I’m thrilled to announce that in July of this year, I’ll be joining the team at Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship where I will be the Digital Humanities Librarian. In this position I’ll continue to help imagine, design, and carry out digital research projects in conjunction with faculty and graduate students. Some of this work will be in connection with the newly awarded $1.3-million grant from the Mellon Foundation for long-form digital publications in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Since big data can often be a red herring, I will also continue to advocate for the value of small, short-term research projects. Finally, I will partner with colleagues in developing and deploying innovative digital pedagogy.
With this new position, I will be leaving Emory, where I have worked in one form or another for 12 of the last 13 years. (During that other year as I taught at Clemson, I continued to haunt the stacks at the Woodruff Library.) I’m proud of the work that colleagues and I accomplished during the last five years as we created the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) and now the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, which includes large projects like the Battle of Atlanta and small ones like Tweeting #OWS. What’s more, I’ll be here long enough to put the finishing touches on Belfast Group Poetry|Networks, which Rebecca Sutton Koeser and I have been working on for close to three years. Significant work is underway on other projects that I’ve helped design, such as “Schooling Donald Allen,” an exploration of the networks in and around mid-twentieth-century American poetry using the materials in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, and “Hacking Haiku,” which traces networks, allusions, and places in the work early modern female haiku diarists in Japan. Alongside these big projects, I’ve appreciated the chance to spearhead a number of small, undergraduate-driven projects in the courses that I’ve taught in the English Department over the last four years. I’ve learned over and over again that the computer-assisted pattern-recognition and interpretation of the digital humanities can operate at all sorts of different scales.
I think it’s telling that my work—as is the case with so many others in digital humanities—has been and will continue happening in the context of a library. Since libraries ultimately preserve knowledge, it’s critical that librarians be involved with researchers and others in the creation of 21st-century scholarship. But as anyone who has done research knows, libraries aren’t just the endpoint for research, they are where research begins. One needs the stacks and the databases when getting a new project underway, of course. Yet more and more, I think people come to the library not for the materials but for the people, as Virginia Tech’s Brian Mathews put it following a talk I gave there in November 2014.
I’m headed to Brown for the people, and I hope that people at Brown start coming to look for me soon.
