 So welcome everyone to this virtual dinner party for early career researchers and practitioners in GLAM and academia. I think we'll be eating salad at this dinner party because of the hot weather today. So our session today is an interactive session where we want to give early career researchers and practitioners the opportunity to dig into relevant topics such as inclusion, training, well-being and career planning in the digital space. This session is open to delegates attending the DC-DC conference as well as ECRs and DCPs from the sector more widely. For those of you who haven't heard of the DC-DC conference before, it stands for discovering collections, discovering communities and it's a cross-sector conference bringing together delegates from all career stages, working within galleries, libraries, archives, museums and academia. The conference is run by the National Archives, Research Libraries UK and JISC. Before we start with the session today, I'd just quickly like to mention a survey that we're running at the National Archives dedicated to early career researchers and practitioners. We're hoping to understand more about the sorts of training and opportunities that you'd like the National Archives to offer and you'll find the link to the survey in the chat coming up soon. We'd be grateful if you could find the time to complete the survey and pass it on to colleagues. I'd also like to say before we start that we're pleased to have Ozzy from the Live Doodle Company joining us today. Here we'll be live doodling some of the discussion and we'll check in with him throughout the event to see how he's getting on and how he's visually represented some of what we've been talking about today. Okay so to get us started on the first course of our dinner party we're going to just introduce some of the early career speakers that we have with us today. So if I could ask all the speakers to turn their camera on that would be great and if each of you could just say a few words briefly introducing yourselves and a little about the career stage you're at and how you're finding the sector currently. So first up we have Anita Goldschmidt. So Anita can you just introduce yourself briefly please. Sure thank you. I'm Anita Goldschmidt. I have dark brown hair and I wear a black top today. I completed my PhD just over a year ago. I work in academia and I'm a senior lecturer at the moment. In terms of my backgrounds I come from an interprofessional background. I'm a dual-equalified health and social care practitioner but I did my master and PhD with the Faculty of Arts so hence my connection with archives and broader sector. So yes I guess I find myself between sectors and disciplines as an early career researcher so thank you. Thanks Anita. Pushpi Bakshi, can I come to you? Thanks Louise. Hi everyone my name is Pushpi Bakshi. I'm a South Asian designer and participatory design researcher and I am wearing, I don't know if you can see it, but a brightly coloured top. So I finished my PhD in November last year and at the moment I am in the first year of a two year postdoc at the University of Edinburgh based in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and my practice and research at the moment is sort of based in again participatory methods and facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration and that's why I thought it would be interesting to be a part of this panel. Thank you. Thank you Pushpi. Carina Westling, are you there? Are you able to turn your camera on so we can see you? That would be great. I have brown kind of slightly frizzy hair because Amsterdam where I'm sitting now is very hot, very summery. I've got glasses and yeah hot and bothered but very very happy to be here. I am an early career researcher. I did my PhD at Sussex. I work with specifically interactive works of art across physical and digital platforms and how we think about audiences. I'll be talking a little bit later about my research with Punch Junk and other types of performances and I welcome any kind of audience engagement and of course my esteemed peers. Thank you Carina. Amy Webster. Hi everyone. I'm Amy. I'm a senior lecturer in education studies and based up at Bishop Ross Tess University in Lincoln and I completed my PhD just around the start of the pandemic. I was based at Cambridge before in education studies but particularly in terms of children's literature. So I involved in Gauging's archive at the British Library and at Cambridge looking at children's books and I'm looking forward to hearing thoughts from fellow early career people as well and as I start to explore some of the potential issues I've come across with both being an ECA, ECR in this area but also particularly at the time of the pandemic too. Thank you. Thank you Amy. I look forward to hearing more in a second and Gareth Millward. Hi I'm Gareth Millward. I'm a millennial white man short-haired beard and a shirt. I don't know if I'm an ECR any longer. I passed my PhD in 2014 and have done various postdocs in the United Kingdom since then but in February I started here as an assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark in Onsen in Denmark and my experience with doing digital humanities has been around the use of web archives and working as a solo researcher using web archives in my history work on the history of the post-war welfare state in Britain but also some work with the British Library in thinking about how historians might use web archives in the future and how they might be using them today and that's something that I'll speak about a little bit later. Amazing thank you Gareth. So we've had a brief introduction from all our speakers now we're going to move on to our second course. How it works is we're going to have two of our speakers do a brief presentation around a theme and then we'll invite some discussion after. So please put things in the chat but also volunteer to come up with us and join the panel and share your view. So for the second course the theme is all around