 Well, good afternoon everybody. Thank you for coming. We're actually taping this session. The questions will not be taped, the questions and answer sessions, so we hope that you'll have plenty of questions, and it'll be very dynamic. So I'd like to welcome you to building expertise to support digital scholarship. My name is John Cawthorne, and I'm the Dean of Libraries at West Virginia University. And my colleagues here are Vivian Lewis, University Librarian at McMaster University, and Lisa Spiro, Executive Director of Digital Scholarship Services at Rice University. Our colleague, Ximu Wang, the Dean and University Librarian from Cincinnati, home of the Bearcats, right? He's here with us in spirit. And while we all work in University Libraries, it may be helpful to remember during this presentation our research goes beyond just libraries. We're interested in campus support, history, and the career structures needed to build digital scholarships centers now and in the future. The four of us have worked together for a little over two years on this preliminary planning grant funded by the Mellon Foundation. We are deeply, deeply grateful for the Mellon, for this opportunity Mellon has provided. And of course this topic is timely. In fact at the last C&I, the session on digital scholarship filled up so quickly, we weren't even able to be a part of it. So that's how this goes. But we're curious in the session how many people, just by a show of hands, how many people are, how many people have a digital scholarship or digital humanities center on campus? Yeah, there's a... So this question may be for you. How many are thinking about or in the process of, okay, more people. Very good. Thank you. This gives us just a quick snapshot of the interest in our varying institutions, of course. In the planning stages of our research, we had to start with the definition of digital scholarship. And we recognize early on that there's not a universally accepted definition for digital scholarship. But this is the working definition we used throughout the project. And I'll just read it to you. The creation, production, analysis, and or dissemination of new scholarship using digital or computational techniques. So our objectives were to define the expertise important to leading digital scholarship programs. Identify how digital scholars develop expertise. We wanted to identify key characteristics of organizations that promote continuous learning. And we wanted to understand digital scholarship expertise in a global context. And finally, recommend how best to nurture expertise in digital scholarship. It's important to remember, of course, that the scope of our preliminary research has been global in context. Now, we had a deceptively simple methodology as we sort of identified best in class in digital scholarship organizations. We conducted on-site interviews and coded those interviews to reveal patterns. From the beginning, our questions led our research design and process. For instance, does expertise look different in other parts of the world? Do strategies used to build that expertise vary from place to place? We know that a tremendous amount of sophisticated work is being done in other parts of the world. And beginning to tell that story was an important starting point. The red dots represent locations of the sites visited. While we ended up with 16 site locations, we visited multiple organizations within a particular institution. So, for instance, a center and lab focused on digital humanities. And we visited one that focused on digital social sciences and digital archaeology. And even one that was focused on high-performance computing. Just like on many of your campuses, there are diverse models for digital scholarship organizations. And it is important to stress that there's not a single model for digital scholarship organizations. Dancing slides, okay. And you may have questions about how these sites were selected. But in the interest of time, I can say we researched over 100 different sites. And as you see, we based our decision on many factors. The amount and quality of research, the uniqueness of their mission. And one important criteria for our team was the engagement and teaching and learning and research. There were limits and constraints to our research. First, we cannot make sweeping generalizations. It's generally not good anyway. And you should view our findings more as a snapshot of these very dynamic organizations. So with this foundational introduction, I'd like to turn it over to my colleague Vivian Lewis. Thanks, everyone. I hope you can hear me at the back. If my voice starts to trail off, the gentleman in blue will remind me. Thank you. What I'll do in the next few minutes is really give you a very high-level overview of the expertise we saw at our various site visits, the strategies that we saw in use in building and retaining the expertise, and some common approaches that we saw to continuous professional development. And some of what I may describe might not seem that surprising to you, especially those characteristics which align neatly with our own North American experience. What is new here is actually the global perspective. This is, in some ways, our proviso statement. We could not produce a slate of skills, competencies, and mindsets that cover all the roles in all the different DSOs that we visited all around the world. Doing so would really have been an injustice to the complexity of the work happening in this space. What we can do is point to the common expertise that seems significant in many of the organizations that we visited. First, a quick statement about what we mean by the term expertise, and I promise you that in some ways this is the most complicated slide in our deck, so stick with me. We view expertise, really, as the compilation of four kinds of traits or abilities. Domain knowledge is the subject knowledge or the discipline knowledge. For example, the knowledge of Chaucer's work. By skills, we're referring to the more task oriented and easily trainable traits. For example, the ability to use Excel software is a skill. By way of competencies, we're speaking about more abstract abilities or fitness. Over the course of time, learning many different GIS packages may evolve into a broad geospatial