 And if you participated last time, welcome back. I hope you're all doing well during this difficult time of the pandemic. We're so pleased to have over 250 registrants from five countries and a wide variety of institutions. I'm Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, Emerita of CNI, and I'll be moderating the nine sessions of the series. Each of you is registered for all nine sessions, but don't worry if you need to skip some. We'll have recordings available for all sessions, as well as a set of questions to guide planning discussions on your own campus. And we've just put those up for session one. We have two speakers for this session and we'll take questions after each. Please type your questions in the chat box at any time. In addition, after the formal one-hour session is over, we'll open the mics in case some of you wish to verbally ask questions of the speakers. The chat box is also available to communicate with each other or with me or our technical lead, Beth Sechrist. During the presentations, all participants will be muted. For this second session, we'll find out how two institutions are dealing with the impact of the COVID-19 virus on their normal digital scholarship programs. What can they continue? What change and move to the virtual environment and what has not been possible to continue at present? Our presenters today are Pamela Lat, Digital Humanities Librarian at San Diego State University and Chair of the ACRL Digital Scholarship Section Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee and Peter Leonard, Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University. Their bios are on the webinar site and I won't take any more time with introductions in order to give our speakers more time. So over to you, Pam. Thanks so much, Joan. I'm putting in chat the link to my slides. Should anybody want to download them and follow along? I'm really pleased and honored to be here today to talk to you a little bit about what our Digital Humanities Center has been doing during the pandemic and what the possibilities might look like beyond the pandemic, though it's a little hard to imagine beyond the pandemic right now. And I wanna start by acknowledging that I'm speaking to you from the traditional lands of the Kumaie. So what I wanna do today is tell you a little bit about what Digital Humanities looks like at San Diego State and then tell you a little bit about what it used to look like in our Digital Humanities Center, which I direct before talking about the impact of the pandemic on our operations. So to begin with San Diego State is part of the California State University System which is the largest public university system in the country. We're a Hispanic serving institution and we have R2 status with R1 aspirations. And years before I arrived in September of 2016, there'd been a burgeoning Digital Humanities community that began the way so many do, faculty coming together across the disciplines to talk about the digital, talk about how they could use it in their teaching and in their research. And that informal community grew into a formal campus initiative that spans colleges and departments. It is a strategic research priority of our university and that came with a faculty cluster hire of which I was hired into, as well as a commitment from the library, not only to create a space but to fund the space, at least the startup of the space. So when I arrived in the fall of 2016, I began talking to the community and engaging with our faculty, staff and students to do visioning work for the center. And rather than focus on particular equipment or furniture or different types of sort of zones of the space, we focused more on articulating a shared vision and a set of shared values for the space that would drive the design and everything we did in the space. And so using that, we were able to launch the space in January of 2018, largely as a bit of a blank slate, not fully designed so that we had room to grow. And the space was really intended not just as the home in the hub of the campus-wide digital humanities initiative, but as a physical and visual representation of our shared values, which include but are not limited to a non-hierarchical feminist collaboration caring for ourselves and for each other, engaging in transparent and ethical labor practices that could credit to each other, visible credit to each other, engaging in work that is process-oriented, not just product-minded. And I think most importantly, thinking about exposing and hoping to address the uneven and often harmful impact of digital technologies on different cultures. So after our launch in 2018, we began growing quickly, developing a formalized programmatic set of services, largely focused on different event tracks, as well as heavy connection to the curriculum, bringing classes into the space, not just for one-shot instruction, but throughout the project lifecycle, from beginning a project to, as you see here, a class showcase of students showing off their final projects. Actually, they were showing off the drafts of their projects here. Throughout this whole process, I engaged in iterative community-driven design, observing and talking to folks about how they wanted to use the space, how they were trying to use it to engage in critical digital inquiry, that's a word I can't say this morning. I'll skip that. And also begin designing out some of the peripheral spaces that we hadn't yet designed when we first launched the space. So last fall, we launched a new space for engaged learning and doing in digital humanities, and we launched several studios in alignment with new areas in the curriculum, addressing the increased interest in podcasting, both for scholarly communication and for teaching, arise a growing electronic literature program, a new 3D animation program, and many others. But that programmatic growth was not without its challenges, and we faced really two main challenges. The first was a sort of constantly changing staff model where we, at any given time, during our operations had a different number of staff at different levels of commitment to the center from half-time to full-time. At the peak, we had two full-time staff lines. Both of those staff left by the end of the fall to pursue better paying jobs outside of the university. And so constantly onboarding folks and trying to sort of fill gaps with temporary hires. At the start of the spring semester, I had, spring 2020, I had one full-time temporary emergency hire on a three-month contract subject to renewal and two student assistants helping to run all of the programs in the center. The other big challenge that we faced was more of a facilities or infrastructure problem. The new floor that had been installed for the initial launch of the Digital Humanities Center failed within about six months of our opening. And so last summer, we closed down to get a new floor, and as is often the case with construction, it was delayed and we weren't able to reopen until mid-November of 2019. At that time, the co-director of the Digital Humanities Initiative and I had decided not to engage in any sort of public-facing events beyond my DH instruction outside of the DH Center. So we hit pause on all of our programming and tried to engage our community virtually through blogging and other means. But I think more often than not, people thought we had just kind of disappeared or petered out. And so that was a real problem for us in losing a lot of the momentum we had gained in growing our community over the years. So we reopened in mid-November and by January, we'd settled on yet another staffing model, a temporary staffing model, while I searched for two full-time staff. And we had a full calendar of events ready to go for spring 2020 when the pandemic