 Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch, and I'm the director of CNI. I will be moderating the session. And I just like to welcome you all. This is a special session that is part of the second of our two plenary days for the CNI fall 2020 virtual meeting and recording the session. The session will be available publicly later the video of it. There is closed captioning available. Please use that if it's helpful. We do have a chat going and there's also a Q&A tool. This session is really, I guess the best way I can describe this is it's a response to the fact that so much has moved virtual in the world in the last months because of the pandemic. Many of you will be familiar with the Clear Fellows Program, which has enjoyed a long and very fruitful relationship with CNI. Over years we have invited the fellows from the recent cohorts of the Clear Fellows Program to join us at CNI, and they have been very active, engaged, and I think much beloved presences at our physical meetings. They often bring great insights, they ask wonderful questions, and they're often doing some of the most interesting and innovative things around. Many of them over the years have become sort of more permanent members of our community as they have settled into positions at CNI member institutions and stayed engaged with the work we do. Unfortunately, since we're not meeting in person, we don't have an opportunity to meet the current Clear Fellows to get to know them a little bit. So I thought that as long as we're doing virtual meetings, it really made a lot of sense to schedule a session every meeting. And we couldn't do this in the spring because there just wasn't enough time because we suddenly had to go virtual, you know, on almost no notice. So my thought was to have a session where we take a few of the current fellows and get to know them a little bit and give them a little bit of visibility in our community and find out what they're doing, have some conversation with them. Variably, I have found they're doing fascinating things and they bring really important and valuable viewpoints. So what I've asked our fellows today to do is to spend around 10 minutes or give or take a little telling us who they are, what their background is, what they're working on, and to reflect a bit on the current environment and the challenges and opportunities that they see in that environment. After we hear from all of our fellows, we will have a little conversation and then I'll open it up to questions from the audience. As questions occur to you, please put them either in the Q&A or in the chat and we can also handle audio questions later if that makes sense. So with that, let me turn it over to Nicte Fuller-Medea to tell us a little bit about who she is and what she's doing. We started with her because she has a graphic and we figured we'd just get that out of the way early on. So on to our other fellows. So I just want to extend a really warm welcome from CNI. Thank you for being here and thank you for all you're doing. Over to you, Nicte. Thank you very much for that introduction Cliff and for organizing this panel. I'm very happy to be here and to participate. I'm Nicte Fuller-Medina. I'm currently a fellow at the UCLA library and data curation in Latin American and Caribbean studies. And I'm a linguist by training specifically in sociolinguistics and I study language in Belize and so I just asked for this graphic to orient people in case not everyone knows that Belize is part of Central America, south of Mexico and to the east of Guatemala. And so as a sociolinguist, I'm interested in telling the human story of language, how language travels and changes as a result of migration, how communities use language as a social mechanism for cultural expression for linguistic agency for linguistic resistance. How language itself through its lexicon and structure archives community histories. And also how speakers navigate grammars as well as ideologies when they use multiple languages in the same utterance in other words when they when they code switch. And I work with spontaneous data. So speech that says naturalistic as possible. And I work within a quantitative framework, which means that I need lots of data for analysis. I work primarily with interviews. The research agenda that I've just described having a record of how people spoke at an earlier point in time and especially having multiple instances of this in multiple interviews is really invaluable. It provides a linguistic benchmark. And so I'm currently working with a collection of legacy interviews collected in the late 1970s in mestizo Maya communities in Belize and this is the project I'm working at at UCLA. These interviews were collected for a PhD dissertation by then student Timothy Hagerty who did his PhD at UCLA. And as I mentioned, they provide a really important linguistic benchmark but more than that because they contain narratives of Maya mestizo community life folklore and spiritual beliefs as well as languages that was spoken at an earlier point in time and they were done in Spanish. Because of the content I reimagine these interviews as cultural patrimony. This then positions the collection as a body of knowledge, which belongs to the communities as well. Specifically the communities where these the interviewee communities where the records were created. And in this way it makes evident the need for repatriation. And so it becomes really important for these records to then be located close to these communities and for the communities to have access to records. Now, standard practice in linguistics is that in the creation of a corpus really linguists are what centered and not so much community access so then we'll organize a corpus according to how it's going to be used for