Category: Libraries and Librarians

THATcamp Denver Takeaways

Published by Iris on Monday, November 19th, 2012

I’ve been watching blog posts trickle out of THATcamps for years, and this fall I finally got a chance to attend one. As luck would have it, just as Carleton signed onto a Mellon Digital Humanities planning grant with Macalester and St. Olaf, a THATcamp popped up focused specifically on Digital Humanities and Libraries.

What a rich experience. It was populated by such a range of participants: people from large research universities, university presses, centers for digital humanities, OCLC research, major digital libraries, regular old librarians like me, and some disciplinary faculty, and some graduate students. It was a great opportunity to hear from people who are a few years ahead of where we are, to hear what questions they have now, what confusions exist that maybe we can head off before they become issues here, what workflows they’ve arrived at, what kinds of projects may be coming down the pike.

It was also an exhausting experience because the whole time I had to listen not so much to what, exactly, people were saying (since that was usually mostly irrelevant to me) but to patterns underlying the conversations: what kinds of services do institutions provide, are people mostly working in teams or alone, are the teams institutionalized or ad hoc, how do they negotiate the class differences between disciplinary faculty and library or IT partners, where do student research assistants fit into current work, what terminology do people use and where do confusions in terms exist… So many things to listen for and translate into my own context. And often I’d realize that information I’d dismissed earlier as totally irrelevant to me suddenly fit into a new pattern I was noticing, so by the end of the day I was pretty fried.

So what were some of the things that stood out as interesting or important themes or patterns? Well…

Have a Process — Allow for Exceptions

One session was about libraries becoming more involved as publishers since they often house the tools or manage the preservation and access to digital humanities projects. In my case, those tools would probably come from our IT department rather than the library. It was still really interesting, though, to hear the conversation slowly gravitate toward the consensus that in an ideal world institutions would have both a formal publication/preservation process and then also a sort of sandbox publishing process. This second process would accommodate projects that didn’t fit well into the formal containers (journals, books, wikis) or that couldn’t be evaluated in the same way prior to publication (peer review, for example). As one person said, often you have to build a thing before you know if it’s going to be worth anything, so the before-hand evaluation for publication process is largely impossible in these cases.

And in fact this became one of the major themes of the day for me. It seems that in order to support digital humanities projects, the goal is always to have the project based in tools, support structures, and data that are already present and ready for that kind of project. But there are also a lot of projects that simply won’t fit into existing structures, and so many programs provided capacity to work on these “boutique” projects. One woman had a phrase I really liked, saying that she looked at these as “first of a kind projects, rather than one of a kind projects.” The idea is to use these boutique projects to develop tools or services that the become part of the standard suite of support options, therefore taking less effort the next time.

Collaboration is Difficult and Necessary

This has been a theme not just of this gathering, but of every digital-humanities-related gathering I’ve attended or heard of. One humanist at St. Olaf said point blank that the humanities have traditionally been a realm of solo work so humanists don’t really know how to play well with others. They lose control of the process, the timeline, and the outcome, and the conclusions aren’t necessarily fully their own. Another humanist at a conference hosted this fall at Carleton spoke bluntly about how this “go it alone” attitude can easily translated into almost a master/servant relationship when collaborations mix faculty and staff because this relationship fits more easily into disciplinary practices that privilege solo work. “This is my project. Please make this thing happen in the way I want.”

Library Disciplinarity

While I was at THATcamp, I started thinking that one way to think about these projects so that they maintained their collaborative nature would be to think of it almost as interdisciplinary work, where the library is a discipline more than it is a service. The library has hundreds of years of disciplinary experience with finding, organizing, using, preserving, and making accessible digital and physical items. We study the rich complexity of the interstitial spaces between discrete pieces of instantiated knowledge. We study the socio-cultural practices that develop in these spaces and that draw dynamic connections between the items. To think of ourselves as “just” a service organization is to sell ourselves short and to relegate ourselves to perpetual outsiders in these ideally collaborative pursuits.

For this reason, I also really appreciated the ways that some institutions have “Digital Scholarship” programs rather than “Digital Humanities” programs. From the CS and Library perspectives, we bring very similar portions of our disciplinary training to projects from the Humanities and the Social Sciences, so there is really no need to have separate programs to support the various disciplines. (No need, that is, after the humanities have had a chance to acclimatize themselves to this new realm of scholarship. I can absolutely see how having dedicated energies directed to the humanities is important when first getting digital humanities off the ground.)

