In-class Google Fusion Tables exercise with Dr. Saeyoung Park’s HIS 382: Science and the Body in East Asia course. The students and I worked together to create a map of all the restaurants in Davidson, North Carolina. The map is still in-progress – I hope to have other students continue to add to and enhance what’s here. See the map here and the spreadsheet here.
Year One
Last week marked my one year anniversary of moving to North Carolina and taking up my position as the Associate Archivist of Davidson College. I’ve written a bit in here before about all of the Big Life Changes that have occurred over the past year and half or so (completing two graduate degrees, moving 900 miles, etc.), but anniversaries always seem like particularly apropos times to reflect, so, here’s a few of the things I’ve done over the past year (get ready for a long-ish post!):
INITIATIVES
Probably the most enjoyable part of my job is that I get to work on a vast array of different projects and initiatives – there’s always something happening in the small (three FTE) Archives & Special Collections working group. We’re a constant hub of energy and ideas, and much of that is down to the amazing people I work with – the College Archivist & Records Management Coordinator (Jan) and the Special Collections Outreach Librarian (Sharon) have a combined 55 years of Davidson work experience, so their institutional memories and knowledge are invaluable. But even more important (to me, at least!) is their total willingness to try new things, play around with ideas, and listen to the new person in the room. Though I work most closely with Jan and Sharon, my larger department at the library (Discovery Systems) is similarly inventive and friendly, and I’ve met and begun collaborating with lots of amazing people around campus and around the state. I love working in such a supportive unit, AND they frequently bring in snacks to share – I’m living the dream, you guys.
When I came into work last Wednesday, Jan and Sharon had placed this incredibly heartwarming whiteboard in front of my office:
A (Brief) History of THATCamp Piedmont
This Saturday, October 18th, Davidson will play host to the third THATCamp Piedmont. THATCamp, short for The Humanities And Technology Camp, “is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot,” according to the official website. The first THATCamp was held at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008. THATCamps are often organized either around a theme or geographic location, and provide a space for learning, sharing, and collaboration across a range of disciplines and specialties.
THATCamp Piedmont was first held in 2012, at Davidson College, and again in 2013 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. You can read reactions and reflections related to the events by Roger Whitson, Donna Lanclos, Barry Peddycord, and Davidson’s own Mark Sample.
This year’s THATCamp sessions will be split between E.H. Little Library and the Knobloch Campus Center, with the day’s activities starting at 8:00 AM with breakfast and registration, and wrapping up at 4:30 PM with post-THATCamp drinks and conversation at the campus coffee house, Summit.
Register online for this Saturday’s free unconference, and please contact Mark Sample (masample@davidson.edu) with any questions. We hope to see you there!
25th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo
In the early morning hours of September 22, 1989, Hurricane Hugo wreaked havoc around Davidson, after causing significant damage in the Caribbean and coastal South Carolina. The college community was lucky, for the most part – although the storm felled over 230 trees and damaged the roofs of four dormitories, as well as the porch of the President’s House, there were no injuries and buildings were able to be repaired. As Davidson student Jim Leach commented in the October 11, 1989 issue of The Davidsonian, “I was really happy that I have a home to go to for fall break… I feel sorry for the people in Charleston.”
While fortunate that no lives were lost, Mecklenburg County declared a state of emergency and some homes in Davidson and the surrounding towns were without power for over a week. The cost of replacing the downed trees on campus was estimated at $400,000, and the cost alone was not the most severe blow – the October 1989 issue of Campus Chronicle quoted director of facilities planning Grover Meetze as saying, “You cannot express in tangible terms what was lost. Dollars and cents just won’t do it. Everyone had special trees around campus, and the sight of them all lying on the ground at once was powerful.”
The damage from Hurricane Hugo was such that classes on the 22nd were canceled, a rare event at Davidson – as The Davidsonian commented, “Students will forever remember the unexpected holiday from classes.” Students, staff, and faculty worked together to help clear debris from campus, and the food service staff worked overtime to make sure students were fed. Then College President John Wells Kuykendall called the volunteer clean-up effort “the epitome of the Davidson spirit.”
Supervising Student Workers: Summer Blog Roundup
My duties in the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections include supervising student workers, and this summer we had a bevy of them – five total! I’ve been in supervisory roles before – I was in charge of an office as an undergrad, and I had an intern work under me for a summer when I served as the archivist of the Nichols House Museum. However, this summer was my first experience with student workers in an academic library/ archives setting, and my first time supervising so many at once.
All in all, I think the summer ended up being incredibly productive, and our student workers were all amazing! I learned a lot by working with them this summer – it was challenging (in a good way) for me to train a new corps of students, and although I tried to balance out work I knew would most likely be tedious (scanning for hours) with some more exciting or creative projects, I’m aware that some of the tasks might not have been enjoyable. However, these five women handled every assignment with good grace, and I enjoyed getting to know all of them (as did the rest of the archives staff!). All of our students did some digitization work (primarily scanning, uploading, and entering metadata for student publications), although each had a variety of projects and assignments.