the study of language in terms of building collections in libraries. Generally speaking that's not done together with communities and there's priority in terms of access to scholars, particularly in academic libraries for example and the preservation of legacy materials. I want to and I want to say a bit about what I mean by repatriation so now when we think about repatriation maybe what comes to mind is physical artifacts. kept in museums and perhaps obtain or taken from communities under less than fair circumstances. In some cases outright theft. But in this case I'm talking about ephemera so these are audio recordings. And when I talk about repatriation I'm talking about a return of patrimony, which was obtained under circumstances. It can be described as default extractivist practices supported by or created by a colonial legacy. So what I mean by that is, in terms of collecting, but specifically in terms of data collection. It's quite normal and in fact standard that data can be extracted from the so called global South, for example, remain in the global north and any findings publications that are created from that data remain in the global north. And then communities where the data was collected don't have access to that body of knowledge. And you can think of that in similar ways of what happens with collecting. Now, of course, a lot of institutions such as UCLA are challenging this type of collecting through post custodial collecting. And so in working with this collection, while the goals are to preserve the collection because the work that Tim Haggerty did in documenting community life the folklore and the language is indispensable. It's a social justice initiative. So in addition to making the collection accessible to scholars through the UCLA library. We also want to return this patrimony to people so it has to be repatriated so we want people who best know how to interpret the collection to have access to the collection and that could be the community members, local scholars, students. Simply putting the collection up online doesn't accomplish this so we might think of having an open access online collections being accessible to everybody. But in fact it doesn't really mean that it's accessible to everybody many communities don't have the infrastructure to reliably access an audio collection like this and I'm thinking specifically of course of the communities and believes where the interviews were collected. And so in creating the online collection, which is major goal of the project we have to actively challenge default practices and one of the ways of doing that is co creating with communities to jointly address issues such as anonymization redaction of interviews, permissions from interviewees and also the type of representation that communities want through the collection. Now, in times of pandemic, that actually becomes very difficult and I've, I've actually written a blog post about this about how covert challenge this framework that I'm trying to use in creating an online collection and repatriating the collection to communities. I wasn't able to travel to Belize as I had originally planned in order to do the community collaborative component in order to work with communities to co create this corpus I wasn't able to be on the ground for the capacity building that was planned in Belize that's been really there is still some capacity building happening, but not to the extent that was originally planned. And so the project has had to be scaled down. Now I talked about the content of the narratives. In fact, Timothy Hagerty co edited a book, and a lot of the narratives have been published in this book. And so the way we've scaled down the project now is we're only going to put online the interviews that correspond to the stories that have already been published. Another issue around the challenge of working during times of COVID is that while Belize had gone, I think, about two months without any confirmed cases of COVID it's currently exploding in Belize right now and Belize has the highest number of active cases among the Caribbean states. And so while I recognize the important of this work and how indispensable it is to preserve this data and while I've certainly had interest and expressions from community members that it's very important in this moment, it may not be a priority. And so I really have to balance that with how I move forward with the project. I do want to end though on some positives that have come out of this new world of remote work and virtual communication and again I want to be clear I'm not saying that there's a positive that has come out of the pandemic at all. I want to talk about how remote work has impacted the work that I'm doing in a positive way so for you know it's so widespread it's become almost natural for us to work virtually and so that has made it so much easier to bring together a transnational team. There are two research assistants who are based in Belize who are working on the project doing transcription work and other data management that supported through the Clear Fellowship Research stipend and then there are two student research assistants supported through UCLA Library and we have our project meetings obviously virtually on Zoom and it's just natural there's no additional planning that needs to happen. We all have the same expectation that we're going to meet on Zoom. The work itself really does lend itself to be completed remotely. And again that has been straightforward there are no special permissions for you know having students complete work remotely that sort of thing and we've even been able to have a project meeting with Tim Haggerty who is still alive and you know the research assistants got a chance to ask him all sorts of questions I got a