Nine Months In! Supporting Digital Scholarship at the University of Delaware Natalia Lopez, Digital Scholarship Librarian

What is digital scholarship?

Digital Scholarship @ Morris Library We’re here to connect you to expertise & resources when you are working on research that incorporates digital projects:

Web publishing Data visualization Database building

Text mining Text encoding

Data Management Etc!

Data literacy and scholarly communications

“[Humanities’] scholars will sometimes describe elaborate visualizations to me, involving charts and graphs and change over time. “Great,” I respond. “Let’s see your data.” “Data?” they say. “Oh, I don’t have any data.”

-Miriam Posner, Assistant Professor in the Information Studies department at UCLA

http://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/

Before digital scholarship librarian

Colored Conventions Project (CCP)

http://ccp.lib.udel.edu/

The Colored Conventions Project

The Center for Digital Collections NEH Delaware Digital Newspaper Project

The digitization of historic Delaware newspapers published as part of the state's participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) from master negative microfilms held by the University of Delaware Library.

Student Multimedia Design Center (SMDC) Mapping & Multimedia

Fall 2017 -Spring 2018

Projects

The Baltimore Collection Class Website

The digital:

The knowledge:

The takeaways:

The Baltimore Collection Class Website The digital: wordpress sites administered by central IT; google drive; artstor

The knowledge (as provided by library): metadata; data management

The collaboration: three instruction sessions by librarians; administration of artstor and data cleaning and upload of metadata; metadata “help-line;” design assistance and set up of wordpress site; library space use

The takeaways: ●  A one pager to outline responsibilities and deadlines when multiple staff are collaborating ●  Helpful things to include in the consult:

○  Is the goal digital pedagogy or publishing a digital project? [creating “sandboxes”] ○  “Lifespan” of the project helps us select the right tool and the way we design the backend ○  How much are students engaged in the design of the digital project? What is their role?

●  Introducing students to scholarly communication issues (creative commons, copyright, etc)

ThingStor

ThingStor The digital: initially Omeka; transition to AirTables; google drive (google sheets)

The knowledge: data management; metadata

Collaboration: initial set-up of system; support in developing workflow and data management practices, training of students

The takeaways: ●  Differentiate when to focus on data management versus the design of the tool ●  Supporting project teams in developing workflows (timelines, documentation, etc) ●  Supporting relationships with partners who can help customize digital projects ●  Input from staff with copyright expertise

Wilmington Archive Project

Wilmington Archive Project

The digital: scalar, digital storytelling

The knowledge: digital storytelling; archival research; metadata

The takeaways: ●  Collaboration that involves many library staff from various departments; figuring out the best way

to communicate ●  Critical to establish communication lines with faculty teaching classes as soon as possible;

project goals versus class goals

Instruction

Instruction Requests

Dr. Persephone Braham’s SPAN875010 “Seminar: Spanish Literature”

Dr. Edward Larkin’s English 480-010 “Visualizing Early American Literature and Politics”

Dr. Laura Helton’s ENGL/AFRA 382 “The Civil Rights Movement: Word-Image- Sound”

Dr. Sarah Wasserman’s English 101-010 “Tools of Textual Analysis: Intro to Digital Studies”

Dr. Jessica Horton ARTH602010 “Seminar: Curatorial Studies: NATIVE ART & INSTITUTIONS”

Consultations

Instruction Requests The digital: wordpress sites administered by central IT; google drive; Carto; Tableau

The knowledge: writing for different audiences, data management, basics of data manipulation/cleaning/visualization

The collaboration: working with existing tech systems in place by units across campus (museums, special collections) to support instruction requests; initial consult with faculty is very important here

The takeaways: ●  Developing instructional materials that go beyond buttonology, meant to complement one-two

sessions ●  Recognizing appropriate scope when trying to get started

Library workshops

●  Data Collection with Qualtrics and Excel ●  Data cleaning with Excel (and an intro to OpenRefine) ●  Data visualization with Tableau

The takeaways: ●  Disciplinary versus interdisciplinary focused workshops ●  Solving authentic problems; more hands-on

Next steps...

What next?

●  Environmental scan project ●  Workshop development with different departments (i.e. metadata? Discipline specific?) ●  Fleshing out our workshop and resources to reflect data literacy (beyond buttonology) ●  Developing internal projects to grow our collective expertise with digital scholarship methods