Category: Scene Reports

Stephen Zweibel is Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Patrick Smyth is a doctoral student in English and Digital Fellow, also at the Graduate Center. Both work on the NEH-funded project, DH Box, designed to help faculty integrate digital humanities tools into their curriculum.

Patrick: So we both work on DH Box, but could you briefly describe the project for our readers?

Stephen: We call it a computer lab in the cloud, but it’s really a web app that ties into a tool called Docker. Users create an account, and when they sign in, a new DH Box instance is created: a kind of virtual computer that has a number of programming and digital humanities relevant tools installed on it, built individually for the person who signed up for it. So they can play with, say, IPython Notebook or RStudio, or Omeka, or a number of other tools, or run scripts, or break it, or do whatever they want. It’s a cloud computer that you get personal access to, that has DH tools already provided for you.

Patrick: How did DH Box get started? Where did the project originate?

Stephen: At the time, I was a Health Sciences librarian at Hunter College, and was teaching workshops to other librarians at different CUNY campuses. I realized that it was a pain to have to install all these tools every time, and found that it was extremely frustrating to deal with the different IT policies and the different procurement requirements and the different infrastructures that were at each campus, and it was a huge barrier to teaching these kinds of skills. I had been trying to learn programming myself and was playing with all of these different types of tools like IPython Notebooks and RStudio. I was also made aware of equipment like the Raspberry Pi, and I thought it would be super cool to just deploy Raspberry Pis for everyone, so that everyone could have a little computer lab of their own.

So we started with Raspberry Pis, and then found that most people preferred to click a button on the internet than to buy a bunch of hardware (even if it’s cheap) and assemble it. And so we turned to the cloud.

And that’s where you came in.

Patrick: Right. In 2014, I joined the Digital Fellows, a small group of graduate students that works on digital projects at the CUNY Graduate Center, under Matt Gold and Lisa Rhody. That first summer I joined, Matt sent an email saying, hey, do any of the Fellows want to get involved with this project?

And when I came to the first meeting and heard what it was about, I recall being a little excited. I had just started playing around with Python and I was very much a novice, but one thing I was struggling with was package management, and where’s the REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop)? And what’s the difference between the command line and Python? And all of these very elementary things that you struggle with at the beginning when you’re learning.

Stephen: So that’s a question that has come up a few times, whether the installation of these tools is a necessary pain. That if we move more in the direction that DH Box is going, our students will miss out on some essential learning if they skip the installation.

Patrick: Something that’s often brought up in DH is this idea of experimentation and play, like Stephen Ramsay’s “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around.” I think this is part of what DH Box allows you to do, that it does reduce some of these transaction costs. The difficulty of setting up DH Box versus setting up a whole MALLET environment is a pretty big one, and you could even just use our demo to ask these questions, like “What can MALLET do?” or “What does IPython look like?” And then you know if you want to install it or not.

[pullquote] It’s a way to get people to play with and experiment with these kinds of tools, and see whether or not they mean something to them, see whether or not they resonate with the kind of research they want to do, the kind of learning they want to engage in.[/pullquote]So I think there’s a case to be made for doing things the “hard” way, where you learn to configure everything yourself from scratch. But there are also a lot of use cases that involve skipping over the process of installation, either to test something or just to get people excited about DH.

Stephen: Sure. There is also a social justice aspect to it. We talk about accessibility and creating an on-ramp for people to use and learn these kinds of tools, engage with computational literacy. We work in the CUNY system, and it’s not always easy to find the resources of a fully kitted out computer lab, especially in the humanities departments, and especially the undergrad humanities departments. DH Box can serve as a bridge for anybody who has any kind of computer, and a browser, to use these tools that are difficult to find your way into. It gives you a friendly entrance. That’s the thing we talk about, it’s a way to get people to play with and experiment with these kinds of tools, and see whether or not they mean something to them, see whether or not they resonate with the kind of research they want to do, the kind of learning they want to engage in.