hit. And as with so many folks, this was chaotic and confusing and things kept changing rapidly. When it became clear that our library and in fact, our campus was going to shut down, I hit pause on everything. And rather than try to scramble and port everything into the virtual, the way that the teaching faculty were quickly pivoting to virtual instruction, I decided to stop everything. So I canceled all of our upcoming programs and we had quite a few on the calendar for the spring. And really figure out what it was we needed to do to quickly get some messaging out that said that even though the center was closed, we the staff were still here for everybody and that the center was more than just the space but the staff and the resources we could bring to the table. I then spent some time thinking about all of the competing needs and demands. For one, needing to keep my staff working. My temporary emergency hire staff member was up for renewal on her contract in early April. And we were very nervous that we'd be able to get her renewed during the pandemic without her being able to do a lot of the sort of day to day operational work that she had been doing to support the space. So I needed to think about a way to make the case for her essentialness so that we could get her renewed and keep her working during the pandemic until she was ready to start library school this fall. I also needed to think about how to keep our student assistants working virtually when they too could not be supporting our daily operations. I also really wanted to think about how to maintain community. We'd lost so much momentum in the fall with our unanticipated closure that it was really nervous about not doing anything during the pandemic and really losing the community completely. But I also wanted to be mindful of the fact that this was an incredibly stressful and anxious time. Faculty were struggling to adapt to online instruction. Many were taking care of their children and homeschooling them and trying to find time to do their own work. So I didn't wanna ask folks to do too much. So to get restarted, I did what I normally do. I went back to the community and I asked them, what is it you need and what is it you can handle? How much can you actually do right now? And based on that, I developed a new set of virtual programs, programs that were never intended in the face-to-face world that were modified from in face-to-face events and designed for the virtual with low expectations for what people needed to do to show up. So rather than a robust research group that we normally have every month for faculty, we just engaged in light readings, exploration of readings about digital pedagogy to help them right there with their virtual instruction, events to try to bring people together to keep the community going. And then in lieu of full-on robust workshops, tool a week, tool exploration over Zoom, in part to help me learn how to teach a tool over Zoom and in part to manage people's expectations about what was possible in Zoom because at that time I didn't know. A quick assessment of our tool a week showed that it was really successful. We had much higher attendance than we would normally have in a face-to-face event. And folks came with very little prior knowledge and articulated a sort of eagerness to use what they had learned beyond the workshop, the tool a week event. We also attracted far more people outside of SDSU than I was anticipating, making me think about what access looks like for a digital humanity center once it virtualizes. Now, while I was developing these virtual programs, I was also trying to think about ways of keeping my staff working in a non-exploitative way. And we developed a project to create tool tutorials in large part to support virtual instruction and to show how the DH Center could still contribute to the campus efforts to pivot during the pandemic. We aligned the tutorials based on strategic campus priorities, particularly the push to improve access to Adobe Creative Cloud. This year, it is free for everybody, including our students and faculty were being encouraged to use it in the classroom. So my staff person focused on creating a lot of Adobe tutorials to help faculty do this very quickly with virtual instruction. We also identified tools that I commonly used in my instruction that were being used for class projects. And we encouraged our student assistants to explore those tools and find ones that they found interesting. Do a deep dive and become experts in them so that they could engage in peer to peer instruction, developing slides and videos and transcripts often in English and Spanish to support their colleagues, their peers and for us to support our faculty. We started releasing these tutorials over the summer and we'll have more coming out this fall with my new, I have a temporary position that I'm sharing with our makerspace. So I have a half-time person working on more tutorials this semester. And what I realized about the tutorials is that this had always been a strategic priority of the Digital Humanities Initiative at San Diego State. We'd always wanted to create what we call digital literacy modules, sort of really easy plug and chug things that faculty could easily pull into their classes. And I never had the bandwidth in the face-to-face world to be able to do this. But going to the fully virtual pandemic world actually enabled us to go back to these basics, leverage these affordances and actually create something that we could then use successfully to demonstrate my staff person's essentialness to get her renewed, to keep our staff, our student assistants working in ways that they were actually learning something and having fun doing it. So it was a really gratifying experience. Now, as we were doing this in the center, we were doing similar work with the Digital Humanities Initiative. At the end of the spring semester, we pulled together our faculty advisory board, which had largely been dormant since this year, in part because of the closure of the center in the fall. And we came together as a group and we talked about what is it we need and what is it we can do? How can we as D.H. faculty lead in this pandemic moment? And we realized, well, we've already been engaging with digital tools in our teaching. We're already highly interdisciplinary and collaborative. And we already think about the impact of digital technologies on humans and what really are human centered. And so as a group, we committed to articulating those values in a more visible way with the creation of this website, teaching during quarantine, ostensibly created for fall virtual instruction. We've already learned that our spring will also be virtual across the CSU. And this was intended not as added work for our faculty, but really a curation and aggregation of existing work that our faculty were doing in their classes. So part one involves ways that faculty were using different tools in the class. And it includes assignments, assessments, tutorials that I've created and sample student work. Part two emphasizes helping students think critically about digital technology and culture. And then a third section focuses on virtual programming that can support virtual instruction this semester. And this website, which we launched July 1st, has been really generative. It's led to new points of contact for my own DH instruction. It's led to new sections of the website based on conversations that it sparked, in particular, how to create a learning community in Zoom, a trusted and supportive learning community. And also it's led to new sort of innovations. We have a section on digital annotation and folks who are really interested in using Hypothesis, the social annotation tool, in their classes this semester. And through