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.

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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!

c/o Jacque Hettel - some of the post-its I was using to make point of view statements
Photo c/o Jacque Hettel – some of the post-its I was using to make point of view statements.
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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.

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