Tag: internship

Digitizing the Past: My Time as a Digital Cultural Heritage Intern

By Grace Robbins, Office of Digital Research and Scholarship Intern, Fall 2019

 

During this semester I have been working as the Digital Cultural Heritage Intern in the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. You might be wondering, what in the world is digital cultural heritage? It seems like a fancy title, but for what? Essentially the concept of digital cultural heritage is defined as preserving anything of cultural significance in a digital medium. Anything we preserve becomes part of a “heritage” to something, whether that be to an individual person or a whole culture. I was interested in working more with the intersection of digital humanities and archaeology after volunteering on the Cosa excavation in Italy directed by FSU. Archaeology is such a material driven, hands-on discipline (and science!), and it proves to be an effective tool to understanding–and interacting with–the past. However it generates so much data. Archaeologist Ethan Watrall writes, “The sheer volume and complexity of archaeological data is often difficult to communicate to non-archaeologists.” Furthermore, many discovered artifacts and architecture remain inaccessible to most of the general public. Thus, the goals in my internship revolved around understanding how digital platforms affect accessibility to these “heritages,” specifically in the contexts of archaeology and the humanities, so that scholarship is furthered for people in academia but also, hopefully, the general public.

I did most of my work with the Digital Cosa Project, which included uploading data from the Cosa hard drive onto DigiNole, FSU’s Digital Repository. My tasks confronted some organizational and technological challenges, however, as the large amount of data to be ingested meant rethinking the best way to organize the digital collection. We ended up switching plans from organizing by excavation year to organizing by type of file (artifacts, plans, maps, stratigraphic unit sheets, etc.). I also practiced coding, which most historians or archaeologists may not be familiar with. It begs the question, should these disciplines incorporate more digital education in the future? How useful would this be?

I also wanted to experiment with visual technology, including 3D applications such as 3D modeling and 3D printing.

3D model of a trench from 2019 excavation season being built in Meshroom, a free and open source photogrammetry program.

I especially enjoyed learning about 3D printing because it ran simultaneous to the FSU Archaeology Club’s “Printing the Past” exhibit in Dirac, which displays one important way digital humanities can further archaeological knowledge: hands-on learning! I couldn’t have learned about ancient Rome better than when I was unearthing ancient material on the dig and providing such artifacts in the form of 3D printing for non-archaeologists to interact with bears pedagogical significance.

Standing with the Cosa poster for the “Printing the Past” exhibit by the FSU Archaeology Club. I helped 3D model and 3D print the 3rd object from the left, an inscription found in the 2019 excavation season.

3D scanning was not as easy of a task, as new technology always comes with a learning curve, but in the future I want to continue working with this practice.

3D scanning the Napoleon Bonaparte death mask in Special Collections.

In my time at the internship, I have broken down my understanding of digital humanities from a broad concept to a web of applications that further humanities and archaeological knowledge. I will continue to work in the internship next semester, and I hope to continue mastering 3D modeling and printing and am looking forward to developments in the Digital Cosa project as we finalize our plans for the Cosa digital collection. Most importantly, I am eager to experiment with more creative ways these digital applications can be used in academia and the general public that will enable us to be more “in touch” with the past.

 

Spring 2017: A User Experience Internship In Review


It’s my final semester in the iSchool program, and I made it. I had a long journey from the start, including a brief hiatus, and yet I returned to finish with a passion – I even received the F. William Summers Award to prove my academic success. But perfect GPA aside, I’m most proud of my personal and professional development while remotely interning for the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. The highlight was visiting FSU for the first time this semester and working in the office for a full week. Through meetings, workshops, and events, I learned even more and enjoyed interacting with the team in person. It was a fun and informative visit which I’d recommend any remote intern to do, if possible.


A beautiful Tallahassee day at Strozier Library.

My Spring semester objective was to learn more about user experience (UX) and apply it by compiling a report for the office’s website redesign. To prepare for the process, I spent half of the semester reading journal articles, checking out books, and utilizing online sources such as LibUX, Usability.gov, and Lynda.com via FSU. The other half of the semester, I applied what UX principles I learned to consult the office on how to redesign their current website. With this project, I now have a foundation in UX and demonstrated the process through quantitative research, user personas, and visual design. It’ll be exciting to see what recommendations will be used and how it’ll impact existing and new users.


Hitting the books on web and UX design to Depeche Mode.