this website and the conversation it sparked, we were actually able to get Hypothesis integrated into our Canvas Learning Management System by the start of the fall semester, which we were all somewhat surprised, pleasantly surprised we were able to do so quickly. We are launching a new set of virtual programs this semester, much fewer programs than we normally would offer. We normally have four tracks for our events. This semester just two. Our workshops are aligned with the curriculum, so either workshops I'm doing in classes that we're opening up to the public or the five-part podcasting workshop series that launches this Friday at one o'clock Pacific time, which is aligned with the growing interest in podcasting in the curriculum as well as with faculty engagement. Our virtual lecture series for the most part focuses on recent publications coming out of DH faculty, so it's meant to highlight the work we're doing and not create more work for anybody. So our goal here with this, as with everything we've been doing, is not to do more with less, as we are increasingly going to be asked to do in a time of sort of budget austerity, but to do less with greater impact. So where does that leave me today? It's not, the pandemic has not been without its challenges. The biggest one has been what does it mean to be a space without the space and how are we still a digital humanity center without a space to bring people together? One of the things I've really been struggling to do and have not been able to figure out yet is how to provide safe access to specialized equipment in support of virtual instruction. And when I say safe, I don't mean just safe for the faculty using it or the staff who are supporting that, but also our facilities cleaning crew who have to come in and clean anytime someone comes into the building. How do we do this in a safe way that protects everybody and still supports virtual instruction? I was working on a plan for this all summer and then I hit pause when I started to see campuses back East reopening and then quickly closing and our campus has been no different. Our library, which had opened at the start of our semester is now closed again. I should say it was partially opened and I'm still thinking about what it means to provide access to specialized equipment and I don't yet have any answers to that. But I would say that what I've been doing throughout the pandemic is trying to see this as a moment of reinvention and reimagining. It's clear to me that I won't be able to return to what I had done before the pandemic. It's just not going to be possible. It's not clear when I'll have a fully staffed. We have no idea yet what the long-term budget implications of the pandemic will be. We've got some early projections for the next couple of years, but we don't really quite know what that's going to mean. So how can we continue to articulate for the importance of the space without the space and how can we continue to bring people together in this kind of organic way that sparks conversation and sparks ideas and mutual collaboration. It's really hard to recreate this in a Zoom environment try as we might. How do we do this in a way that doesn't just pile on to our faculty with everything that they're doing and our students for that matter? So I've been trying to think through these possibilities and take this as an opportunity to reimagine. So one of the things the co-director of the DH Initiative and I have been thinking about is how can we transform the initiative and the space simultaneously during and after the pandemic to begin thinking about how we can seed research? We have still some startup funds from the early days of the initiative that we could use to seed research projects, research centers and bring those into the center. And rather than focus on programmatic events, we could be engaging in the space to seed this research and generate new research. This is just one of many ideas we're tossing around right now. What I would say as a final set of reflections and takeaways is that, and I've kind of already said this already, but reopening whatever that means during the pandemic cannot be a return to business as usual. We have to think about all sorts of new concerns about safety, public health, equity and access, things that we never had to think about before or not quite in this way. And that reopening after the pandemic cannot be a return to the way things were. We are in a moment of forced disruption and I think that there's an opportunity here to think creatively about this if we allow ourselves to. And so what I've been doing throughout the entire time and what I encourage folks here in the virtual room here to think about whether you're trying to reopen your center or launch a new center during or after the pandemic, is to sort of go back to basics and think about who we are, what is it we do, how do we do it and most importantly, why do we do it? And if we stay centered on our community and our communities shared values and shared vision as much as that evolves over time, we can find a way to safely reopen now and sort of see ourselves transformed in the future. Thank you. Pam, that was amazing. And we have a few questions, which I'll get to in just two seconds. I really have a rhetorical question. Given your small staff, do you ever sleep? Very little. I'm a workaholic and an insomniac. So the first question is, can you talk a little bit about the reading group activity? We're considering something similar and would love to hear more about it, the planning, engagement, attendance and someone. Seconded that and said they're forming one at their institution and how do you maintain the momentum and this would be for the reading group activity? Yeah, we had a sort of a research reading group among faculty for many years and typically we would get about a dozen faculty. It would meet monthly over lunch and we would provide lunch and we would engage in a set of shared readings. We'd take turns facilitating the discussion of those readings. And sometimes we would actually engage in more formal presentation of research. And the purpose of that research group was to develop a shared vocabulary and a shared understanding that could then potentially generate new research collaborations. With the virtual reading group, I was really cautious about asking folks to do more work to get ready. So I didn't want to assign reading in advance. So we picked the digital, sorry, I'm blanking on the name, digital. I have to look at my cheat sheet here. It's a digital pedagogy reader that had just come out and we encouraged folks rather than read it, just explore. So explore it, bring something of interest. And then we invited one of the co-editors who is up at San Jose State, which is another CSU. She came and sort of talked about the development of this volume. And so it was much lower expectations than normal. We're not actually rerunning that reading group this semester. We decided to hit pause on that because we thought it would be too much labor for our faculty who have very heavy teaching loads. And so, but last spring, we had about a dozen folks show up and not just faculty, but students as well. I would add that I limited this to San Diego State because I saw it as a community building activity. So I didn't allow non-SDSU folks into the room for that other than the co-editor. And it was really just a conversation about how to engage with digital in the classroom. We didn't actually talk about anything sort of concrete or concrete tools or anything like that. And so I think if I were to do it again, I might pose some questions when we announced the event to get folks sort of a little bit more focused and ready to talk. Thank you. The next question gets to something you mentioned at the