 I'd like to introduce Dale Aske to you. Dale Aske is the Associate University Librarian for Library and Learning Technologies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. I've known Dale for a long time. He started working at the University of Utah in 1999 when I was already there. And his position there was reference in web services librarian. So we worked pretty closely together. But he didn't stay. He took a job at some university called Yale on the East Coast as the librarian for Germanic Languages and Literatures. That was in 2002. And then after that, in 2005, he followed his wife, Jennifer, who had just finished her PhD, to Kansas State University, where he became the content development and electronic publishing librarian, in addition to doing some more web development. During his stay at Kansas State, he took an 18-month leave of absence and went and lived in Germany, where he was a visiting professor of electronic publishing and media at the Hochschule für Wirtschaft, Technik, und Kultur in Leipzig, Germany. And he moved to McMaster in 2011, where he recently launched the Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship, which is why I wanted him to come here and speak to us. Dale holds a BA in German from the Colorado College, an MA in Germanic Languages and Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, and his MA in Library Science from the University of Missouri, Columbia. So please welcome Dale. It's great to be here. I really appreciate you coming out at 9 o'clock on a Monday morning. I don't think that's any different than where I sit in Canada. That 9 o'clock Monday morning is a perilous time to schedule anything, so I really appreciate it. Despite the tie, which I don't do on a normal basis, I'd like to keep this pretty informal. I'm going to speak for probably about 35, 40 minutes. And then I'd really like to hear questions and have a discussion, because I think I'll hopefully throw some things out that might raise a few questions or spur some conversation. So I'll be wandering around a bit and keeping it pretty loose. Just to give you a sense of what I'll be talking about, I'm going to cover, hopefully, you'll see the transitions, some different topics. First and foremost, what is digital scholarship? It's a question that comes up when you are the administrative director of a Center for Digital Scholarships. The first thing people ask you. The second thing is if you have any money for them. Going to talk about the three pillars of supporting digital scholarship. Talk a little bit about its impact on teaching and learning, which I think a really important feature of what we're trying to do. Talk a little bit about building the field and its culture, supporting sort of the global development of the digital turn, digital scholarship. Then move into what we're doing at McMaster a little more concretely, what our Center looks like, how it's structured, how it's staffed, where we are in our development curve, and then I'll finish with a brief summation. So like I said, the first question people ask you is what is digital scholarship when they see what you're doing? And it's kind of funny, this is the number one thing I spend my time doing nowadays, which is trying to define digital scholarship. So I'm really happy to be here because I get to sort of test out a whole bunch of ideas with a large group. There are, you can combine the pieces of digital scholarship so many ways that you can probably give about four million answers to this question. And it's not that it's vague or amorphous or that there's no substance to it. It's that there are a lot of pieces and depending on who's asking the question and what their point of reference is, it's important to answer the question in a way to which they can relate, what their role would be, what their interest might be in digital scholarship. But when people ask, there is this sort of moment where you stop and especially people, I notice people who are just now coming into the Center, for example, our academic director hasn't been doing this as long. When people ask her this, there's this pregnant pause and she sort of sits there and thinks for a second and you can see her collecting her thoughts and then it comes out. The reason, another reason to be careful isn't just the number of answers, it's also to help head off misunderstanding or a lot of ways when you take words like digital and scholarship and put them together or digital and humanities when you put them together, a lot of ways to misunderstand what that can be and so it's important to sort of create that boundary and rein it in a little bit. My personal favorite answer to the question, it's very flippant but I've been known to use on occasion, is to just say I know it when I see it. And if anyone else came up through a humanities graduate program, in a certain time period, as I did, post-modernism was all dominant and it was all people talked about and of course defining post-modernism is equally vexing. What is post-modernism? It's whatever you want if you want it badly enough. It can be anything you want it to be and yet there is some substance there so I don't want to link the two things but there's a little bit of that sort of definitional back and forth going on. It can be easiest perhaps to start, especially for the purposes of a talk like this, to talk about what digital scholarship is not or at least not in its totality. It's not that digital scholarship can't include some of these things and of course I think by default it includes at least three of the four or four of the four all the time. It's that these things don't by themselves make something digital scholarship and this is what I mean by sort of defining it so that not everyone says, hey I'm a digital scholar, what? No, it's not that you get a badge or a little gold star when you become a digital scholar but you have to take that methodological shift to become a digital scholar. So it's not just using a computer to do research. People who are generating spreadsheets and doing some sophisticated computing, it's not necessarily by default digital scholarship. It's not using online resources or conducting your research wholly on online resources. It's not studying, this is the one that I think really rubs people funny or people get really confused about. It's not studying digital culture using normal methodologies. So if you're an anthropologist doing an observational study of user behavior in Facebook, it may or may not be digital scholarship depending on how you're conducting your research. It could be quite traditional. It could actually in many ways be no different than sitting on a hillside in Guatemala observing another population doing another type of behavior. And it's not alone publishing online. So being sort of an active online scholar is not necessarily digital scholarship. So if it's not that, it's a lot of other things. The basic definition, and this was in the advertisement for this talk, is it's applying software and computational power to research to allow it to go beyond what was possible with analog means and specifically in areas where this hasn't happened as sort of part of a normal evolutionary curve. In the pure sciences, you've changed how you, I'm gonna oversimplify. So if there are any natural scientists here, please don't throw objects. But basically, research hasn't changed fundamentally. You're still doing the same kind of testing of a hypothesis using experiments, gathering data, it's driven by computers now. And of course it's done at a scale that wasn't imaginable 50 years ago. But that's been a very gradual curve. And there was probably never a moment when people said, hey, we have to really change how we think about this. And there certainly wasn't much of a methodological change. In this case, it is because humanities research in particular has been so wholly different. So just some simple examples of what this would be is extracting meaningful data from a massive text corpus. So you've got a huge body of text. Scholar, a lone scholar, even a group of scholars could never hope to manually process with their eyeballs and their brains that massive text. And so that's impossible without applying technology to it. I don't know if anyone saw a recent article in the New York Times about such a project, but they were basically drawing inferences from a huge 19th century database about the influence of authors on other authors. And of course, authorial influence is a big topic in the humanities and literary studies, but it's typically done on close reading, not on the mass reading