Words’ End

I’m making a topic list for some digital research methods workshops. This is a request for feedback and/or supplements!

Some background first. The school I work at is a theological seminary existing within a Research I university. The students in it are all [post]graduate: Master’s- and doctoral-level. Some degrees are more vocationally oriented; others—more research-oriented. This refers to what the students do after they leave here; all of our graduate programs involve the usual amounts of traditional scholarship. Some also involve field work.

I aim for these to be one-off, two-hour workshops offered to every student near the beginning of their time here. There will be two different workshops, one for most of the Master’s-level students, the other for our advanced Master’s and all doctoral students. The topic list is more or less the same, with different areas of emphasis for each workshop.  For those people writing theses and dissertations, there will be an additional hour-long workshop touching on things like how to properly format things in MS Word (sigh; yes, really—nobody teaches them this stuff!), open access, authorship etc.

These might more rightly be called digital scholarship primers, I don’t know. In any case, “digital research methods” might be a misnomer. I actually don’t think that it is. Implicit in the topic list below is my belief that the use of digital resources that feed you information and the use of digital tools to directly create new knowledge are different skill sets, but both classifiable as digital research.  If you think I’m off the mark here, I’d welcome your reasoning—not to make you justify yourself, but to gain more perspective—and/or suggestions for other workshop titles.

Here’s what I have so far. What would you add? Do you see problems with my thinking that I’m not seeing? Read more…

I’m on a plane from Seattle to Minneapolis and then to Boston, finishing up ten days of travel.  When we were taking off, Rainier Mountain just out my window was rising above the lower clouds, its head just touching the upper layer. Gorgeous and apt: the past week has given me new knowledge and a wider perspective.

I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria!  This was made possible by the DHSI and by my dean, and I’m grateful to both.  The Institute’s ninth year was my first time attending, and it was an intense experience.  Something like 35 hours of instruction over five days; evening plenary talks and early-morning graduate student presentations for four of those.  I took the large project planning and management course with Lynne Siemens. It was even more exciting and useful than I’d expected it to be. Who would’ve thought I’d be into project management?  But bring industry-born ideas about cat herding resource wrangling into academe, and I’m there.  We talked about juggling (often too-little) money and time and people, getting folks to be as excited about your ideas as  you are, getting your head around a project in the first place.  We had guest speakers in almost every class and got to plan our own projects.  All of this delightfully low-tech: I’m bringing back large sheets of flip-chart paper with wild scribbles and post-it notes.  Now to get grant funding for this thing.  (Grant application is in, but we don’t find out for a couple more months.  If we don’t get funded, I imagine we’ll apply again.  In any case, the training will be applicable in other contexts, not least of them the everyday juggling of activities at work.)

The best part, of course, were the people.  I saw some old friends and acquaintances, and finally got to spend a bunch of time around Julie Meloni, who is moving to Victoria to work as a postdoc at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. (ETCL folks put on the Institute every summer—and let’s pause for a second to appreciate the work they do, and their success at it.)

Talking to Julie, and to Jentery Sayers, and Jon Bath, and Susan Brown, and the many other folk I met at UVic,  one thing is clear: networked technologies are finally at a stage where they can be reliably and cheaply used for long-distance collaboration in the digital humanities.  There’s no substitute for in-person interaction, but it’s also increasingly easy to work together over arbitrary distances, meeting in the same place every once in a while.  This is changing our work process.  It’s no longer just that we can email Word documents back and forth.  We can use combinations of text/audio/video chat, collaborative editing environments, remote file upload and syncing venues, online project management systems, even bibliography and research sharing systems to work on projects either synchronously or asynchronously, as circumstances permit, at times across many timezones.  All of these tools have been available for some time, but have been clunky or expensive or not easily interoperable.  The recent explosion of networked tools and services (some of them created by and for academics) is a perfect storm for academic collaboration.

At the beginning of the DHSI week I got pretty discouraged about my self-imposed geographic restriction to Boston.  All this activity swirling around me, watching people who have found inspiration in working with one another, felt like being on the outside looking in.  Which is pretty ridiculous, all things considered: nobody can do everything, and I have a job in Boston that’s at least nominally a digital humanities/digital libraries job.  But it does get lonely at BU sometimes.  There isn’t much DH activity either at the university or generally in New England. (Sure, Brown University is just an hour away, and THATCamp New England has just opened for applications.  But given that we’re in CollegeTownUSA land, there’s still woefully little DH work going on around here.  It’s ramping up, but slowly.)

Well, seems like there’s nothing like a little live interaction to get things going.  Seems I’m about to get involved in a couple of projects that will feed me in ways that will supplement the satisfaction I draw from current in-person work.  This is good both for me and for my workplace.  Information will flow through more channels, inspiration can be distributed. Perspective allows serendipity to do its unpredictable future thing.

I love Boston, and have good reasons to live where I live. This has meant passing on multiple opportunities to apply for jobs I’d no doubt enjoy. But I’ve placed a high priority on being near my people. It was a hard decision to make when I made it, but the rewards are constant and significant. And now, the trade-off doesn’t seem as big as it did even only three years ago.

