administration 53, no.1 (January 1, 2013): 27-42. doi:10.1080/01930826.2013.756689.

Jennifer Vinopal (who was also this conference’s keynote speaker, though we’d planned to site her even before we knew that), and her colleague Monica McCormick wrote a fantastic piece on “Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability” in the Journal of Library Administration. In it they recommend having an infrastructure such that the majority of project can use standardized tools that are well-supported on campus. Then allow for creativity by building in support for projects that can mostly use those standard tools but with some standardized consultation services, or with a bit of custom tweaking. But reserve some capacity for a few truly custom projects that will require a lot of support (and try to make sure that these project can be “first of a kind” rather than truly one-off projects). So perhaps you have a couple of docks for some ferries not far from your bridge, or a landing area for your base jumpers, but there’s communication and vetting involved in committing resources to these special projects.

And no matter your solution, close communication between support and coordination folks will prevent boating collisions, or the building of duplicate bridges. To mix metaphors quite wildly, at Carleton we think of our coordinating folks as a three-legged stool: Library, Humanities Center, and Academic Technology. Representatives from these areas try to make sure that things move forward in a coordinated fashion even when the actual support and work of digital scholarship happens in all kinds of places on campus. We’re calling it a “coordinated distributed model,” and it is still in its infancy. We are currently tackling the question of what infrastructure to build and for whom, which tools will be our standard and which will we cut loose, who will be involved and to what extent, and how will we make sure that people who need us will find us?

Exploring these questions, we handed out blank maps to participants and asked them to depict their campus’ current models, talking in small groups about how things work on their campuses, and comparing with others to find trends and themes.

Feel free to use or make your own. I just drew this sketch of a map on my iPad. — Feel free to use this map or make your own. I just drew this sketch of a map on my iPad. https://drive.google.com/a/carleton.edu/file/d/0B1hW_xoemoVvSklzYmJTNnFzWTA/view

One fascinating thing was that there were three participants from one college, and all three drew different maps. Others drew people drowning in the river, or people standing on one shore and gazing longingly at the distant shore. But one thing that became clear was that whatever infrastructure an institution adopts, it has to fit the local context. There’s no sense sinking a ton of money in a massive bridge if there’s no demand, or just because another school did it. And on the other hand there’s no sense leaving researchers to fend for themselves on campuses where lots of people have a similar need.

Then we handed out new blank maps and asked participants to think about an ideal infrastructure for their campuses over the next 5-ish years. There were so many interesting and useful responses. One person drew a crew of happy inner-tubers (beer implied), and someone at a different table drew one big inner tube. Most had more than one method of getting across. Others had thought about setting up villages or resorts on one side or the other to show the community that would be important, or close communication, or the bringing together of units that are currently separate. The creativity and thoughtfulness in the room was so inspiring!

At the end we asked participants what one thing they wanted to take back or change first at their institutions. My own answer was that I want to hand out blank maps to the people I work with on campus and see what we each think the current model looks like, and where we each hope it might go.

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Data Management and the Humanities

Published by Iris on Saturday, June 11th, 2016

Humanities Data: Document fragments from church archives in Cuba

This morning my colleagues Kristin Partlo and Sarah Calhoun presented with me on data management plans (DMPs). The session itself was mostly a conversation about some example DMPs from the collection of successful DMPs that was recently released by the National Endowment for the Humanities followed by conversations about how we might talk to faculty (using this DMP template as food for thought). But from this conversation a few themes crystalized for me.

Why would humanists care?

I think we often hear that “sharing the stuff of my research with the world” isn’t a huge motivator in the humanities. I’m not sure how broadly true that is, but it’s true enough with enough people that it bears thinking about. And I have heard skepticism, usually in the form of “nobody else will care about this stuff I’ve collected,” so how do we address that?

Sometimes I think maybe it’s a matter of vocabulary, so talking about creating “an archive” or “a digital collection” might capture imaginations where “manage/share your data” won’t. Even talking about how a bibliography is a described dataset can be useful because humanists are very familiar with practices of collecting, organizing, and sharing bibliographic information, usually at the ends of articles, books, and syllabi, but sometimes independently. Humanists have actually been doing data management since forever when you think about bibliographies. In this context, we care about versions (editions), standardized and encoded “data fields” (so that other researchers know if you’re referring to a title of a chapter, article, or book, for example), durable URLs whenever possible… Bibliographies are rich with descriptive and preservationist practices that can help inform management and sharing of files and information more broadly.

