My Experience at the HathiTrust Uncamp

A word cloud showing the most frequently occurring words in a selection of dime novels from the HathiTrust corpus.

On September 10^th and 11^th, I attended the HathiTrust Research Center UnCamp held in Bloomington, Indiana. The UnCamp was a joint venture organized by Indiana University, my institution, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All in all, the UnCamp spanned a day and a half of demonstrations and hands-on examples geared to orienting attendees toward new uses of HTRC data. As a graduate student, I was lucky enough to have my registration paid for by IU’s Data to Insight Center in exchange for volunteering throughout the UnCamp. For my post today I wanted to briefly share my experience.

Librarian as Project Manager

In this installment of Hack Library’s School’s Emerging Career Series, Caro Pinto explores the role of librarian as project manager. Caro Pinto is the Social Science & Emerging Technologies Librarian at Hampshire College where she oversees collection development, outreach, and instruction for the School of Critical Social Inquiry, works on Digital Humanities projects at Hampshire and in the Five Colleges, and explores the technology landscape to find sustainable solutions for higher education. You can find Caro on Twitter and on her blog.

Librarians are helpful advocates in the research process. We aid our users in the location, retrieval, and evaluation of sources. However, as libraries implement more effective discovery layers and users come away with tens of thousands of results in mere seconds, our role has necessarily begun to shift from information retriever to information evaluator, arbiter, and now manager. We collaborate more closely with our users in the research process, helping to prepare data into management plans as part of grant requirements for the NSF and the NEH. Increasingly, we are librarians, but we are also project managers.

{Series} Declassified: Digital Humanities

Image credit: Flickr user nicomachus

This is the third post of our Declassified Series, in which we focus on exploring the similarities and differences between courses on the same topic that are offered at different schools. Previous posts include Reference and Information Architecture. Below, Brianna and Barbarajean discuss their experiences in Digital Humanities classes.

[Series] TMI #8 – Audrey Watters

TMI week marches on.*

I am so excited to be able to chat with Audrey Watters. Audrey writes (like 100 posts a day) at a leading tech blog ReadWriteWeb.com as well as HackEducation.com. Her posts on both blogs are often center around educational technology, and the interactions of tech and cultural trends and institutions, including this recent one on an app that librarians might be excited about. Be sure to check out her weekly Ed Tech Roundups to keep up with that world. I could go on a fanboy rant here and talk about how cool it was to meet Audrey (along with Seamus and Adrianne) here in NYC when I was interning with ReadWriteWeb, and how she was the first real life internet celebrity that I met, and how encouraging it was to chat with her about the state of education generally and some of my ideas (that may or may not have developed into this here bloggy blog!), and how I got super excited when she showed up on my favorite Digital Humanities podcast talking about ebooks… but I won’t.

Listen on…

*We’re noticing a lack of comments on these shortcasts, and would like some feedback: Like/Dislike? Mix it in with writing?

[Series] TMI #5 – Dr. Ethan Watrall on the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

For this episode of HackLibSchool TMI (Two Minute Insight) I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Ethan Watrall from Michigan State University. Dr. Watrall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of Matrix:The Center for Humane Arts, Letters & Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University.  In addition, he is Coordinator of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative and co-director of the Scholarly Creativity research cluster of the Michigan State University Creativity Initiative.

CLICK HERE –>  More info about the fieldschool.

 

Dr. Watrall and I chatted for several minutes over the 2 minute limit, so what you’ll hear here is a trimmed down version of our interview. [If you'd like to hear the whole interview email me].

The CHI Fieldschool is, in my opinion, one of the coolest new initiatives that students interested in cultural heritage can take advantage of to get hands on experience “building as a way of knowing,” a popular mantra in Digital Humanities circles. If you or your classmates have any interest in cultural heritage, tech-based projects with humanities roots, or just want to be part of the inaugural class of a great new project, I highly encourage you to apply.