of a huge text corpus. Another example would just be taking disparate data sets, very dissimilar data sets, integrating them into a hole where they begin to correlate on key points and use that to generate new knowledge. There's a lot of examples of that work going on. And perhaps the most simple example is just creating a system where scholars can work together over space, time, and distance. So they don't have to be physically at the same campus in the same space doing things, and they don't have to be doing it at the same time, but you can begin to gather a large research team where people don't even know each other. Of course, the big thing in this is the scale is really important. You do a lot more with a lot less effort. Making things is a really big part of digital scholarship. You're creating software, you're creating tools, you're creating interfaces, you're creating databases that drive your work. And the key point here is that you don't let the existing tools drive the research. You articulate the research questions and what your agenda is, and you create the tools that are required to do the research. And I think that's one of the big shifts in digital scholarship and goes back to the point about what it's not, is that you're not just saying, what I can do is made possible by what's available. You don't let yourself be constrained by those limits. It's probably fairly clear that it's not designed to be done by a single researcher. The loan researcher in their office, in the lab, is not going to be very successful and it would miss the point. The point here is collaboration, both to conduct the research, but also to give it sort of longevity and reach beyond what it's typically had. So instead of just having a researcher, you know, in the academic environment, when we're talking about researchers, we're talking about people with PhDs, typically in a faculty tenure line, typically. In a digital scholarship project, it's very common to see a number of people that fit that mold, but also technologists, people from the IT side, librarians, archivists, the general public, that's a big shift. Students actually being directly involved in research, everyone wants to involve students in research and this is a fairly low threshold of entry area where students can get involved. And these roles aren't just a subordinates, they're not people at the bench doing things, these are people who should be credited for their specific contributions because they're different in nature from what the person with the PhD is going to contribute. And of course, one of the things that can result, to hit the last point, one of the things that can result are just typical publications, books, articles, the usual output of academic research, but there will also be other products and in particular, products that might be designed for public dissemination and widespread use, where you invite the citizen scholar, the citizen researcher to come in and contribute or at least use the material. So you put it out there, you invite the public participation and that's a big departure, I think, especially for the humanities. How many people, I'll ask, how many people come from a humanities background here? And how many people who come from that background know what I'm talking about when I say like the rarefied discourse of the humanities where words like alterity and becoming and reifying and on and on and on are just dropped like spare change into every sentence. And I was just reading, it's called a, I should give a citation, but I can't think of it off the top of my head, a short guide to the digital humanities and it's written in sort of humanities speak and it's so, when you read it, it's sort of off-putting because it's just this, yes, yes, yes, futurity and it's like, let's just speak in plain English. And one of the things I like about this cross collaboration is that it means that you have to develop a lingua franca that everyone can speak and it's not that language that you would see in a typical journal article. What I mean is if you're a typical person, if you walked up, they're an excellent reader, they're very interested in literature, but if you handed them an article from a typical literary journal, academic journal, about their favorite text, they would probably lose any sense of joy on reading within about three pages. They would hate the book and they would hate the article. And it's overstating it a bit, but I don't think that's much of an exaggeration. So it's, that's scholarship for scholars and this is about scholarship for society as well as for scholars. There's a bit of an anecdote behind this slide. I was, we had the grand opening of our scholarship center, our digital scholarship center in November and for the first time and probably the last time in my life, I had a speechwriter and it was kind of awesome because the president was going to be there and what they didn't want was they didn't want me to say something that would conflict with what the president said. So they had the speechwriter who writes for the president come in and talk to the two others of us who were speaking and say, okay, I'll write this tripartite speech that will not look too fabricated but will be wonderful. And I have to say the guy was scaled. He was really, really fantastic. I think I changed one word and just stuck with what he did. But we had this meeting where he said, okay, I want to know what you want to say. And so we sat down and we were talking about it. And he said, okay, I think I get it. And he went out and dug out this quote and he put it in the, so I got the email with it. You know, here's your text and I popped it out and I saw this quote and I thought, yeah, that's pretty much it. And this was 1911 when Alfred Whitehead said this about the speed at which you can do things. It's a pretty apt way to do it. And so in some ways what you're doing with digital scholarship is just accelerating the pace. You're skipping over some of the preliminary work and getting more towards the answering questions, doing something novel much, much faster. And the way I like to think about this is if you took a scholar in our magical time machine from 1995 and had them sit down with someone who was doing research in 1965, of course there'd be a big gap. If you start to categorize what would be the difference between someone doing research say in history in 1965 and 1995. There was already a pretty radical shift by 1995 in terms of how fast they could retrieve literature simply by using indexes and the power of things like dialogue and computers. But if you take the gap again and take that scholar from 1995 and compare them to 2013 and if you just look a few years down the road, it's a massive departure. You know, the internet and the web have just completely and utterly torn apart how we communicate, how we do things. And so there's become a massive elision of how we, you know, so many actions that we do if you think hard about things you did 20 years ago and how you do them now, it's just things that become incredibly simplified. We do more without thinking about it and so that ought to give us time in a scholarship sense to spend more time on the meat. And the other thing that I want to mention though is that it's not just about a computer doing the work for us, that the magic in digital scholarship is taking the power of machines and marrying it to human intelligence. And my favorite example of this is Google Maps. Google Maps is not a machine-generated product. Of course it's got a huge machine-generated data source behind it, but what makes it so useful is the amount of human intelligence that's layered over the top of it. They have this data center, I was reading an article recently and I think wired about Google Maps and how it's created and the amount of human intelligence that's put into that database to explain, no, you can't turn right there or you'll hit a wall. No, you can't, that's actually not a bridge, that's a wall or something. You know, you need that human intelligence. So Google Maps would be useless without this merry of the human to the computer. So going back to the flipping answer, you know when you see it. I just wanted to mention one concrete project and sort of describe it as a way of making clear that when you see digital scholarship it becomes eminently obvious what it is. There's a project federally funded in Germany, but all in English, called Tambora.org. And it's named after the volcano that erupted in 1813 in Indonesia and wiped out a big part of the island that it was on and changed the global climate, and that's