inclusion in this digital space so how does it relate to some of the work that our speakers are doing? What ways could they be better supported and how would they like to support others? So we've got two speakers in this section the first one is Pushpi and then the second one is Anita. So Pushpi I'll hand over to you first. Thanks Louis. So hopefully my screen sharing gimmick works again so perhaps I'll just share my entire screen and can everybody see the slides? Yep that's working. Okay fantastic. So today I thought I'd share a bit about a project that I worked on last summer and this was just sort of after I had submitted my PhD thesis and at this point you know August 2021 maybe we were at two years of lockdown at various stages and the University of Edinburgh where I'm based there was basically a pot of money that most senior academics were traditionally used for attending conferences and sort of just setting around the world which had been unused and thankfully one of the one of the senior academics Dr. Maria Soledad Garcia decided to use that money to fund a short project to figure out you know what does it mean to design peer networks using digital pathways especially in this post-COVID world because a lot of the research at the time was suggesting how ECRs were going to be negatively impacted by the lack of ability to attend conferences and develop networks to in-person interactions and our aim was to basically help identify what are the gaps that we found and also what were potential opportunities that could help facilitate research networks, facilitate mentoring and collaborations especially amongst interdisciplinary academics who you know a lot of people felt that moving to online formats people were sort of within their existing networks perhaps building stronger bonds but those serendipitous connections that you make with people in person had been lost so how do you help catalyze some of that and I thought I'd talk a bit about two issues that came up through this project also to say that it wasn't just people at the University of Edinburgh who we were speaking to we also had ECRs from University College Dublin's Institute for Discovery who took part it was through a base a series of Zoom workshops and interviews we didn't just interview ECRs we also spoke to a lot of senior academics because we felt that you know you can't help you know there's no point in talking about collaborations and mentorships unless you had people who were potential mentors participate and give their views so as you can see from this list it was quite an interdisciplinary project it was sort of trying to get as many voices in from different parts of the university and external institutions as well so again the two insights that I want to share is who is an ECR and the second was this idea of potential digital fellowships in a post-COVID world and so for our working definition you know we tried to be as inclusive as possible so we said you know an ECR is anybody who is a researcher academic practitioner or a tutor who is in the early stages of career development because you know when we were looking at sort of defining an ECR we realized that there was a lack of consistency of how an ECR is is described as an example the British academies postdoctoral fellowships you know identifies an ECR as somebody who's within three years of having been awarded their PhD the AHRC says it's eight years of being awarded a PhD or equivalent of professional training within the University of Edinburgh I'm based you know there was sort of acknowledgement of fixed term research staff so people like me who are research associates or postdocs as well as academics who were on tenure track positions with full-time contracts but then you know it wasn't including PhD candidates even though doctoral students quite often as part of their workload include teaching or working in research within teams tutoring marking preparing didactic materials but they were not considered as part of their sort of ECR identity so this issue we felt became more and more prevalent when it came to accessing opportunities because you know people do their PhDs at different times in their life so the fact that our own institute was in considering a PhD practitioner or researcher as an early career researcher we found problematic and in general the lack of consistency you know within institutions in the UK and even wider in Europe because there was so much mismatch that it creates feelings of exclusion and compromise in a way so it's just something that you know we were quite clear about and felt that there really needs to be some kind of push to have more of an inclusive definition of who is an ECR and who should be considered an ECR. The next was this idea of digital fellowships because again you know when people were stuck in one place we realized that right you're again losing an opportunity to build networks and moved places for short amounts of time but at the same time we felt that the potential of the digital fellowship there was also an opportunity for people who perhaps can't travel with ease as much so here we were you know particularly thinking of people who are you know researchers early career researchers who are based in parts of the world where you need visas to travel in to the UK or Europe and there are these other sort of political barriers that come into play and therefore the idea for digital research fellowship could be more inclusive at the same time there was a lot of discussion about the necessity for that in order for any sort of digital collaboration or fellowship or project to be successful there had to be ideally there should have been pre-existing social relations and also clear structures of engagement and this sort of map that we developed sort of helped identify you know what could be the perceived benefits what were some of the concerns and what were some of the recommendations for this sort of format and again I'm happy to share these slides afterwards if anybody's interested but again