I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining the UC San Diego Library as the Digital Scholarship Librarian. After two and half years of working in a variety of digital humanities positions at UC San Diego, it’s a tremendous honor to take on this role and help our Library build out the next stage of its digital services. Given the profession’s longtime stewardship of information systems and practices, the library stands uniquely equipped to help our academic community critically reflect upon and shape our digital future. As our emerging digital world continues to open up new possibilities and new challenges, I couldn’t be more honored to carry the title of “Librarian” nor could I ask for a more brilliant and passionate set of colleagues.
I’m also excitied to continue to cultivate a variety of digital humanities projects and services I’ve been working on over the years. For example, I’ll be working closely with the awesome San Diego Digital Humanities group (representing about ten different local institutions) on growing our CBOX- powered digital commons KNIT into a collaborative hub for students and faculty across San Diego to produce projects related to digital and public humanities, open educational resources, networked pedagogy, and community building. In conjunction, I’ll also be helping faculty use KNIT to create public facing collaborative class projects that serve as public resources, such as the incredible Race and Oral History Project facilitated by history professor Luis Alvarez, ethnic studies professor Yen Espiritu, and their group of collaborators. I’m also very excited to continue working with the brilliant graduate students in our digital humanities research group. Next fall, we’ll be focusing on creating accessible course modules for text mining our student newspaper archive based on lessons we received from Benoit Berthelier, possibly in collaboration with UCSD’s student run newspaper The Triton. And, given how much I benefitted from “socializing” my recent dissertation in a project called #SocialDiss, I’ll likely be encouraging students and faculty to experiment with collaborative and public facing writing tools in their own research.
As ever, I remain committed to cultivating new spaces for students and the broader academic community to participate in critically understanding and transforming our digital medium to better serve our intellectual, social, and political values. Those interested in learning more about my approach to digital technology in the university can check out my talk for Design@Large below. Many thanks to the communities at The CUNY Graduate Center and UC San Diego for supporting my work and helping me cultivate my skills over the years. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can build together!