Some Practicalities

People at THATcamp were justifiably concerned about the sustainability and scalability of their programs. Some had decided that they would provide consulting support only or that they would cap the number of active digital humanities projects they could support at any given time (with a wait list for people once an active project graduated or died). Several found that they were in high demand to help scholars develop data management plans now that humanities scholars were applying for grants that require those, and that this had been an unanticipated and heavy demand on their time. And other libraries pointed out that rather than being all things to all projects, they would specialize — so Library A might specialize in text analysis and Library B might specialize in GIS applications for humanities. Most make use of graduate student work (we intend to employ undergraduates here).

It also became clear that initial conversations in the planning stages for a project should include some discussion of how permanent the end result is intended to be. Is this something closer to an item in our “circulating collection” that can be weeded when use dwindles and space gets tight? Or is this more like an item in “special collections” that requires greater commitment to long-term care? Who will be responsible for the server space and upgrades? Who is the intended audience and how will we get it to them? If it is interactive, how much of a change log should be available, and how much control do we exert over the kind and type of interactivity? Questions like this are not just procedural, it turns out, but can actually shape the project itself on a fundamental level.

And finally, it turns out that most projects need (but do not have) good graphic design. This is especially important for projects that involve crowdsourcing. And if you’re after interactivity, you’d best have thought about how to get people to participate (I’m reminded of Riedl’s research for this problem).

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Becoming a Linguistics Librarian

Published by Iris on Monday, October 29th, 2012

When I started here I had degrees in English and a degree in Library and Information Science. But I was also the librarian for languages, music, linguistics, and American Studies. A while ago I wrote about important things I learned about being a music librarian (part 1 and part 2), and about being a librarian for language departments. Well, for the last week or so, I’ve been sitting in on a linguistics class, and over the last year or so I’ve been working more closely with their upper division classes, and here are a few things I’ve learned in the process.

The Field

From the perspective of the interested outsider and the helper of undergraduates, the field is easiest for me to think of if I liken each branch of it to other fields. So there are the neuroscience-linguists, and the psychologist-linguists, and the sociologist-linguists. And lo and behold, that helps when picking databases and search terms. Happy librarian! PsycINFO and Sociological Abstracts can come in really handy to flesh out the Primary Duo (i.e. Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts and the MLA International Bibliography).

Linguistic Data

Linguists talk all the time about data and about datasets. When they do this, they mean “example sentences” or “example sounds.” So a grammar of Turkish is full of data on the Turkish language (which is distinct from a book on the grammar of Turkish, which may or may not be all that full of data). So if students want data on Turkish, I’d look for a grammar, I’d look for articles on a particular construction or sound in Turkish, and I’d look for researcher websites (using the “site:.edu” limiter in google, usually) where researchers put up their linguistic datasets.

If I were going after a much lesser known/studied language, SIL and researcher websites are probably the best bet. I find SIL’s website hard to navigate, so I search it using Google.

If there’s “nothing on my topic” I’d use Ethnologue and find related languages and see if they can be useful by analogy.

Currency Oddity

Linguistics is odd in that some of the sources need to be very current indeed, particularly the parts having to do with brain science. Meanwhile, other parts of the field rely heavily on books that are 50, 60, or 80 years old. Typically, complete descriptions of languages are only done once and then amended in the literature, so it shouldn’t be very surprising if the primary source of primary data comes from a well worn book written by some African explorer in the 1920s.

Navigating the Jargon (with undergrads)

Linguistics is jargon-heavy. I often can’t even make out the wikipedia articles on the topics I’m supporting. But just like being a librarian for foreign languages, this is a good reminder for me to keep my consultations highly collaborative with the student. They supply the terms, I suggest ways to come up with terms (“what kind of a thing is a genitive? a Case? Ok, so what if we look for Russian cases if we’re not finding what we want when searching for Russian Genitives?”). They interpret the results while I give them pointers about categories of things to watch for in the results.

Jargon is also your friend because it makes keyword searching so much easier than in the humanities. “Ergative-Absolutive” is far more likely to return accurate results than “performance of self” regardless of my level of understanding.

My next steps

I’ve been pretty happy with my research guide for Linguistics, and they’ve said that it’s very useful. But now that I’ve sat in on a couple of class sessions I think I’ll add a tab on gathering linguistic data. And if I can, I’ll try to sit in on some different classes next term.

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Why yes, I have been teaching in my office lately

Why yes, I have been teaching in my office lately

Published by Iris on Monday, October 1st, 2012

It’s been and instruction filled couple of weeks in my neck of the woods, both in classrooms and in my office.

Here you see snippets of me teaching indexing rules for the MLA International Bibliography, mind mapping a couple of students’ topics with them, and teaching AND and OR.