you know so for example in the benefits you know this idea that you don't need visas you don't need a lot of paperwork for non-EU participants it could be more inclusive it could allow for more interdisciplinarity and then at the same time that there could be a lack of mentorship there could be a feeling of isolation that if somebody's sitting in their flat in in Lagos Nigeria and you know they're doing a digital fellowship in Edinburgh then they might feel completely cut off at the same time and there are some recommendations from the group for how you know these digital fellowships could come across so yeah so these are just some thoughts that I thought I'd share forward today and thank you everyone for your time and I look forward to the discussion afterwards. Stop sharing my screen. Thank you. That's great. We'll hear from Anita next and then we'll discuss some of these ideas so Anita are you here? Yes thank you so hopefully can you hear me? Yeah brilliant. So I work in terms of my PhD and my present research I work with images, storage, objects and try to co-author research with my clients so I think it's very nicely follows up the previous presentation. I started exploring alternative ways of community engagement and inclusion and the digital is one of those ways and in particular dissemination and how we can share research and cover beyond traditional outputs. So I brought here today just a very short sample which is part of a longer work so I thought it might be interesting to see a bit of an illustration. It is based on my doctoral work and the topic of this particular piece was joy and the everyday experiences of people with living with disability so I will try to share my screen now and hopefully you can see just a minute of this so let's so hopefully you can see now the shared screen. I will start playing it then and I will come back to it after then. Thank you. Day after day I was walking the streets listening to the sounds of guitar talking and laughing with Jane and Peter. Their lives are joyful and we wanted to share this joy with you but how how can we better work with the everyday experiences of hidden disability to come up with something a more innovative approach that attempts to match our everyday life and all of its surprises. Peter responds tells it all. Peter was collecting the board game one day in the autism group the dictionaries and all the other actors needed play his favorite game Scrabble. Every week in the autism support group he placed it his friends and volunteers. He went to the back of the building approached the big grey cupboard took out all items and made his way back to the main hall. I could not help and the spectacle became part of the act. I asked Peter Peter can I help you carry something I do not need help Peter responded immediately I do not carry anything the board game carries me. Thank you let me just stop sharing and hopefully you come back to me so I thought this is a just a demonstration that how I try to move towards and exploit more the digital and what it can offer us in in teaching as well as in research and the feedback I received was very positive and I thought I think it opens up more opportunities to engagement and inclusion with the wider audience but I thought that I thought today is a that is not as straightforward and there are some very pragmatic issues that I sort of experienced as an early career researcher working with the digital. I called this pet Patrick or Patricia the kind of barriers or or issues P stands for platforms. A is accessibility and T is time so platforms making digital outputs using them requires platform that is not always ready or sometimes they are out of date by the time I try to use it or try to share research so and and the academic work how much the academic word is ready to accommodate and appreciate this kind of digital outputs accessibility I think is both in terms of our different age and and relationship with the digital it makes a difference how much we can engage and how much I can engage and also some of the more physical and more traditional barriers that what what we can access and how probably one of the most obvious would be money that what what we can access and the third in the pet model would be T and time which we just never have enough and and creating some of these more digital outputs like even just this animated video is takes much longer than than writing the article or or presentation so how we can we can work with them so in terms of my as an early career researcher the digital is here in fact I think the digital is already outruns in many ways the material and and if one thing for me as an early career researcher here is that I feel sometimes that we are between two words academia most established academia and and practice that built without the digital and the next generation definitely will be everything digital and and where we are here so I think for me the question is as an early career researcher that how we can support us as well as others with so that platform accessibility and time do not get into the way of digital into innovation so I hope we can have a bit of a discussion about this how we can find solution and and yeah and community engagement so yeah thank you thanks very much Anita and so that concludes our presentations for the second course so what we're going to you now is have a bit of a discussion thank you both for sharing your thoughts on the challenges we face in making inclusive careers for early career researchers and professionals as a reminder to the audience if you want to join us in the discussion you'd be very welcome so please raise your hand and we'll pop you on the screen and I'll ask you to ask answer your question or comment and I can see Liz in the chat is ready to ask the question so I think she's just about to pop up on the screen there she is so Liz would you mind asking your question too I think it was pushy if you turn your camera on as well that'd be great hi sorry my camera was just frozen hi