Author Archives: Meghann Williams

Newbery Outreach Plan

    • We will create a website for our project in addition to an Instagram and Twitter account. The website will include some “traditional” academic writing to contextualize the findings and point toward further readings. It will also feature sections “for librarians,” “for prize committees,” and “for educators,” among others 
    • We will reach out to members of our target audience (Librarians, Educators, DH community), Advisors to the Project (Diverse Book Finder, ALA and their sub organizations like the ALSC), Publications like School Library Journal and LIS Programs. 
    • Twitter and Instagram are going to be the best way for us to share our work. 
      • Twitter: this is the best platform for having conversations with established figures in the field and for the website to get shared the most. We would get the most interacting and followers there. 
      • Instagram: we can do infographics that could be widely shared using the story mode especially if they are graphically compelling. 
      • Facebook is just so overrun these days… and also sharing websites on there is pretty seamless… like we can submit to pages that would have interest in our content rather than having our own page. 
    • We can immediately begin sharing the critical lenses we are using while developing the project and the “importance” of diversity and prizes (I think I put quote there because I mean relative importance… rather that we will be evaluating these claims)
  • Creating a schedule for posting is important, at least once a week in the beginning and then increasing posts once the site is active and we are closer to launching. Outreach main person to post, but team can suggest content.
  • Worth thinking about retweeting vs. posting original content. Maybe an equal amount of both in the beginning, building relationships through retweets and commenting on posts. Then increasing original content.
  • Should set up a gmail account for the project, and include it on the website. Also a contact form directing to the gmail. Important for people who are not on social media, have many questions, or organizations/institutions that would like to discuss collaborations.
  • Who will be in charge of handling questions and comments from email address and contact form? One person will filter the messages and forward to the appropriate person.
  • Outreach goals: 
    • Bring awareness to the research topic to our audience
    • Increase traffic to the website and our research
    • Establish connections with those in our field to help support/endorse our project and for potential collaboration
  • Resources to help bring awareness
    • DH Now: an experimental, edited publication that highlights and distributes informally published digital humanities scholarship and resources from the open web.
    • Dh+lib: aims to provide a communal space where librarians, archivists, LIS graduate students, and information specialists of all stripes can contribute to a conversation about digital humanities and libraries.

Meg Williams Bio

Meg Williams is a student at the CUNY Graduate Center Program for Digital Humanities and holds an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College, where she worked as an adjunct lecturer and a substitute administrative coordinator. With this background, Meg explores the intersection of art and technology through digital poetics. She is currently working as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Group at Queens College, where she works on issues such as higher education affordability and campus sustainability.

Her main role in the Newbury project is outreach. She is particularly interested in issues around the importance of minority representation, the concept of whiteness, the economy of prizes and their ancient origins. Meg hopes her explorations of these topics will contextualize her groups finding in a critical analysis of the Newbury Prize.

Meg Williams: Skillset

I work for a public policy research group as my day job, though as a community organizer and not a researcher. I work with the policy team to design outreach to inform the public. This means I have to be very research literate and able to design outreach programs to explain this rather wonky stuff to college students. I have also done research at the Library of Congress and the NYPL Berg Collection and served as a fact checker on a Jonathan Franzen novel (which I never read because I lowkey find him insufferable).

I know SPSS and statistical methods which we can use to test whether our claims are really supported by the data or are just random. I have a background in psych experiment designs, but this translates well to archival research as well. I can use Excel/csv to organize data and generate graphics.

As part of my background in statistics, I am skilled at designing projects so that we can ensure the data we are using actually illustrates what we are claiming. Also, I am very sensitive to arguments and can spot problems in logic. I am good at asking the right questions.

I want to learn how to:

-work with large datasets through programming

-use Python in some way

-use code for archival research