the notion here. And of course, climatology is a very hot topic these days. And so what they've created is a tool that essentially allows, a platform that allows people to conduct historical climatological research. And so this involves climatologists, historians, social scientists, a number of people. And what they're trying to do with their project is essentially recreate weather information from before the time when we began to record weather information using instruments. And so they built this massive database of texts. The earliest texts go back to about 800 AD and the bulk of them are pre-1800. And what they do is they have a very rigid and well-defined taxonomy. And they go through these texts and they mark them up based on weather information. Rain, heavy rain, snow. And so you can take these weather events and you can begin to almost quantify them. They also do things like the appearance of certain fruits. So in Japanese literature, for example, it's just, it's been for a millennium, important to talk about when the cherry blossoms open. Well, if you're a biologist, when the cherry blossoms open, you can pretty much say what the conditions were because they open up under certain conditions. So you can really begin to see weather patterns take shape over time and this is interesting to a lot of people. And this is multidisciplinary. Obviously a lot of people have to be involved in this. They've created this platform. This is another element that is optimized for collaboration. Like I said, they're a German project, but they did the interface in English and their taxonomy is in English, specifically because they acknowledge the fact that the lingua franca of academia is English. So they want participation from around the globe. It's a very low barrier to entry too. It's not a difficult tool to use. And what's really fascinating, and they demonstrated this when I saw them do a tour through their database, is that you can extract information from text that you can't even read. So the database itself is multilingual. There's Latin, Arabic, German, Dutch, you name it. It's dozens of languages. But all you need to have is the markup. And so if you want to know information about snow in the 13th century in Europe, you could be pulling that information from text that you couldn't even process because you'd have to learn the language first. For me, that's someone who's bilingual and who knows how painful that is. The lowering of that threshold is an amazing thing. I don't know about you, but one of the things that I observed from my vantage point, from my, what's my vantage point? We'll do that again. Is that a lot of scholarship ends in English. It's one of the beefs I have with a lot of scholarship, especially when you're talking about literature, is that there's the English Canon and there's that world literature that's over there doing what world literature does. And so if you can remove that barrier, I think it's a major shift in how things work. One of the questions that comes up, and I'm just gonna sort of give a brief reason not to worry too much about it is why do some people say digital scholarship and why do some people say the digital humanities? I don't think it's that important to make the distinction and what one calls it often has to do with one's vantage point. If you come from the humanities, you tend to call it digital humanities. If you come from outside of the humanities, you tend to call it digital scholarship. I don't think there's a substantive difference and I think that we're basically moving towards convergence that there's not, it's not going to matter what we call it. And I think this was from the article that was in the New York Times recently about the text corpus that they were using to talk about 19th century literature. Is that it's going to pass from being something that we name and put in this category to something that's just a part of scholarly research and so that the nomenclature for it will be less significant. So we don't, since we're a center for digital scholarship it sounds like we're planting some sort of flag and saying no, we're not the digital humanities. But for me it's just a very obvious choice to make that if you say humanities, people who are not humanists who don't come from that background don't feel implicitly invited. And so why not just do away with it and call it, say, digital scholarship? But like I said, I don't think it's a huge point to spend much time worrying about. So of the elements that it takes to support digital scholarship, it's funny, it's ironic to me because it would seem like since you're talking about digital scholarship that one of the least important would be space and it turns out it's the most important and it's certainly the one that most people have the most immediate interest in. As soon as we opened the doors it was the thing that people want to come see. I'm like a tour guide at Disneyland these days. I get calls every other day. Can we come see your space? I'm like, it's just a big room with computers. Oh, but can we come see your space? There's this hunger for and this desire for space that is not departmental, space that is not a classroom, space that is something else on campus. And we've heard loud and clear there's an initiative going on at McMaster as part of the new president's tenure or fairly new president's tenure. And it's called Fort Worth Integrity and he set up a bunch of task forces and there was a research task force and when they gave their presentation to the campus one of the first and loudest points they made was there's nowhere on this campus for faculty to come together and drink coffee. I thought they were joking but they're actually really serious about this. There is a very tight campus, spaces at a premium like most campuses, there's never enough floor space and they feel awkward going to other departments. You know, it's not, you know you don't want to just walk into some seminar room for anthropology when you're an economist. It's not, it's not done. And so they want these, these sort of third spaces neutral spaces on campus where they can go to do these things. And so a digital scholarship center, a place can be that third space and it's not owned by Starbucks and it doesn't smell like coffee beans. So this is kind of a kind of an important thing. And so I really can't stress enough that I think that space is a big part of this. One of the points to make with spaces there are universities that for geographic reasons don't have the luxury of any space and one of them is NYU and so they have a digital scholarship initiative but they're setting it up as a set of services out of existing offices. So this function is taking care of over here. Your digital repository is over here and your consulting services for media creation are over here and your coders are over here in different buildings and I've seen them present on this twice at conferences and the question that lots of people ask is how well does that work out? And the answer is not super well because you want collaboration between these areas. You want people who are doing design talking to coders talking to people who care about metadata standards. You don't want them in different buildings. You want them together. You want them to have these ad hoc and sort of spontaneous conversations. So one of the beauties of digital scholarship is that you not only create new knowledge which is of course the point of research but it tends to leave behind a footprint in terms of tool development. So you create tools and use them for your research but ideally they won't die with the research. It's not a one-off where you create a piece of code, you create a tool and you just leave it with your project and move on. Maybe you do for your own purposes but why not put it out there for other people to replicate, build on, use for their own purposes. And of course these require, this requires distribution, requires further development possibly, you need some committers, requires some maintenance just to keep them going. And it's not a reach to say that in digital scholarship the culture is by its very nature open and about sharing. So the GitHub logo there is designed to sort of make a statement. There aren't many people doing digital scholarship that don't post their code on places like GitHub and just put it out there for people to use. It's a very open and free market out there. You wanna put the barriers as low as possible and put your standard open source licenses on it to make it explicit what your intent is with your tool. This is not a complete set of the