Skip to content

Category: Digital Humanities

Managing Digital Humanities Associates, Week 2

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 13th, 2015

Well, classes start tomorrow, and I meet my student workers for the first time on Tuesday, so the time to get organized is NOW.

Along with several more useful meetings with people who have information and training to share about current DH projects on campus, this week a few over-arching things fell into place. First, the computers that the students will use (and, oddly, the positions that the students fill on campus) were officially blessed as “ongoing.” This means that the ancient computer will get replaced sometime in the next few weeks, and the newer computer will be automatically up for replacement when it reaches 5 years of age. What a relief! As anyone can tell you, the state of the digital humanities and of technology in general could be entirely different in 5 years, but whatever happens, I’m absolutely sure that faculty will still be performing scholarship, and student assistants will still need technology of some sort to help support that. So for now, that piece of academia’s future on our campus is a little less shaky. Whew.

A second big falling-into-place was that the college’s post-doc in Digital Humanities, Austin Mason, and I sketched out a kind of syllabus for our student workers. Their work is so very academic that this approach made natural sense to Austin and me. They have to get some basic training, but even more than that they have to learn to think like digital humanists. So they’ll each have the their own projects, but our weekly team meetings will also give them a chance to brainstorm with each other, explore topics in the field, and present their work.  We’re also going to explore more conscious and consistent participation in the DH community by putting our thoughts and updates out there in the DH blogosphere rather than locking it down in a Moodle site. The DHA program already has a blog that needs some work, so one of our group projects is going to be to clean up the current structure, About Page, Bios, etc, and develop a coherent structure and look for our future work. Mundane or private things can be published privately, but we’re going to use the site pretty heavily for both internal and external communication.

Along with that, I’ve spent a few hours today setting up a workspace in Asana for us and linking it up to a Google Docs folder structure. There’s a Gdocs folder and an Asana project for every DH project we’ll be supporting, and I’ve built in regular recurring tasks to ask for documentation and project management, along with prompts about when to check in with me.

Of course, I still haven’t managed to secure a table to put in the room where we’ll meet and work. Tables are, apparently, worth their weight in gold on our campus.

Comments closed

Managing Digital Humanities Associates, week 1

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 6th, 2015

So, I’ve had this new responsibility for one week now, and what a week it has been! And I haven’t even met the student workers yet!

One thing that I think might be a distinct advantage of having a newbie in charge is that it gives all kinds of stakeholders on campus the chance to articulate their understanding of what’s going on and what they see coming down the pike. It’s kind of like having an external review without the external reviewers or the reports or the expense or the… well all of it except for the useful things everyone learns when they have to say their assumptions out loud. Now, I don’t think that people were necessarily in different places before this week or that I’ve triggered any “ah ha” moments or anything like that. I just think that it’s incredibly useful as we get ready to make decisions about the future of digital humanities on our campus to have everyone take a moment and say “This is what has been amazing so far, this is where I see things going, and here’s the stake I have in that future.” I’m going to do my best to document these things for the new librarian, but I also know that when we do hire the new librarian that person will add his or her own facets to these conversations.

I’ve also learned (again) that grant funding is a double-edged sword. We had a grant on campus years ago that was awesome but then left us with all kinds of aspirations and assumptions on campus that are no longer supported or funded. One tiny piece of that is one of the two computers my student workers will use. It’s now too old to function well but was bought with grant money and therefore isn’t on a replacement schedule, so who’s going to pay for it? And can we get it on a replacement schedule this time around so the headache doesn’t repeat itself ad infinitum? These are questions I hope to sort out during week 2. Wish me luck!

I’m also learning that this venture shares a characteristic with many of the exciting campus-wide initiatives that I’ve been a part of or heard a lot about: it is fueled by lots of talent and enthusiasm from many quarters on campus, but it is not (yet) part of a cohesive structure on campus. There’s nobody who “owns” digital humanities on campus, so coordination isn’t as tight as it could be and funding for things like computers (see above) is kind of up in the air. Luckily, solving that is high on the agenda for several of the big stakeholders on campus. Hopefully we can figure out how to get all the benefits of a cohesive structure without losing any of the start-up like innovation of the current semi-structure. (My own view is that this future cohesive structure should actually coordinate and fund the Digital Liberal Arts, not just Humanities, but more on that another time.)

And finally, the breadth and depth of the projects this small but growing group of student workers has contributed to is pretty awesome. And the students themselves seem like they’re going to be quite a team to work with (though I really wish they were all equally good at responding to my request for their schedules). I hope that I can give these students the structure and support they need so that they can keep doing the work they’re so obviously good at doing.

Here’s a little video about one of the projects that the students have worked on in the past.

Comments closed

Taking on someone else’s job (or, Hey look, I’m in charge of the Digital Humanities Associates now.)