nice to meet you thanks for your presentation um so yeah I'm joining from the National Archives um I do communications for the research team there and we um are kind of trying to expand our ECR audience um so um yeah that presentation was really helpful and I was just kind of wondering um from your research and your experience with ECRs do you think that there is a way to sort of help people who might be doing um digital fellowships to kind of feel less isolated um like did you have any feedback from people or did you have any ideas when you were just kind of conducting your own project yeah absolutely thank you can oh yeah my mic is on okay um thanks so much for the question Liz um so yes there were some clear recommendations that people felt quite strongly about I think the first thing about this idea of digital fellowships and because we had quite a few international candidates or ECRs who were part of the research you know so for example I am Indian I am here in the UK on now a graduate study visa um throughout my time here I was on a tier four student visa so a lot of times when you know we would do projects there was just so much administrative paperwork that went into my ability to travel and go across to places so there was a clear benefit of seeing this as being a digital fellowship as being more inclusive um in that way um and then the other sort of recommendations that people one of the ideas that was suggested which was quite interesting was this idea of a hybrid model of a fellowship where you could have um let's say the institution that you're doing the fellowship with is based in a different country and then the ECR is based in a different country but perhaps they have an in-person partner who could be an industry partner or an archive or a library or another sort of third sector institution and that could create that sort of interesting format for engagement as well um there was also sort of discussions about if if you do have these sort of digital formats that can be figure out better ways of sharing resources so the other idea was of you know potential of sharing digital data sets um and the other one was sort of having a clear framework for social engagement and and setting up that expectation right from the get-go so whether it is knowing that you know every depending on the length of the fellowship if there is going to be a clear time for you know sort of these video chat calls or for example where I am based just now at the Edinburgh Features Institute because we are part of an office which is very interdisciplinary we have what we call a Monday morning assembly so people are based all over the world but everybody just pops in and sort of gives an update of what they're working with so even though I've not met a lot of my colleagues in person I'm still very aware of sort of what's going on and it really helps build that idea of community so having these sort of clear frameworks for engagement so that somebody coming into the fellowship or considering applying for the for such format of a fellowship knows what to expect and then taking it from there so yeah so those were just some of the initial ideas that people had but and I think again in general people were quite excited about the idea but the biggest hesitation was always a feeling of isolation and or sort of being cut off and not actually being able to get access to resources and mentors and people like that so how could sort of those anxieties be addressed in the initial framework from of how these fellowships are facilitated. Thank you that's great, thanks very much. And thank you Liz and if anyone else wants to join our panel please just raise your hand I think we'll say goodbye to you now Liz. I want to open up another question to all our speakers today about something Anita raised so Anita raised three potential barriers for early careers working in this space so it was around the kind of platforms accessibility questions and the issue of time as well so I wondered if any of our speakers could comment on how we might begin to overcome some of these barriers of platforms accessibility in time. I can just one of the things I hope it's okay that I'm going and I don't feel like I'm monopolizing the conversation. This idea of time is really interesting because one of the things that in the project that from last summer people spoke a lot about is this is this sort of time accounted for within contracts so as early career researchers do you have mentors or as part of your sort of modes of engagement is there always time set aside for personal development and facilitating collaborations and and perhaps that should be something that is because I think it's assumed or implied that you know we have to do all these other things in terms of sort of furthering ourselves and our careers but is there an explicit dedicated you know if you have a 35 hour work week then a slot in the calendar that everybody has to put in and say that okay how is that time being spent so I think it's always a tricky one of how we implicitly assume time is being spent on things but if there is no explicit time allotted to something then it doesn't come about and so sort of creating again a sort of mode of engagement as early career researchers within whatever work we do to sort of set time aside for things and have that valued by institutions. Thank you Pushby. Anita have you got any comments on this issue of time? Yeah I think that's why some of the outcome that you talked about in terms of structure I think it's one of the key thing and then that just you added it to that I think we just need to really go into these details and and that the organization level at different sector level think about these things and and and get some more yeah I think a better structured frameworks would be very helpful and working with the people who are in the digital and they can be make sure that they are everywhere so they can put their input in and and help shape those structures and frameworks so yeah thank you. So Louise