Here’s a roundup of the blogs the students wrote to summarize their experiences:
Monica Nelson (class of 2015) – My Role as a Student Assistant for the Davidson Archives: A Glimpse into Past Projects
Meredith Pintler (class of 2016) – Behind the Scenes: E.H. Little Library in the Summer
Ellyson Glance (class of 2016) – A Summer of Scripts ‘N Pranks
Emma Kenney (class of 2015) – My Final Week as a Student Assistant
Vera Shulman (class of 2015) – A Summer of Scanning, Editing, Uploading, and Researching
Digital Humanities at SAA 2014
In a week, I’ll be attending my first Society of American Archivists annual meeting – this year’s theme is “ARCHIVES * RECORDS: Ensuring Access.” In order to help sort out which sessions I want to attend, I thought I’d crib from my colleague Mark Sample’s Digital Humanities at MLA 2014, and compile a list of digital humanities-related sessions and events.
Obviously, this list will be biased as to what I consider “digitally-inflected” – for instance, I’m not including any of the pre-conference workshops, although these definitely include options that have a strong digital component, nor am I including sessions/ events that appear to be standards-based (if I did, the list would be almost entirely standards!). This list includes five of the 70 sessions, which means that 7.14% of this year’s sessions are DH-inflected; however, that does not account for day-long events (like the Research Forum or THATCamp SAA), posters, roundtables, or committee meetings, some of which I did include on this list.
Please do let me know if you think I’ve missed a session/ event, or included one that shouldn’t be on the list. As someone whose professional personal interests certainly cross the (perhaps occasionally siloed) archivist-librarian-digital humanist borders, I’m looking forward to discussing DH and plenty of other topics with the crowd at SAA’s largest meeting yet!
These descriptions are copied-and-pasted from the SAA’s online schedule.
DH 2014 Thoughts & Wrap-Up
Note: Some great DH 2014 resources – dh+lib put up two great wrap-up posts (part one and part two), James Baker posted his (great) notes from DH 2014 on GitHub, and ADHO posted several Storify’s on their account.
Earlier this month, I attended DH 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland. I got back to the states about a week ago after taking a bit of vacation, so now I have time to write about my experience!
This was my first time attending DH, and it was definitely one of the best/ most productive conferences I’ve been to in the last few years. So, here are some of my highlights from nearly a week in Lausanne:
“Methods for Library Staff Professional Development of Digital Humanities Skills” Workshop.
I found this full-day workshop really interesting – the facilitators (James Baker from The British Library, Chris Bourg and Jacque Hettel from Stanford, Alex Gil from Columbia, Purdom Lindblad and Laura Miller from University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab, and Padraic Stack from NIU Maynooth) all gave presentations on DH training initiatives at their organizations, followed by discussion and exercises aimed at helping participants draft their own plans for DH trainings. I loved hearing about the five ongoing initiatives, and I thought the exercises were really helpful in generating new ideas – I’ve never done a design-think before, and my interview partner (shoutout to James Baker!) gave a valuable outsiders perspective. A few patterns emerged as the workshop went on: subject librarians are the point people in the library/ archives world who seem to be engaging with DH, on a wide scale; and many of the facilitators and participants approached DH training through working on projects. Basically, I left the workshop with a bunch of new ideas and new acquaintances to ask for advice from. A+, would workshop again!
A Computer for Davidson
The archives and special collections staff have previously written here in Around the D about our enthusiasm for and collaborations with the college’s budding Digital Studies initiative. At the end of 2013, Davidson was awarded an $800,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant in order to “create a curricular model of digital studies that can be replicated by other small liberal arts colleges.” According to the 2014 – 2015 College Catalog, Digital Studies at Davidson “gives students an opportunity to pursue coursework and research related to the digital tools, cultures, and practices that permeate everyday life” by focusing on three areas: digital creativity, digital culture, and digital methodology.
As we prepare to work with several digital studies and digitally-inflected courses this upcoming semester, we’d like to share a peek into the history of academic computing at Davidson. One of our volunteers in the archives, Loretta Wertheimer (mother of history professor John Wertheimer), came across this October 11, 1962 memorandum from President David Grier Martin (Class of 1932) to all faculty members as she worked on President Martin’s papers:
President Martin’s closing remark, “that computers will inevitably influence thinking in many fields and therefore it is highly desirable that Davidson students and faculty should have first hand experience with one,” seems particularly apt. We’re looking forward to another semester of the Davidson community experimenting and learning using our now numerous computers – just as we have been for over 50 years!
Takeaways from Data Driven – Digital Humanities in the Library Conference
Note: this post was originally posted on Davidson College’s Archives & Special Collections blog, and then featured in dh+lib Review‘s “Data Driven Conference Wrap-Up” post, which you can read here.