Being a free agent in the age of networked communication is pretty exciting.

Last week I gave a talk at the second annual conference on distance ed put on by the BU Faculty Advisory Board on, You Guessed It, Distance Education.

It was a great time! I was heartened to see so many people thinking so creatively about classroom technology. Distance ed may not equate to using technology (networked or not) in the classroom, but there’s a lot of crossover, so I was asked to reprise a talk I’d given few months ago through the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching.

I’ve taken recent thinking about slide presentations to heart, so looking at my slides wouldn’t yield anything particularly coherent: there’s little text on them. So I’ve inserted the slides here instead of putting them on SlideShare; click on a slide to see it full-size.  Alas, I haven’t figured out yet how to open the full-size images in the same page, with a gallery-like overlay (is there a WordPress plugin for this?), so—apologies—they’re set to open in a new window.

This gets long; here’s hoping the LiveJournal crosspost can deal with the more tag. If it can’t, sorry, LJLand—I don’t do this often… Read more…

Life’s been chugging along, and the best I can do sometimes is keep up. In the now-venerable tradition of good-thing, bad-thing, here’s my week and a half, give or take.

• ++ Birthday! I had one. I went out to dinner with mom and Vlad, and later had a party. It was well attended by lovely people; Mark supplied lights and gorgeous swathes of cloth to drape around things; the food was appreciated; much merriment was had.
• - Then last Monday I started feeling sick.
• - Then last Tuesday I came in sick to cover library supervision in the evening (until 9pm), and proceeded to lie on the table floor for most of the time I was in, unable even to watch stupid TV online, much less work.
• — Then Wednesday I discovered that what I had was strep throat! I don’t remember whether I’d ever had it before; certainly not since I got to the States almost twenty (!!) years ago.
• + Yet I recognized it for what it must be, went to get myself checked out (thanks for the encouragement, mom), and got
• +++ penicillin, which is a wonder of (semi-)modern medicine, even though it’s kicking my butt by greatly diminishing my baseline energy level. But hey, it’s only for ten days.
• - Meanwhile, I missed my weekly playdate/kid-sitting night with four year old Natalie. SO looking forward to seeing her today.
• ++ On Saturday, I had fantastic dinner with my family, all of them—even brother Zhenya, sisinlaw Jo Ann and nephew Tesher came up for this—as a first, early celebration of my mom’s 70th birthday (coming up in May). I do so like hanging out with them, particularly when it involves food and then sleeping in my own bed.
• + The last two nights, I had excellent dates, with conversations and food and laughing that left me feeling hale and whole.
• + Yesterday, I finally finished up the saga of having had to have a tooth extracted a year and a half ago, then get an implant, then get a crown for the implant. Dentistry has been the bain of my didn’t-grow-up-with-fluoride-in-my-water body, and I’m glad this one’s over.
• ++ Also yesterday, I acquired a physical therapist and a therapy schedule to finally fix a year-and-a-half-old shoulder injury. I like the therapist, and I like that he’s two T stops away from the building where I work. Major win.
• + I’ve been productive and happy at work (except for that miserable evening with the strep throat). We submitted an NEH grant proposal; I’ve been talking to faculty about teaching with technology; we have several IT and digital library projects going; and as terrifying as it is to essentially be my own boss most days, I’m also learning new stuff at a pace I can feel. Mostly learning about managing time and expectations. Valuable stuff.
• - Work is also exhausting and often frustrating. Yesterday I shut down my computer after reviewing and commenting on four long library policy documents, and literally couldn’t think for a while, just let myself be on autopilot going home.
• + Good thing cooking perks me right up.
• - I’ve also been chronically under-sleeping again, mostly by making bad time-management choices in favor of being with good people.
• + Good thing I got plenty of sleep while sick with strep throat!
• + On a different note, I’m participating in a Tufts study on how people manage their personal finances (or at least that’s what they claim the study is about). This got me thinking more deeply about my own personal finances, and once again coming to a conclusion that I can manage them well even if the jam-tomorrow enticements that just keep coming from my ex never materialize, and I have to pay his share of our mutual debts too. I wouldn’t be happy doing it, but not having any choice, find it more pleasant to be sanguine about it. Of course I have a rant about that, but that’s not the point: the point is, this isn’t driving me crazy anymore.
• +This past weekend, I saw a bunch of old friends and acquaintances from my days of hanging out on the interactive fiction MUD.  I also got to see a screening of the excellent documentary Get Lamp, by Jason Scott of textfiles fame, which (both Get Lamp and textfiles) I’m highly recommending if you’re into that sort of thing.
• ++ My house and my life are full of people so good in so many ways, it makes me dizzy sometimes.

And these are just the highlights. Life’s full, and mostly good.

He even has his own URL now: rolandht.org.

If you’re just tuning in, that’s my dissertation over there.

At work, that is. No sign of slowing down any time soon. Some are challenging, others less so, all of them are a lot to keep track of. (Thank you, project management software, for help with this.)