services that are required, just I think four of the major ones. You have to have some focus behind these services and you have to have a great deal of expertise. And while there are digital scholars, digital humanists who are becoming expert coders. And I wonder how they do this, these people that have publication lists that are 50 miles long and teaching awards and grants and by the way they're really good Python coders. I don't think they sleep, I think they're actually vampires and we should all be very frightened of them. They're out there but most people are not going to become expert coders. They either don't have the aptitude or they certainly don't have the time. And I'm one of those people who will happily admit that he's a failed coder. Many times in my career I thought, if only I could code, I could do something I wanted to do and it just takes focus. And anybody in the room who's ever done it, if you don't keep at it, it just dies in withers. You have to be constantly doing this. So you need expertise behind that. Data management is one of those things that it makes a lot of sense to manage centrally as well. So of course the granting agencies, especially in the US are really beginning to harp on this. You have to have a data management plan. You have to have a set of practices that you're going to apply to your data post research. It's the most efficient and it's most cost effective to take that and put it into a central place. Saves the time of the researcher and it really facilitates their grant writing if they can just tap into a campus resource and say okay what's my data management plan and what's it going to look like and then if the termination of grant be able to pass things on to the central entity. Curation is slightly different if you've created digital objects. A lot of digital scholars have to create the materials or help create the materials or make the materials useful that they're using in their research. And so they will often create digital collections of objects, images, text, whatever. And the question is what happens to that at the end of grant? It requires curation, it requires management to do something with that to make it useful for other people. And there needs to be someone on your campus or out there who sees this as important and puts the effort behind it and takes a long view of it. And metadata is much the same. It's a great idea when you create these collections to use common framework and common schema that someone else is going to use. It's a great idea, it takes a lot of time. A lot of people have a lot of ideas that metadata is important but it's difficult to execute. And it requires a lot of consistency and you have to really stick to it. And so again, that's going to require some major support. And if it sounds like I'm being, I am a librarian, I work in libraries. It sounds like I'm beginning to make a case that there might be some expertise that libraries have in this, I am. In theory, a digital scholarship center could be anywhere on campus. If you have the right funding, the right mission, the right staff, you could put it anywhere and it could be successful. But I know from experience that it works really well if you give it a home that already has walls and a roof and people in it doing certain things. And for example, the library would be one of the places that has that kind of space. But beyond just the space, there's a lot of, we have a lot of transferable skills that are coming from areas that were de-emphasizing because the nature of our work is changing as we move from print collections to more digital collections as the nature of reference changes, the complexity of reference changes as the way students approach the library completely changes. So we have a lot of metadata and storage experience. It's called cataloging and archiving, but we have a lot of native experience with that. And it's, I think the culture of libraries that suits digital scholarship really well. We take the long view to things. We're open to everyone. We tend to sort of be very agnostic about supporting research and supporting learning at the university. We don't tend to privilege one area over another. It's just sort of the natural culture of libraries. And there's the archival component. Libraries take care of things for the long term and spend a lot of time and effort to keep those things viable. So the objects that are coming from your research, the data sets, the publications, data visualizations, GIS products, maps, the video, the audio, all the multimedia, it's all going to require curation in a home and a home that's going to be durable over time. And that's something that a library is very good at. Libraries also have a lot of expertise in dissemination, so getting things out there, publishing, tapping into networks, knowing how to discover things, making them actually findable. It's the one thing to have objects. I'm looking at Kenning as I say this because he's doing a lot of research on this. It's one thing to build a system. It's another to make that system discoverable by the tools that people use to find their information, which of course means Google and others. The other piece is that there's sort of a political element to this, which is that you have to sort of create this and maintain this open culture, that open source and open access are important underlying elements of digital scholarship. And libraries have, since these things were articulated, Ben at sort of the forefront in terms of advocacy for open access. And it tends to be a place where open source with some variations is also well understood and well articulated. And there's a tie between those types of things and the ethics of libraries that we believe that information should be as free as possible, that we want people to access that we want people to use it. That's our culture and I think there's a good match there. So obviously I think that a library could support such a center, but I think one of the difficult things to turn this on its head a little bit is for some people in libraries, and I'm speaking of my own, to understand that although it's in the library and it's part of the library, it's not really for the library. It's less inward looking than a lot of the things we do. And it's much more about relinquishing a bit of control over space and over staff to support work that is happening largely outside of the library. And that causes a little bit of queasiness, but I think it's a very good thing. And but it's something that is, you can't overlook it as a potential pitfall. So why do we do all of this? What's the point? Well, obviously to serve the core purposes of the university, one of these is to produce new knowledge. Its research, it produces new knowledge. Other though is to enlighten and educate students, so we can enrich our society, make it a better place, crank out people who are interesting and interested in engaging and do things that we find valuable. And to that end, digital scholarship reflects the inevitable change in the world from doing things manually to doing things digitally. And of course, it doesn't take much of an imagination to look at students these days and see how wholly different they are from students even 10, 15 years ago and how they expect certain things to work certain ways. And I think it's just obvious to expect that when they come to the university, if they walk into class and they're handed a paper syllabus with a lot of articles on it, it is just like what I saw when I was an undergraduate a generation ago, that they're not going to be terribly engaged by that. And it's not about spoon feeding them or just playing to the dominant meme in society, but it's really a fundamental shift in how they're processing information, how they're seeing things. So they're coming with this different set of expectations and we should keep up with what they're doing. So we can go from this, we want students to be engaged. And so research should influence teaching and how that knowledge is then framed and presented in the classroom. And what cracked me up about this picture, I was looking for a picture of board students. It's great to search for board students in lecture. You can find these pictures. The funny thing was it's had a caption in Flickr and it was basically, these are students in my gaming class. So this is a game theory class. And I thought, how funny this new topic and what are they doing? They're sitting, looking, they're not doing anything. I mean, I'm overstating it somewhat. Maybe it's a fascinating lecture and they're actually just gripped by what they're