Patrick: Exactly! There are all these great open source tools out there now, but if you don’t know how to use a text editor or the command line, many are just too hard to get started with.
I was trying to explain this to someone the other day in terms of an anecdote. My dad is a carpenter and he builds all these houses, and so growing up we actually lived in a house that he had built himself. But for quite a long time, there were no doorknobs on any of the doors.

Stephen: Hmm!

Patrick: And I think that was because, as somebody who really enjoyed working on houses and building things, he’d done all of the stuff that was interesting for him. The house was built as far as he was concerned, but the…

Stephen: …the usability…

Patrick: …or getting rid of the pile of gravel outside. [laughs] Or putting doorknobs on. That just wasn’t interesting from the perspective of a builder or a creator. And I feel like I see that so often with programming, or even with myself now that I’ve gotten deeper into programming, that usually what draws you to a project is a problem, either your own problem you want to solve or there’s some interesting turn of the problem that intrigues you, and once you’ve solved the problem for yourself or you’ve solved that portion of the problem that drew you in, you tend to lose interest. So that’s the last mile problem, that the internet is filled with all these scripts that work for the person who created them, but they didn’t take the time to include the UI or the documentation or whatever it would take for an ordinary person to make use of it.

DH Box is a project that doesn’t do that, it’s a project that actually cares about the last mile. I appreciate that about working on DH Box.

Stephen: And getting to the last mile…what—or who—is the last mile?

Patrick: We’re building for someone at an institution or a library or a class who could set it up for a group of students. That’s a somewhat technical user, because DH Box still requires a certain amount of configuration to set it up for a group, and then everyone in that group can be an “end user” and just use it, without any particular technical knowledge.

Stephen: What would you say you’ve gotten out of working on DH Box, as a graduate student and as a researcher?

Patrick: I feel like I’ve gotten a ton out of working on this project. And I think this is an interesting thing about digital humanities projects in general: many of them tend to be very experimental and I feel like they really help people who work on them to grow as scholars, or as technologists. When I started working on DH Box, I’d done some technology consulting work before my Ph.D., and that was useful when working on the initial NEH grant. But I really hadn’t done much in the way of really technical work, like working with Python or working with web apps, or knowing about ports and protocols. And stuff like Linux, I use Linux all the time now, it’s one of my go-tos for…

Stephen: It is your go-to.

Patrick: [laughs] It is my go-to. And honestly it was really working on DH Box that brought me to that, because in order to work on DH Box, which uses Docker, I had to use Linux. I think nowadays you can use Docker on Windows or OSX, but Linux is really what it’s based on, and back then you had to use Linux to use Docker. And getting into Linux made me follow some other rabbitholes, learning about computers in general, learning about other programming languages like Lisp. And so I think that working on DH Box has started a bit of a landslide for me, where I kind of got brought into a whole world that I hadn’t really known existed.

Stephen: Yes…as for me, it’s a similar story, it’s taught me a lot about Docker, and containerization, and ports, and all that, which is all very useful for a lot of library applications; for instance digital scholarship centers should be using Docker, I think, more widely, and they probably will be. But also it’s taught me a lot about user experience and how difficult that is. You can do what you think users will like, and that has almost nothing to do with what users will actually do. UX is so iterative, and it’s certainly not intuitive to me, and it’s something I need to learn a lot more about.

Patrick: What’s next for DH Box?

Stephen: Well, we’re continuing work on it, we’re finding individual groups that are looking to do interesting things with the platform and building along with them. And we’ll see how it goes, and perhaps we’ll apply for another grant or two. We just had two great team members join us, Jojo Karlin for outreach and Jonathan Reeve at Columbia who is working on a corpus downloader. So we’re still full steam ahead for the project.

