Institutional Tactics: Locating Social Justice in Liberal Arts DH

The following is an attempt to draw a loose frame around a cluster of disparate activities at Swarthmore College Libraries in order to explore what social justice in digital scholarship pedagogy can possibly mean. The questions at stake: Where can we find and make space in our professional practice as librarians to address injustice? How can we make that work legible, substantive, and important when that work takes place diffusely across a range of decisions, sites, and stakeholders? Given the privilege inherent to our context, how can we avoid being subsumed by trends in higher education and resist institutional virtue signaling? In considering these questions, I want to shift focus from digital projects whose content variously engage issues of injustice and inequity to highlight three sites of less defined activity: faculty training, student programs, and ad hoc collaborations

Aerospace Engineering / Chemical Kinetics - University of Michigan

The graduate student interviewed for this data curation profile is studying the ignition delay of fuel-air mixtures under high temperature and pressure conditions using a rapid compression facility. Specifically, the researcher is interested in the formation of reactants, such as greenhouse gases and pollutants. The data management issues include a lack of formal venues for sharing data widely and a lack of data management protocols within the researcher’s lab. He shared that within his lab, researchers typically create their own metadata according to personal preference

Swarthmore Projects for Educational Exploration and Development (SPEED): Promoting Public Scholarship in the Liberal Arts

Swarthmore Projects for Educational Exploration and Development (SPEED) is an initiative jointly administered by Swarthmore Libraries and Information Technology Services. Loosely based on the agile development model, SPEED provides dedicated staff and student intern support for accepted proposals during an eight-week summer period in order to design and build digital resources that extend pedagogical possibilities and promote undergraduate research. The program is inherently collaborative. In addition to pooling the resources and skills of librarians and academic technologists, SPEED has worked alongside faculty from across campus, Engineering to Russian, Linguistics to Music. Beyond the gamut of administrative and academic partners, the program works with students from a range of majors and provides substantial scholarly and professional development. SPEED projects actively push beyond the limited time and space afforded to the traditional classroom to put student and faculty research in conversation with broader publics. Examples like a web-app for generating Navajo verbs, a digital book for the hearing-impaired, 3D modeling of ancient Roman topography and a visualization of Latino Immigration in the USA allow associated courses to engage broader audiences, both those intended and sometimes ones we had not imagined. Through outlining our processes, touching on issues that have emerged during particular projects and sketching out some of what we have learned, we will present the possibilities and perils of such a model for exploring just what public scholarship can look like in a liberal arts context

Data Curation Profiles Symposium Panel on Educational Needs

The Data Curation Profiles Symposium was hosted by Purdue Libraries and held on September 24, 2012. The participants on the panel on educational needs were Dr. Suzie Allard (University of Tennessee), Nabil Kashyap (University of Michigan), and Elaine Martin (University of Massachusetts Medical School). Participants on the panel were asked to answer and discuss three questions: What do you see as the educational needs of librarians, LIS students, and other graduate students regarding data curation needs in learning and training? Besides general needs, what are specific concerns regarding how to engage and immerse “students” in data curation? How have you seen, or how do you see, the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit applying in this area