Published by Iris on Monday, August 31st, 2015

As of today, I find myself in charge of the Digital Humanities Associates on our campus, seven exceptional student workers who partner with faculty on digital humanities projects while they also help build the digital humanities conversation, community, and infrastructure on our campus. It’s a temporary assignment until we hire a new librarian, but it’s a weighty one for me. There are so many hopes and expectations riding on this program, so many practical and political, technical and interpersonal aspects. So much room for excitement, engagement, and success. So much potential for failure.

Dutch Boy and Dike
“The Hero of Haarlem” from Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, by Mary Mapes Dodge (1865)

My good friend and outstanding colleague Heather Tompkins built the program from scratch (not alone, of course, but centrally important), and now she’s moved on to work her magic at St. Kate’s. Walking up to work this morning, everything felt slightly unreal, slightly fractured, as I realized that there’s a Heather-ish hole in our library now, and that I’m supposed to be able to patch one portion of that hole – keep the dike from bursting – while doing some semblance of justice to Heather’s vision for the DHAs and the digital liberal arts at Carleton.

Taking over from someone who has built a program from scratch is a daunting thing. You’d think that with a young program, now entering its fourth academic year, it’d be easier to pick up and move forward. There’s less history to learn, for one thing. But with less history comes fewer people who know that history who can support you as you find your way, more things that lived solely in one person’s memory, fewer stable pieces of infrastructure to cling to.

So today I’m going to pour over the documentation and notes that Heather left for me and the notes I took while she told me about her work, and I’m going to begin the process of wrapping my head around this new project.

Comments closed

DASHcamp: Digital Arts, Sciences, & Humanities camp 2014

Published by Iris on Tuesday, April 8th, 2014

Two weeks ago, I was able to attend DASHcamp at the University of Minnesota. It was such a rich and useful day, both in terms of what I learned and also in terms of the people I met. None of us wants me to write down all the things I learned and thought about that day, so here are the highlights.

Data Management and Curation Profiles for the rest of us

Data management is an increasingly important (and often required) step in research. The idea is to describe your data, any decisions you made while collecting and using your data, and any tools needed if others are going to use your data. Two tools are:

  • DMP Tool
    A tool provided by the California Digital Library that helps researchers develop a data management plan.
  • The DCP Toolkit — Summary of Interview Elements
    Summary by Kristin Partlo of the “DCP Interviewer’s Manual” of the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit, developed by Scott Brandt and Jake Carlson of Purdue University Libraries, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Distributed Data Curation Center. http://datacurationprofiles.org/

We started trying to think through the elements in these tools from the perspective of humanities data. The group I was in discussed textual data (other groups discussed video, images, sound, etc). It turns out, this is a complicated discussion! We decided that we would need some description of the level at which the primary source material is encoded (did you code down to the paragraph level? the word level? the chapter level?). We got so stuck on describing our data that we didn’t get much beyond that in my group, but the discussion was fascinating nevertheless.

One important point that came out of this conversation was that we don’t have to start from scratch as we think about data management for humanities. We can draw from at least two bodies of knowledge: scientists and social scientists who have thought through so many aspects of data management already, and archivists who are trained in managing and describing the “data” of humanities.

One real Ah-Hah moment for me was when we talked about how to start the culture shift that would result in people documenting their processes and decisions as they do their research in the humanities. Someone mentioned that teaching bibliographic and file management is an important step in the process. I do that already! I talk with students about how to make their raw material (PDFs, citations, research note) retrievable and sortable, and all I have to do is mention casually that this is a humanist’s data management.

Conversation about the term “Digital Humanities.”

One interesting conversation during the day involved when it is and isn’t important to claim the term “digital humanities” for your work or outreach. One person remembered back when there was e-Science and wondered when Digital Humanities would just be “humanities” again. Most of us were only interested in using the term when it’s needed to claim resources. You’ll need it for many of today’s grants, for example, or to get some kinds of support from a campus.

Tools:

  • VideoAnt
    The University of Minnesota developed this simple video annotating tool, and it’s free and open for all to use. It was originally used to help professors respond to video assignments, but now it’s also used for collaborative work or whenever people want to have text associated with specific points in a video.
  • Git and GitHub
    I’d heard a few people talk about using one or the other of these tools as document drafting tools, so I was interested to see how to use them and what the appeal might be. The room was full of academic technologists, instructional designers, and librarians, and it was interesting to hear the various ways they knew to use the tools. Some create HTML-based tutorials and use this as their editing and publishing platform. People who work with data librarianship can apparently search for shared and useable data there. For me, I think it looks pretty overpowered for most document drafting, and it’s full of unfamiliar terminology for most humanists (pull requests, branches, forks, etc). I think the version controls in something like Google Docs is more accessible to most of the folks I work with, but it was great to get an inside view into a new-to-me tool.

So that was fun

I really hope they hold this camp again next year. And if they do I’ll make sure to register before I share the information, because I want a spot!

Comments closed