Overall the yearly internship was somewhat unconventional since I worked remotely, but I was still able to understand the parts that make up a whole within digital scholarship. At this point I better comprehend how technology is changing research support and the research process as well. Although my time as an intern has ended, I’m looking forward to seeing what more the Office of DRS has to offer in the future – the new website included. I am grateful to have been introduced and involved with such a supportive and innovative community at FSU.

Thank you, Micah Vandegrift, for your leadership and mentorship, and the entire DRS team, for sharing your time and knowledge. With your guidance, I made it! 🎓

Fall 2016: A Digital Scholarship Internship in Review

This past June I went to my first ALA conference seeking inspiration on what to do next. I had just put in my two weeks notice at a paraprofessional library job to focus on which final classes to pursue for my Master’s in Information. In between linked data and zine panels I met up with a classmate, Camille Thomas, who opened my mind to the idea of an internship with FSU’s Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. She spoke positively about her graduate assistantship experience and how I could apply myself in this new field. Right before the semester began, I met the DRS team for the internship interview via Hangouts, since I’m based in central Florida. Apparently Camille also recruited an intern for them the year before, and I’ve since joked that she should consider asking the office for referral bonuses because I signed up right away.

Continue reading Fall 2016: A Digital Scholarship Internship in Review

Anno Discipuli: A Digital Scholarship Internship in Review

*Micah’s Note: This is a guest post from Matt Hunter, who interned with me this past academic year. Matt’s enthusiasm and knowledge were an incredible asset to DRS this year, as we established our office, hosted events, and kicked off our program of digital humanities support. His time and efforts provided great momentum, and we’ll be the lesser without him. Good luck Matt!

Over the past academic year, my last in the MLIS program at FSU’s iSchool, I worked as an intern in the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS). I joined the DRS in the summer of 2015 after connecting with classmate Camille Thomas, who worked under Micah at the time. Camille spoke of some cool vaguely-digital projects underway down in the Stygian depths of Strozier Library’s basement, and I asked if I couldn’t join in on the fun.

The R&D team

My introduction to digital work in libraries was a weekly “R&D” group meeting where some nascent DRS staff brainstormed media-rich mapping projects to build a portfolio of a  tools and services to support. Although the project ended up falling through a couple weeks later, it was still cool to play around with HistoryPin and the library’s digital collections. Looking back now, that brainstorm session couldn’t have been more ideal; we covered a variety of digital scholarship topics in one meeting – content development, tool analysis and selection, copyright considerations, to name just a few – and even had to deal with what happens when a project fails! After two semesters working on projects, reviewing tools, writing proposals, and learning more about modern librarianship than I could imagine, I still think back to that first discussion as a distinct turning point in my library career.

As a new office in a new area of librarianship, DRS is somewhat unique and unfettered by tradition and long-established departmental rules or guidelines. This freedom allowed me to blaze my own path in projects, and be part of a creative support network spreading across campus. I jumped onto as many projects as I feasibly could, and covered a pretty wide spread. Over the year, I worked on things ranging from metadata entry to drafting a digital humanities strategic plan for FSU Libraries, to digital publishing. Here’s some of the highlights.

Internship, Fall 2015:

This semester was dedicated to learning how librarians worked in the research process of universities, and understanding the state of digital scholarship as a discipline.