chance to ask some clarification questions about the interviews and without this remote work being such a norm. I would have been trying to find funding to bring Tim Haggerty to UCLA or it may have, you know, involved so many more emails to try to coordinate and get everybody online, but we all have the same expectation and so that's really helped things move along. And so so far we've completed time logs we're creating the timeline transcripts and we plan to have interviews up online in January. Happy to take questions at the end in the Q&A and just want to say thanks again for having me on the panel. Thank you so much. That was just awesome the number of really important issues and insights you just packed into a very small amount of time. Thanks. Christian, do you want to tell us a bit about what you're doing next. I'm always happy to talk about the things I'm working on. It's just the, it's the thing that everyone loves about academics talk all day. But, okay, so I, my name is Christian Casey, I am a clear fellow in the ISOL library. I saw is the, the acronym that we use for the Institute for the study of the ancient world which is affiliated with NYU. And I'm an Egyptologist by training. And my research involves doing things with Egyptian language that haven't really been done or have been tried and haven't worked. So, everyone's probably at least loosely familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs. You've definitely seen them before. You've probably seen them in the context of an inscription on a stone wall or something like that. But what you might not have seen as often are the, the thousands of handwritten texts so when, when Egyptians wrote each other letters or wrote up contracts and things, they didn't actually carve them into stone like in a cartoon they just used the papyrus and ink. And when they did that of course they didn't draw the glyphs exactly precisely they just kind of briefly sketched them out and we can actually see from the old kingdom around. I think the text is dated to around 2500 BC we can see we have papyri where they've, they've just literally drawn the glyphs with ink on on paper basically. We see a transition all throughout Egyptian history as the scripts develop over time they become more abstract. The characters no longer look like the hieroglyphs that they originally came from in the same way that the letters of our alphabet no longer look like the hieroglyphs that they came from originally. They became sort of arbitrary shapes. That's the thing that I study I'm really interested in this process of script evolution. It has a lot of connections to linguistic evolution more generally in fact it's, I think I demonstrated pretty thoroughly in my dissertation that they are essentially equivalent processes. And there's not, not a whole lot has been done on the way scripts evolve over time. And Egyptian is the perfect test case because we have multiple scripts we like I said we have thousands of texts, the stuff in these texts is really interesting so there are, you know, there are, there are things like legal documents and letters which can be interesting for the study of history. But there are also things like stories and songs and hymns, all these really wonderful things that are difficult to access in their original because they're written in this super obscure ancient script. So there's there's a lot of interesting stuff to do there. The thing that I'm working on now as part of my postdoc is I'm creating a digital tool that allows students of and scholars but people who study the script. To search for signs by shape. So what we have right now. We have these massive tones that are just lists of all the possible hieratic signs. Hieratic is the name of the of one of the handwritten scripts. So if you're a student you're trying to learn the script in like an Egyptology course. You're given a text and the text is just, you know, like any text is just a sequence of random letters that you don't know yet that's why you're reading it, but there's actually no way to look up those letters without going through the entire list and the list has a thousand things in it. So it's really difficult to learn it's really tedious. What people do most of the time is they take the hieratic text. That's totally incomprehensible to them and they put a transcription in computerized Egyptian hieroglyphic font. You can convert one to the other and then you get the nice little pictures of you know birds and animals and things and it's much easier to read and you kind of just sit with those things side by side until you start to get it. And then you then you kind of know enough to use a sign list or something. Another thing that people do is they create their own cross references. I have a friend and a colleague who made this really wonderful hand drawn like 12 page document that is a sign list where they're sort of roughly sorted the the hieratic signs are roughly sorted by shape. And we were talking about it one day and I realized that this this thing that I've done for my dissertation where I, you know, use text to match different shapes to one another and extract the shapes of letter forms from these ancient texts. That could actually be really useful for for creating lookups and things that people really need if they're studying this language. That's the big thing that I'm working on right now. I want to create an online tool that allows you to actually go and draw the shape that you're seeing on the page and it will give you a list of the matching shapes and you know all the other information like which hieroglyphs they're equivalent to and where you can find them in the text and all those kinds of things. I think that would be an extremely useful tool. It's just having started working on it. I'm getting a lot of really positive feedback from the Egypt logical community because this is just a massive gap that could not have been filled before there's really, you know you can you can hand draw your own sign list but that's about the only thing you can do to simplify that problem without computers so it's it's something that wasn't possible before I think that's really exciting. Come on have I been speaking cliff you'll tell me if I just talk forever please. I won't be offended. It won't be the first time I've been asked to stop talking about these things. Okay, so the other thing I wanted to talk about is I guess I could say more about the different things I do at I saw so that the hieratic look up web app project is the thing that I'm most passionate about but it's not the only thing I do we're also in the I saw library we are creating various digital tools and data sets for academic libraries generally so at the Institute for the study of the ancient world where this big eclectic group of scholars who study the ancient world. Defined as broadly as possible. So we have people who study very diverse regions, and one of the things that we found just they found as as I saw has grown is dealing with the different needs of all those people as an academic library is much more challenging than you would think, because each of these subject areas so if you if you study ancient China or ancient Egypt, each of these areas has their own, you know, totally different siloed world and way of doing things. So what we try to do in the I saw library is find ways of forming connections between those different approaches. So one of the projects that I just completed a major milestone on. We're calling it the new titles project for lack of a more creative title honestly, but it takes all of the new acquisitions in the I saw library and places them on a map of the world. Each book gets a dot or several dots on the map. And then if you're a scholar at I saw and you study, say the ancient Caucasus, and we just got 1000 books in this month. 980 of which don't pertain to your subject area and anyway, you can go look at this map and click on the dots and find which things we've gotten that are actually relevant to you. So that's, I think it's a really cool project. It's, it's been a lot of work and it's been a huge learning process because I really haven't hadn't done a whole lot of web development before I worked more on like machine learning type problems. So the last thing Cliff I'm sorry I'm going to run out of time but I was going to talk more about the effect of COVID. I've certainly been less impacted than than many people and I don't want to complain too much but it really has been. It's come at just about the worst possible time for me in my career, especially because I was having such a blast at I saw, you know, living in Manhattan and walking to work at I saw every day. And it's got this wonderful community in an old townhouse. It's, it's a block away from the Met. I am whining at this I'm just whining about all the cool things I was doing before COVID. I think the biggest impact is probably stuff like this. This this meeting was a great idea it's it's really good for us to come and meet and talk to each other. It's still not the same as us just getting to hang out and, you know, find new people that we would work well with and find out what we're interested in. I think that's the loss of that personal connection has been pretty, pretty devastating. I guess I'll go and I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying that it's had quite an impact. I think I'll stop there on kind of a sour note I'm sorry. I think we all feel that very strongly Christian. We all we all miss that kind of, you know, in person collaboration. That was, that was fascinating I the work with the hieroglyphic languages really, I think is a potential game changer and fascinating. Brian, tell us about what you're doing. I'm Brian Robinson currently working Jackson library at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, but then digital collections. My interests around. Well, I was trained as an American historian, but my interests around Southern history, Southern education. History of ideas, black cultural building and slavery. What I'm working on currently is people not property slave these in North Carolina. This project extracts the name of enslaved people from property these from 26 counties in North Carolina. Property these if you do not know usually come about do do do sell wanting to sell in documents like bill of sales need to trust, need to give or marriage contracts. Usually, the things that are included in those documents are things like cattle or land, and in this case, enslaved people because they were considered property in some ways and sometimes people. Currently we are in the process of transcribing those deeds. We have I think we've collected 15,000 slave deeds. So in essence we have the name 15,000 slave people, in which we hope to create a searchable database from the from that, from that data set. My duties range from kind of helping to develop the website recruiting volunteers, leading volunteer sessions because a lot of the things that we do rely heavily on volunteers. I'm a lecturer in those labor in North Carolina, helping with grants to expand the project was one of our goals to spend it to more counties in North Carolina. And I also do general research on archival information about antebellum North Carolina that will help us to identify more names of enslaved people. One of the things that I have found thus far is a tax assessment list of North Carolina Revenue Act 1863 that has provided a significant amount of names and information that we will use later on once this people not project people not