end of your presentation about getting back to first principles. And you're asked, I'm interested in the founding values of the center, the feminist project development, et cetera, and how those translate to the virtual? Has it been seamless? That's a really wonderful question. Well, I guess I would say nothing has been seamless in the pandemic. So I'm not sure about that, but that's really been my touchstone throughout the whole thing. So trying to make sure that everything we do is driven by these principles of caring for each other and ourselves and equity and visibility. So for instance, with the Teach DH website, the teaching during quarantine, my co-director, Jessica Pressman, did a lot of the heavy lifting and originally didn't put her name on the website anywhere. And I pushed back and I insisted that she put her name on it and that we give her credit for the work that she did. And if you go through that website, you'll notice that every faculty member who contributed to it in one way or another is listed. So that was one way that we tried to sort of stick to those values and continue making them visible and articulatable. I don't know if that completely answered the question. And then a comment. Love the idea of the community user group and having users help to continue to shape and share knowledge, to have experts on campus teach and share their knowledge. I don't know if you wanna expand on that or if I should go to the next question. I think you can go to the next question, but thank you to whoever said that. And our next question, you mentioned getting feedback from your community. How did you do that surveys or direct emails or other methods? During the pandemic, it was largely surveys because that was the easiest way to reach people. And we didn't get a lot of people filling out the surveys because there were so many surveys going around at that time. And then using the feedback mechanism for our tool a week generated a lot of feedback, but it was also a lot of emails and just any time we were in a Zoom room together, just trying to talk, not just about the work we were trying to do in the Zoom room, but how things were going. So starting every meeting with, how are you doing? How's it going? And using that to drive the needs of the community to articulate a shared set of needs and drive the work that we do and really stay focused on that. I wanna invite the participants to put any links to their own programs that they may be doing that are particularly innovative during the pandemic. So please add them and share them with each other in the chat if you would like. I think Pam, you've really given us an exceptional look at your creativity and innovation during this time. And I'm sure that many of the participants are gonna take ideas from what you've shared. So thank you so much. And now we're going to move on to Peter Leonard and Peter, please proceed and share your slides. All right, thank you, Joan, for the invitation and thanks very much, Pam, also to starting us off. I'm starting my timer and I'm starting my slides in one second, here we go. And great, so let me pull us into, can everybody see my slides? Joan might have to hold up a thumb or something. Yes, Peter. Great, thank you, okay. So I'm here to talk about digital at a distance, continuity of DH or the most we can do to ensure continuity of DH research services during a pandemic. I come to you as the director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University Library here in New Haven, Connecticut. I'm one of many members of the lab. We have a great team of collaborators who've come on since 2015-16 when we founded the lab. So these are all the folks with whom I work every day. This is when we could take pictures in the space. We haven't been in in a while, but this is the room we were given. So the folks who have not had a chance to come to New Haven and visit Yale Library, you know, it's really interesting when you're setting up a digital humanities lab, you never wanna look a gift horse in the mouth. Our university librarian said, we think we can arrange to have this room serve as a new physical space for the digital humanities lab. This is quite a striking room. It is very much of the 1930s when the building was built by John Gamal Rogers. It is, of course, a 1930s understanding of early English Renaissance. So it is a tutor fantasy in many ways. We undertook a large renovation project to try to keep the beauty of this room while also making it more responsive to modern research methods. And this is an image of what the room looked like shortly after it's reopening in late 2018. This is some Yale graduate students demonstrating their work on one of the screens we have around the room. That's Job Sankofa there. He's standing next to some digital humanities books which are in the original 1930s bookcases that we changed the bookcases to show the covers of the books rather than the spines. And you might see a couple more images of these books as we go forward through the rest of the images of my presentation. We find that the physical volumes about digital humanities, about critical big data studies, those are really books that start a lot of conversations in the room. And then finally at the back right there, you'll see one of my colleagues, Doug, who's working in this glass special projects cube. And I'll be talking about each of these spaces and each of these affordances, the screens, the books, the room and what's changed since we had to shut down in March. I do wanna just offer a really quick note about where we are here in New Haven, where we are at Yale in regards to reopening. And so one thing that's important to say is that although we closed our physical doors to the library in March, the library never closed in terms of its services that it provided to scholars. We reopened the physical doors in early September and most undergraduates were then able to come about a week later. We had about a week of a soft launch. And so now as of today, we have the undergraduate, graduate and faculty populations who are still physically present in New Haven are able to get into the library. That's not the entire population, of course. And so one of the themes I'll be returning to is the question of how a digital humanities lab can help ensure access and equity to what is now a geographically dispersed student body and for that matter, even faculty body. But the library is now reopened as a physical space. Most staff, including myself, are not going into the library every day. And so what I'll be talking about is how does a physical lab change when we don't have the same presence in the space? How do we have to transform that space? How do we have to transform our services to ensure some kind of sort of research service continuity even when things are still changing? I should also acknowledge we're very lucky in Connecticut. We understand ourselves to be on the right side of the distribution in this current moment. Things could change in terms of the impact of COVID. It's not an impact that is evenly distributed across socioeconomic boundaries even within the city of New Haven. So there's a lot of disparities. But on the other hand, if you look at where we are across all 50 states, I think that we're encouraged by the general health situation in Connecticut. So broadly, I'm gonna go through what was continued throughout the physical closure and now that the room is reopened. I'm also talking about what we've had to change to adopt a new circumstances and digital humanity support. I'll talk about what we stopped doing and how we plan to restart it. So one of the things to say is that, maybe virtual consultations and training and project work is the easiest thing to move online. It's not to say that Zoom is a perfect