Developer: While I do not have a background in programming, I recently began learning Python, HTML and CSS. I have enjoyed developing my knowledge of these languages and hope to further my experience with them during this course.

Project Manager: I am very organized and have experience with juggling my projects and tasks at once. In the past, I worked as an operations assistant so I am familiar with making sure things are running smoothly while taking care of issues quickly and efficiently.

Researcher: My background is in history and using traditional research methods. I love to dive deep into new specific events or periods in history.  I have experience working with a variety of source material and often use online databases to further my research. My past academic research has focused on British history and more specifically the creation of its social welfare state during WWII.

Outreach Coordinator: I am familiar with and use various forms of social media.  I enjoy engaging with others and believe community engagement is extremely important when working on humanities projects. During my undergrad, I helped with community outreach for a museum exhibit I curated with other students.

Designer/UX: I some experience with design and user experience but I am interested in learning more and developing a solid understanding of this area. I am familiar with Adobe Premier and Indesign.

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

The following are a few traits close to my heart for the past few years. I have worked in many different positions within the Arts and have worked on multiple Geography related projects within the areas of Cultural Geography & GIS while at Columbus State University. My personal interests are documentation and digitization of historical objects, artifacts and events whether of personal interest or cultural significance for public use and long term accessibility.

GIS: ArcMap/ArcGIS Online/QGIS
Intro-Adv GIS courses as a Geography minor during my undergrad. Assisted with digital map projects for Cultural Geography projects and created digital maps of artist’s studios.
http://www.arcgis.com/apps/presentation/index.html?webmap=be0f292017154d6e8be446edb2e6aba2

Archival: Omeka/Excel/WordPress/Wax
Worked on the archive and CV of realist painter Bo Bartlett with Excel and Omeka while an undergrad and in the course Archival Encounters in Spring of 2019 with Lisa Rhody.
https://philiplivingstonjr1777landpatent.omeka.net/exhibits

Documentation and Digital Scan: Photographs/Documents/Objects
Work with the Warwick Historical Society to document and digitize collection by a flatbed scanner and digital camera. Scanned over 50 journals and sketchbooks for the Bartlett Center.
Grace_Herbert_Pelton_Autobiography_1918

Data Analysis and Design: Tableau/Excel
Data Analysis and Design: Fundamentals course last semester with Michelle McSweeney. Created over 12 data visualizations with 12 different data sets to tell a specific story.
https://public.tableau.com/shared/MD6TPPWJ2?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link

Outreach and Social Media: Program Director/Webmaster
Directed non-profit program Home is Where the Art is and assisted with Art in Jails for the Bo Bartlett Center and Bartlett Studios. Also, webmaster and social media creator for the Center.
https://bobartlettcenter.org/home-is-where-the-art-is/

I decided not to propose my DH project, so I am ready to be a collaborator on one of the project teams.

Research + Digitization: I have a disciplinary background in history, which has allowed me to work in traditional research methodologies. I’ve worked on research projects that have had strong historical underpinnings, such as looking at the geopolitical ramifications of Non -Aggression Pact of 1939 in Eastern Europe. I’ve worked on all types of colonial history and black identity projects. If your project requires digging into digital databases, archives, libraries, and cultural institutions to find particular source material, I can help. If you need to write through a historical lens, I can contribute those skills. However, I want to do more than contribute skills I already have. I want to learn new skills in research. I want to learn the tools of digitization, audio, visual, textual and otherwise. Digitization which is a process that DHers often use to reproduce materials and expand their accessibility to other researchers. I want to learn the fine skills of working with OCR to translate print material into machine readable material, which is enormously important to anyone working in the humanities, if you want to export that data to do any sort of computational text analysis. I want to learn how to organize a digital repository or archive.

Outreach + SEO: I’ve previously worked in digital marketing where I optimized upward of 7000 pieces of jewelry for a small business. We had a multi-pronged strategy through social media activity, digital advertising, and search engine optimization to get customers to our website. As a result, I have some skills optimizing pages through meta data, links, keywords, and creating social media attention for our products. Not only that, I also edited materials in Photoshop for our campaign and online placements. I definitely want to learn newer skills in online marketing to make sure our projects get the public reach it deserves.

Project management + Team leadership: I’ve certainly served as team leader and a team member. Most often, I opt to be a collaborator. If I feel that I know enough about how the project should work, I would be enthusiastically choose to be a project manager but I generally don’t like to take roles where I don’t have much expertise. It will certainly have to depend on the project.

Coding + Programming: one of the most important roles that will be part of every project is the programmer role. I have close to zero experience in that capacity. I would like to work closely whoever is in that role since my chief objective in taking this class is to learn more about coding in general.