competency. Finally, by mindset, we're speaking of a collection of attitudes, inclinations, or habits of mind that largely determine how an individual will typically respond in a given situation, and we use the examples of curiosity and flexibility as mindsets. In reality, these categories are more blurry than they read. The lines, for example, between skills and competencies are particularly fuzzy, but collectively, we believe they capture the full cluster of the expertise we were interested in when we travel to all those various parts in the world. So what did we learn? Advanced domain or subject knowledge was identified as foundational at most of the DSOs that we visited. This knowledge was often, but not always, evidence by advanced degrees. We did meet a small number of very senior scholars who had come through different paths, but they were the aberration. We were often told that subject expertise is required to understand research problems, to critically evaluate data, and to effectively collaborate with peers. The notion of respect was also clear. You need knowledge to be respected in the profession to be brought into the global conversations. And this deep knowledge seemed especially critical in some of our international visits to China and India, where the DSOs are working with historical materials of deep cultural significance. In some cases, the expectation for deep subject knowledge was intense for faculty, but significantly less for staff, who tended to focus primarily on the technical skills. We intuitively knew that collaborative competencies were important. All job postings of course refer to them, but we were routinely surprised by the critical importance placed on collaborative competencies at virtually every location that we visited. We soon learned that collaboration and interpersonal skills are not rhetoric. They are not filler in the job postings in these DSOs. The teams doing truly groundbreaking work and digital scholarship are genuinely and deliberately collaborative in their approach. They bake the collaboration into their grant proposals and into their daily practice. So remember, a mindset is a way of thinking. It determines how you behave in a certain situation. We met people around the world working in disparate projects in different languages, but who shared a clear learning mindset. They were curious and inquisitive people who were eager to try new techniques. The fast pace of technological change made a focus on continuous learning and absolute imperative. Methodological competencies such as GIS and data visualization were often mentioned during our visits. Virtually all incorporate a deep understanding of how to compile, organize and analyze data. Technical skills were actually a bit of a surprise to us. We expected them, possibly naively, to be more prominent in our study than they actually were. In reality, we could not identify a core set of technical skills. Programming was mentioned the most frequently. Systems administration, database design and web design often came up. And digitization was also often cited, especially by organizations in India and China, again focusing on presentation and analysis of heritage materials. And managerial skills really came down to two big traits, project management broadly defined and grant writing. I'll now turn our attention to the strategies used by these DSOs to build and retain expertise on their campuses. Again, we saw some very clear trends, although the specifics vary based on the academic environments. We saw a very clear and strong preference for learning by doing. Our DS scholars are doers. They prefer to tinker with something rather than read a manual or take a formal course. And we did see some significant variation in how the current leaders had developed their own expertise and what they saw as the needs of the generation coming after them. In many cases, these senior leaders were self taught. Many of them were pioneers in their fields long before there were courses to register for. And that said, they were very eager to help the next generation of scholars develop skills in a more formal way by supporting workshops and summer institutes. The concept of community of practice was critical. Many of the people we interviewed spoke about learn, do, teach as their mantra. In most cases, excuse me, in most places that we visited, the teaching was very democratic. One spoke of the quote, egalitarian exchange of knowledge. When you hit a wall, it's great to be part of a community. It's energizing. The image on this slide comes from the University of Cologne's Center for E-Humanities workshop on 3D scanning. We also saw what I would describe as a patchwork of practices regarding external learning. In some cases, it really was the faculty who got away to conferences. In many cases, there wasn't funding for the research staff to go as well. And finally, we were really struck by the passion many of the organizations we visited had for training scholars beyond their own institutions. I draw your attention to the University of Victoria's Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the DHSI, the Oxford Summer School, and the Dixit Training Network out of Cologne. Taking pride in the accomplishments of the entire profession was a hallmark of many of the organizations that we visited. Finally, I'll just speak very briefly about some interesting characteristics of the organizations we visited in relation to continuous learning. We talked already about the importance of collaborative skills, so it should be not surprising to learn that the organizations themselves are collaborative and open. As one leader put it, check your ego at the door as you enter. We're about open discussion. We establish a level playing field and bring in people from all over. These organizations are not working in silos, they're not working in isolation either. Rather, they're deeply engaged with international partners. We draw your attention, in this case, to the China GIS project led by Fudan University and Harvard, as well as Stanford Humanities and Design Teams collaborations with Italy and Australia and others. Most of the places we visited were actively engaged in education and professional development on many fronts. They're training the next generation of scholars