In late 2001, after the renovation was over and dust had settled, we had a party in the library to celebrate Scholarly Resources & Technology @ 2East, a new collaborative concept and new physical home to Digital Media Services and Collection Management (two library units) and the Academic Technologies group of central IT. Dan Garrison came to the party. Over wine, he told me about his 10-years-in-progress translated scholarly edition of Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica. He was planning a print edition when the work was all done, but had been thinking of an online edition as the translation progressed. Bill Parod (AT) and I were both intrigued. To make an extremely long story short, somehow we convinced our respective administrators to let us work with Dan on his digital project, with only loose goals and timeline, and little idea about how it would be achieved, technically.

To my 2012 eyes, the online version of book one, released in 2003, looks deceptively simple, even slightly long in the tooth in spots (resizable frames!) but it would be impossible to overstate how much I learned during My Favorite Year and how instrumental the experience was in framing my ideas about collaboration, creativity and the digital humanities. As a senior tenured full professor, Dan outranked both Bill and I in pretty much every sense. Bill was a technologist of many years experience. I was barely out of librarian babyhood, trying to help the organization figure out what its role should be in supporting scholarly technology projects, and supervising a small production team in what probably would (at that time, anyway) best be described as a skunkworks . On the Vesalius project team, however, we were partners and equals. Dan and I tackled the production and content aspects: what was the ‘stuff’, how did we need to capture and encode it digitally, what was the best scale on which to work for naming schemes, data streams, text chunks, footnotes, anatomical drawings, annotations, facsimile pages? Dan and Bill tackled indexing and search, presentation and web wizardry, mucked about with Vesalius’ hand-drawn characters and with polytonic Greek and Hebrew in the days before browsers reliably supported Unicode, considered how it should look, feel, and function. Bill and I grappled with infrastructure, resources, standards, scalability and organizational politics. Team members specialized, and we came to appreciate our strengths and our limits: the pros and cons of various possible XML attributes were maddening to some of us but fascinating to others. We lucked out in hiring a very talented NU undergraduate student, Paul Clough, to do the TEI-XML encoding. (Incidentally, a few years later, Paul came back to work in the library; he now oversees the in-house book digitization operation in Digital Collections, and is just completing his Masters in Library and Information Science.) The entire project was a huge leap of faith. We figured it out as we went along, with a lot of helping each other but also a lot of help from the wider DH community, the TEI community in particular. We were patient with each other, and we learned to adjust our expectations and goals as we realized where we had overreached, and where things were possible that we hadn’t imagined at the outset. There was nothing service about it, but it wasn’t ‘pure’ humanities, pure library or pure technology either, it was all of the above and greater than the sum of its parts.

The Vesalius project was mostly a digitization, digital production and publishing project, but I believe the lessons apply just as well to software development, any kind of infrastructure-building project, teaching, designing research, and indeed any kind of collaborative inquiry or shared work.

I’ll conclude with a brief summary of my background: I floundered around in math, chemistry and physics as an undergrad before making the happy switch to humanities. I have a BA in English Literature (minor: Humanistic Studies) from Saint Mary’s College and an MLIS from Dominican University. I’ve worked at NU since 1994, and am now the director of the Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation (CSCDC) and Head of the Digital Collections Department in the University Library. Here’s my Northwestern Scholars profile. Incubating projects and helping to develop infrastructure to support digital publishing, digital humanities and curation of digital research data is a key focus on the Center, and direct collaboration with faculty and students on these projects will be an important activity for us. I spend most of my time synthesizing, organizing and managing these days, and in addition to a general love of technology, I’m particularly interested in issues of scale, constructing solid teams, skill expansion and organizational development, and have a strong sideline in policy issues (copyright, etc.) I’m really looking forward to NUDHL!