I’m a seasoned educator and a budding hacker. If your project has didactic intent, I can help you shape your interface for your intended audience. If you need a courageous team member to learn a new program or coding language, I’m happy to do it. In my 20 years of tinkering with technology in the humanities, I see joy in every opportunity, from designing game-based play using TWINE and building critical collections in Manifold to automating the resizing of huge collections of images in Photoshop and creating envelope-pushing audio versions of text and primary sources. As a published author of fiction and a long-standing department chair and curriculum director, I’m also happy to write and edit.

Research
My passion for research has been reignited since entering the DH program. Last year’s courses led me to the collections of the Morgan Library and Schomburg Center for the sacred experience of holding in my hands an 1899 edition of The Yellow Wall-Paper and letters penned by Nella Larsen. I’ve loved the digital bloodhound pursuit as well, sniffing around the web for details about New York Times best-selling authors or merging and cleaning datasets from disparate sources.

Development
My skills are adolescent, but my persistence is professional! My most developed skills are HTML and CSS. For DH courses, I’ve done some decent work with Tableau and Python. I’ve tinkered with (and loved) JavaScript, SQL and Jekyll as well, though I’m far rockier there.

Design/UX
Last spring, in Patrick Smith’s Software Design Lab, I helped a peer create a network-independent website for teaching DH in prison. In considering the UX for that site, we did a lot of research into the psychology of prison reform, the psychology of color and layout, disabilities common among the imprisoned (there’s a disproportionate number of colorblind inmates), and W3C accessibility guidelines. What the Intro to DH course last term taught me is that good UX goes farther than that: you start with a diverse team, the principles of universal design, and a deep eagerness to detect implicit bias in the work. You also include loops of testing and feedback with a diverse group of reviewers. And even then, there’s still work to be done, such as versioning and clear crediting, as our reading for this week reminds us. I’m deeply committed to these issues of accessibility and universal design. (In fact, there are great accessibility tools even in WordPress that I think few have explored.)

On the more skill-specific side, I’ve used Photoshop for years and I’ve just begun to explore Illustrator, so I’m happy to create web graphics or logos as needed, though I don’t have a background in graphic design.

Project Management
Years of serving as a dean of studies and department chair have taught me that explicit expectations and clear deadlines can turn brilliant vision into reality. In order for a project to work well, team members need to agree on the timing, medium, and nature of their meetings and work—decisions that often vary widely from group to group. My experience with workflow apps has been limited to proprietary software for education, but I’m happy to learn.

Hi All,

As I mentioned the last Tuesday, this is a class in which my aim is to learn digital skills. This semester I am taking a class on GIS. I know to use Excel, SPSS, NVivo. For my own digital project (capstone project), I will have to learn to create a webpage, visualization of statistics, creation of interactive maps, and analysis of photographs. The range of skills I need to learn is broad, and I am willing to learn and assume a more supportive role in this area.

I have certainly an extended experience doing research, in project management, and outreach, though I am not particularly interested in doing something in social media. Those who took classes with me know that as life philosophy I do not use social media.

I think that for two of the projects, it is important to mention that Spanish is my mother tongue and race and ethnicity is one of my fields of specialization.

Among the three projects presented, though I find all of them super interesting, I am more inclined to participate in Kelly’s project. I am academic and I like a lot of her proposal and the fact that she had the imagination and courageous to create a journal. This is something I would like to be part of and gain experience. I also know well the field of publications. I have published myself and I am reviewer in peer-reviewed journals.

Hello everyone! As I’m used to doing most of my digital work solo, I’m a tad unfamiliar with the appropriate categories to parcel my skillset out into. So forgive me if this comes off scattered.

Technical/Developer: Thanks to an awkward few months of employment anxiety, I possess programming knowledge of Python, R, Java, Lisp, and (at a surface level) SQL. (Also knowledge of BASIC if people still use that…) I also have working familiarity with HTML, CSS, and general principles of web design. Regarding theoretical knowledge, my background is in Computational Linguistics and I’m fairly comfortable with using text analysis models. In the past, I’ve designed web-sites for coursework and managed a blog for an online supplements company. As well, I implemented a command line tool in Python for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for Korean texts. As much of my technical background has been acquired piecemeal, I would prefer to work in a developer role to help sand out the rough edges and help me become more comfortable in technical implementations.

Project Manager: The past year I was an editorial assistant for the 2019 edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities and Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, during which I was responsible for tracking and managing the multiple edits going between contributors and the publisher’s copy-editors while ensuring adherence to established time frames. From that I learned to be comfortable managing the multiple parts involved in a project and how to keep accurate accounting of project advancement.

Design: The only asset I really provide in terms of a designer role is that I’m fairly knowledgeable about ARIA rules and their enforcement for accessible web-design and about the use of open-source formatting to ensure a more broad user experience. I would like to try and learn more about design philosophies through this role.

Outreach Coordinator: I have a background in sales and outreach thanks to multiple hats I’ve worn over the years and know how to manage public engagement. However, to be perfectly frank, I’ve always disliked this role and would not really enjoy working in this capacity more than necessary.