in many ways, through formal graduate courses, through certificates, undergraduate courses, etc. As one participant put it, they're placing their bets on future scholars. And finally, most were heavily invested in creating collaborative spaces. Sometimes these spaces were highly polished, like myth, but not always. At this point, I'm actually going to stop and I'm going to turn to my colleague Lisa, who will really delve a little bit more deeply into the international aspects of our study and then walk you through some recommendations. Can I have a little clicker so I don't lean too much? So we had the rare privilege of going to China and India and Taiwan, Germany, the UK, as well as Canada, the US, and Mexico to explore the shape of digital scholarship in these different contexts. And that has afforded us the opportunity to kind of look across the world and try to determine some larger trends that are going on. At the same time, we are quite conscious that we only went to a few places around the world. So we're not prepared to the grand generalizations, but we do want to point to a few different characteristics or structures that inform the shape of digital scholarship, which we're kind of defining broadly to include digital humanities, which was our primary focus, as well as digital social science. We visited a few organizations that had work in that domain. So one important influence on how digital scholarship takes shape in a particular national or regional context is the tradition of digital scholarship. So a lot of discussion around digital humanities in particular has popped up in the last, say, seven or so years in the United States. But of course, the tradition is much longer, stretches back to the late 1940s, according to many accounts. And we saw that in countries such as the UK and Canada, there is a long tradition of institutional or organizational support for digital humanities in particular, with conferences, with centers, some of which have kind of come and gone with established professional roles. But in other contexts, that sort of organizational and professional identity is less mature. So for example, Isabel Gallina and Ernesto Priani in Mexico had been looking at digital humanities there and observed in studies that date back to, say, 2010, that although there are people doing work in this domain across Mexico, they didn't necessarily know each other. They didn't have any kind of formal organizational support for that work. So one of the important things that they have done through an organization called Red HAD is to bring together scholars in that area who have an interest in digital humanities and sort of build a network of people who can turn to others at different institutions for help with their projects, who can think about how to evaluate digital humanities work and who can provide access to training. So a networked approach seems entirely appropriate in this context. Of course, another characteristic of different kind of national level digital scholarship operations is where the funding is coming from because where the funding is coming from is going to affect the sort of research focus as well as the sort of institutional support. So for example, in Taiwan, the government there through the National Science Council has been funding digital archives programs since the late 1990s. And this involves not just digitization, but building the kind of fundamental technological infrastructure and networking people as well. In the European Union, there are sort of transnational research infrastructure programs such as the Dixit Network that Vivian mentioned that really try to build both the sort of expertise and also the sort of core technologies to support digital scholarship. Now one thing that I found personally most bewildering in traveling to different contexts was just trying to understand how academic jobs work in these contexts. I mean we're used to, at least assuming that most of us in the room are from North America, we're used to a sort of standard structure of assistant to associate to full professor and research staff positions, but you can't assume that model is the same around the world. So Germany has a fairly complex structure that isn't necessarily linear and often will involve a stay as sort of a research fellow before advancing to more senior levels. But they also try to provide support for young researchers through, for example, an e-humanities young research program there. And I mean it's important to note that tenure and promotion, which is a major concern in this context, doesn't necessarily exist in the same way around the world. Another factor in, you know, how digital scholarship plays out in these different contexts is the role of the research library. So a lot of discussions at Passianis have focused on the ways in which research libraries are sort of the homes for digital scholarship centers and labs and so forth. And we found that that model didn't necessarily apply across the world, that the library might be involved in say supporting digitization, but didn't necessarily have a role in the sort of core research operations with some exceptions. So those are just some general observations with all sorts of caveats attached to them. I would also like to point to some common challenges around the world, one of which you might be able to guess is funding, right? So not surprisingly, a lot of digital scholarship organizations are fairly reliant on soft money and that isn't necessarily abundant. So some of them had sort of tenuous funding situations and were in some cases kind of shoestring or had to rely heavily on grants, but we also saw an interest in kind of diversifying funding, including looking to research libraries as one possible source of more stable support and looking at more integration into the teaching and learning mission of the university. And again, where your money is coming from is going to in part affect the kind of direction of the expertise that you build. Related to this is something we particularly want to call attention to, these challenges around recruitment and retention. As Vivian noted, there's a really specific skill profile for experts in digital scholarship, which include not only the technical and methodological expertise, but this passion for