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Spencer D. C. Keralis is Research Associate Professor and Digital Humanities Coordinator with the Public Services Division of the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries. He is also the Founding Director of Digital Frontiers, an annual conference and THATCamp that brings together the makers and users of digital resources for humanities research, teaching, and learning. Digital Frontiers celebrates its fifth anniversary in September at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Spencer was interviewed by Courtney Jacobs, Special Collections Librarian at UNT.

Courtney: You are a Research Associate Professor with UNT Libraries, not a librarian. How does your unique background and your particular research interests facilitate digital humanities (DH) and libraries?

Spencer: I came into the library as a Council on Library and Information Resources Fellow back in 2011. That program places humanities graduates in academic libraries as a way of both helping humanists learn more about the way libraries operate within the academy, and also to enrich the culture of libraries with the deep subject knowledge and practical experience that those humanities scholars bring. DH is a logical place for CLIR fellows to intervene in the libraries because you can’t do DH without libraries and you also can’t do DH without the deep subject knowledge that scholars bring. For me it seems like a logical point of intervention for a person like me in libraries, especially because my background is mainly in book history and early American literature. That’s an area where digital archives in particular have a real opportunity to enrich the field. The knowledge that book historians bring can be valuable for collection development and interpretation of archival materials as they’re being digitized. For me it just seems like a natural outgrowth of the kind of work that I have done and that I want to do in the future.

Courtney: So how did Digital Frontiers develop during this time?

Spencer: It actually started as a question when I was still a post-doc here. I had a meeting with some of the folks that run the Portal to Texas History and asked if they had ever had a conference that highlighted scholarship that had been done based on the materials in the portal. The answer was “No,” and when I asked if we wanted to they said, “Sure!” It quickly outpaced that sort of narrow definition of what our question was in relation to the Portal. The interest within libraries and at the intersection of libraries and digital humanities was so great that we realized that it could be a much more diverse and much more interesting space. Typically scholars go to MLA, librarians go to DLF, and ne’er the twain connect. Although we do see a lot more librarians now at MLA, I don’t think you see as much cross-pollination into the library conferences.

Digital Frontiers provides a space where the librarians, archivists, and technologists from the information sciences are able to get together with the people who are using the materials that they build to ask important questions about what is being done with these materials and what the future of this field is. I think it’s unique in that it is derived from a research question, and it’s driven by the community. It’s not so huge that the thematics and messaging gets lost, but it’s not so little that it’s just an echo chamber. We get a really good diversity of students, scholars, early-career professionals from both the teaching and research side of the house and libraries and also people from the community who may not necessarily feel welcome at other kinds of conferences.

Courtney: Digital Frontiers is an innovative collaborative and cross-disciplinary conference that is coming up on its 5th year. What are some of the most surprising things you’ve learned in that time?

Spencer: One of the things that’s actually been a surprise in a negative way is how invested some DH scholars are in gatekeeping in the field. That some of the new things that are being attempted in terms of creative dissertations in media studies and such aren’t necessarily welcome in digital humanities as its been established through other conferences and professional organizations. That’s a disappointment to me. I think that as more and more of our scholarship moves both into the digital realm in terms of scholarly publications and our ability to reach wider publics, and also as more and more of the primary source materials that we are working with are available digitally, it’s really important for us to be limber and open to new kinds of interventions in the field. The digital humanities has proven over and over again that there is a definite in-crowd mentality that wants to exclude certain types of things that are maybe challenging to a certain kind of status quo in the digital humanities and that bothers me.

I see Digital Frontiers as being a real intervention in that we will highlight that kind of work and we will call it digital humanities. We welcome folks like our keynote speaker from last year, Carolyn Guertin, who works on new media and games. We have an opportunity to bring humanistic understanding and digital research methods into the study of games and game culture. I think that the big tent DH that we advocate for is super important.