saying, hanging in every word. But that's maybe a little optimistic. So go from this to this. You're touching, you're doing. And it's not really just about sexifying dry material. Like, hey, I'll take my syllabus and I'll punch it up with some, with a Prezi and some really cool graphics. It's about enhancing learning by employing other media, taking some new approaches. And most importantly, engaging students in the creation of knowledge and to offer experiential learning opportunities. So whether it's data gathering or improving data sets or making them the crowd and crowdsourcing, making them part of the creation of the tools that you need to do digital scholarship, do something to engage the students. And it was great when I was creating this talk and I was thinking about this point. I got this email from one of the postdocs who works in the center that we have. And he said, hey, I've got this, this is undergraduate class. The instructor knows me and just approached me because the students are engaged in a text mining project, undergraduate students. And they've run into some technical problems. They don't really know what they're doing. Can we talk to them? You know, emails like that are kind of the emails you want to be getting. And so that's exactly what this is about. And beyond what they're actually doing, the actual work, the concrete work they're doing, there's sort of a meta lesson. There's an implicit message that they should be getting about the digital age and digital culture. One is create good knowledge and share it. Don't hoard it. Observe the rules. There are rules around this. Copyright, how you share, licensing. Learn these rules. Work with others. Don't compete with others. Collaborate. Share and benefit from sharing. Be good digital citizens. Contribute productively and don't just make noise. There's a lot of people contributing to the web and to the creation of knowledge. And a lot of it is just so much static and friction and trolling. And this is an opportunity to take students into that space and show them that you can do meaningful work in that medium, not just comment on blogs and put something on Facebook, although that's fun too. So the question is, are we reaching some sort of tipping point? Is this going to become the new norm? And I think that it's a matter of, I think it is. I think it's a matter of time till this becomes very much a normal way of doing things. And I have the NEH logo here for a reason. They've opened the Office of Digital Humanities, I believe, in 2004. It could be a year off there. And it was, as they describe it, a broom closet sort of down one hallway. And in very short order, I heard this recently at a CNI conference in DC, it's become mainly the dominant gateway to the NEH, the applications they get are all steering toward the digital humanities side through the NEH. And so if the funding is there and these products are getting funded, we have to be ready. So the scholars are out there and I think we're getting really close to that. But it takes more than just money. You have to have material and you need to have that material be discoverable and usable. So this takes a lot of work. And so a bad source, for example, for a digital scholarship to use an example would be Google Books. Massive text database. They digitized millions of books, but it's a complete mess. They've used no standards. There's no markup. There's not even good metadata, bibliographic metadata for the titles in there. So taking a big chunk of stuff out of Google Books, besides being somewhat legally dubious because of Google's conditions, it's very difficult to do anything sensible with it because it's just a big string of words. And it's actually fairly inaccurate OCR. A better example would be an encoded text corpus like the Tambora Project where you basically take text, put them in and mark them up according to what your research aims are. That's a good source and that takes a lot of work. And the difference again to go back to the previous point is that that's human intelligence applied rather than just letting machines do it all. So it's done by scholars, but libraries, IT professionals, there's a lot of people who can contribute to making these sources possible. So I'm just gonna sort of rely on a couple points here. This is an area where you really have to see where the collaboration starts and how it happens because scholars don't have the time to create those tools on their own and it's not the best utilization of their expertise. And so this is where you sort of see the cross-departmental collaboration begin to happen. Cross-functional. So at McMaster we have the Lewis and... We now have, as of last year, we have the Lewis and Ruth Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship. And I have to explain that. I came in somewhat midstream. I've been there for about two years and the grant that gave it its name came in about a year before I started. So I wasn't part of that. So other people get credit for bringing that money and then sort of having the seed idea. Ironically, the two people who were the champions have both left the university. One from the library has moved on and one from the faculty has also moved on for another opportunity in Canada. So it's left to us. And I was recruited with sort of this as one of the things out there that I could be involved in the launch of the Center for Digital Scholarship. And it sounded very exciting and it's turned out to be that and more. It started the original pitch to the foundation that was very limited. It was basically that they wanted to have a digitalization center, a place to digitize our special collections and make them available. Which I think is like creating the conditions for digital scholarship, but it's very limiting. So over the last couple of years it's evolved from that very scoped and narrow into just being sort of a broad digital scholarship center. So we're supporting research across the full spectrum including the creation of content, digitization, but also the conduct of research and then the dissemination and the curation of the research after it's been conducted. We have a great location going back to space. We're on the main floor of the main library and we have a huge chunk of land. Maybe a little bit large for our purposes right now but that's just a matter of time until it probably feels small. Lots of light, very attractive. These are not immaterial points. On one wall we have these little sort of diner booths. They're very popular. They draw people in, people sit, work. We have in a large open space, it's sort of a long rectangular space, a third of it is dedicated to workspaces that are not staff workspaces. They're designed particularly for people who are doing research assistantships or finishing their graduate programs or just need a space to do their research and so we bring people in who are interested in digital scholarship, methodologically or doing digital scholarship or just curious about what it offers. Of the 15 spaces we have, nine are currently occupied, one by a postdoc, eight by graduate students and we basically govern all of this with a memorandum of understanding that we sign with them about what the expectations are if they're in our space in terms of participation, collaboration, but also, this is an important point, the term that they're allowed to sit there because we don't want to have someone who just sort of takes up residence and grows into their chair and in five years it's like, you know, Bob, we love you, but it's time to move on. So we take care of that with the MOU. We also have, what I don't have a picture of is we have eight staff located in the Sherman Center. So besides myself, the administrative director, there's an office for the academic director. We have two librarians, a digital repository librarian who is responsible for the technical infrastructure that's behind all of our digital collections, kind of a Titanic task. She's got a lot of work to do. But we have a digital scholarship librarian who does a lot of project management and infrastructure management for the projects that we run and that we're going to run. We have a full-time programmer and we have two postdocs. Got a couple of enclosed meeting spaces, very nice. One in the back with the orange wall is quite a large room. It sort of goes on beyond the corner there. Got a little glass, very open chamber there. And I'm gonna show this from a different angle and it's not, this isn't coincidental. That's a little kitchenette, as you can tell there with a bar and microwave and a teapot. No espresso