could I jump in? Yeah go for it. I thought I need to make a really interesting point about what we value as an output that I think definitely could be opened up much more. I love the idea of presenting real research and finding in some digital format like the bigger but with a really powerful way and in a really accessible way but it's the divide between maybe the archives that we work with and what academia traditionally values and how you sort of was the shape of a peg in the hole and how you put those together and because I remember when I was doing my PhD a huge output was collecting together series and creating a database of that but how did I submit that? How did I work that into the PhD and PhD is kind of a very 2D thing and you submitted that and my supervisor insisted that I'd submit also kind of memory sticks and web links to show the product of the work which was as much a part of it as the words that I had written in the PhD as well but then you shift past PhD in the way that we value things in terms of journal articles and written formats and that's what we're encouraged and moved towards and so I think definitely it's the wider conversation around outputs and how we can use those to reflect the nature of the type of archives that we're now engaging with because there's still that discord between making use of digital but then not fully using it or being encouraged to use it maybe in our outputs as well. Yeah thanks Amy there's a bit of a block who isn't there around sticking to traditional outputs. I can see we have Connor on the table. Connor would you like to ask a question or make a comment if you turn your camera on and turn on the on-com? Brilliant. Hi. Hey guys I just have a question for all of you really. You guys have all gone your PhDs and stuff. I just wonder if you had some advice for people who are scarcing us thinking about doing a potential PhD in the GigiGa humanities field like say for example if they are if they might be out of a job and the PhD they're thinking about you know requires a lot of access to GigiGa technology a lot of you know access to internet access and you know the kind of things that they might need to access to Google research in GigiGa humanities like web archives etc etc so I'm just thinking in general do you have any advice for people who are scarcing us doing a PhD in this area how could get a how PhD proposal together if it if it requires access to technology to get a PhD proposal together. Thank you Connor. I'm just going to read interest of time just give this to one speaker is there anyone who'd like to volunteer? Gareth. Yeah thank you for the question Connor and I'm going to try to answer it albeit I did my PhD funded as a medical historian so my funding was I need some train tickets I need to be able to get into dusty old archives that was pretty much all the minute I asked for. I think it is something that is an issue that on the one hand I'm glad that you're considering it because it does show that you've thought through that there are there are going to be costs involved but on the other hand it's also then you get into the problem of yes but had you actually deal with that and from from my experience of working with people who have now moved into the digital humanities those yes sorry Gillian for saying dusty old archives but some of them are dusty quite a lot of them are well kept but I have been into places where you sort of wince at how they've been stored in these old kind of like storage lockers and thinking well I really hope that that's some time there's some money to actually put this somewhere properly anyway yeah digital humanities have become more aware of the fact that things cost money in the same way that historians have had to work with oral history most of the funding bodies have now come to realize that actually it does cost quite a bit of money to be able to transcribe things to be able to have train tickets to get places so I would I would say think about the the archives that you're likely to need to use think about the the training that you might need and think about the the software and the hardware that you might need and then talk to the department that you're thinking of going to and seeing okay how much of this stuff do you already have how much of this stuff might I be able to get access to and then if you are thinking about using web archives and things like that then thinking about do you need anything more than simply access to old webpages or do you need access to data and ways of being able to crunch that data which is a completely different kind of question so in general yeah I'm sure you will have other tips as well but feel free to put them in the chat as we go along for other speakers and thank you Conor we're going to move on to our third course shortly but before we do I just want to ask Ozzy if you've mind sharing his doodle so far of some of the things we've been talking about if you could share your screen Ozzy that would be great oh fantastic so yeah we can see inclusion mentoring I like the symbol for the Monday morning assembly especially and we'll check in with Ozzy again after our next course but we'll move straight on now to our next presentations so we've got three presentations in this next part and I'll hand over to Karina first of all. Hi there so I will focus on collaboration and impact rich research activities to counter the kind of isolation and you know both in a sort of post-COVID environment but also as an early career researcher I think that isolation and the sense of not being part of a community is one of the main challenges and it of course also that can then feed into difficulties building funding and networks and other sort of career opportunities so with that in mind I'd like to show a little bit of research about that I that I do this is sort of a dinner do so I've focused on slightly uh quite sort of visual and hopefully inspiring content and I hope you will enjoy that so may I share screen go for it thank you let me see I'm