On the positive side I’ve been really impressed and delighted to learn how eager the community that’s grown up around Digital Frontiers is to learn and grow. For me the community is as much a product of this project as the conference itself is because we make these human connections that are so important not just to the conference but to the social networks that emerge out of the conference and endure beyond it. I know there are collaborations and projects that have emerged from the conversations we have at DF that wouldn’t happen at other conferences because they’re either too expensive or too exclusive for certain people to feel welcome. So that’s, for me, one of the great joys of doing this project: that it brings together people who may not otherwise have the opportunity to engage with each other and produce really fruitful results.

Courtney: Speaking of big tent DH and inclusion, you have written about undergraduate research in the digital humanities, and are invested in empowering undergrads in this field. Why is this important to you?

Spencer: I teach in the English department and the Information Sciences department here at UNT, and as a teacher it is really important for me that students are empowered to use what they learn in the classroom and that they are given the opportunity to really be treated as a potential peers and colleagues in this area. There are some really great examples of student research that we’ve been able to feature at Digital Frontiers, from folks at Texas Tech and UT Dallas, and we’ve gotten to hear about really pioneering stuff that is going on at Southern Methodist University library with their digital projects practicum. For me it’s really important that we think about these things in terms of what is in it for the students, not so much what’s in it for the scholars and the schools. So it’s a point that I think is going to become more and more important as this field develops and as it injects itself more and more into our pedagogy.

Digital Frontiers is an opportunity to both model ethical behavior towards students and to give students a professionalization opportunity as early as possible in their careers. It’s a way to give students the opportunity to fall in love with the humanities and the digital humanities, and to learn about what it means to be a librarian now, and to do technology in the humanities in an environment that is really welcoming and isn’t talking down to them. When an undergrad can share the stage with a tenured professor and be given equal attention and be treated with as much respect and credibility as the tenured professor, it really can change their perspective on what we do.

Courtney: What’s the most significant thing libraries and other cultural institutions can be doing right now to facilitate the digital humanities and research being done by digital humanists?

Spencer: A lot of the groundwork that’s been done in the last 15-20 years around digitization has been really important, but what needs to happen now is that we shift our focus away from the canonical, nationalistic stuff that has been typically funded through projects like the Chronicling America Project and others, and start looking at making sure that we can provide access to works by people of color, works from the LGBT community, and the documentary and historical records of those marginalized communities. There has been a big push recently to diversify DH in the #PocoDH movement, through the volumes like the Disrupting DH collection that Jesse Stommel and Dorothy Kim are editing, and through the #TransformDH conversation. These interventions are really important to draw attention to the gaps in what is the digital record now and in how scholars have used it.

There’s a really great activist tradition in librarianship, like in cataloging where they are challenging how Library of Congress subject heading are sexist, and racist, and trans- and homophobic. We need to bring those up to date with contemporary usage so that people can find stuff about themselves. But also I think there’s been a really great activist tradition in archives. Our colleagues at Texas Southern with the Barbara Jordan archives are working to make sure those materials are available; and Marvin Taylor at NYU is working to ensure that magnetic media is digitized before more durable stuff. So I think we need to be making more spaces like Digital Frontiers where conversations can happen between scholars, archivists, librarians, and the technologists that facilitate all this so that we can be better at prioritizing at-risk media, and the historical and documentary record of marginalized communities.

The canonical stuff is always going to be there. Even American newspapers are already reasonably well digitized and paper will still be paper in 40 years, but there is a lot of stuff, especially in contemporary history that is at risk now that we need to be making more efforts to preserve

Courtney: You sort of talked about some of these already, but what do you think some of the biggest challenges the future of Digital Humanities faces today?

Spencer: I think that the biggest challenge that digital humanities has in general is that it is expensive to do, and that is only going to be exacerbated. We have very quickly moved into a sphere where there is a separation between the haves and the have-nots. The DH in-crowd generally comes from well-resourced institutions; institutions that have infrastructure to support these kind of projects. Those who don’t have access to those resources are marginalized because they’re not making and developing tools. They’re just using the tools that other people have developed. I think that kind of divisiveness needs to end. Because it’s not going to harm just the digital humanities, but humanities in general.