Matt made Buckeyes!
  • Il Secolo metadata – The very first week working for Micah and DRS, I was assigned some “proper intern work” – cleaning up metadata records for a 19th-Century Italian newspaper housed in the FSU Digital Library. This was my first introduction to digital library systems, and despite Micah’s efforts to relegate me to Data Entry Intern, I used the experience to explore the guts of Islandora.
  • Digital Bibliography project – This started out as a simple faculty request for the management and display of a bibliography online. After researching possibilities, I developed a (semi-)functional prototype, which can be viewed here. The faculty member liked it enough to pitch it to DRS’s upcoming Project Enhancement Network and Incubator (PEN and Inc.) program for full development support!
  • Digital Scholarship Symposium!
    • I learned the ropes of Voyant, a text-analysis tool, and assisted Abby Scheel, Humanities Librarian, with her workshop. We played with different visualizations from the North American Slave Narratives
    • I was also introduced to Tableau and CartoDB, providing cool entry points into mapping that I now have in my quiver of tools.
  • I took the initiative to develop a Digital Humanities Strategic Plan, outlining how FSU Libraries might develop services and support infrastructure to support non-STEM researchers doing digital scholarship. After interviewing a handful of faculty who were already heavily involved with digital humanities research at FSU on what they would like to see, I drafted and presented this plan, which is under consideration and has been (I’m told) used as the framework for future support plans! This was a huge experience for me.
  • Acronym/abbreviation research: I had briefly heard of some of the alphabet-soup of topics DRS worked with on a daily-basis, but to go from recognizing to being able to knowledgeably talk about OA, TEI, DataViz, GIS, CC, Digischol, DH, TaDiRah, DiRT, R, and all the names of tools and processes that are thrown around took a goodly chunk of the first few months of my time. There is a serious reliance on jargon in the office, and it took a while to really be able to keep up! Micah also likes to coin business-y sounding new buzzwords for fun, which is weird – “coordinize”? “re:mergence”? I fought him on this a few times. It was a good time.
  • Scalar, Zotero, Slack – Among the dozens of other tools I was exposed to I spent the most with these three. Scalar and Zotero because of the bibliography project I was working on, but Slack was a great way to communicate with the team outside of my in-person hours and really helped with feeling like I was connected to and a part of the office. Being able to send emoji in “work” correspondence was also pretty cool.
  • Signed on for Internship Part 2! As December rapidly approached, I realized I wasn’t where I wanted to be with the completion of some of the projects I had spearheaded, and I asked the team if they wouldn’t mind if I stuck around for just a little bit longer so I could wrap things up as best I could. This set the stage for Internship, Part Deux.

Internship, Part 2: The Internship Strikes Back

 

  • Percolator – When Sarah Stanley joined the team in November, she brought a ton of cool ideas to the table,  one of which was having an open space and time for anyone to come discuss digital projects. I loved the idea because it put the library center stage as a valuable part of the scholarship process (something that I’ve come to feel very strongly about being a Good Thing To Do). We started hosting the Percolator every Wednesday 3p-5p, and this is where I spent most of my intern time. These meetings were absolutely amazing introductions to new ideas and tools. For example, I:
    • learned how to use TEI to encode a 19th Century cookbook with elements that could be referenced and queried in corpus searches;
    • looked at ArcGIS projects to see socio-economical divides in food availability between greengrocers and fast-food shops
  • Publish or Perish: Conversations on Academic Publishing and the Institute on Copyright in Higher Education – in February, I took a few days off from my real job to attend these fantastic events hosted by the library on the topics of publishing and copyright. I can’t say nearly enough about how amazing the speakers were or how much I learned from taking part in the conversations that happened those two days, but I am incredibly grateful I got the chance to attend and learn so much.
MattCamp!
  • Proposed and presented at THATCamp Florida! – This was one of the cooler experiences I had in my internship year, for a bunch of different reasons. The biggest is that this “un-conference” was really the first time I felt like I knew enough about digital scholarship stuff to talk knowledgeably about it and not feel like I was faking it. My proposed session there was supposed to be a conversation about funding and research and libraries, but it ended up with me just talking about how things work at FSU (as I understand them). This was fine and well and good, and still a fantastic experience, but my main takeaways from this conference came from outside my own session.
  • Proposed (and was accepted to present) a paper at the 2016 Keystone Digital Humanities conference with Sarah! – Because my traditional academic background (Classics/Latin) values papers and conferences so highly, I feel like this acceptance (and the super awesome paper we’re going to present) is the encapsulation of my accomplishments in the internship. Talking about funding and digital humanities at a conference with notable and highly-respected players in the digital humanities fields is beyond anything I could have expected when I joined the team last summer, and I think it’s rather fitting that it’ll be a year after my original R&D meeting. I am beyond excited about this opportunity, and I can’t wait until June!

For the life of me, I can’t imagine a better way to be immersed in the culture and community of digital scholarship than my time at FSU’s Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. My official association with them may be coming to a close, but I plan to stay in touch with Micah, Sarah, Devin and the rest of the DRS team as I continue in my library career. The guys and gals down in that sequestered little basement cubby were absolutely wonderful to work with, and I want to thank them immensely for the opportunities they afforded me. I doubt I’ll ever really be separated from DRS for as long as I’m at FSU, and I’m going to make sure the social and professional connections I’ve made there will survive even longer.