machine yet, we're working on that. And like I said, the one thing we've heard loud and clear from the faculty on our campus is that there's nowhere on campus to do this kind of thing, to sit around, eat and talk and have this. Everything we know about workplace design, if you read any of the current literature from coming from architecture, private space is where you can go to your work, but you have to have these points, these necks eye, where you can go, gather, talk, meet people that you don't have to see every day and exchange ideas. And it's not really a reach to say that this kitchen has become the center of our, if you were to map the footpaths inside the center, it's the place where everyone converges and so all the conversations happen. We have a, this is outside of the center, we have this kind of entryway that's really slick. It's a wall that sort of sticks out from a wall and it has space behind where we can go install technology. And we involved undergraduates, we ran a design contest through one of the undergraduate art courses and so the student did the design and then we've put it in the technology. And the technology itself is part of the maker element of the digital humanities. So the back of this wall, which I don't have a picture of is a curiosity cabinet of strange hardware, pie boards, torn apart laptops, laptops. I think there's five different operating systems driving these seven monitors. It's kind of a mess, but it's basically proof of concept, what can you do with these computers? We've learned so much about pie boards that we're beginning to roll them out into production areas at $35 apiece, might I point out. So there's lots of things to be learned about doing these kinds of experiments. It's also a great calling card. So a little bit about the governance. The library is the main driver. We're the home of it, we're the main financial source behind some of the staff that's in there. Of course there's the grant that we got but that's like all grants, it too shall run out so we built on a sustainability plan. The Faculty of Humanities is our main academic support. They were sort of a titular collaboration although they have a zero financial stake in which I think they like greatly because they're a very destitute faculty at McMaster. Like I said, there's a dual directorship and that's very, I think that's a real asset that we have is that we have two directors. We have one whose job it is to be the academic director and be out there both on campus but also in the profession and beyond sort of talking to scholars with the credentials of a scholar. I'm a librarian and there's a bit of a culture gap there and so I can talk to them about it but really a scholar has a much easier entry way there. On the other hand, there's me, the administrative director who is there to manage staff, manage operations, take care of the financial side. Things that I would say are my natural competency or an administrator's natural competencies so we're not trying to do each other's jobs or doing things that don't come naturally. Part of the process of becoming the scholarship center was being designated as an official research center of the university. That happened, we finally got the board approval in October and that's a big driver because now that allows us to be participating grants to do a lot of in-kind contribution to grants and that's really opened a lot of doors. Right now our big push is doing a lot of marketing, getting the word out. We've had a lot of really good press, both local and national in Canada. We offer tours, like I said, I feel like I'm at Disneyland sometimes. I get interrupted all the time, hey, can you give a tour to this dean? Yes, I can, of course. A lot of talking to faculty, a lot of talking to students and this is all setting the stage to bring in a lot of projects but as you know, research has sort of a long arc from the articulation of an idea to getting the funding to executing it and so we are a little bit shy right now in terms of meaty and weighty projects but we have a sense that that's about to change radically. So just to wrap up, I wanted to say, I hope it comes across, this is pretty exciting work and as far as my career and what I'm doing, this is probably the most interesting thing I've been involved in. It feels very unsure and very difficult sometimes to sort of push some of these things through but it really feels like fundamental collaboration with faculty. As a librarian, as a professional librarian, we talk about collaborating with faculty but oftentimes that collaboration is reduced to what can the librarian do for me from our research and it comes down to I need you to buy these things, I need you to order these things, can you teach a section on some information literacy for my classes? It's very utilitarian to some degree and in this case, it's working with faculty rather than just granting their wishes. We sit down at the table and we say, so what is it you're trying to do and how can we collaborate and how can we pull these pieces together and a big part of it, and this is one of the risks is that you open the doors too widely and you let everyone in and say, we can support it all and that's just not possible. So one of the things and I think that another way to describe the dual directorship is that the academic director is the bait, she's out there fishing, she brings people in and the administrative director's the no, we can't support that. So I'm not the no person but you need someone to say that's out of our scope, that's beyond our scale, we can't afford that, let's do what we can. So a lot of what I do is sort of set boundaries and keep things doable. So the OED, what's the OED doing here? This, I would call the OED the pinnacle of analog scholarship. Professionals sitting in an office in the UK trolling through texts manually looking for word origins. That's of course what the OED's great strength is. When was the first usage? Well when I was working at Yale about 10 years ago there was a librarian in the law library who had a regular column in the New York Times which we should all have, I think that's a great side gig. And his goal was to basically out OED the OED. And so what he was doing was using some of the early full text databases, 18th century collections online, things like that to basically make a mockery of the OED. You say the first occurrence was in 1634? No, it's actually 1532 when it was used in this concept. He completely exploded their use of the word baseball for example, just trashed what they said about the word baseball. And as an American citizen I was pretty crushed too because it turns out that it's kind of English in origin but you know that's okay. And of course the point is nowadays children could do this. You know a kid with a computer could probably beat the OED at finding the origins of the word. And if you follow the OED, one of the things that's really big on their site nowadays is what they call the appeals program. And basically they're crowdsourcing the OED. Think you can find an earlier usage? Tell us about it and we'll put it in the OED. So they've flipped from being this very rigidly controlled canonical work to well just tell us how to do it. And this has happened in basically the last 10 years. It's a crowdsource thing. So as far as the turn and where we're headed I think this is a real bellwether for what's going to happen. So I'll stop there, say thank you and hope that there's a couple of questions where we can have a discussion. A little of all the above. I mean I take the example from our own campus. So we have an entity research and high performance computing services and so they're over there doing the heavily computational things. And I think the best distinction I can make is one of scale. So what they are particularly good at is supporting people who are doing research that requires great computational might. So people doing, especially in the pure sciences, physicists, astronomers, they are expert at that. But they do not sort of go to a different part of what you're asking. They don't take it further. They don't necessarily have a direct involvement in data management or data curation and it's not really their expertise. They're very, both in terms of their mission and their makeup, they're very technology driven. They really care about infrastructure. They have an enormous swath of machines and services to run. And so some of these secondary things where what happens with this after it's done they are not capable of addressing and I don't think it's efficient for them to address it. So what I