I think another aspect of why Humanists might care involves thinking about sharing with the sympathetic collaborator that is your future self. Your future self will forget the ins and outs of where you put or how you named your image files, or what the columns on your spreadsheet actually mean. Our computers are chalk full of the stuff of our research — PDFs, draft versions, images, audio, video. Knowing where all of those things are requires management of all of that data just so that you can find things again later.

Learn through analogy with the known

Kristin talks about how the monograph is largely self-describing. It has title, author, and publisher information in predictable spaces. There’s the table of contents, often an index and bibliography, and things like introductions and conclusions that describe the book for you.

Then there are style guides and formal or informal glossaries that people adopt, and these serve to help make your data (“data” writ large) understandable and consistent for other readers.

These are things that are familiar, so it’s easier to point to these things and remind ourselves that we’ve already seen the usefulness of self-describing units of scholarship and of somewhat standardized best practices. Now we just need to apply it to the digital stuff we’re working with more and more these days.

And in the past, libraries and archives were the main places that managed the sharing of shareable humanities data (primary and secondary sources), but the sharing involved researchers traveling to those collections (humanities “datasets”) to use them. Now individual researchers can create collections, or use collections without physically traveling from dataset to dataset. But this also means that researchers now have more responsibility to do some of the description and standardization that libraries, archives, and publishers formerly did a lot of. So yes, the work feels different, but it’s built on the same principles that humanists already value.

Formal vs informal data management

One of the interesting themes of our session and all the other data-related sessions I attended is that people talk a lot about the data management requirements of grant-funded projects. Meanwhile, I haven’t supported that work at all, but I have helped quite a few people manage their own individual or collaborative non-grant-funded projects. And I really think that data management becomes much more alive and broadly useful if I think about how the best practices identified and codified by grant funding agencies help us think about best practices for regular, every-day digital life, right down to the daily action of naming and putting a file into a folder on my computer. For me and for the people I’ve worked with so far, formal DMPs are alien things that don’t intersect with my life and research. But the spirit and practices reflected in those DMPs? THOSE I care deeply about. So perhaps shifting language from compliance to best practices, and shifting focus from grants to every day organizational practices, perhaps these things can help make data management less of an alien object that only scientists and social scientists ever touch.

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The Digital Humanities and the Librarian

Published by Iris on Monday, February 8th, 2016

Here at Carleton I’ve been tasked with helping to draft a proposal for a campus-wide digital humanities initiative and infrastructure. Being the librarian that I am, I’ve been spending a good deal of time reading the literature of the field in addition to investigating potential model programs at other institutions and pulling together what amounts to a SWAT analysis about our own institution. And one of the really interesting things in the literature of the field is how librarians are thought of (and think of themselves) in relationship to DH work.

There’s a sizable camp of vocal “librarians should be full partners in the research” proponents. There are quite a few “provide good, quiet service and provide it well” advisers. There’s the “this is a new thing for librarians so we really need to figure out what we can do” camp. And there’s the “there’s nothing new under the sun for librarians so just do this” camp.

I fall somewhere in the middle of all this. There aren’t well-oiled mechanisms here or at many other institutions for humanists (as opposed to scientists) who want to do digitally inflected research, and yet this research is becoming more and more of an expectation in humanities fields. So in that sense there’s an awful lot to figure out, cobble together, and invent when it comes to supporting this research.

On the other hand, librarians have always studied and supported information use and dissemination, research methods, and scholarly communication cultures. We have always fought to make sure that intellectual freedom is a reality and that everyone has a chance to create new knowledge from the record of human thought. These things sit at the core of our profession — the core of our guiding documents and professional ethics.

A few years ago the humanities departments I serve became much more dependent on data and statistics as they engaged in scholarship, so I learned what I needed to know about finding, understanding, and using numerical information. Right now it’s becoming clear to me that the humanities research in my departments has taken on a decidedly spacial flavor, so it’s time for me to learn enough about spacial analysis and GIS to be conversant with the information and methods of the scholarship in my areas. And while I will never be a GIS specialist, basic familiarity is no more outside of my professional scope than leaning database searching was for the librarians who trained me. The stuff of scholarship changes, but our professional expertise lies first in understanding and facilitating how information flows and functions within scholarship, and it lies second in understanding the mechanics of locating the particular kinds of information that happen to be in use at the moment.