medium. It's the opposite of a perfect medium, but at least we understand how to set up, drop in office hours to have continue existing conversations that we've had with some existing clients and to help serve new clients through digital medium such as Zoom. We have continued to hire graduate assistants who help us out at those virtual consultations. So my colleague, Kathy DeRose has done a great job of rehiring a bunch of students who had the roles, the people who were in those roles had graduated. We've continued to interview and hire during the shutdown to ensure that we have the right team there to help people with digital humanities questions. One of the other things that we have noticed is that there's a change in what people are coming to us for. People are now really eager to talk about ways of sharing data and research work online. Software that people always had thought about or sort of mentioned, they're suddenly being forced to work with every day. They're being forced to set up, shared, so tarot bibliographies. They're asking us really interesting questions about can we share a trophy file over like Dropbox or Box so that a researcher who's cut off from there, research assistant can still input data into the same database, keeping repositories on Dropbox, things like that. So virtual consultations and training are a core part of what we do and they've been in some way not the hardest thing to move online, even though certainly there are some things that we all like better about in-person interactions. We've also done a lot of, tried to continue to do our outreach and global engagement. There are programs such as Young Global Scholars who come to us every summer for a brief introduction to DH, sort of getting a sense of what digital humanities is. We did ask for permission for the students to be able to use their image in this context. So that's real-life students who were being trained by Kathy up at the top left. Normally these folks come to New Haven. They come to New Haven from India, from many countries in Africa, from China, all over the world. This year they couldn't come to New Haven for a million different reasons. We were committed to continuing to doing that kind of outreach work over Zoom, even though we couldn't welcome them into the Frankie family room. Another thing you remember and we should have known to begin with, but certainly having a large percentage of our group abroad meant that we were sort of confronted with access restrictions to American companies' websites such as GitHub or Google Maps. If you tell everybody follow the tutorial on GitHub and GitHub happens to be banned in a particular country, you're gonna have to scramble to do something else. We also have a physical room that I showed you a couple of pictures of. And what I'm showing you now is a floor plan of the room roughly as it was when we opened in October of 2018. And although this is gonna be hard to see probably over Zoom you can see tables and you can see chairs. And trust me when I say that every single one of those chairs was usually occupied by students studying or working on a digital humanities project throughout the day. This is the current layout. And what I've tried to do in the current layout of our lab is to only put a red dot where people are allowed to sit given the physical distancing rules. I wasn't able to erase every single chair but trust me those chairs aren't there anymore. The only things that are there are the red dots. And so one of the big transformations we did in our room was to reduce the seating, de-densify the seating, allow people to study in the room, to work in the room, to conduct research in the room but not be too close to other people. We also did some transformations to our digital signage. So you might have seen in one of the first images I showed you a graduate student was showing his work on African American juveniles in the criminal justice system. And those screens still can be used that way as presentation media but they now also show of course coronavirus safety information. So at the top left you're seeing a six foot distance sign and at the bottom right you're seeing, wash your hands, keep them clean. You're also seeing some of our digital humanities books in the bookshelves there. So we did do that early intervention to just make sure that when we reopened in September that all of our, we figured that we love data visualization but in the current moment what we have to visualize is the crucial safety steps. They're gonna keep our scholarly community safe and that we were willing to kind of de-emphasize the data visualization story so that people can continue to enjoy the room and in a safe manner. I mentioned before the, we have a kind of glass area of the room, the special projects cube and that area is shown here back in 2018. So that area is set off and it's set off because it has some equipment in it like VR goggles and a scanner I'll be talking about in a moment. But I wanna talk about how the equipment in this cube in the middle of the room has continued to work even when the room has been empty from March through September. And so I thought I'd talk about a couple different projects that we've been working on. This is a machine in the cube which basically manages all of the raw data from companies such as Gales Engage or ProQuest or Elsevier or all the companies that we license data from in the library system. And that you can see on the right, there's a big silver box. That's a large storage area for all of the images and texts that comes to us from vendors. So that computer has continued to process all of those images and all of that data. And I'll be talking about in a little bit more in a bit how we've managed to get that data to users but certainly it's a problem because we used to invite them into the cube to hook up with one of their own hard drives to get access to a data source such as Ebo or Echo or some licensed material. Of course, after they had signed an agreement understanding, making them aware of licensing and copyright. Other things that are going on in our cube, we have some specialized digitization equipment. And what I'm showing you here on the right is actually a video of me in the basement scanning microfilm because we had a microfilm scanner that we had traditionally used for text and data mining projects. And we really shifted the use of some of that specialized equipment to just general access to materials during the pandemic because we, although before we would have said we wanna help out people get data off of microfilm for text and data mining for sort of digital humanities purposes. When all of our, when the entire library's clients were no longer able to come into the library, we realized we had some specialized equipment that could ease access to material. There's so much amazing historical material trapped on microfilm. So we did shift this over to more general purpose access. Again, there are still licensing and in some cases copyright questions around microfilm. So this is not stuff we're able to put online for everyone but it's in response to specific user queries for I need this particular newspaper. I ended up scanning about 20,000 pages over the course of the time that we had our doors closed. This is one of my favorite pictures of 2020. This is a palimpsest of two different monitors in the cube. You can see at the very back, that's a keep your hands clean, wash your hands, go to COVID-19.yale.edu. In the front, there's one of our workstations that's doing some deep learning, some artificial intelligence. You can see all of the cores there on the screen and the GPUs which are doing even more sophisticated inference. So while the room was closed and even after the room has now opened up, the specialized equipment