Nothing like a good CHAT

I was fortunate this week to have time to attend part of this year’s CHAT Festival (Collaborations: Humanities, Arts, & Technology), conveniently hosted at Duke and just outside my office for much of the week.  On Monday afternoon, I attended a faculty panel highlighting successes and lessons learned from the innovative work of the Franklin Humanities Institute Humanities Labs.  Later in the week, I attended three additional sessions – one highlighting the challenges of working collaboratively across cultures, one focused on data-intensive humanities projects, and one featuring four very cool digital mapping projects and perspectives – along with a lunch conversation on the impact of this type of scholarship on pedagogy and learning.

Maybe it’s just me, but it’s taken some time (too much time, I feel…) to understand fully the expansive field of digital scholarship and digital humanities, in particular…

As part of our work on Perkins Libraries’ Research Commons Exploratory Committee, committee chair Jean Ferguson and I attended a mini-conference, Exploring Digital Humanities: Practicalities and Potential, at UNC-Charlotte in December.  That event, which provided a nuts and bolts overview of what (practically speaking!) digital humanities actually is and featured a number of innovative approaches to scholarship from area researchers, coupled with the CHAT Festival, have helped me wrap my (aging? saturated? overstimulated?) brain around this exciting — and ever-changing — field.  I found participating in these two events to be extremely useful for my participation in the Research Commons Exploratory Committee, as well my work on the Research Services desk and, of course, with students and faculty in the classroom.

A few take-aways related to our work in Instruction & Outreach:

• While Duke students are bright, motivated and frequently described as “digital natives,” many simply do not have the skills necessary for developing technology-rich research projects.  Many of their faculty feel they themselves do not have the skills to teach them, prompting them to look to the library or OIT staff for assistance.
• Those (many) students who learn the technologies and create incredible examples of digital scholarship do not always remember to cite their sources — this is especially problematic when students have built their work on difficult-to-find or original datasets that future researchers could benefit from using
• Faculty and students alike wonder where and how to preserve their digital works of scholarship — submitting a thesis or dissertation to the library for preservation makes sense, but how do they (and we!) go about archiving digital maps, multifaceted databases and interactive websites?
• Because of the highly disciplinary and even cross-cultural nature of this work, it becomes difficult to determine whose job it is to support these researchers — Does the visual studies librarian support a class being taught by a computer scientist and an art historian, or does that fall on our comp sci specialist?  And how do we serve adequately those students whose home university is in Italy but are working with students and faculty in courses hosted here at Duke?
• Our circle of stakeholders is expanding by the day:  A number of these projects involve not only faculty and students at Duke, as well as at other institutions, but also community partners (Preservation Durham who commissioned the Reconstructing Hayti, for instance), which means that priorities for research instruction will surely shift

Fortunately, I’ll have more time to consider these complex issues through the Digital Research and Tools workshops put on this spring by Liz Milewicz and Diane Harvey and at Research Wednesdays, hosted by Duke’s Medical Center Library.  We subject librarians will be learning the ins and outs of digital research and technologies and data management in hopes of gaining necessary skills for faculty and students in our departments, many of whom, based on what I saw at UNC-Charlotte in December and here at Duke this past week, are eager to explore this new world of representing research and visualizing data.

Are we librarians in a position to provide the support they say they need?