On top of all of this, the information that makes up the bulk of the data for humanities scholarship resides in various kinds of libraries, the “labs of the humanities.” The ties between librarian and scholar have always been particularly strong in the humanities. We geek out together over dusty codexes and digitized primary source collections, monograph browsing and frustratingly jargonless full-text article searching, bulky archival boxes and streaming video collections. Humanities scholarship has never been the solo enterprise that has gotten so much air time lately. Librarians and scholars have been there for each other through the ages, though the librarians’ role is often invisible to the broader community. The librarians aren’t listed as co-authors (and shouldn’t be!), but they do participate in very real ways in humanities scholarship’s inception, feasibility, creation, dissemination, and use.

So I think librarians and scholars function best when they are full partners with each other, and I think that “full partnership” often means playing a pretty invisible role.* I think that there is a lot that’s new that needs to be figured out, and I think there’s nothing new under the sun. But most of all I think that this is our world and our reality, and I think that we are equipped to tackle it, messiness and unanswered questions and all.

* There are some problems with invisibility, including things like being underpaid, over worked, etc. But that’s a topic for another post.

Here’s a bibliography of things that contributed to me thinking these thoughts.

Aarsvold, Nancy, Kasia Gonnerman, and Jason N. Paul. “Shaping the Roles of Academic Librarians to Meet Emerging Demands of DH Scholarship.” In Supporting Digital Humanities for Knowledge Acquisition in Modern Libraries, 44–65. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2015.

Maron, NL, and Sarah Pickle. Sustaining the Digital Humanities Host Institution Support beyond the Start-Up Phase. New York, NY, 2014.

Nowviskie, Bethany. “Asking For It.” Nowviskie.org, 2014.

Posner, Miriam. “No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library.” Journal of Library Administration 53, no. 1 (2013): 43–52.

Schell, Justin, Jennie M. Burroughs, Deborah Boudewyns, and Cecily Marcus. “From Digital Arts and Humanities to DASH.” In Supporting Digital Humanities for Knowledge Acquisition in Modern Libraries, edited by Kathleen L Sacco, Scott S. Richmond, Sara Parme, and Kerrie Fergen Wilkes, 234–252. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2015.

Vinopal, Jennifer, and Monica McCormick. “Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability.” Journal of Library Administration 53, no. 1 (2013): 27–42.

What would you add to this list?

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What are we DOING as we support digital humanists?

Published by Iris on Wednesday, October 21st, 2015

As I manage student’s workload and facilitate the projects they do in support of digital humanities projects on campus, I’ve noticed that one of the underlying dynamics that I have to negotiate is what The Work is that the students do. People talk about job descriptions and the scope of the service, but unarticulated below of if that are deeply held assumptions about what counts as meaningful work for whom.

The student workers themselves are divided on this point. Some of them are very good at zeroing in on core questions that help us think through the project as a whole and set baselines for future decisions. They engage with the process of defining projects, and documenting decisions, and engaging with the campus, and they see this as part of The Work. Other students see this kind of thing as “administrative” work. They would prefer to DO rather than plan or document. Planning and documenting is not The Work to them.

I can see the same thing playing out in different ways with the faculty heading up the projects. Some see the student workers as collaborators with whom to exchange ideas about how to proceed. Others see the student workers as people to cary out project duties as assigned.

Meanwhile, as I look at my own work associated with digital humanities on campus, I can see that I’m kind of at war with myself on this topic. First, I’m an interim in this position, which I’m not good at. A couple of times I’ve wanted to engage with questions or jump into action and my steady comrade-in-DH has reminded me that we should do things right rather than soon, and I’ve felt chagrined each time because I know this and I think that in my regular work I’m usually good at this, but somehow in my current situation I seem to get ahead of myself sometimes.

Another layer of my own internal struggle is that my main goals as the interim DH supervisor is to keep the program afloat and to document, document, document. I want the transition for the new person to be as smooth as possible, and I want to be an effective project manager for my students. But sometimes I worry that I might be too deep in the “admin stuff” (as one student calls it) and pulling my students too far in with me. I can totally relate to the desire to just plug away at a project.

Planning, documenting, and program development are important parts of the job for each of us. They are definitely a good part of The Work of digital humanities on my campus. The trick is to figure out the right balance for each person. I don’t think I’ve figured out that balance point yet.

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