in the lab has continued to support digital humanities research projects. And I'll start this off. Let's see if I can increase my volume so people can hear a little bit. If you like Schoenberg, you'll love this. This is music being composed by a flocking algorithm. So it's basically a semi-deterministic sort of deep learning way of asking notes to be composed by sort of random birds that behave in certain ways, virtual birds. No birds were harmed. So this is in the service of a experimental opera project being done by a professor at Yale. And so we were helping them out with a little bit of artificial intelligence for music composition. I guess that's a great way to save time. We are also doing some computational work on photography. So what I'll show you on the screen here is this is a generative adversarial network that is hallucinating cars. And that is to say it's a network that's been trained on automobiles. And we are then sampling from that network and asking it to kind of dream up cars that never existed but might have. The ground truths for this project, the original data that we train the network on is several hundred thousand automobiles photographed by Ed Rushe kind of accidentally as part of his multi-decades work driving a van or having a staff drive a van down the sunset strip and other streets in Los Angeles. And this is part of a research collaboration with a Getty. So what you're seeing here is essentially again a hallucination of the automobile, that sort of that symbol of Los Angeles after having observed hundreds of thousands of automobiles in the late mid-century, this network tries to dream up automobiles that might exist. It's essentially like a deep faking Los Angeles. We also have other work in the textual domain. So these are imaginary rare books that we're working on that we have sort of sampled from a network, a textual network this time. So not a musical network, not a visual network, a textual network, these are books that don't exist but they were hallucinated by a network that had learned the 12,000 books that in the rare domain that Yale's acquired since the 1940s. So if you look closely at one of these you'll start to see it's plausible and then you will run into a clause where you think maybe this book doesn't quite exist. All of this material, the sort of generation of music, the hallucination of new cars from Ed Rache's archive, the sort of the sort of forgery of new rare books drawn from the bibliographic tradition of institutions that Yale like the Beinecke which have been collecting special rare material for decades. All of this was done in the equipment that was still in the room. And so my point is that that equipment kept working even when we couldn't be in the building and when more importantly, our clients couldn't be in the building. We were able to do this work on the GPUs and using the AI hardware and keep those research processes going. So what were the consequences or effects of the multi-month period where our doors were closed, our services continued and now our doors are back open to welcome folks in at a reduced level? Well, the obvious point is that we have a much rarer room capacity and it's not just a de-densified room, it's a room in which the original vision of having the tables and chairs be infinitely movable to allowable collaboration. Of course, we've had to disable that. We've had to fix the chairs and tables in place to the degree that we can. And that's really heartbreaking because the room was really set up to allow collaboration and sort of informal gathering. And now we have these very serious public health restrictions on that type of work. The thing that hits me a lot is the removal of in-person expertise from the room. So my office is in that room, my team's office is in that room and we're basically not in the room as an effort now as part of our effort to de-densify the library. Shared equipment, the high-powered computers that people come in and use when their own MacBook Air 11 inch just wasn't up to the task. We've had to remove that for the same public safety reasons. Putting goggles on your face for Oculus Rift just not gonna happen for a while. So that's really too bad. On the other hand, it does ensure that we can help the room be used in a safe manner. Mentioned before in terms of shifting things to Zoom, we don't have those in-person consultations anymore. And it's not just DH. I think Miriam Oluvaris, who's our GIS librarian here at Yale may be on the video. And she came, used to come to our room to meet with people who needed help using mapping or geospatial technologies. We're no longer able to offer that kind of in-person meetings with an expert. No more in-person workshops. Although that's something that has actually spurred us to do some work on virtualizing those workshops. Certainly what Pam was talking about earlier is something we really aspire to. And now I think as we put that into effect, we'll be left with a great repository of asynchronous or on-demand videos that might help equalize access to this information because of course not everybody is gonna be in the Eastern time zone. Mentioned before the Gail Cengage and ProQuest data that we gave to researchers after they understood the licensing restrictions, we can no longer invite them into our cube and have them hook up their own hard drive. So we have to figure out other ways of them getting that large information. Had to remove all of our introductory brochures and change all of our signage information to reflect more COVID-centric messaging. So what's gonna happen as we try to restart some of these in-person services? I think one of the things we can, not just restart but actually extend is some of the bulk digitization we've been contributing to, specifically around microfilm. Many historians and humanists are passionate about the material that's locked on microfilm and the possibilities of doing just extraction of those images and OCR on them. I'm working on a way to kind of split that scanning task up to meet our sort of labor environment at Yale. So we have some paraprofessional and some professional workers. In terms of equity and access, we know that not everybody can physically come into the library anymore. And so the question is can we, once we have a workflow set up, can we have a button next to a microfilm reel in our online catalog that says, I would like 16 images from this reel. Can we make that a one-click button so that somebody can then scan those items and OCR them and get them to the patron subject to copyright and licensing? Because we know that the way that the travel networks are and the way visa problems are, not everybody will be able to do their work physically at Yale libraries. Getting raw access to data for text and data mining purposes, can we, for those folks who are not physically in the States and may not have great brand width, can we mail hard drives to them full of the data that they need to analyze for their work? I don't have any answer to that yet, but I think it's something we want to work on. Consultations and training, as I mentioned before, we have continued to hire for those consultations, the graduate workers who work us with that, but we don't know when we'll be able to resume in-person consultations and training. We may need to sort of continue the virtual option because not everybody can return to New Haven and that whole scale return of Yale's affiliates to New Haven may take a long time to really come true. And then finally, I think the return to staff offices to make sure that the room isn't just a room with books and screens and computers, but that it's full of people who care passionately about DH. We just don't know the timeline for that and we're all wondering about large scale changes and work