property is complete. Another project that I'm also somewhat leading is no no longer yours contextualizing emphasizing freedom seekers in a brief history of North Carolina. This project is sponsored by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the National Park Service through a network to freedom. The goal of this project is to create a digital textbook and highlighting a brief history of slavery in North Carolina, while highlighting freedom seekers which are runaway slaves in North Carolina. This project to tie in with the strong database that we have a UNCG which is the digital library and an American slavery, specifically the runaway slave advertisement database. In order to contextualize the environment of freedom seekers we wanted to kind of synthesize a lot of the history that the history of slavery in North Carolina which is somewhat known but relatively unknown. When you think about the historiography of slavery in America, North Carolina is one of those states that are that is usually left out. The focus is mostly on South Carolina Virginia and North Carolina because it did relatively have a small population. It's usually left out of that out of that story. And so our job or my job is to kind of fill in a lot of those boys and understand what was the environment for runaways and why did they want to run away in North Carolina how did they escape and what routes did they take out of North Carolina. So let's see some of the challenges with this project is the inability to do interviews spend time with teachers, community leaders and the archives. Each of those aspects are quite important, particularly spending time with community leaders one of the goals of this project is for to be appetizing for the general public. One thing that we want to do is bridge the gap in terms of how we understand race in America and one of the ways that we believe we can kind of come to a different understanding of that is understanding the development of slavery, how race is somewhat constructed in the earlier times of America. So by making it a digital textbook we wanted to be filled with centered on kind of multimedia, adding a lot of pictures, a lot of data is in order to make this something that people will be attracted to. I'll turn now to kind of talk about some of the challenges I have in general, being a clear fellow in the library and having training somewhere in the background of American history. One thing that I had a problem with initially with this job opportunity was kind of compartmentalizing my skills, you know really kind of focusing on the kind of a la carte type of way of thinking about what I do. And then the implicit implicit knowledge that is acquired through a lot of the process I've done before, and kind of narrowing it down and figuring out where I fit with with the team because when you're doing a dissertation you usually alone. You usually don't have a lot of people around you is just you. So, going from that and then working with a team that does a lot of different things kind of fit finding myself in that took a little time. In regards to COVID. I think it has severely impacted my relationship with supervisor not in the social good way but in terms of learning each other I think, coming from my background and, and going into the library, you need that interaction on a daily basis to kind of learn from one another, learning the strength and weaknesses of each other so that you kind of approach one another to say hey, I think this would be a good thing to do, or this wouldn't be a good thing to do. It's hard to do that when you don't really know the person that well, even though I have a great supervisor David is phenomenal, but that time is necessary to kind of understand each other strength weaknesses and pushing each other forward in different ways. One of the things I have learned through this process, particularly because I've focused on writing a number of grants is thinking about the local community and how we actually engage with them. And so one thing that I'm pushing back against now when we're thinking about grants is, is to not corporatize our research and by resisting kind of abstract language. I find that many academic projects of focuses, oftentimes out of touch with the reality of people. Not saying that, you know, we shouldn't have those things because we need those things but I think we have to kind of think of more about the town and gown relationship more than we do now. I'm more of a kind of a blue collar scholar so I kind of tend to think about community, much more than others. So I just, I kind of push on that now and I find it challenging to push back but a useful thing to push back on. So hopefully that that sums up what I had to say. Thank you. That was just fascinating. The, the whole play of different scholarly and organizational cultures that you described, and that whole question of engaging the community, I think is one that is becoming really much more important for a lot of folks as they think about their work now. So, thank you for just a great synthesis of a lot of things. And finally, we're going to hear from Azure Stewart and her really interesting work. Over to you, Azure, and welcome. I'm Beth and Beth and everyone from CNI for having joined and have all of us on the panel. So, I'm Azure Stewart, I'm a clear fellow at NYU as well. My post is a little bit different. I actually work for an engineering library. Prior to coming in why you most of my career has been at the intersection of education and STEM. I'm not a scientist by trade but it just so happens. A lot of my work has ended up in those different intersections. My primarily position there was considered an engineering strategist, educational strategist. So I work kind of the intersection between the