going to see so can you now see a beach front yes more precisely this is Brighton Beach this is a lovely sunset Brighton is where I normally reside I am currently in Amsterdam doing the digital methods summer school Brighton is a town where people have long amassed for exploration of self for extending their understanding of who they are who they want to be and having a lot of fun in the process so not entirely surprisingly this became a subject that inflicted my research and PhD so I'm a oops I'm a senior lecturer in cross-platform media at media and communication in Bournemouth and I did my PhD at the University of Sussex in 2017 um Digital Humanities snuck into my life via the SHL the Sussex Humanities Lab the Digital Humanities at Kings College London where I worked for a while and of course the general tenor of my research since I began my PhD I have engaged in collaboration across a range of disciplines not only digital humanities but also creative media biological sciences psychology and software engineering um these come together obviously I have allowed my my curiosity and interests to lead me but also I think that the social nature of research and the the social rescue framework of an of an early career researcher to some extent drove me towards this kind of way of working and it has actually turned out to be a very functional approach I think in my own way I've also had a lot of fun as per the theme the slightly thematic sort of a subcurrent here um my broad research theorizes participation in interactive environments and free at the point of use digital platforms and this um I did the research with Punchjunk the theatre company currently having a large production in London um I worked with them at their previous production as a researcher and as a sort of participating designer actually to really give my teeth into how they work with audiences and this is published as immersion and participation in Punchjunk's theatrical world so one of my pieces of advice for people who consider taking on a PhD and who are early career researcher is to to look at the publication because it seems to me and colleagues that books and being published actually really does help so really try and think ahead when you plan your career path so that you incorporate um outputs that are publishable that would be an advice that I would give actually um the kind of projects um I've been working with over the last a few years include making heritage buildings into sort of experience machines with um with the massive design um we during the covid period we I worked with Punchjunk on the third day their production there the covid theatre project Dr Tulp's Theatre of Zoom with Cambridge Digital Humanities and then I carry on in the background this idea of beyond personalisation post-identitarian agency modeling for audiences and emergence in experience designs those are the sort of themes of my research very social in nature and I honestly think this sort of helped keep me sane both throughout my um PhD research and also sustain me through the period as an ECR before I had a permanent post um not going to be talking at you a great deal about text I'm just going to show some slides this is a slide from the digital ghost hunt um we worked within heritage buildings and a theatre company who are um engaged schools uh classroom experiences with a theatrical uh narrative that stretches across the classroom into these heritage buildings where the children take on the roles as designers a co-designers of this um this um these uh these experiences so um would you be able to wrap up please if that's okay absolutely I'll switch so I shan't um rattle on too much about immersive experience I'll just take you through some so these are just um so essentially audience agency as a material it's a very social focus on on on on research which I again I think has really sustained sustained me in the through the ECR period um questions of sovereignty ontology privacy and sustainability are key to my research area and my research focus and I think they are actually in a broader sense related to the social the social environment that we have as as researchers especially in a post-COVID environment where we do connect digitally a lot of the time so that I'm going to stop sharing there thank you Karina we'll come back to you in the question time Amy over to you now thank you Louise um so I'm just going to talk very briefly um a little bit about um sort of my thoughts my experiences um on the transition from PhD to early career researcher and particularly in the context that I was operating which was um the COVID pandemic so just a little bit um about my own research so um I'd come from an education background with a qualified primary school teacher and I started my and from education at Cambridge's um looking at John's literature and then got into PhD and there's a centre for research there in John's literature but it was very much um quite a traditional literary one um and it didn't have a long history at all of people engaging um with archives with collections of books generally tend people tended to focus on one or two texts rather than a collection of them and and it was just really by chance as I said that I started to think about how I could look at not just one or two books but how I could look at a collection of books um particularly in terms of series of children's classics how I could map the genre to get a sense of what had been published as an entirety and when I began to start to think about my work in that way um it was then the area of well how do I do this um and it particularly became apparent quite quickly that because there wasn't a history of that um I was feeling around trying to identify well kind of what archives can I use what theoretical text should I be consulting really how can I do this income of practice from the digital way um and it was through a very supportive doctoral supervisor and encouraged me this but a lot of it was on me to find this out and to search out people