patterns after coronavirus. But I do think for me personally, having that community in the room, the offices open right off the room, having that interaction between students and faculty and staff is really a key part of our vision. And so that's something that I'm really, I would love to get to a point where that is no longer such a problem. And with that, I'll stop the slides and we can shift to questions. Thank you so much, Peter. I think that it was a real treat for all of us to get a glimpse into some of those really fascinating projects as a bonus to your presentation about the difficulties of doing so much of this work during the pandemic. So far we have one question which was put into the chat right before you started to talk more specifically about opening up. And the question was that she'd like to hear more about how the physical lab is being used for DH work wasn't clear how much of the space or any had been repurposed for general use and how is access to the DH technology managed and supported. And also specify, did you just open in September or are people starting to come in now or is this in a couple of weeks or? Yeah, it's a great question. So just on that last thing, the main doors of sterling, the main, what most undergrads would think of as the library, although there are many libraries reopened last week and then most undergrads had about a week later they had to wait most of them due to quarantining. There's always exceptions folks who are from Connecticut or New Haven had some different rules. But in general, we've only seen patrons in our space for the last couple of days. And so that's been real and undergrads. There've been some faculty and grad students. But I think that touches with the first question you were telling us about, which was the breakdown of the space between like specialized DH usage and then general usage. And although sterling has a lot of beautiful rooms that more than most where I went to college we had one room that looked like this and sterling has like seven. But part of the notion of turning this into a digital humanities lab was that it would support not just specialized digital humanities work but also be a great place for any user of Yale services Yale library services to come in. And we didn't wanna gateway it and gate keep it and say you have to be like on a list or you have to have a project. That's one of the reasons the books are around the wall so you could accidentally walk into the room and then see books on GIS or see books by Sophia Noble on the wall and get intrigued by something whether it's Python programming or critical big data algorithms of oppression or GIS or mapping. And so the question is really great because if you before March, if you stepped in you'd see a mix of folks doing very specialized work for which they needed special hardware or big screens. And then you'd get folks watching YouTube you get folks chatting that's we were specifically not a quiet space. And so there were some folks who love that aspect of us. Am I concerned about reopening now is that the basically the professional staff aren't there and so I do think that will change the tenor of the room but it's important to remember I mean, it'll be less of a DH space, let's be honest. On the other hand, we're playing a role in the larger ecosystem of study spaces within Yale library. Yale is not by and large not holding in-person classes there are some exceptions for studio art and sort of wet lab work and I'm sure a couple others but by and large Yale's classes are on Zoom and this we are also at de-densified levels holding an undergraduate population on campus much smaller than we would normally but we do have folks undergrads in dorms. And so what that means is that I think the art digital humanities lab can play a role in offering a space both for specialized digital humanities work but also just for general usage and general studying. And I think that's an incredibly important role for the room to play at a time when we're all thinking in six feet distances and we're thinking about social spaces for students to see friends who might, who they'd otherwise run into in class but they now only see on Zoom or something. Yale's doing a huge renovation of its student center and so that building is not currently open. The library I think is playing an outsized role in its importance for social interaction quiet study medium noise study. And I think that our room fits into that ecosystem of support. So building on that, Peter, someone asked are there any unanticipated positive aspects to the present environment COVID-19 and shift to remote work for your DH lab? So you've talked about some of the benefits for students and others and maybe you'd like to add more but also what about the shift to the remote work? Yeah. I think, so it's interesting to think about all of, at least me, I suffer a Zoom burnout. I mean, nothing against this, but we're all on these meetings all day long. It's crazy. My interactions with my team are actually really positive on Zoom. At least I say that you could ask, pull them if they share the opinion. But I think it's, it is nice to, it reminds me of times we've been together in the past and it is a reminder of how lucky we were to attract this group of folks to be able to work with us. I think that we all struggle with not being able to have those water cooler conversations, those casual interactions. If you just see somebody, all of our offices have glass walls. So if you see somebody, something on somebody's screen, we used to stop by and say, oh, that looks amazing. What are you working on? But I think that what answer to that challenge of what is, is there any positive? I mean, maybe it's forced us to be a bit more intentional about how we use meeting time or how about how we organize what we're working on or how we discuss it with people. There's certain, although we're a very collaborative group, there's certain things that you want to take off into like a two-person Zoom that it's not useful to talk about with a group of five people. I think anything that asks both managers and colleagues to think more carefully about what they're trying to communicate, how they communicate it, balancing positivity with sort of creative criticism, I think anything that gets us to be sort of better coworkers to each other, even something as awful as the separation from the work environment and this sort of enforced video conferencing regime, I mean, that can have some positive benefits. Thank you. As a follow-up, one of our participants is curious about whether researchers are comfortable using the space without staff nearby and also how access to machines is managed. Now, my impression is that you're not really letting too many people use at least some of the equipment. But how do you keep them away if you put it away? That's, you know, it's a great question. That glass area, what we call the special products cubes, that does have lockable doors. And so, but one of the reasons we architected it like that is we wanted the objects of investigation, goggles or whatever, or a special scanner to always be visible, even if they were secured. We didn't want to put them in a basement windowless room because we thought that, I mean, ideally you'd walk by the cube and you'd see an English professor putting on the headset experiencing a poet's house that she helped to document and that would get you thinking about mixed reality. But even if that professor weren't in that area, you would still see the goggles themselves or maybe a screenshot of her work on the screen. And so maybe that would be sort of generative in some ways. So the, that area, because of understandable health concerns, as I said, we just can't have that same access to the special, most of the specialized