tandem school and the library. And we're working on a variety of different things. Right now with COVID going on as you see the way that students are engaging in the classroom is having to change, especially virtually. So we're facing a different dynamic with the kinds of students that we are going to be intersecting with. We of course have generation Z but also you have generation alpha. And so it really, a lot of the things that are going on, especially the pandemic, a economic fallout from 2008 is really reshaped how a lot of students are showing up or also how they're investing in their education or what things that they want out of it. So, prior to me coming at a couple colleagues who really been trying to re understand and rethink about engineering as a field and how students are prepared. We focus a lot on the technical skills and the intersections of making sure that they're prepared engineering wise but a lot of the things that are missing out are the soft skills. And those interactions, and also given you guys are seeing a lot of publications and articles written now, things that are going on with Facebook and Google about the intersection between AI and race and how things are presented in data. So what I've been doing over the last year has really been meeting with students across different backgrounds. The Brooklyn campus is really unique because they have a lot of first generation students, a lot of students of color, who are either local within Brooklyn or other areas outside of the New York area. I've really gotten a chance to sit down and actually do interviews. I'm an ethnographer. So I do what you call interactional ethnography. It's kind of an intersection of social linguistics and education anthropology. So I'm really interviewing the students and trying to understand their experiences being an engineer but also their preparation but also trying to figure out other ways to make sure that students are able to not only be prepared but also to understand the, I guess you wouldn't say how to intersect in these different spaces but also how to build teams and, you know, being more of a global society how do you develop and build those leadership skills. And also how do you be better aware of the things that you're building technologically specifically you have AI and all these other things that are generating stuff. How are you being more informed about the decision making that you're doing as an engineer and being inclusive of other populations. So anyway, so I've been doing some curriculum development with some of the insights of what the students are experiencing or what they're not prepared for. And so we've been beta testing that and then developing some grants and trying to get funding for it. And importantly, a lot of this work has been like a catalyst to re-envision just the local spaces that the students have around in their community, how to think about, you know, the local impact of what's in their community and what's happening to them. So I've talked about including, you know, NYU is based on indigenous lands, how to include the conversation of, you know, those acknowledgements and how do you interact with them as a scientist or how do you rediscover what's native to those areas. So it's a lot of trying to think about how we're being responsible scientifically, but also locally and globally as well. So I've been working a lot in those intersections with students and faculty and folks in the library. And then also just the science literacy component too. I think there's a lot of need for students who don't really have the understanding of the writing skills and just the genre of writing as an engineer and how to build on archives of engineering structural spaces that have been based in the city of New York and how different formulations and spaces have changed and how to rethink and re-envision those spaces and make them, you know, renewable but reusable and also honoring those spaces. So those are some of the things that I'm reworking on in alignment to my project. With COVID, how my project's really been impacted this past summer, I did like a whole research unit and we're really getting into ethical conversations about research and science and just a litany of things of how to report and how to engage in scientific work, being an engineer, or just part of the college in general. So my work in a lot of ways was impacted like having these conversations remote with students from Abu Dhabi to Shanghai to New York. And many of the students were not really physically working in the lab, some of them were working with data sets virtually. I presented a big challenge and also some of the projects were based in dealing with COVID and populations and trying to figure out how to intersect with virus and all these things. It's really hard to sometimes have a conversation about some of these ways of engaging in research, but also in ethics and ethical stances and not really seeing the students in person. And I think for some of them that's a struggle. For some of them, it was also an opportunity to re-envision how to work with scientific data sets and not necessarily in a laboratory system, which I think in a lot of ways. We sometimes need to go back and re-look at what we've done and maybe where we've made mistakes and where we need to be better scientifically and using those archives. So that has been a challenge and just seeing how their energy and dealing this online format is definitely difficult. Another issue and barrier has been funding. I've submitted a couple proposals before this all happened and some of my stuff hasn't been funded, which is really important to get response from students to understand their experiences and how to figure out to better support the ones that we do currently