at that time the Cambridge Centre for Digital Humanities was starting to get up and running a bit more um but it wasn't strongly linked to John's literature studies or education and I'd be very open and honest in saying that there was um it wasn't fully supported maybe by traditionalist scholars who had this conception of a literary study as involved in one or two close reading texts um as well and so it was through other supervisors and my supervisor through other students as well that helped with finding the resources um and the PhD is very privileged in this way what it affords you is a number of years to really study and explore a topic that's of interest to you um and it also allows you that mental and physical time to adopt a new approach even if you haven't previously considered yourself as someone who engaged with digital archives I've never been engaged with the British Library much or some of the other collections of digital children's literature including the Baldwin Library at the University of Florida um but it also imposes some clear parameters and I really liked that that had an idea of the subset of an archive that I wanted to look at that was defined by search terms of children's classics and the defining parameter of the series and so I completed my pandemic my my PhD around the time of the pandemic was starting and I then got a full-time academic position a few months later um and so very quickly my focus had to switch from research which had been my life it would be my new experience the last few years to a very full-on teaching position and I was teaching courses I'd never talked before I was having to resource these and meet the demands of online learning it seemed to me that the pandemics would have intensified some common issues that ECRs can face post PhD particularly a very clear one is the lack of physical and mental time to conduct research as well it's hard to match the teaching commitments which are very time limited and you've got a lecture that's got me to be prepared with the research time as well and an ability to engage with digital archives in a sustained and productive way and also particularly for me it was a challenge of what what's next when you're focused on a project for a number of years and kind of working on turning that into a book it's then also well if I want to do some future work where could this go sometimes having lots of choice can be as hard as not having much kind of to carve out the area that you want and the resources that could be useful and so just to sum up and there seem to be you know possibly a link to the concept of accessing mentors in this area provide guidance particularly on the transition and also working with archives themselves really helpful to know the subsets of what they possess to be able to instinctively look at that and to think what could be of use to a researcher and collaboration is always welcome both more experienced peers but also adjacent to again divide up some of the time and deal with some of the kind of transition issues as well and so just a few very quick initial thoughts based on my own experience about this transition point and thank you very much. I'll pass to Gareth now and then we'll have time for one or two questions or comments afterwards so Gareth. Yeah thank you and that's that's a really good presentation Amy because I think I'm at the other end of that to you and that I've gone through that middle period of what do I do next and what comes next so again I'm Gareth Maward I'm at the University of Southern Denmark and I'm in a interdisciplinary institute called the Danish Institute for Advanced Study and one of the reasons why I've been hired is as a historian but also as somebody that does work with digital humanities and is thinking about the methods that might go along with that that's part of my job but not my entire job so I've got some teaching responsibilities but also research ones and some of my teaching time has been bought out to specifically think about those things so when we talk about having the time and the resources which came up in Anita's talk as well I kind of have some of those some of that time so I kind of feel like I've got a bit of a responsibility to use some of it for this kind of stuff so I got into web archives and using them mostly through Serendipity I was offered a small bursary by the Institute of Historical Research in the British Library who were doing a research project where they said we want historians to use web archives think of a question that might involve web archives and then go out and do it and then report back to us on how well it went and we'll have some workshops in between and some sort of meetings in between but basically you're on your own and that was brilliant in the fact that I think it will probably be the only time now in my career that I'll ever be paid to fail at doing something but that was a major part of doing it was that we couldn't answer quite a few of the questions and it led led us to think about what questions are answerable as a overall philosophical problem but also what questions are answerable with the tools that we have at the moment so I've used web archives throughout my work since then I've done research projects on the history of vaccination and on the history of sick notes where because it's about post second world war British history obviously that involves when she gets to the 90s and 2000s you have to think about the web as a as part of that but really there's been not a huge amount of work done with the web as part of wider historical studies so I'm also doing some work with the National Library of Scotland who are doing some web curation work at the moment and talking with them about how that might work out but that's basically the history of my my career to date and I thought I'd end there because I did spend a bit of time answering that question I want to make sure that we've got some space for other questions as well. Oh thank you Gareth how kind so if anyone would