would see as the optimal model is not combining them perhaps into one unit but having a really open channel of communication and collaborating but along very well delineated lines where we're not trying to do the same things. And we have a little bit of a problem now, I'll be honest, that there are people who approach them on our campus who would probably be better suited to approach us but we're new and they're old. And what they're finding it to be difficult from their side, from the research computing side is scaling down to the level of what this person wants to do because what they really want to do is write code but the actual computational piece is fairly lightweight. They don't need powerful servers, they don't need a lot of muscle and so they have a problem with doing that efficiently given the things that they're supporting that are on this level. And they don't have the diversity of staff and expertise that we do in the Digital Scholarship Center so I think there's a natural division there. I think if I were starting today, literally starting from ground zero today I would probably consider putting them together but I'm not entirely sure that that's the best way to proceed. The difficulty is that, and this will be the humanities person in me talking, the difficulty is that coming from the humanities they don't even know how to find the door of research computing often, literally and figuratively. And so it's about creating a different entryway into the work than is required if you're coming into research computing where there's far more assumptions made about what the researcher brings in terms of expertise and readiness to work at this very computationally intense level. But I think there's convergence that's going to happen there. I don't think this is going to be a permanent state of affairs which is why if we were starting over I might consider putting it together. But there are differences in culture there and I see it all the time when I meet with people from research and high computing, high performance computing that we have very different cultures and I'm not sure that those cultures belong unified or that it's beneficial to unify them. That's kind of a weak answer, not a weak answer, but it's kind of an odd answer. But I think that there's a different approach to some of the questions in our two groups. So specifically impacting libraries and librarians. That will be a really interesting question. I'm really curious to see how to what extent this begins to make inroads into librarianship if people are prepared to make this shift toward direct research support. Not in the sense of making materials available or providing information but actually engaging in the conduct of research and taking a part in that research. You see it happening to some degree but if you go to an event that's a digital humanities event that is primarily driven by scholars, people who are practitioners coming from the PhD side, you hear a very different conversation than if you go to one that's being largely conducted around librarians talking about digital humanities. And this happens a lot, say, at the Digital Library Federation. Those two conversations are very different and I think there needs to be a meeting in the middle which means there needs to be a letting go of some of the hey, this is all about libraries toward we're comfortable in their areas and their discourse. So I hope, my hope would be the yes, there's a subset of librarianship that goes in this direction. I think if we want to remain viable as organizations we have to support the work that our campuses do and this is going to be a big part of it. And so in some ways you could almost say it's a survival necessity to be engaged in this. So I think it should happen. To what extent it's happening now I think it's pretty hit or miss depending on the institution. Even in my own institution there's people who get it I'll say and there's people who don't get it at all. I certainly hope so and that's that culture of sharing and collaboration needs to go way beyond the campus because like you said there's no point in reinventing the wheel. And that's in a concrete sense if there's code out there if there's a software tool out there to do what I want to do well of course I should repurpose it. There's no glory in reinventing the wheel just because you can just to show off your coding chops or something like that. Beyond that I think that what we're seeing is that there's sort of a profiling happening where different centers are good at different things. I always use the Center for History and New Media George Mason as one of the really outlying digital humanities centers because of course number one they're older but they're really tool intensive. Who doesn't use Zotero or who doesn't know someone who uses Zotero? So they've created these massive software packages that have this huge adoption base. So they're very much a tool creating digital humanities center. I hear rumors of this army of coders and programmers that they have there that most of us will never have. University of Victoria in Canada is really great at text mining. Why? Because the faculty member who is sort of the driving force behind it cares a lot about text. He's an English scholar. So that's their profile. So if you're in Canada and you wanna talk about text you go talk to Ray. You don't build it again yourself. And so I think what there'll be a natural tendency to do is to say we're really good at this and you're really good at that. And then you can start doing projects together. Rather than saying we'll be a generalist at everything I think that would just be watery and diffuse. What our profile is, where I am, it has yet to emerge. I'm kind of, I think we might be leaning more towards the crazy maker side. Like we'll do the strange hardware experiments and take a lot of risks there. We're doing some of that now to deal with things like mass storage and distributed networks with mass storage and things like that. So that might be our niche, we'll see. Really, really tough question. I think you're living it. I mean you're living the transition and there are a lot of people that there's this publication I mentioned, the short guide to digital humanities. There's actually an entire section in there written for people in the disciplines giving them concrete guidelines of how to assess your work. Don't just look at the publications, look at the work and how they've done it. How did they create it? How are they disseminating it? How are they participating in the culture? And it talks about not devaluing things like interfaces and databases and making things available and making them functional. That even interface design is an intellectual act and you're creating a gateway for people to do research and if you do it wrong it suffers and if you do it right it's great. So there are people out there beginning to articulate what should be considered. I think to go back to GitHub it's a really great way to basically say look, I have taken my work, put it somewhere where people can look at it, review it, build on it, comment on it. And it's more at hawk than peer review or on a journal article but there's very much the notion of you're putting it out there so that people can criticize and build on it. And really that's what scholarship is. And so models like GitHub are really I think the building blocks of what you're getting at. And I mean ideally someone who's doing what you're doing will hit tenure and have a very diverse portfolio to lay out. And ideally there would be faculty who would look at that and say this is fantastic. You've made a huge impact in these areas and not so where's your book? But I think sadly that there are a lot of institutions and a lot of departments within institutions where that's going to be a bit of a challenge to do. And I don't know the concrete reasons but I suspect that the person who was the Ed McMaster who left who was one of the champions of the center I think he went to a place where he felt that there was more recognition for those alternative forms of scholarship than there is at the institution where we are. So that's something that we have to work on. And we're obviously as a digital scholarship center very interested in supporting faculty make the case that their work is significant. And so I think if you have a reason that's why the reason to get the research center designation they're working within the confines of a research center. It has the imprimatur of the VP of research as a legitimate activity of the university. It's not just some closet think tank. If