The problem with not having a portable computer that is also easy to type on is that I take copious notes at conferences and send lots of notes to Twitter, but then find the act of typing up notes for my blog not exactly my number one thing I want to do. Nevertheless, I did get much that was useful from the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science a few weeks ago.
The main reason I was there was so that Nell and I could present a poster on the latest iteration of the Chicago Underground Library catalog. The idea of this catalog is to make it extremely easy for people who aren’t librarians or particularly technically inclined to help capture the CUL’s collection. I say capture because the collection and the catalog is so much a living thing that we can’t ever expect that one day we will complete it. The idea is that as we get comments on records from community members that we will draw that information back into the record to make it richer. What really struck me during the course of the conference–particularly during the Google Books presentation– is that the data we are creating and then collecting needs to be captured on a regular basis so that we can understand how it’s changed over time. That will be a priority for me over winter “break”, as I somehow imagine that a few weeks without many students around will lead to an ability to finish all my big projects.
The session called E-science, Digital Humanities, and the Role of the Library was partly a description of how various digital humanities labs function, and partly a discussion on how librarians function in those settings. There is a discussion at my institution on how standards of retention (and possibly promotion) for faculty librarians might change, and so hearing the types of issues at other institutions was instructive. Basically, while it may be the case that librarians “staff” digital humanities research labs (or really, “staff” research help in general), it is not useful when they are treated as research assistants. Rather, in a sense they need to be co-researchers, though I am not sure if that extends to actually being listed as an author or what. I guess that depends. The point was made that in science it has long been the case that staff (such as lab techs) do research, but this is only fairly recent in the humanities. Now, I can’t say that most lab techs I have known get a high level of satisfaction from their work even if the project they are apart of is very interesting. I guess the point is that librarians want to be on the PI level of work, not the lab tech level.
This is but a pale shadow of the excitement I felt while actually at the conference, but perhaps more will follow in terms of production of content. It confirmed for me the suspicion I’d had for awhile about my actual research interests, and they are somewhat different than what I’d assumed I would end up doing as an academic librarian. That is to say, I don’t really want to do the type of qualitative social science research so often seen in library science journals. You know what I mean, if you read those journals. Not that I can never ever do it–it’s just not what will get me truly excited.