equipment in this current moment. There are even restrictions around collections materials. So I should say that when I take a microphone reel off the shelf and I scan it or whatever, I then need to like let it go for X hours where X is determined by environmental health and safety and everything. So there's a lot of, we're all thinking a lot more about what we touch and where we put it and things like that. But it is a great question. I was in the office this week, I guess Monday, seems like a long time ago. And a student came up to me and said, where are the big IMAX? I'm a stats major and I always used to do my stats on the IMAX and they're gone. And I said, I'm really sorry, we've pulled all, we've had to pull every single public access computer with a few exceptions for catalog lookup. And that's horrible. And so I, for somebody who grew to depend on that. And so I contacted a colleague over in our science, social science library who told me they're, they're putting up virtual machines and they're trying to install the right software on them. And so I think I was able to get that particular stats major and answer that I think helped him. That's a slide I should have had in here. We did have eight IMAX that had specialized software on them. And we basically now need to virtualize that. We need to figure out how can we enable cloud access to a powerful computer that can run Abbey, find reader OCR or that has ArcGIS on it. So we, that's work that lies ahead of us because all of this has happened so rapidly. Thank you. I'm going to ask one final question and ask you to reply first Peter and then for Pam to unmute herself and, and reply as well. In our last session, someone asked how can I make the case for space for digital scholarship when we're able to do so many things with, in the virtual environment. Now I can glean a lot of things from your presentation, but I would love to hear you put it into a few words to help people make that case. And you want me to go first, Joan? Yes, please. Okay, great. Yeah. We were, we were trying to figure out what to do with this room, this beautiful room in 2015, you know, I thought back to when I was a college student, I was a college student from 93 to 97 and I used to work in a computer lab and that was such a great, I know this sound awful, it was such a social space. Because if you, you were suddenly together with other people who worked behind the desk of the computer lab and you got to exchange ideas and learn from people and you got to help, they bring up a floppy disk, my floppy disk died, what do I do? Well, that was in a time in the nineties when Silicon Graphics and Sun and, you know, all sorts of computers were too expensive for a mere more, mortal to own, but you could come into a computer lab and use the most, most kids I knew didn't have computers, laptops or desktops. So what do you do in 2020 when like a thousand dollar MacBook Air will do almost everything you need with the exception of deep learning? And to be clear, not everybody can afford a thousand dollar laptop. We do offer, we used to offer checkouts of those in another department in the library. I don't know how they're dealing with that now. So our answer to architecting the Frankie room was it has to be not a bank of computers, right? There are spaces that go even more in an extreme like Butler studio with Alex Gill at Columbia where it's just really a blank canvas for whatever people you bring into that room. And so I, and that may have, I'd be interested to hear Pam's thoughts on that as you guys have gone through a couple of iterations of your space. But so we, I think the two quick answers are that it's not an exclusive space. You can come into that space as a biomed undergrad and just read PubMed or whatever those people do. We're not exclusionary and hopefully you'll catch a, you'll catch a book on the wall about facial recognition and start thinking about that in a different way, right? So we're not exclusive space and then number two, it had to be about displaying the books about DH, displaying the visualizations which are generally graduate student projects on the walls normally when it's not COVID material. Creating a, the first layout I showed with the U shaped tables, those were for workshops gathered around an enormous virtual digital monitor so that we could bring, we could create community in that space and say, we're all learning intro to text analysis, but we're also going to get to know each other. All of those things are things I think we look forward to doing, you know, restarting once this current exigency goes away. But I think my main answer would be non exclusive space and space that doesn't fixate on equipment. I know I should have a lot of slides of equipment, but that was also flexible and open and lets people just sort of come together in different ways because we are definitely past the, the computer lab model was just rows and rows of CRT monitors. Thank you so much. How about you Pam? What are your thoughts? Yeah, it's going to be a lot of the same to what Peter said. We similarly designed our space to not look like a computer lab and not function like a computer lab. We have computing labs in the library. We didn't need to recreate that. We really wanted to emphasize humans. So we downplayed technology. We actually keep a lot of our technology hidden most of the time because we're really trying to facilitate cross disciplinary conversation and connection. So making the case for a space when there isn't a space right now is tricky and it's something that I'm trying to struggle with because, you know, I don't want to do such a good job with the virtual that we no longer need the space. But I think for one thing, we've demonstrated that there are certain things that you just can't virtualize. It's really hard to virtualize community. And I think that point of zoom fatigue that Peter was talking about, we all started feeling it really early on in the pandemic. I shouldn't speak for everybody, but I certainly felt that way. And I think the other thing too is that I think the broader case for digital scholarship is more than ever, it's more powerful than ever right now. Because we're not just in this virtual moment that's going to end when it's safe to come back together and act and without social distancing and things like that. I think that we're in a period of transformation. I'm not quite sure what things are going to look like when we emerge, but I think that digital scholarship will be even more centered than it was. And so spaces that support forward thinking innovation and that can support virtual for future fast pivots. I'm thinking in particular being on the west coast that it's completely engulfed in flames and smoke right now. This isn't going to go away. The next crisis might not be public health. It might be environmental. But we're going to need to be ready to pivot again. And so I think that the space can facilitate that kind of thinking that can then function semi independently from the space, even though the space originally doesn't matter. It's for this very circular argument that I'm somewhat caught up in right now. But I think that we're going to need to be ready to do that. We're going to need to be ready to do that. We're going to need to be ready to do that. We're going to be trying to make the case for, we can still function without the space, but the space is so essential to bringing people together to improving access to not gatekeeping all the things that Peter said. So I'm not sure that I have a perfect answer. But it's one I'm going to be thinking a lot about in the coming months. Thank you. Thank you so much, Pam and Peter, is this coming Thursday, September 17th, and our speakers will describe assessment needs and ongoing.