May 19th’s Day of Digital Humanities 2015 (#DayofDH, #DayofDH2015) is over and done with, but I can’t resist the urge to participate for posterity!  I love the concept behind this international project.  Registered digital humanists everywhere document what they do in a work day, in order to crowd-source data that will be processed using digital humanities methods in order to provide us all with a better sense of what DH encompasses.  It’s a DH feedback mechanism extraordinaire!

Even if it’s too late to provide a data point for the project, it’s important to make DH work visible.  Although no two days in the life of a digital humanist are exactly alike, I would say that yesterday was pretty representative of my professional life these days.  Here’s what I got up to:

• Blogged about my Spring 2015 digital humanities class, “Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition.” My post cites several student posts from our class blog.

Screenshot of our class blog for “Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition.”

• Wrote a description for the workshop on “Modernism and Digital Archives” that I’ll be leading at the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Conference.

Themed graphic for the Modernist Studies Association 2015 Conference.

Here’s my description of the workshop: “This interactive workshop will focus on how to incorporate digital archives into research and teaching on modernism.  Participants will 1) learn about digital archives and digitization initiatives pertinent to modernist studies; 2) mine selected digital archives and databases for primary source materials that speak to their research interests; and 3) learn strategies for incorporating these archives into their teaching.”

• Tweeted out an article from the Southwestern University Department of Research and Digital Scholarship Twitter account (@SU_RADS) profiling Kathryn Stallard, Director of SU Special Collections, who is retiring this spring.   The article features the grant-funded special collections digitization project Kathryn has spear-headed, and it links to the Digital Texas Heritage Resource Center Omeka site I’ve been working on (and which remains a work in progress!).

• Communicated with colleagues in the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium about logistics for making a recording of a recent TxDHC webinar on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) publicly available on the TxDHC website.  Matt Christy of Texas A&M has been the point of contact for the TxDHC website, while Jennifer Hecker of UT-Austin has been coordinating closed captioning for the webinar recording using Amara.  Accessibility is one of the core values of the digital humanities, so we look forward to posting a video that is accessible to hearing-impaired users.

Screenshot of the landing page of the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium website.

• Conducted a quality control review of student digital archiving work conducted in my spring class for the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) collection at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI).  Since students in my spring class transcribed, audited, formatted, and synced TAVP oral histories on the HRDI website, I play an intermediary role between the students and the HRDI archivists.  I’m delighted to report that Kathryn Darnall, Digital Assets Management Intern at the HRDI, is very happy with the students’ work so far.  I spent some time yesterday remedying problems with naming conventions in oral history transcripts that students input using GLIFOS digital archiving software.

Screenshot from the GLIFOS editing page on the Human Rights Documentation Initiative website.

In addition to the above, I wrote a slew of e-mails (naturally) and had some nice hallway chats with fellow library staff, including Head Research and Instruction Librarian Joan Parks, who clued me in to this webinar introduction to Native American primary source databases.  All in all, it was an enchanting day of DH-related work and activities!

What did you do during Day of DH 2015?  If you tweeted, blogged, or otherwise participated in Texas, consider logging in and linking as appropriate to this running list on the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium website.  It would be great to get insights into a day in the life of DH across Texas.