learning and for doing and for working together. And finding those people can be tough, especially given that the positions in which they're being recruited for don't necessarily come and often don't come with kind of stable career paths, that you're reliant on soft funding, their short-term contracts. And one of our interviewees suggested that they were a member of the academic proletariat. And this is something that causes anguish often to the leaders of digital scholarship organizations who wish that there were a path to promotion for these excellent people, but there's not that path to promotion. So often tech companies and other organizations had had success in kind of luring away the digital scholars or in winning them from the get-go. Finally, or actually second to finally, we noticed a sort of tension between research and service. So most of the organizations that we visited were really explicit in saying, you know, we're about research, we're about creating new knowledge. And we don't really want to be involved in the service activities. But there may be a call for that at their home institutions. And there's also a tension between generating new knowledge and supporting your old projects. So finally, given the global nature of our work, we did notice some challenges around language. And this is something that's been a topic of conversation in the digital humanities community for the last few years. You know, pointing out, for example, that most of the presentations at the major digital humanities conference are in English. And, you know, for scholars whose native language is not English, there's often a sort of choice between doing your work in your native language and having a smaller audience, although we are seeing, you know, professional organizations focused on particular countries and language groups emerge as well as journals and so forth. Or you can present your work in English, and it takes a whole lot more time to actually produce that work. So twice as long, basically, to write it and then to translate it. So given these challenges, we do want to point to a few recommendations. We have a list of 33. But I will not bore you by explaining every single one of those recommendations. Rather, we want to point to three kind of general categories of recommendations. First, recommendations aimed at leaders of digital scholarship organizations. And we use this term DSO. It kind of reminds me of yellow. But the idea there is to acknowledge that it's not just digital scholarship centers or labs, that there are diversity of models for digital scholarship. So in terms of digital scholarship organization leaders, we observe the really important role that leaders played in cultivating strong communities of practice, in cultivating a culture that embraced continuous learning. And that includes being part of that community. So sort of continually learning yourself as well as providing the both financial and moral support for informal exchanges of ideas over coffee or beer, as well as bringing in outside experts to lead workshops or to seed new ideas. Also, a couple of organizations that we looked at had sort of dedicated research time, recognizing that research is a core part of developing expertise and ongoing learning. In terms of universities and host organizations, our first recommendation for creating stable, rewarding staff positions may be easier said than done. But given the challenges we noted around recruitment and retention, we wanted to call that out at recognizing the important contributions that these staff make to the institution. We also observed that some of the more successful organizations had access to money, not a big pot of money, but some money that they could use if they say wanted to throw a workshop on 3D modeling, if that's an area of expertise that they wanted to cultivate. And of course, you know, tenure and promotion processes and other advancement processes need to evaluate this work in fair ways. Finally, in terms of the digital scholarship community, just in terms of grappling with these issues around different languages, I think it's important, for example, in a practical way to provide adequate time when call for papers are issued, to make sure that if people choose to translate their work into English, they can do that. So this was a pilot study. And there are lots of areas where the work can be expanded. We acknowledged, for example, that although we had the privilege of going to several different places around the world, there are a lot more that we could have gone to, to have an even richer perspective on digital scholarship. So we would have loved to have gone to South America, for example, or to have expanded our analysis in Europe and Asia and elsewhere. Also, I think it would be really interesting to have a sort of richer transdisciplinary perspective. So we look primarily at digital humanities, a bit at digital social science, but to fold in, say, bioinformatics would allow us to see the different strategies that are used to cultivate expertise. Another concrete way I think we could better understand what people are doing and how and what skills are important is to look closely at job descriptions and kind of do an analysis across a range of job descriptions. And finally, as Vivian noted, many of the places that we visited had a strong focus on education. And of course, you know, the interplay between education and professional development is really important and understanding the sort of emerging curriculum for digital scholarship, I think, could give us a richer understanding of what's important to emphasize in the curriculum. So our work has been of interest to people involved in kind of developing digital scholarship degree programs and also give us a sense of sort of what's ahead. So we deliberately made our presentation brief because we want to really encourage questions and conversation. So let's open up now for questions and conversations. And as John said, you're not being recorded. Well, you are, but they're going to throw it out. So we welcome no matter how brilliant the question is, it will be thrown out. We welcome any questions you have and we'd be happy to respond. Yeah. Any other questions? Thank you. Yeah, you've been very patient. Thank you very much. Thank you.