you're active in, I take it you're asking the question from being probably involved or yeah. I see a lot of it and of course I think it's axiomatic to say that people who do digital scholarship are typically adept users of social media. And I think that the one of the major benefits isn't just to sort of publicize and proselytize but it's also to find collaborators. Number one to be able to sort of create joint projects based on putting your interest out there and seeing who bites but also going back to the previous point of a way of raising awareness. And one of the things you would need to demonstrate when you do this work is it has impact. And so the number of eyeballs the number of people traveling across your work makes a difference. Was it 10 people? Was it a thousand people? And where were they? So I think it's really important. And I think it's again going back to the point that it's just research reflecting the change in our culture. It would strike me as odd if someone were a really accomplished digital scholar and not also sort of just off the cuff talented with how to use social media effectively to promote their work and to find collaborators. Which channels to use? I don't know. I'm personally not a GitHub user. I don't code to save my life but I realize that GitHub also has social aspects as well. And I think that's one of the networks that's becoming really important for some of the people who work in the center. Of course. Yeah, exactly. It's, yeah, it's, you know, I ask questions. I say things and you get responses and you put ideas out there and let people sort of smack them around a little bit and it's really helpful. There's some of the more interesting projects I've seen in digital scholarship are actually built around social media. And there's a lot of work to be done there because social media is very ephemeral. Twitter is a great example. If you don't capture the tweets you're gonna have to buy them. And so there's a lot of research considerations in that when there's this knowledge of, created that you have to capture. I think that it's, I'm watching that. I look, as a study, I would look at myself as the administrative director and I would look at the academic director of the center and I would look at some of the who work in the center and we're all more or less engaged in social media but I think that there's a definite uptick and change in the nature of the use when you begin doing this kind of work. It sort of focuses and channels it and you begin to sort of see more potential for how you use social media than just to say, you know, had a great breakfast and good run. Although, you know, that's Facebook. Yeah, that's what Facebook is for me. I sort of cordoned off to Facebook but Twitter can become a very, very useful tool and I noticed that the academic director has an incredible network across the profession internationally and so she put something out in Twitter or she uses Facebook for this quite a bit and you can get an enormous amount of feedback instantly so I think if you weren't good at social media and you began doing this, you would become good at social media. I think it's inevitable. They're in the making. I mean, the services are in the making. We're responding, of course, to what people come to us looking for. I mean, to some degree, the needs dictate the services not the other way around. One of the things we do is we just have people who come to us who aren't quite sure what they're doing and they run up against tool limitations and so what we do is we invite them typically we invite them to come into the center and we have them meet with several people at least, different people from around the center, sit down at the table and say, tell us what you do. Show us what you do. What are you trying to do that you can't do? What's the potential to work with this person or that person? What can we do for you? And so just that meeting right there can have great potential and what happens is, one concrete example is we have a linguist working in our space now and he's really adept with clan. If anyone does conversation analysis, clan is a very old piece of software that does markup of conversations for CA purposes. Well, what he wants to do now and what a lot of people in his field are doing is taking clan, writing very sophisticated scripts to extract data from clan and then do a bunch of statistical manipulation in R and what he realizes that he's an expert clan user, he's an OKR user and he's a terrible scripter and so basically we sat down with this group and said, okay, where's the crux point? What do you know and what don't you know? And he left, came back and said, hey, could I sit in your space because I want to be close to this person? And we said, yes, this is what we're here for. And next thing I knew was somebody else who works in the library who's very good with statistical software wrote to me and he said, hey, what should I be doing this year? You know, I need some new stuff. You know, what's got some ideas? What can I do to support what you guys are doing in there? I said, what do you know about R? And he said, I know what exists. I said, what could you know about R in six months? He's like, I could probably know a whole lot. I said, okay, go learn R. So here's Mackenzie over here doing his CA work and over here is Vivek and they don't even know each other yet. Quietly building up this, you know, amassing this R, body of knowledge and eventually we'll put them together and fireworks will go off and great stuff will happen. But I think that's kind of, that's the potential we have is to sort of steer our own expertise toward what people are looking for without doing it haphazardly. We're building quite a armada of draft sort of service level agreements and those kinds of memorandums, a memorandum of understanding to govern some of our relationships so that we're not doing things without some sort of document where we all understand what we're committing to. Some of the ambiguity is that people hear Digital Scholarship Center and they think, oh, it's gonna be a one stop shop. You're gonna take care of everything for me. And one of the things we have to say is, no, that's somewhere else in your grant. Will you run my website? No, we won't run your website. That's your job. And besides, someone else can do it for less money and far more efficiently than we can. Go get a $10 web host with an amp stack with everything sitting on it for $10 a month and run your website there. Don't use university resources to do that. It's inefficient to do that. And no, we don't have a web designer. So we say, we will help you do your research but running a website is not per se doing research. And so we say no to things like that. So people kind of expect us to be the IT shop. And we have to explain to people, no, we're not just the IT guy down the hall. That's a big one. A lot of people see the space. The space is also another thing that's sort of a calling card and people come in and think, hey, there's space. We can do all these things in your space. And we have to explain to them that the space is programmatically driven. If it's not related to the scholarship center and it's not something that is part of the culture of the place, then it's not something we're going to host just because we have a big room. There are other places on campus to do those kinds of things. So that's the saying no part, but it's also just being realistic about your resources and your ability to meet all the demands. If we were to say yes to things like running websites or doing all of the hosting for a project, we do parts of it. We might host some of their research software, things like that for the duration of the grant. We would tap out our resources in months and be nothing but a very expensive campus-based web host. So that's one of the things that we've had to throttle a bit. But it is very ambiguous, that's the word. We don't even know what people are going to ask sometimes. And some of it's kind of shocking, very open-ended too, a little scary. We had a professor come recently who was writing a grant and she said, I want you to do something to help support this. And I said, what is this? And she just had a hard time coming and I was like, well, what kind of, how is this digital scholarship? And she couldn't define it. And so finally we just said, sorry, I think this is out of our scope because we need to know what, how this makes use of our expertise and services and we just don't see it. It was a nice conversation, but it required saying no. Thanks again, this was great. Thanks. Appreciate it.