Sprinting Toward Faculty Engagement: Adopting Project Management Approaches to Build Library-Faculty Relationships

This is a prepublication version of a book chapter submitted for the book Project Management in the Library Workplace, forthcoming in 2018 from Emerald Publishing.Purpose – In the spring of 2016, the University of Kansas Libraries piloted Research Sprints: One Week, One Project, a program aimed at cultivating relationships with faculty through deep project-based engagement. Methodology/approach – Three faculty members, matched with a team of library experts, worked intensively to complete a research or pedagogic project for one week in May. Critical to the program’s success was the use of project management methodologies and tools. These tools were essential to identifying task dependencies, developing workflows, and documenting work processes. Findings – The overall success of the Sprints demonstrated to faculty that library staff can be more than one-shot consultants; faculty collaborators learned first-hand that the library can be a true partner throughout the scholarly process. As an approach to user engagement, Sprints pose some considerations for library management, including the need for robust staff training in project management and teambuilding, internal resistance to utilizing project management tools, difficulty finding staff time and resources to commit for a short but high-concentrated period, and the need to align projects with staff expertise and availability. Originality/value – This chapter provides an assessment of the Sprints pilot, addressing some of the implications, potential benefits, and challenges of adopting and adapting Research Sprints to support library work. It will be of interest to project managers and library staff who are considering integrating project management methods into their outreach and services, and provides examples of how project management can inform library efforts to more deeply collaborate in advancing the scholarly work of local research and teaching communities

Dancing Dreams: Performing American Identities in Postwar Hollywood Musicals, 1944-1958

With the pressures of the dawning Cold War, postwar Americans struggled to find a balance between conformity and authentic individualism. Although musical motion pictures appeared conservative, seemingly touting traditional gender roles and championing American democratic values, song-and-dance numbers (spectacles) actually functioned as sites of release for filmmakers, actors, and moviegoers. Spectacles, which film censors and red-baiting politicians considered little more than harmless entertainment and indirect forms of expression, were the least regulated aspects of musicals. These scenes provided relatively safe spaces for actors to play with and defy, but also reify, social expectations. Spectacles were also sites of resistance for performers, who relied on their voices and bodies—sometimes at odds with each other—to reclaim power that was denied them either by social strictures or an oppressive studio system. Dancing Dreams is a series of case studies about the role of spectacle—literal dances but also spectacles of discourse, nostalgia, stardom, and race—in inspiring Americans to find forms of individual self-expression with the potential to challenge prevailing norms. It explores how Gene Kelly tried to broaden definitions of dance and art to make a case for the heterosexual male dancer; how Judy Garland used her performances to strike back at studio executives who tried to mold her femininity; how racial stereotypes and the Hollywood politics of race limited Oscar Hammerstein’s liberal messages of racial inclusion and cooperation; and how fantasy dances could remold nationality and gender. Musical motion pictures thus expand the definition of rebellion to include the sort of private, and often, quiet forms of personal resistance that occurred throughout the 1950s, and helps us to understand better the radical potential of postwar America

Thinking Historically about Data: Improving Automation Processes for Harvesting North Carolina City Directories

Scaling up to handle big data can be challenging for the Digital Humanities given the often diverse and unpredictable nature of such data. This project proposes a system for automatically harvesting North Carolina city directories by developing a historically-minded parser. City directories vary significantly in format and structure, making the use of a one-size-fits-all approach impossible. Building a smarter parser requires that historical variances be taken into account from the outset. Such an understanding may come from an analysis of directory attributes, including the presence of a header or the connotation of a resident's racial classification. When taken together, these attributes reveal patterns across directory publishers, city locations, and publication years that form the basis of parameters for adjusting the parser to improve overall automatic data extraction. This project demonstrates how applying historical thinking to computational solutions contributes to more effective tools for handling big humanities data

What is Digital Humanities and What’s it doing in the Classroom? Toward a Digital Pedagogy

Digital Humanities Seminar, University of Kansas, Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities & Hall Center for the Humanities, September 21st, 2015. Pamella Lach is at the University of Kansas.Incorporating digital humanities into the classroom, while rewarding, can be difficult and messy—for instructors and students alike. In this talk, Lach will share her experiences experimenting with DH in the classroom. She will discuss a range of attempts along a pedagogic spectrum, from undergraduate blogging about digital objects to graduate students implementing self-designed digital projects. Her talk will address some of the challenges of adopting a digital approach in the classroom, and gesture towards some best practices. This talk is especially geared to those curious about or interested in integrating DH into their teaching

Anti-Racist Digital Humanities Pedagogy in the Library

Digital Humanities librarians engage in a range of DH-related instruction, from the “one-shot”—a single and standalone interaction with a class—to embedded librarianship—in which a librarian works closely with a class for the duration of a semester. Librarians striving to infuse critical digital humanities and anti-racism approaches into classrooms that are not their own must be prepared to incorporate critical approaches in both small and large ways. This talk explores one particular framework for librarians to engage in anti-racist digital humanities instruction

Spatial Humanities Moving Beyond the Dot on a Map

The rapid development of digital technologies for representing space combined with an ongoing explosion in potentially relevant data sources to which these technologies might be applied have led to a growing number of digital humanities projects that work at the nexus of space and experience. These bring together in new, creative and productive ways a wide array of source materials that illuminate relationships among place, event, and people. In order to inform the design and development of a new digital humanities platform that aims to provide a low-cost, sustainable solution to implementing projects, the People-Event-Place (PEP) project (2013-2014) surveyed the most commonly deployed features and functionalities that such a platform would need to incorporate, and interrogated the intellectual and practical issues that such a platform would need to address. This paper describes the PEP project’s core aims, activities and findings