I also think labor ethics are going to be an ongoing challenge for digital humanities, especially in terms of using student labor in the classroom, but also in adequately representing librarians and technologists as equal partners in the research and as collaborators rather than just service providers. That’s a conversation that’s been going on for a while but there’s not been much resolution. But I think there is hope in those areas because there are people that are calling out that kind of stuff. My recent work about the use of student labor in the classroom is going to be appearing in the Disrupting the Digital Humanities collection. Students shouldn’t be paying for the privilege of working on a faculty member’s project. There is a place for students to be able to do durable work and to produce durable products out of the classroom, but they need to be given credit for it. And if they’re doing technical labor, it needs to be compensated.  A grade is not, I think, compensation. Miriam Posner and a team of her students at UCLA recently published the Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights, which is a great soft solution for getting the conversation started. But at some point there is going to need to be some sort of intervention in terms of policy, both at the university level and from funding agencies, that makes it clear that these kinds of practices aren’t tolerated by the community at large. I think that adopting our Statement of Inclusion for Digital Frontiers last year is really important for making people feeling welcome in the discipline and in the field. But we need to do more to make sure that people are protected in terms of being able to take credit for their labor, and be compensated for the work that they do.

Talk to us on Twitter: @hauntologist & @courtneyejacobs; and follow @DigiFront and #DF16RU for information on this year’s Digital Frontiers conference. Thanks to UNT Libraries Major Programs Student Assistant Laura Schadt for help transcribing the interview!

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Brandon Locke is the Director of The Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR) at Michigan State University. Kristen Mapes serves as the Digital Humanities Specialist for the College of Arts and Letters at MSU. This interview was conducted by Bobby Smiley, the Digital Scholarship and American History Librarian at Michigan State.

Bobby: While you’re both trained as librarians, you don’t work in a library. How did you arrive where you are?

Kristen: My order of operations was first libraries, then digital humanities. I was in graduate school for medieval studies at Fordham, and after a considering a Ph.D., I decided to go to library school at Rutgers. Because of my medieval studies background and experience with rare books and manuscripts, I initially wanted to focus on special collections. But in my exploration of on-going special collections work, I began to think more about digital humanities’ ability to bring something new not only to special collections work, but academic librarianship generally. This prompted me to take Chris Sula’s DH course in the library school at Pratt, which helped cement that interest in digital humanities and librarianship.

Brandon: I was an undergrad history major at Nebraska where there’s a lot of digital humanities work being done. While I was there, they offered an undergraduate digital history class, but I ran as far away from it as I could. I had already decided I’d never need to know how to program or make a website. But as I was approaching graduate school, I realized that the field was moving towards digital work, and recognized how digital humanities opened new ways to look at a larger variety of sources, and new ways of interpreting those sources, and a platform for sharing and communicating scholarship. I decided to stay at Nebraska and focus on digital history for my graduate work. As I was working on my masters, I realized I was more interested in working on digital projects, information infrastructure, and collaborative work, so I went to library school at Illinois, and continued to build on some of the digital work I started at Nebraska.

Bobby: Even though you’re not stationed in a library, I think of you—and I know you think of yourselves—as DH librarians. How does your library background influence the work you do?

Brandon: Most obviously, I wear cardigans everyday. More tangibly, I can see it come through in my emphasis on information literacy and digital literacy in the classroom. As Director of LEADR (The Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research), I focus on facilitating and assisting student (especially undergraduate) research, largely by partnering with faculty in History, Anthropology, and other departments, to add digital components to their classes. For students who are History or Anthropology majors, or want to work at cultural heritage sites, developing digital projects has immediate use and value. However, for the other students from across campus, the values can be less clear. I focus on making students comfortable with digital technology, helping them develop multimodal websites, short video or documentaries, or using mapping text analysis to develop their research questions. Research and writing in digital forms are essential skills for the future, so I tend to focus on these types of base skills.