have. And then just overall structurally it's changed in a lot of ways in my library. I have gotten the experience to get a little bit more hands on what's going on conversational wise because we're we've had a lot of retirements because of COVID we've had people have decided that they wanted to retire or before that had retired. So by proxy it's gotten a little bit more of a hands on experience being there. But I also have gotten to see more kind of the leadership side and the decision making of what positions they're going to staff and have been on committees for hiring and being in the conversation conversations about what they're going to try and redo and re-envision for the library to in terms of positions and staffing. So that's been a positive part and and seeing where people make decisions administratively and why. So, and then just missing my colleagues to and having those conversations I think it's really important like Christian I think it's kind of hard to continue sometimes the momentum they're not meeting with folks and I think I've enlarged a lot of the people that I work with because New York is at the center have just been working with trying to figure out how to even have instruction or reduce instruction in person or to have engineering labs open. That's been a really big focus. So yeah, yeah, I've gotten those emails to Azure about the, like the engineering. So we have a makerspace pretty close to our library and that's really big component that we really collaborate with a bunch of folks between them in the school and so. So yeah, it's been a difficulty. So, I think that's pretty much it most of my experiences and things that are going on. That's fantastic. What a, what a, what a, what a wonderful view of of your work and how how your, your fellowship is unfolding. Well, I think that all of you have done an amazing job and I thank you. You certainly once again, I think proved my assertion that the clear fellows are doing wonderful and fascinating things. And you're doing pretty good for time. I'll, I'll open this up for a question or two from the audience. And as I say please put it in Q&A or put it in chat or if you like I can even turn turn your mic on if you want to ask it by audio if you raise your hands. Well, we're thinking about questions and putting them in. I have, I have one for all of you, just to feel briefly. So I'd be very interested to hear you say a few words about how you're thinking about your career trajectory after your clear fellowship. Where do you, where do you go from there and I know that's a completely unfair question especially in this environment with so much changing and up in the air but nonetheless I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Anybody you want to start Brian you're grinning you look like you might like to take a swing at that to be. No, I mean to be honest I have no idea. Clear as open me open me up to like a lot of opportunities and things to think about. I'm anxious to get back to teaching of course I'm anxious to get back to kind of traditional research but I'm fascinated by grant related work. I'm fascinated by what the library composes of and his capabilities. It's dynamic in a way that I think of putting together a team through the library. I'm not sure what could be done in terms of some of the imaginations I have with history related projects. So, I'm kind of open. I'm very curious but I honestly have no clue. Fascinating. Anybody else want to go for that. I guess I can, I can talk about it. I just really don't know the, the future is much more uncertain to me than it was a year ago at this time. When I went to see and I actually and I took the train to DC. I felt very much like I was where I was supposed to be. And doing what I was supposed to be doing. And now the future is just totally unknown. I've been more, much more than it was, you know grad students talk all the time about there are no jobs and being kind of anxious about it but nothing like this. It's, yeah. I don't know what else I can say about I feel like I should say more of substance but. No, it's, it's, I don't know. Azure jump in. Yeah, I mean I was, I'm kind of uncertain to, I kind of had looked into roots, maybe potentially staying where I was at. I think of anything, I'm really enjoying the librarian work. Not really sure what that would even entail if that's an avenue with how things are going economically, but also really enjoy working with faculty and students just kind of reimagining what possibilities could be for how things discipline disciplinary wise can be a little bit different and kind of bridge opportunities for for learning about different things and just making kind of more of a richer experience because I think we'll need some of those intersections and skills with the students that we have coming forth. And I think the problems that we have, especially with coven and some other. I think infectious diseases or potentials, I think it's going to really change how we need to look at what we end up doing. I want to echo the uncertainty that the other fellows have have mentioned that in terms of moving forward, the, you know the project that I described is really the idea with that project is developing a model to then be able to work with additional data sets and repatriate additional data sets that set of data that was transferred to me from Timothy Hagerty really inspired a larger project. Language culture and history believes in a digital age with the idea that additional data sets would be repatriated and that would also create a model for the region. And for other institutions about how they could work with collections like that. And so certainly I'm wanting to continue with that work and whether you know the library the experience in the library has