like to join the panel to make a comment or ask a question please just put your hand up maybe in the meantime Ozzy could you show us your screen how you're getting into the doodle. Oh fantastic Ozzy thank you so much that's very great to see everything that we've been speaking about being represented there and yeah the DC-DC organisers will share this after the event and maybe while we wait to see if anyone would like to join or ask a question and one thing that came up several times in the presentations was the importance of maybe having digital mentors so people further along in their career who can support and help you. I'm going to stop there actually because I can see Melinda is joining us and she has a question so I'll pass over to her so Melinda take it away. Oh thank you Louise I didn't mean to interrupt and I apologise if I switch my camera off I'll be having a revolting coughing fit. My name is Melinda Haunton I'm also with the National Archives and I sort of have to apologise for how archivisty this question is but I've been really inspired by some of the things you've been saying about kind of working towards non-traditional outputs and valuing different ways of working because digital is different and I just wanted to think in the context of an early career how important is it to you that a lot of those outputs are going to be quite ephemeral. Digital is much harder to keep than you know a journal article which you can be pretty sure will still be there when you need to apply for a job in 15 30 years time and I was just really interested in that and the impact of that and whether that's a consideration for you. Thank you Melinda. Is there anyone who'd like to volunteer to take that? Gareth, call your handphone. Yeah well very quickly that does that does interest me and worry me and it's not just about it being digital and ephemeral some of our outputs are simply the conversations that we have which you cannot track and some of them are methodological questions that might not end up with an answer and getting any funding body to give you more money on the basis of no we need to talk more is quite difficult so that's my kind of view of it but I think other people might have some more specifically digital answers to that. Thank you Carina. I worked specifically with the legacy project at KDL and I can vouch to the instability of non-traditional digital outputs and the importance really of putting in the longer term plan right at the outset of a project. Normally you'd expect a front-end sort of audience facing a platform to have maybe a life of three to five years which is not that long if you are in an early career research position so do try to think about the back end obviously our curves can be preserved on their own on their own merit in more stable form but I think it would be really helpful to think across different public facing outputs if you are looking at digital outputs because they have a very short shelf life and they're expensive to maintain. Really good points do you want to come back with anything on that Melinda? I'm just to say that I'm so glad that Carina said much of what I would have really wanted people to say so I'm glad it's on your minds and I hope it won't put people off thinking about these more creative and kind of engaging digital outputs because it's so important to take that out beyond academia so thank you very much. Kim and Linda we just need to need a bit more thought into the long term when you're working digital things. I can see Herbert's put a question in the chat Herbert would you be willing to come to the table and ask it you can turn your camera and mic on if you're willing I'll maybe read it out so we can go from there. So Herbert's asked for early careers what advice can you give for people that might want to take a masters especially if they're doing a multi-disciplinary approach. Has anyone got any thoughts in response to that one? Anita? Yeah I think it's very exciting so I definitely I coming from this background and I work in this background so I think it is very exciting is just you need probably a bit more resilience to know that and more how you get on with it and you will probably be a bit more independent in terms of managing the cross the difference in terms of the disciplines and using the mentors and the disciplines for your advantage. I think that's probably would be my best advice to take out what you need from the different disciplines and make it for your own. Thank you Anita. I've maybe got one last question before we go if there's no one else joining. So my question that I was going to ask earlier was just around mentors and I maybe put it to you Amy because it's something you mentioned in your presentation so if people feel that they don't have a digital mentor at the moment have you got any advice for what they might do? I think particularly because of the nature of the interdisciplinary world we work in often there isn't a clear carved path it's not that when you start a position often that someone's assigned as your mentor has that background they might have knowledge of your subject area they might have knowledge of academia they're kind of course you're working in but they might not have that digital archive knowledge and particularly that's been my experience and so possibly this is kind of a thought for those working in the area in terms of archives if you could offer some of your mentors if you have partnerships if you have kind of collaborations with senior academics you could offer that and there was some way to kind of centralize it so because maybe those kind of pockets of experience aren't in universities particularly smaller ones such to myself and you have to branch out as well so if there was some kind of broader networks and kind of broader national mentor scheme I think that would be very welcome. Thank you Amy and yet just a plug for us at the National Archives we do a lot of digital mentoring so if you explore our website you should hopefully find some good links.