Kristen: Working at the college level, I help develop undergraduate and graduate curriculum, teach the intro DH course, build the DH study abroad program, serve as the advisor for the digital humanities undergraduate minor and graduate certificate, in addition to teaching workshops and consulting on digital projects and digital curriculum development. In effect, I act as the DH liaison for the eight departments in College of Arts and Letters (CAL), and in that sense, I think of myself as a deeply embedded subject librarian—reaching out to a number of departments is something subject librarians are very familiar with. Besides collaborating with Brandon and the Libraries (on workshops, symposia, and other DH programming), in many ways, my work is informed by outreach librarianship, and my efforts to build DH capacity across the university.

Bobby: Given the nature of your work then, who has most influenced your thinking?

Brandon & Kristen (in unison): Miriam Posner!

Kristen: In addition to being key in helping us think through issues around outreach and programming, [she’s influential] especially for her generous and thoughtful work on digital humanities curriculum development, and important because of the centrality of curricular development and support in both our work.

And in my own research on social media and medieval studies scholars on Twitter, Bonnie Stewart is another touchstone person for me. Also, Melissa Terras is awesome, and influential on my thinking about DH.

Brandon: In addition to Miriam, Jentery Sayers, Shaun Macpherson, Nina Belojevic at the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria, as well as Bethany Nowviskie, especially for the work she did at the Scholar’s Lab at UVA.

Bobby: And what projects you’re involved in excite you the most?

Kristen: I’m currently working with Devin Higgins, one of the Digital Library Programmers [at MSU], and we’re taking a little bit older digital humanities project, The Roman de la Rose Digital Library, and looking at ways of mapping and creating a tool for exploring information about the manuscripts in an interactive way, both for their content and codicology. I’m excited by bringing digital humanities into conversation with my own medieval studies background, and, with this project, giving back to both communities.

Brandon: I’m really interested in bringing material culture to the classroom, and I’m drawing up two new courses. First is a History Harvest course that will encourage students to engage with historical objects and the relationships people have with them. Second, I’m working on a course that focuses on museum exhibits and 3D models of objects, really modeled on Bill Turkel’s work at University of Western Ontario and the amazing stuff coming out of the UVic Maker Lab. For both of these courses, I’ve been working with the MSU Museum.

Bobby: In all your activity, how does the library fit in your work?

Kristen: Besides all the collaboration we’ve done with the library on programming and teaching workshops, in my introduction to digital humanities course, I regularly take my students to the library for class. We had a class session with Ryan Edge, the Media and Digital Preservation Librarian, on metadata and preservation. Also, Thomas Padilla was the class’s embedded librarian. In addition to teaching a session on network analysis, he came to the class several times to assist students with digital projects, and acted as the on-call help for their final projects. Basically, the library is my go-to answer for everything in my course.

Brandon: I turn to the library for you in teaching informational literacy, Thomas Padilla for teaching about data cleaning and preparation, and both of you as well as Devin Higgins for helping students with digital projects.

Bobby: Candidly, I feel like the Library gives me, Thomas, and Devin a lot of flexibility and freedom to pursue DH possibilities in our work, and I know the same applies to you both. Besides front office support, I’m wondering if there’s anything about being at Michigan State that helps facilitate the work you’re doing?

Kristen: Well, there was the organic nature of our hires; we’re in the unique position of having basically arrived as a cohort. But I also think one of the main reasons we feel so supported is we were not asked or expected to build digital humanities from the ground up. That there was the confluence of interests and activities around DH at the university level over the past several years helps explain why the library hired two digital humanities [now scholarship] librarians—with Brandon and myself hired less than a year later. And that DH support came not from the provost or university level administrators, but organically from departments and individuals, which reflects the state of digital humanities writ-large at MSU. Not being the only DH person in your college or department and knowing  you have faculty advocates across the university who can provide additional support for new projects and initiatives has allowed for my and our collective success after a relatively short period of time. Especially, the groundwork done by WIDE (Writing, Information, and Digital Experience) and MATRIX (The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences), in particular on grants, helped foster that interest in DH well before we arrived.