really opened up an avenue and shown me that that's possible within a large academic library or even a smaller library but it can also take place within a faculty position in an academic department. There are also other avenues and so really it's about being open to that and just being patient with our current circumstances. You know, being in the middle of a pandemic and being able to see what possibilities open up what possibilities still exist. Thank you. Thank you all for those very honest answers. The amount of uncertainty in there I think is a really important message to our community but I also I also sense in here a trend to thinking in terms of, I can, I can be both in a, you know, sort of traditional faculty role sometimes and other times do new things around new forms of scholarship and communication of scholarship that I think is is very exciting. We have a question in from the audience for Brian. Brian, you mentioned the importance of language in how projects and partnerships are framed. Can you talk about examples of where you sharpened or clarified language in proposals or project plans or elsewhere. That's that's loaded. Partly because that's that's part of the challenge is that when you think about grants and writing grants they're looking for a certain language. So one of the things that I found as a challenge particularly regards to race is that people don't think about problems as others do what the problems of the black community is somewhat different than the the priorities and the problems of the white community and the language that is used to kind of specify that it doesn't usually show up in in grants and this is something I talked to clear about. And one of our sessions is, I kind of want to get involved with how kind of grants are developed and written and described so some of that language in terms of who applies and why they apply can be attacked in a certain way but I think one of the challenges that I find with the grants is the language of of the grant itself. And so what I try to do at least on the back end is kind of think creatively about how projects could be developed so that I can kind of think about problems in a broad way to kind of rectify the situation. But I haven't developed any kind of clarifying language, because I think if I use very direct language, I don't believe I will get the grant and sometimes I haven't gotten grants because of that so it's really kind of finding backdoors and being imaginative of how to think about the project in general that has helped me to kind of get around some of those issues. I cannot resist asking as a follow on to that. Have you ever toyed with the idea of doing a stint as a program officer for a major funding organization. Recently is this is this is new that I think clear has really opened me up to thinking about those things I haven't thought about that before. It wasn't even a possibility in my mind before but now being with clear and kind of thinking through these things I have definitely thought about doing something like that. You know, they're just incredibly important positions sometimes and, you know, can really influence the shape of activities going forward. Really, that's fascinating. Have we got another question. I don't see any additional questions, and we are pretty much at time. We'll just take the last minute or two. Oh wait, we have another question. We'll take one more quick question. Sorry, I was trying to write an answer and I made the question go somewhere else. No worries. I'm going to send you next are you presenting or publishing or sharing something soon how do we, how do we follow your work going forward is the is a question for everybody. I'm working on a publication right now. It is submitted to a library journal I'm just trying to wait to see if I get more feedback to see if officially like final except, but I can post my email. I don't have I'm not fancy I don't have a website out like Christian yet but something something I need to work on but I could put my email up and everything. I'll tell you as you're maybe I shouldn't tell people this but I just use Squarespace, like I build websites for my job and I was like screw that I'm just going to make it automatically. I know I have mine but I just haven't released it yet so but. Nick, Brian, you want to jump in on that before we go. Well, sure. Currently, I'm head first into this project. The digital textbook. I have a year fun year worth of funding so I have a lot of work to do because it's primarily me on the project. So I won't be presenting in the recent future, and it's in the short future, perhaps, maybe October, November of next year, usually asked when the season comes around for a lot of programs I conferences anyway so I'll probably be back on the circuit then, but in the near future I don't see me doing anything. So, need to contact me I can I can out place my email in the chat and thank you. And we look forward to your reemergence with that. I've put up my information I typed it in the answer. I'm not sure if I did that correctly in the Q&A. Yeah so I put in my Twitter handle my email my website is there. And I'm writing up the project that I'm working on and hope to have that submitted in January. Wonderful coming up later next year. All right, we will we will put some of this information on the on the page for the for this session for people who want to follow up. Let me just say really heartfelt thanks congratulations on the wonderful work you're doing, and please stay in touch I'm thinking that a number of people here will probably be in touch with one or another of you. Following on. And we look forward to continuing to hear about the great work you're doing. So I really appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you. Thank you.