Scanning by others, scanning by me, institutional repository, faculty computers, dean’s computer, budgeting, classroom tech retrofitting, major website overhaul, planning for student services starting up in the fall. I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff. Oh, and I’ll be on vacation and off the grid for ten days in August, coming back on orientation day.

This couldn’t be happening at a better time, is strangely invigorating, makes me want to work on the weekends. There, I’ve got my groove back.

*dives deep*

I’m at Digital Humanities 2009, my home conference, the place that actually feels like home. The people are fantastic, the energy is high but not crazy, and the entertainment is made of awesome. Tonight, about 300 of us (literally) went to a crab shack.

I’ve been blogging the conference–or at least, the sessions I’ve managed to attend. The posts are here; if you’ve been wondering why exactly I’m in love with my somewhat obscure (and yet pervasive and important to all of us, whether we know it or not) profession, this is a good way to find out what excites me about digital humanities.

Oh, and hey, I was lightning-interviewed! Now I have had 1m4s of my 15m of fame.

Today is the international Day of Digital Humanities, in which over a hundred of us (I think…) are blogging what we do on this particular date. It’s not going to cover everything I do evar, but it’s a decent cross-section. If you’re interested, take a look here.

Since intersession ended on January 5th, I have not had a single full school-night’s sleep. Catching up on the weekends is useful but still not healthy.

Thursday was one mad dash after another at work right up until about 6:30pm, and culminated in drinking wine at a reception in our library, chatting with coworkers, then cleaning up and getting a ride home, arriving around 7:45. And immediately turning around to drive the car I time-share to its home, take the bus back, and collapse.

Friday was one mad dash af… well, you know. Ran around almost non-stop 8-6 with a two-hour break for a dental appointment (three cheers for my dentist, again), came home and had a fantastic dinner with this gorgeous babe who is funny and fascinating and has good taste in movies. I showed her An Ordinary Miracle.

Now it’s almost 2am. Not setting an alarm. Still, I’d like to figure out how to live life as fully as I want, and still get anything approximating enough sleep most nights. I feel my immune system wearing down.

Yesterday I woke up grumpy. I had my reasons, but mostly it boils down to, I’ve been getting abysmal amounts of sleep this week – five to six hours a night. No good reason for it.

Moaned about, got out of bed like an hour late, went to work and stayed there for ten hours, in part because the first half of the day I was mostly useless. (Enh. It happens. It’s SAD season, and I do what I can, and somehow work-blogging after hours feels different, calmer, with nobody around.) And near the end of the business day I found out I’d made some people unhappy, and had to deal with that, and it wasn’t a big deal—in fact, the conversation with a third party was helpful and reassuring—but it’s never a good feeling to know you’ve screwed up. On the other hand, learning experience, and a mild one as such things go.

So by the time I left work at 8pm I was tired. And… not exactly grumpy, just feeling off. But then.

Then I came home, and there was a circus band rehearsing in my living room. Went upstairs, and housemate Coraline was hanging out in the kitchen with her friend Carolyn. I threw my stuff down and—having had no dinner—declared I needed scotch, and to make a casserole. Why? I dunno. I guess I’d had a fantastic casserole at Molly’s the day before, and I’ve had random foodstuffs hanging around the cupboards for forever, AND I’d never made casserole before.

Yeah, really.

So we broke out the bottle of 12-year-old scotch that I’d taken to Burning Man and we’d never gotten around to opening (there was other alcohol around, but it’s not tempting to drink a lot of dehydrating liquid in that climate). And I made a casserole of frozen artichoke hearts, frozen peas, frozen corn, frozen mixed mushrooms (thank you, bulk food ordering, I have a mushroom invasion in my freezer), chick peas, canned tuna, multi-colored potatoes, cream and two kinds of cheese. And I’m probably forgetting other stuff.

All the while, people around me chatted and sipped tasty alcohol and giggled a lot. And later I ate and felt more human, and around 10:45pm Coraline (ok, Johanna) and Eric and I went out against all better judgment, because spectacularly under-advertised Midnight Madness was going on in Davis Square. We gawked at antique bobbles and boutique-y clothes, but mostly we dropped by Dave’s Fresh Pasta, sampled tasty foods, and brought home mozzarella made that evening by a neighbor of theirs (or something).

Oh. my. gods. Homemade mozzarella with crushed pink peppercorns and a drizzle of truffled olive oil. Yeah, I’d say that, combined with hanging out with my awesome housemates, was a win even though it meant that once again I got too little sleep.

Boy, if that was a bad day, bring them on, you know? Speaking of days, I should probly go face mine. The sun’s rising, a warm shower awaits, and today I get to take tasty casserole to work for lunch. Oh, and tonight I get to see both of my favorite small girls (can’t call them toddlers anymore, as they’re skipping and giggling on either side of three years old), and go to the Museum of Science with one of them and her dad. WOE. Woe is me in this sad season.

Today I’m thankful for good people in my life, and for all the weird bipolar days that, in the end, let me know that things are going to be ok.