Brandon: MATRIX was really big for me—they’ve been incredibly supportive of my work and the development of LEADR. I think, more importantly, MATRIX was critical in developing an awareness and appreciation for this kind of work on campus, so we didn’t arrive having to tell people about digital humanities for the first time. Many faculty members in my departments have already done DH projects or used DH pedagogical techniques in the classroom. MATRIX has also helped to establish MSU as a known quantity in the DH world—people come here knowing that there is appreciation in departments and support across campus for this type of work work.

Kristen: And because, in our case, that community wasn’t a single centralized unit that did all DH on campus, Brandon, you, Thomas, Devin, and I have been able to work across all units together, and that collaboration has been supported at all levels.

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Justin Schell is the Learning Design Specialist at the University of Michigan Library, where he is leading the development of the Shapiro Design Lab. Alix Keener, who conducted this interview, is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the U-M Library.

Alix: I’m enjoying that there’s a Star Wars BB-8 robot rolling around in the background of this interview. There’s probably something there about humanities and technology; which, speaking of, how did you get involved in digital humanities and libraries? What came first?

Justin: Libraries came first. I worked at the Music Library at UW-Milwaukee during my undergrad and worked for the Immigration History Research Center and the Digital Content Library during my PhD program at the University of Minnesota. Then I received the CLIR postdoc and that was the start of my work in digital humanities and digital scholarship.

Alix: Where did your interest in DH come from?

Justin: As soon as I started at Minnesota, I tried to push the work I was doing beyond DH. While there were very real and important issues facing humanists and humanities as a whole, it was important to me to create communities beyond those boundaries; working with scientists of all stripes, technologists, and more. It was more about building communities through these different methodologies and practices than it was about building their uses within certain groups. So, the example I always use is physicists use Python, humanists use Python, both for types of text mining; let’s see how they can talk to each other and help each other. Libraries are nicely positioned to help facilitate those conversations and offer a way to get started with those kinds of projects.

Alix: What projects are you currently working on that you are excited about?

Justin: I think just building the space at the Shapiro Design Lab (here at the University of Michigan), that’s the biggest project I’m working on. It’s not just me, we’ve got a staff of 12, both graduate and undergraduate students in different fields. There’s a lot of buy-in and support and engagement from other parts of the library and the campus. It’s a place to try things out, from foam cubes for seating to 3Doodlers to developing video games. It’s a space to try new things out. Right now “design” can mean anything, though we have an emphasis on project design, on laying out the foundations for a project to set someone up for success in the type of project she is working on. Our goal is to encourage possibility yet discourage too much “magical thinking.” I think Jennifer Vinopal said that! At least for the first year, we’re going with a “kitchen sink” approach, and this breadth is really exciting (and sort of daunting). This could include everything from citizen science projects using Zooniverse to internal library projects using open hardware, like a Raspberry Pi gate counter or an Awesome Box.

Alix: What’s an Awesome Box? How do you find out about these things?

Justin: Conferences, Twitter, word of mouth, random places on the internet . . . the Awesome Box originally came from the Harvard Library Lab. At Code4Lib last year, librarians from Cornell who implemented it in Raspberry Pi form presented their work and they have the code up on GitHub. It’s a way for students to “awesome” materials they really enjoyed when they return them, creating a different level of engagement with the collection that also allows the Lab to explore an exciting facet of open hardware in libraries. One of my students, Jen, is figuring out how to work with our library catalog’s API, call up bibliographic information up when a student scans a barcode, then populate a website with recently “awesomed” books. This is just one thread running through the Lab, in what could be called broadly “digital scholarship,” but I don’t want it to be defined by that.