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MindMapping for Research

MindMapping for Research

Published by Iris on Monday, September 17th, 2012

It’s the beginning of a new academic year, and this year’s thesis students are starting to come see me in panicked waves. The meetings are intense and exciting and full of possibility and fear and anticipation. Right now we’re mostly trying to come up with a Plan rather than specific sources. Given your interests and given the kinds of resources we each know of, what would be both stimulating and researchable here and now.*

Lately, I’ve been mentioning mindmapping more and more often as students wonder how to figure out if they’re original enough, or how to figure out if they’ve created a stable enough grounding in the relevant literature. I teach it sometimes as a way to build good searches with useful terms, but this is different. Sometimes the student has a clear question in mind, and we can draw in supporting bodies of research. Sometimes the student doesn’t have a clear question in mind yet, and we can draw in the supporting topics first — the things where they say “I’m kind of interested in x and y and want to see if they’re connected with z,” and then fill in the spaces between the topics to find the question.

After a session this morning, I’ve realized that I teach four distinct forms of mindmapping to move students from the very preliminary topic questing through to the production of the final product.

Types of mapping

1) Mapping sources to find concepts (early stage of work)

For the early stages in topic selection, students often have vague ideas about topics but haven’t yet come to a point where they’re able to say what piece of the topic they’re going to concentrate on. They know they want to do something with the implications of fictional characters’ names, for example, but haven’t really figured out exactly what about the names to pursue or maybe even what fiction to use as foundational examples. But they’re really interested in race and culture, and they know that fictional characters have names chosen for them by authors, so there’s got to be something they can do that combines the two.

For this, some students find it very helpful to keep their broad topic in mind while reading/skimming several readings. Each reading becomes a node, potentially related to other readings, but not necessarily. The students can then draw connections between readings, using this process to discover the concepts that may be key to their own work.

2) Collecting search terms and source type strategies

Another tricky part of early stage research, particularly in the humanities, is learning the vocabulary of your topic and learning what counts as evidence to the community of inquiry that you’re planning to enter. Unless you do these things, searching can be pretty impossible since it’s just term matching. If you’re using “self-concept” and your community of inquiry is using “identity” you’ll never retrieve the sources you need.

Similarly, if you produce an argument based on evidence that your community scoffs at, or if you need ideas for what kinds of sources would help you make explore your topic, watching what kinds of evidence show up in the literature can be a great strategy.

And of course, following up on people or institutions mentioned in the literature is another great way to build future searches based on readings you’ve found.

So for this kind of map, I have students think about their major concepts, and then fill in those concepts with terms, source type ideas, and people/institutions associated with that concept. These all become fodder for future searches.

3) Mapping concepts to find your own question

Once students have solidified the core concepts of their work a bit more, they still need to figure out how to assimilate the source material into something that original rather than duplicating others’ work or simply patching together quotes from here and there. For this, a pretty traditional mindmap can help.

I have students plot out their key concepts and list the key sources for each concept (for students to did option 1, these can often be the labels they assigned to the connecting lines between sources — in fact, the whole map is like the inverse of option 1). This time we pay close attention to the spaces between concepts. Students can then see what has and what has not been covered by their source material and figure out what they’re adding to the conversation. “People have covered x, y, and z, but I’m going to take these parts of what they have said and add this new idea.”

4) Mapping to test the completeness of your evidence

And finally, for students who are thinking critically about their work and want to be sure they’ve made a rock-solid case for their position, I have them think about building a bridge between themselves and their readers. Their paper is supposed to walk their readers from Belief A (the reader’s start point) to Belief B (what the student hopes the reader will believe after reading the paper). We start thinking “Well, they’d have to be on board with the assumption that x, and know about y event…”

Each of these concepts contributes a bit of itself to the students’ goals, forming one of the planks in the bridge the student is building.

It’s also a way to think about potentially interesting ideas that aren’t actually necessary to the paper.

Tools I use

Generally, if I’m working with students in a class setting or in my office, we do one of these types of mindmaps and we do it using whiteboards. Low-tech and potentially messy, but it gets the point across.

For myself and my own thinking, I do this kind of thing on paper if I’m thinking on the fly or if I’m not intending to use it as the basis for a long-term project. It’s faster and there’s something helpful in the tactile and kinesthetic activity itself — the sketchiness. (Now that I’m getting used to drawing on my iPad, I can imagine the pencil/paper version moving to the iPad from now on. Incidentally, I did the sample maps for this post using the iPad.)

If I’m doing a long project (where I know the map will get pretty big and where I’ll probably be rearranging nodes as my thinking becomes more nuanced and clearer), I use MindNode.

* Over the years, these meetings have grown from being (literally) introductions to the catalog and one major database in their field to being highly collaborative sessions where each of us brings our own expertise to the project of finding an interesting, original, and researchable topic. What a relief! There was nothing more demoralizing than covering such basics with thesis students.

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