[This is an abbreviated post based on the original, which is found here: http://www.annakijas.com/digital-frontiers-2014/]

I have just returned from Digital Frontiers 2014, a conference at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas where I had the pleasure of spending two days with a wonderfully diverse crowd of people representing K-12 education, higher education, academic/public libraries, and museums. I was invited to participate in a panel on Digital Humanities in Music for which I gave a talk on “Open Access and Geo-Spatial Tools in (Music) Research.” 

I heard many interesting presentations and panels, as well as two great keynotes. In the opening keynote, “Here and There: Creating a DH Community,” Miriam Posner shared her rules for building community, which were a poignant reminder of why we do what we do. It’s not about the Digital Humanities, it’s about the Community, which is made up of our faculty, students, colleagues, and others. She provided honest answers about the current environment and culture many of us work in; pointing out that the things we need [i.e. server space, resources] in order to build DH projects are often not available to the newly hired DH academics and librarians, whose job duties call for the unattainable – building a DH center/community/project/program without any support. Posner also provided suggestions about building relationships with individuals at your campus who will be advocates or allies, as well as participating in the scholarly conversations and activity on campus—meeting your faculty or students where they are. She offered her view of workshops, specifically workshops that are meant to train people on DH tools or software, citing the often-low attendance and poor retention of skills, despite the hours of preparation and labor required on behalf of the librarian or instructor. Posner pointed to another option, immersive training over several days or a week, which still won’t teach the participant everything about the topic they are studying, however it will give them a chance to focus, experiment, and ask questions over a longer period of time.

Dorothea Salo gave the second keynote, “Don’t Make Me Think!,” in which she purposefully challenged us to think about the way in which we judge each other in academia and wear our degrees almost like badges in order to trump those who may not hold the same degree or be officially part of our group/discipline/community. Other people have also written about this similar phenomenon, recently Roxanne Shirazi presented “Reproducing the Academy” at ALA sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Section of ACRL, in which she discusses “shadow labor” of librarians and the issues around credentialism. Rather than building exclusive communities that continue to marginalize those who are on the outside, we need to work on creating a safe and open environment for those who are in and outside of academia. This is not an easy task, because this culture is so prevalent across academia. Salo’s keynote is a call for all of us to stop making excuses why we can’t [fill in the blank: publish open access, do a DH project, learn how to use a new program, etc.]. She provided a number of examples in which librarians and faculty basically say “don’t make me think” because it’s easier than actually doing or learning something new or difficult. Stop making excuses and do something. Salo suggests that we stop allowing others make excuses, but rather sympathize with them and then provide a suggestion—show them that we can teach each other, learn from each other, make each other think.

Presentations and panels covered a range of topics, such as representing difficult cultural memory, social networks in digital scholarship, e-Science and data management initiatives, building collaborative work environments for faculty and student collaboration, as well as digital humanities projects and initiatives at libraries and museums. A few of the papers which interested me, included Christopher J. Dowdy’s “Right Remembering by Digital Means.” He is developing a curated exhibit of lynching in downtown Dallas in 1910 and has assessed a number of different archival digital exhibits, including those from the Minnesota Historical Society, Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, and Mary Turner Project, all of which have tackled with curating and presenting primary sources and narratives around “difficult memories.” Dowdy is very conscious of the effect these primary source materials may have on the community and is therefore interested in curating the content in a way that is not inhospitable to the community who experienced the original event. Nathan Hall presented findings he gathered from interviews with faculty about their use of digital libraries/repositories and open access publishing in “Sociotechnical Affects in Digital Library Use,” which demonstrate that their is a lack of understanding about the function of open access repositories or open access publishing amongst faculty, as well as a lack of incentive for them to use OARs or submit to OA publishers. Clarke Iakovakis and Rafia Mirza presented on “Developing Library Services for Digital Humanities & E-Science Support Using Qualitative Research,” in which they shared findings from faculty interviews about roles of librarians in E-Science support, data management, technology support, and open access repositories for data. They identified strengths in which librarians are perceived by faculty as information specialists on an interdisciplinary level, navigators of resources, and that they build relationships with faculty. Weaknesses identified, included the lack of money and resources to support computing, including issues with bandwidth and transfer speeds, server space, and software or technical support. To address these findings, their library will be focusing on better integrating scholarly communication into the work of their liaisons, as well as hiring several new positions.

These two days were filled with interesting conversations, learning about projects, tools, and sharing ideas. This conference catered to people from various disciplines, institutions, and organizations, as well as interest levels and skill sets in the digital scholarship spectrum. It is a great event to meet other professionals working on various aspects of digital scholarship, including data management, instruction, digital projects, open access publishing, data/content curation, etc.

You’ll find more comments and conversations about Digital Frontiers 2014 on Twitter: @DigiFront | #DF14TWU.