Alix: Could you say more about not being defined by digital scholarship?

Justin: I don’t think spaces that are called DH spaces are inherently discriminatory or anything like that, but we want the Lab to facilitate participation in larger communities inside and outside the University. We have so much to learn from each other in these different projects and practices, both as a library and as a university. In some ways it’s an interdisciplinary space; it’s purposely framed so that it will attract people that can cross pollinate in this area without being specifically framed for a particular audience. We’re in a pilot phase now, identifying and working with both early adopters on campus as well as reaching out to others who normally wouldn’t think of themselves as “digital scholarship” people.

Alix: How will you know if the Design Lab is successful? What does that look like?

Justin: I don’t ever want to get to a space where I’m comfortable in the Lab, because that means it’s time to try something else. I think we’re always going to be iterating and trying out different things, large and small. In some ways, we already know what we can’t or don’t want to do—we’re not a “production house” where someone has an idea and we build it for them. The space doesn’t really work for conventional workshops where everyone needs a computer in front of them and you’re led through tutorials. It’s more about active hands-on learning without the hierarchy that workshop spaces can often connote. I keep going back to Stewart Varner’s community garden metaphor [from the 2015 DLF Forum]. How do we cultivate that in the space? What do we do with the people who are already there, what do we do with the staff, what do we do with the furniture and the colors? How do you make it immediately visible what the space is for? It’s about encouraging people to build a space together and embrace the space as their own and make their own contributions to it, in concert with the intentions of the library.

Alix: Stewart’s metaphor resonated with me too. Are there examples you’ve looked to for how to encourage people to embrace a space as their own?

Justin: First and foremost, the Design Labs on North Campus [at the University of Michigan], which have been around in some form for at least 15 years under the work of Linda Knox. Other libraries have these spaces, like North Carolina State. I’ve also had experience with co-working spaces in the Twin Cities and here in Ann Arbor. I think Alex Gil’s space at Columbia (Studio@Butler) is a great example of this kind of work. So, spaces inside and outside of libraries and academia. It’s interesting to think about an academic space and what will work in that setting and also where we might push to change what an academic setting could or should be.

Alix: Switching gears back to DH, what’s next for DH and libraries? What do you see as some of the unanswered questions?

Justin: Sustainability is always the unanswered question, because it can’t be answered. We’ll figure out something for now and then we’ll re-assess. It’s part of making this part of the everyday identity of the library and this kind of work. Not that everyone needs to know how to do everything—I come back to Columbia’s Developing Librarian project, where people are participating and learning in different aspects of the project. You’ll never learn everything and you can’t, and that’s unsustainable. But being able to better understand who can do what, and convincing people that they do have a lot to contribute [in the way of domain knowledge]; it’s getting that shared understanding of DH or whatever we’re going to call it.

Alix: What do you wish DH did better? That libraries did better?

Justin: I think it’s the critical digital literacy piece. Being contextually aware of what it means to be using this or that sort of tool. If you’re relying on an algorithm to make a scholarly argument, others may not be able to check on that in the same way one can with a close reading of a book in front of me. In this pervasive networked culture we live in, if you’re using this tool, you need a critical and contextual understanding of that tool. There are obviously a great number of scholars doing this: Roopika Risam, Adeline Koh, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and many others, but there’s always room for more work in this area, especially reaching out to our colleagues in critical media studies and/or digital studies departments.

For me, it comes down to the idea of literacy and helping people understand (and perhaps dismantle) black boxes. Being more transparent and helping others to develop that, which gets into the digital pedagogy side of things. What does it mean for us to be the product in search algorithms, and our own complicity in that? We need to recognize that some things about libraries will change and it’s part of the conversation we’re having. I hope it’s a democratic conversation. The biggest thing, going back to the Design Lab, we’re not building things for people—we’re going to work together with you to create what you want to create. That’s the goal of this—to foster these communities around what it means to be doing scholarly work in the 21st century.

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