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Settling into my new home(s)

Posted in Digital Humanities, and News and Notes

Ashley Sanders becomes the new Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Claremont Colleges Library.
Ashley Sanders becomes the new Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Claremont Colleges Library.

Nearly a year later, I am finally setting up my new Omeka site. It’s been an eventful year! In December 2014, I interviewed for and accepted a position as a Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Claremont Colleges Library. You can see slides from my interview presentation on trends in digital scholarship here.

Just a few weeks after I signed the contract, I presented a talk entitled, “Digital Historical Research: Problems and Possibilitiesat the American Historical Association 2015 meeting in New York.

Ph.D. Graduation 2015
Ashley with dissertation adviser Dr. Peter Knupfer after graduating with her Ph.D. in May 2015

 

 

And then I went into hiding as I settled into my new job and completed my dissertation, Between Two Fires: The Origins of Settler Colonialism in the United States and French Algeria. I successfully defended the work and graduated in May.

Then it was time to move to Claremont and stop commuting from Westwood (near UCLA). Thus, I eliminated the dissertation and commute in one fell swoop and took the summer to recover from dissertating and moving.

At long last, I feel like I’ve acclimatized to my work in an academic library and the heat of the Inland Empire. This fall, I’ve been busy teaching a short 6-week “Intro to DH” course for faculty and graduate students at the Claremont Colleges and will begin a similar 5-week course for librarians on November 12. The bare bones of the website for the latter course are beginning to take shape at dhatccl101.com. Keep check in for updates! And for more on DH at the Claremont Colleges, check out claremontdh.com!

Now to return to a discussion of my new Omeka site… Omeka is installed on my domain, but now the hard work begins. Just as I counsel faculty and grad students embarking on new digital humanities projects, I want to spend some time reconsidering the purpose and audience for this site. Rather than import my old materials onto the new site, I want to carefully rethink the project and determine if my initial idea is the path I still want to pursue. The opportunity to teach a graduate digital history course on settler colonialism and collaborate with local indigenous communities will shape the objectives and design of the site, so I will know more in coming months and will post updates as frequently as possible. Watch this space for more!

In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about how to pursue your own DH project idea, take a look at materials from my recent workshop on designing and planning digital scholarly projects!

Or if you’re developing your own digital scholarship community of practice at your college or university, here are a few suggestions from the literature and my experience at the Claremont Colleges.

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