What I Do All Day

It’s been about seven months since I started at Emory, and sometimes I feel a world removed from my life as a grad student in New Haven. My day-to-day life has changed in a thousand different ways: I have new colleagues, new friends, a new kind of work.

Collection of name tags
My collection of name tags continues to expand

I sometimes have trouble explaining my work to other people, so, for the benefit of my family and friends, as well as for other grad students and academics who might be considering alternate academic careers, I thought I’d talk a little about what it’s like to be doing what I do.

What do I do? My job title, “Postdoctoral Fellow,” doesn’t really tell you anything. My job, really, is to help build a new digital scholarship program for Emory, from the ground up. There are two of us dedicated to working on this (though we’ve called on a lot of people for help).

Continue reading “What I Do All Day”

What I learned from the Scholars’ Lab and the Center for History and New Media

"Embroidered Digital Commons," by Bethany Nowviskie

A big part of my new job at Emory is researching models of digital scholarship. The idea is that by getting a sense of what’s out there, Emory can benefit from others’ experience when it launches its own center for digital scholarship. So my colleague, Stewart Varner, and I have been going on field trips to centers whose work we admire.

So far we’ve hit the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab and George Mason’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). Next up is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. (Before I got to Emory, staff members visited Duke’s Visual Studies Initiative and the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities.)

Staff at both CHNM and the Scholars’ Lab were unbelievably generous with their time and expertise. Really. One of the things that’s drawn me to the digital humanities is its practitioners’ intellectual generosity, and the people we met confirmed that impression tenfold.

Stewart and I expected to be impressed by the Scholars’ Lab and CHNM, and we were — specifically, we were impressed by the smart, thoughtful, creative people we met. We were surprised, though, by how deeply the visits affected our own thinking about the kind of center we want to build at Emory. Here’s my attempt to capture what I took away from our trips. Continue reading “What I learned from the Scholars’ Lab and the Center for History and New Media”

PDP video available (mostly)

The Past's Digital Presence LogoI’ve been pretty remiss in my website-maintenance duties for Yale’s Past’s Digital Presence conference website.

However! Thanks to our intrepid cinematographer/video editor (A.K.A. my boyfriend Andy), you can watch video of a lot of the talks by clicking on the title of the talk you’re interested in. And Jana Remy, our distinguished and talented online media chair, has turned a number of talks into downloadable audio podcasts.

Andy and I are pretty pleased with ourselves for our decision to host the conference’s video at the Internet Archive. As I see it, this has a number of benefits: the I.A., unlike YouTube, has an explicit commitment to sustainability, open access, and archival integrity. Plus, people can freely download these videos, and they’re even available as HTML5. Here are all the videos over at the Internet Archive.

Our undeserved prominence has inspired me to get on Andy’s case to get the rest of the video up. And I’ll work on making the site a better archive, rather than a conference-registration site.

A quick work update

Chips and beef jerky
Road food during our trip from New Haven to Atlanta

Boy, May just about killed me! There was the small matter of writing the last chapter of my dissertation, not to mention revising an article, grading stacks of finals and papers, finding a new place to live — and, of course, moving 1,000 miles from New Haven to Atlanta. I was fascinated by the exotic variety of weird stress-related symptoms I developed: so very many rashes!

Anyway! We did it, and here we are in Decatur, Georgia, mostly unpacked and doing great. I started my job in Emory’s library on June 15, and I’m loving it. I was delighted to find my initial impressions of Emory confirmed — particularly the part about having awesome coworkers.

One thing I’d missed while in school was exercising a variety of different skills, and I’m finding this one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. I do a lot of research, just like always, but also a lot of planning, talking, and strategizing. And, crucially, I know when my workday is over.

I have to confess to some initial concern that in moving from an academic role to a (sort of) staff role, I’d experience some drop in others’ respect or willingness to take me seriously. So far, though, I’ve been way too busy to worry about that at all. And the faculty members I’ve met at Emory have been absolutely terrific, more than willing to listen to my ideas.

So, basically, I’m congratulating myself on ending up here, and feeling optimistic about what my coworkers and I can accomplish at Emory. If only that dissertation didn’t need revising …

… and PDP is a success!

Logo for Past's DIgital PresenceLogo for the Past's DIgital Presence

The Past’s Digital Presence, the conference Heather, Jana, Molly, Taylor, and I have been working so hard on, took place this last weekend, and the consensus seems to be that it was a success. The papers were fantastic and our invited speakers were inspiring. Edward Ayers, the historian and president of the University of Richmond, called the conference a “watershed,” and Willard McCarty, one of the founders of the field of digital humanities, called it “exhilarating.” So that is all fantastic and exciting. The best part, for me, was meeting people who are active in the digital humanities, both speakers and attendees. It was great to trade stories and references.

We’re hoping to keep the momentum going by publishing the conference proceedings in some form, as well as by posting video and audio recordings to the conference website. Jana has already posted the podcast of the conference’s closing roundtable with Willard McCarty, Edward Ayers, Rolena Adorno, and George Miles.

I took over tweeting duties for the conference (we’re PDP2010), and you can follow all the conference tweets by searching for #pdp2010. It was an interesting experience. I really enjoyed watching momentum gather as the conference progressed, but I do have concerns about the way that tweeting encouraged me to hunt for soundbites in speakers’ talks.

Willard McCarty posted a very complimentary review of the conference on Humanist, a digital humanities listserv. That was terrific, but I was especially interested in a very thoughtful response to McCarty’s post by Amanda Gailey. Gailey points out that, amidst all our post-conference self-congratulation, we shouldn’t forget that state schools have been doing digital humanities for quite awhile, and with a great deal of success. She writes,

I simply want to suggest that to my mind, the conference may be a watershed, but not because DH has finally earned the benediction of the Ivies. Instead, it is quite possible that a hitherto unproven field, within which smart people not housed at the most selective and expensive universities could actually earn influence and rewards, is becoming less egalitarian.

I think this is a real danger, and I’m glad Gailey made the point. I’ll be thinking about it as we move forward with the momentum the conference has generated.