This past weekend, Jan, Craig, and I attended (and presented at) Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library in Charleston, South Carolina. Similarly to when several team members attended the Society of North Carolina Archivists annual conference a few months ago, I thought it would be interesting to compare what the three of us thought of the conference. We each attended a different workshop, although we ended up in many of the same sessions over the course of the weekend.
We each attended a different workshop, although we ended up in many of the same sessions over the course of the weekend.
Takeaways from Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library Conference
This past weekend, Jan, Craig, and I attended (and presented at) Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library in Charleston, South Carolina. Similarly to when several team members attended the Society of North Carolina Archivists annual conference a few months ago, I thought it would be interesting to compare what the three of us thought of the conference. We each attended a different workshop, although we ended up in many of the same sessions over the course of the weekend.
Jan’s experience, in her own words:
Going to conferences with themes around things digital and archives can be dizzying. This conference had ideas galore but what struck me most was librarians and archivists deep commitment to making our collections accessible to a wide variety of users. As a group we’ve plunged into online descriptions and catalogs, charged ahead adding digital images, and now the call is to find ways to encourage creative reuse of digital materials. At Davidson, we’ve seen class reunions be very creative with photographs and old Davidsonians and are working with faculty and current students to extend their digital skills and bring new perspectives to Davidson history.
I came away energized by the wonderful projects being created at other colleges but also proud that Davidson is holding our own and that our projects – Student Letters, Under Lake Norman, Davidson Encyclopedia – energized other attendees. One area, in particular, is high on my to list –getting more access oral history collections (watch Around the D for more news on this in the future).
Like Jan, Craig expressed his satisfaction with the conference and the way that our own presentation went. The size of the conference was very manageable – Craig pointed out that roughly 85 attendees was ideal: “Enough people for lots of ideas but intimate enough to get to know people.” Craig attended the “From Theory to Action: A Pragmatic Approach to Digital Preservation Tools and Strategies” workshop, which was the result of an IMLS grant to encourage planning for digital preservation at small and medium-sized institutions. He expressed an interest in trying out the Duke Data Accessioner. Data curation and preservation was also the theme of one of Craig’s favorite presentations, Liz Milewicz from Duke University’s “Innovate and Curate? Helping Collaborative Digital Humanities Research Persist Beyond the Experiment.” Milewicz and Leslie Barnes advocate for faculty to think about preservation while creating data, and were able to boil down the data curation questions to five or six basics (Craig notes: “I should ask Liz for the questions”). Another talk that inspired the Davidson team was Thea Lindquist, Holley Long, and Alexander Watkins of the University of Colorado Boulder’s “Supporting Digital Humanists: Taking a Data-Driven Approach to Needs Assessment and Service Design,” which focused on how the Colorado Boulder team sought to discover the state of digital humanities both on their own campus, and in similar institutions by using a variety of methods (environmental scan, a campus scan, campus-wide survey, targeted in-depth interviews, and a symposium). Craig says:
Wow. This is library service/innovation planning as it should be. They really mapped out a plan, stuck to it and did it in a timely manner. Did it all in 9 months including a 50+ page report/recommendations. I really hope they post their survey instrument on DH interest and needs. I need to further investigate NVIVO coding software for quantifying data.
Like Craig, I really enjoyed the talk given by the University of Colorado Boulder team. I thought their characterization of three groups on their campus that should be reached out to – “the usual suspects,” or those already heavily engaged in DH; “the unknowns,” people working with DH, but not with the library; and “DH interested,” those who interested but not yet engaged – would translate well to similar studies on other campuses (like our own). As several of us around Davidson begin to plan this fall’s THATCamp Piedmont, hearing a bit about about Colorado Boulder’s dh+CU symposium and attending CURATEcamp at this conference gave me some ideas for possible sessions.
In addition to what’s already been mentioned, I particularly enjoyed both of Brian Rosenblum Kansas University Libraries’ talks – “The University of Kansas Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities: A Model for Library/Campus Collaboration in Supporting Digital Humanities,” and as part of the “Teaching Digital Humanities in the Library” session. I was particularly intrigued by his nice summation of DH librarians as “nodes,” whose main job duty is to centralize digital activities on campus and push them forward, and the assignment Rosenblum gave to a graduate course, to read Stephen Ramsay’s “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; Or What You Do With a Million Books,” and then well, screw around themselves.
Finally, like most of those following the conference hashtag on Twitter, I thoroughly enjoyed Trevor Munoz‘s keynote, “Data Driven but How Do We Steer This Thing?” The talk left me with a long reading list, but feeling excited and inspired about the possibilities (while more aware than ever of some of the pitfalls) for librarians working in and with digital humanities. Overall, all three of the Davidson attendees felt like we got a lot out of Data Driven, and would love to see the conference become an annual one.