In remembrance of John Berry, III

Using Slack as a Closed Twitter Chat for Online Classes

Last semester I taught a master’s level introduction to digital humanities at Pratt’s School of Information. You know, the one where the pandemic interrupted everything and we all suddenly had to move online? Listen. It was a lot.

The Streaming Library

Lately I’ve been tasked with giving an introduction to library research. This is common enough for instruction librarians, but since I primarily work with graduating students at the point of dissertation or thesis deposit (with instruction on the side), the shift towards orienting new students to library research has been interesting, for a number of reasons. But primarily it’s the emphasis on library research. Because these days merely existing online has become a kind of research exercise. “Just search up burgers in Astoria,” as my kids like to say; the most mundane decisions now rely on one’s research prowess, the ability to “search up” the right answer. Yet library research somehow entails a different way of being, a mode contingent on the understanding that at one point there were discrete objects that contained answers and you had to know how to navigate those objects without seeing inside them. How, then, to begin?

A modest plea for digital project critique

This morning, this popped into my twitter timeline: “Digits: A New Unit of Publication.” It’s an interesting presentation, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of this work. This is not necessarily a response to the specifics of that piece, but it got me thinking.

Let’s talk about libraries and digital humanities and publishing

Last month Shannon Mattern tweeted about academics and the politics of publishing venues: