I am the Digital Scholarship Library Fellow at Northwestern University Library’s Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation. I know, that’s a lot of capitalized words, especially for an introductory sentence, but, essentially, I am a librarian (MLIS) with a humanities background (MA American Studies) who consults and collaborates with Northwestern faculty and graduate students on digital humanities research and pedagogy projects, referral to and training on digital research tools, and other scholarly digital publishing initiatives. In addition to this work, I’m also a designer (web and print), I read a lot of Latin American fiction in translation and contemporary American literature, and I also have some modest scholarly side projects such as marking up a Max Beerbohm short story in TEI and using digital tools to analyze and visualize literary texts. You can find me online at my website and on Twitter.

As far as definitions of digital humanities go, I tend to be an agnostic in the semantic debates, the who’s in and who’s out (who cares!) arguments, and try to focus on doing. I know that’s radically naive, and I also know that, as a librarian, I’m a bit privileged and can afford that view, but it also helps me stay centered and focussed on creating, and while I see myself often as a collaborator with faculty and graduate students (and vice versa), I also understand a large component of what I do is support-ish. Anyway, the definition of digital humanities I usually run with is three-pronged:

1. Humanities research enabled and informed by digital means.
2. Humanities publication through new digital means.
3. Humanities scholarship on digital technology and culture.

Honestly, I don’t believe this definition is broad enough, and there’s something freeing about being a part of a field that one can’t even define, but I think this covers three very important approaches, all of which can be exclusive of the other and still count as digital humanities (e.g. research can be done digitally and published in print). Missing from this definition are a few crucial things such as coding, programming, metadata creation, etc. For instance, I most definitely do think marking up a text in TEI is a scholarly activity in and of itself. The one thing I am OK with is the use of the phrase “digital humanities” which I feel is a necessity for a field trying to define itself, make its case, and in many ways is seen as an oppositional force. That doesn’t mean DH is always radical, but it does mean its new and not yet commonly accepted.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting everyone, sharing ideas, debating, collaborating, and so on. I’m very excited for NUDHL and have had the privilege of working with both Michael and Jillana on digital humanities projects and think they are to be commended for their trailblazing spirit and for convening this workshop!