THATCamp AHA 2018
Session 2 – Teaching DH breakout group – professional development for scholars & researchers
Questions:
- What are models that have worked for scaling up/building capacity in a department or organization?
- Make alliances with computer science departments; build a team of people who can work on different parts of projects and contribute expertise
- See what colleges & departments have funding for student research to become research fellows and work with faculty that way
- Skill share – bring together people working on specific projects with people with specific technical expertise – CC uses summer and break between semesters for workshops, skill shares usually best if short (1.5 hours) and woven into programming already offered in department, once or twice a semester is usually enough
- Collect list of different types of projects and ideas so people can get an idea of what it possible and what is available when writing scopes – ashleyrsanders.com/digital-storytelling-project-ideas/ – template
- Library of Congress GIS day had an afternoon workshop where all the curators just experimented with StoryMaps
- How do you start from 0 in DH?
- dhatccl101.com – training course for faculty and librarians – lots of resources, helpful to show projects of different scale and time commitments; now have 3 3-day intensive workshops on specific topics (text analysis, GIS, data viz; last summer was digital storytelling; 2 day crash course to those new to DH)
- work backward from people’s syllabi and approach based on topics – e.g. this course on 15th century Italy would be a good mapping project, want us to work with you? This worked ~3 months ahead of time, started out by creating guides for students and faculty about how to use tools before class starts, especially for smaller projects; especially good for seminar level topical classes rather than big intros
- Palladio is an open source tool from Stanford that is useful for visualizing data and social networks – one you can start with when you have a clean, structured data set that’s ready to go; Geffi (sp?) is a free open source one for research
- It can be interesting to use multiple tools to look at the same data (e.g. networks, maps, text analysis, etc.) and see what different patterns emerge
- What are people looking for, or had success with, from libraries?
- “Buddy system” where you have a simple tool, ready to go data sets, and a maker day where people who are experienced work with others who aren’t
- “The Big Idea” – chapter in Exhibit Labels by Beverly Serrell – helps in finding main theme in writing for the public
- “Collections as data” – libraries presenting collections as data for scholarly use
- How to convince departments that digital scholarship IS scholarship?
- Many faculty are more open to using it in classroom than in their own research because it is not considered equal in tenure decisions – some use digital tools in research but publish traditionally, other option is traditional research but digital/classroom dissemination
- Structuring data may be a continuing challenge since platforms keep evolving to have different requirements; learning different skills/tools in general is transferable but very specific how-tos for all circumstances are less so
