Continue reading »]]>

Thus far this semester, I have exchanged precisely 0 pieces of paper with my students. Additionally, I have exchanged exactly 0 MSWord documents. (Oddly, the latter has been far more difficult than the former to maintain!) This session will discuss a variety of tools for classroom planning, class prep, “handouts,” readings, discussions, and all of the work of teaching in a paper-free way. I’m not imagining a hardware intensive discussion (e.g. if we all have ipads we can do…). Some specifics I can talk about include: WordPress in the classroom, Scrivener as a class planning and archiving tool, and using Wordle for really a wacky number of things. As a mac user on a PC campus, I can also speak to some of the cross-platform pitfalls. I’m also excited to hear discussion of others’ classroom, class planning, and teaching techniques.

Interestingly, not long after I posted this, I saw this article. Perhaps we can discuss the ethical and class issues around assuming access to the technology required to be paperless as well!

Continue reading »]]>

One of the discussions that I’m interested in having with folks at THATCamp intersects with points raised by Lincoln Mullen and Karrie Peterson. Lincoln invites us to explore the potential use of Omeka as a primary source repository that can function as a digitally-enabled anthology for teaching and other uses. Karrie encourages us to talk about the problems that scholars, experienced and novice alike, face in the digital humanities, the tools that they currently use, and the ones they still need so that libraries can usefully reinvent their services and products.   

For my part, I’m curious to discover whether Omeka might be a solution to problems I’ve encountered in my own work. Specifically, scholars concerned with contemporary events and culture increasingly find it useful, if not essential, to include Web-based and other born-digital materials among the primary sources that they study. The transient nature of Web-based information, however, presents a problem for long-term projects and creates difficulties for those who wish to consult a scholar’s sources at a later date.  My own efforts to study museum engagements with the current war are a case in point; much of my data is drawn from Internet sources, such as the exhibition pages on museum Web sites, press releases issued as PDFs, reviews from online media, etc. These born-digital materials are supplemented by material from my own fieldwork (photos, collected printed matter, sketches of exhibition layouts, etc.). So what I end up with is data scattered across virtual as well as physical file folders and a collection of Delicious bookmarks. It’s hard enough for me to navigate let alone share with other researchers who might be interested in, say, a broader topic such as the viusal culturesof war or to utilize in the classroom. 

Are you in a similar bind? What tools are you using? What solutions have you jury rigged? What features would your ideal tool or suite of tools possess?  

My wish list includes a one-stop resource that could be used to:

• Collect, preserve, organize, and display
  • Web sites or selected pages from them
  • Image, text, audio, PDF, and video files
• Analyze data (text mining, georeferencing??)
• Share evolving and finished work
  • In an open access or pass-word protected environment, or a combination of both as desired by the primary user(s).
• Invite collaboration from a broad range of possible constituencies
• Provide informal and formal learning opportunities for a variety of learning communities   

I can imagine Omeka, with its plug-in capabilities, being the springboard for such a tool—but I lack the programming know-how to move it further in this direction myself. (Hello, BootCamp; you’ll be seeing a lot of me this weekend.)

Others have commented on the pitfalls (copyright issues being a significant one) that such archives, which pool together materials from other sources, pose. And, what is the right term for this sort of personal, project or topical archives-on-steroids? Custom archives-plus? Personalized research and teaching platform? Super scholar software?  

I look forward to learning what other folks are doing and thinking in this area.

Continue reading »]]>

If your library doesn’t add genres to the MARC record of films, it’s really difficult to browse a collection that is shelved alphabetically by title (which is common). If you know what film you want to watch, you can search the OPAC/library catalog and go to the shelves to find it. But suppose you’d like a western or a romantic comedy or a horror flick for the weekend, and you want to browse the collection of horror films, you can’t do it onine — and you’re stuck browsing the whole collection of DVDs on the shelves until you land some satisfactory horror movie, romantic comedy, or western. To make a list browsable online by director, say, is easy enough since most directors are listed in a MARC record field from which the data can be exported. But if you want to sort by data that isn’t in the film’s MARC record….   Wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of DVD holdings browsable by genre? Let’s solve this problem, design the solution, and build it!

Continue reading »]]>

As a librarian, I’ve been immersed in reading and discussion about the kinds of support that researchers in digital humanities might need.  My question is being asked in a lot of places — how can libraries reinvent information services and products in the digital age?

A lot of the discussion about supporting digital scholarship is visionary, focussing on ultimate goals — well-developed, high end, mature products and services.  I would like to see a discussion that is more process-oriented, more about the nuts and bolts of getting libraries from where we are now to where we need to be.  Here are some sub-topics around which I would organize that kind of discussion:

• What are the tools and services already existing that serve the needs of early-adopter scholars in the digital humanities?  And how can libraries leverage what is already going on to further develop relevant services and tools? I’m thinking of an environmental scan thru the abundant literature to create a digestible mindmap or overview of the categories of new tasks and research questions being asked, and the concomitant essential tools.  I’m focussed here on interpretation and research (not new forms of expressions).  For example, how is close reading different in the digital age?  How does technology make different kinds of intellectual biography possible?  How can massive-multiplayer collective reading change the way we privilege certain interpretations of a text?  How are place and time mashups affecting research into a text or the body of work of a creator?  How are haptic or visual technologies changing interpretation?   And then, how does the library put that knowledge to use?  With a sense of what early adopters are about, we can think more concretely and systematically about supporting all scholars. By examining how early adopters are solving their information needs (finding, in some cases developing, or accessing the data they need; using tools; doing version control; documenting their methodology; storing their data in the short and long term with various levels of access; presenting their results), we can start asking what resources would help provide more robust structures via our institutions or our consortia or via other groupings?  A very simple example here is the “oneweek-onetool” workshops in which practitioners get together and identify a real need, and then develop a tool to address it–that’s a way to build not only tools, but also relationships, new skills, networks, and organizational capacity.
• In a parallel way, what are the problems facing scholars who are novices in digital humanities?  What kinds of services and support do they need? Once we have a good problem statement, we can begin to think of solutions that are less of the “gee whiz” one-off pilot variety, and more of a systematic approach to creating a people-and-tools infrastructure that we can build on over time.
• Those two discussions, to me, precede the important discussion of expertise.  What are the new skills and understandings needed in the library profession to support these researchers? We’ve had a very specific model of support for decades that has created an explicit understanding of what an “expert” librarian is — how is that changing based on the solutions we need to try and put in place for new modes of research?

To facilitate this conversation, I plan to review “No Brief Candle” especially the sections by Paul Courant and Rick Luce, and to look at the British Library’s new website “Growing Knowledge: the evolution of research.”  There are lots of great reports and examples out there suitable for the kind of inductive review I’m proposing, and I hope folks will use the comments to suggest others!

Finally, and humbly, I’m not saying this kind of categorization hasn’t already been done, but that I want to engage with other people in conversation about it in order to “get it” more deeply and learn to better articulate how to shape library services in a fluid environment.