Last week I had the privilege of sitting down with Madelynn Dickerson, newly-hired research librarian for Digital Humanities and History. We spoke about her experiences in the library and with digital humanities, some of the ideas she’s bringing to this position, and the coexistence of analog and digital technologies. A (lightly edited) transcript of our conversation follows:
Matt Knutson (graduate researcher for the Digital Humanities Working Group): Could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you found your way here?
Madelynn Dickerson (Research Librarian for Digital Humanities and History): I grew up in Southern California and went to UC Santa Cruz for undergraduate. My Bachelor’s degree is in Literature, and I went on to do a Master’s in Art History Theory and Display at the University of Edinburgh. From there, I wound up teaching full time at an undergraduate studio art program. I did arts and humanities, teaching mostly the art history survey. From there I went into libraries, and I started in public services; I was the supervisor of the library’s evening operations at Cal Lutheran (in Thousand Oaks), and then moved to manager of reference, and then from there moved to a collection development position at the Claremont colleges. And my previous position was the American Academy of Art in Chicago, that’s where I was teaching.
So it’s a slightly convoluted path to librarianship, which I find that with many librarians is the case. They’re sort of coming at it from lots of different places. And so throughout it all I’ve had different perspectives on librarianship, from the public services aspect and reference to research support to pretty data-heavy work in collection assessment and management, which is what I just was doing. And what was really wonderful about my opportunity at the Claremont Colleges Library was that I participated in an extensive internal digital humanities training that was developed by Ashley Sanders, who’s now the Vice Chair of the digital humanities program at UCLA. And so I basically got to be a student of digital humanities. And one of the really interesting things that Ashley did was that we had a five week “deep dive” into various types of humanities work, and then we as librarians proposed our own projects. The goal was to use digital humanities methods to solve our own ongoing problems in our jobs that we were facing. So I was working with a research group that included the acquisitions librarian and a STEM team librarian, and we were looking at bibliographic data and experimenting with text analysis and timelines, and our research question that we proposed was understanding historical collecting patterns and trends in collecting patterns over a 25 year period on an interdisciplinary topic – which are very difficult to pinpoint in bibliographic data. So we did “terrorism”: how could we understand how we as a library collected books about terrorism over a 25-year history.
And it’s not something you can do easily using the Library of Congress call number system because terrorism doesn’t fit nicely into any particular call number range. So we explored with Voyant Tools and we spent a lot of time experimenting with data cleaning and getting bibliographic data out of our various systems. And one of the things we were interested in – we never got to finish this project – was trying to understand (this is where we would have liked to take it), using text analysis to understand potential correlations and bias: were terrorism subjects more likely to be associated with a particular religion or a particular country? That kind of thing, and how that may have changed over time. And what we also did was map out on a timeline transnational terrorist events and the books that were published on related topics, and so there’s very obviously a spike after September 11th, 2001 – and it takes a couple of years, but then you do see a spike in the number of books purchased by the library related to terrorism after very large terrorist events. So it was very preliminary but very inspiring, thinking about collections as data and just a really nice way to get to know digital methods, DH methods, and think about them from the library perspective and how they can actually be used internally.
MK: Very interesting. And just to clarify: this is your first DH position?
MD: Yes. Before at Cal Lutheran I was a subject specialist in Humanities and Social Sciences areas. And so I’ve done a lot of research support in sort of a subject librarian role, but never specifically digital humanities. So I’m excited!
MK: The deep dive you mentioned is what got you interested in digital humanities?
Yeah and then in my last position, Claremont has a very strong evidence-based decision-making model for collection development, and so I was surprised to find out about myself that I was really interested in data and sort of learning about something through the analysis of data. So that was another aspect of my time at Claremont that made me interested in going in this direction.
MK: Now that you’re here and working specifically as a digital humanities librarian, what initial goals do you have?
MD: One of my primary goals is to do an environmental scan and really get a sense of what’s actually even happening at this campus. I still feel like we’re at the definitions process for a lot of this stuff. I know there’s been a lot of defining already, but…
MK: Yeah. And earlier work in digital humanities, 15-plus years ago, it’s still the defining stage.
MD: We’re sort of always defining. I feel like there’s an area – and this is an area I’m particularly interested in – is more critical frameworks for DH in terms of critical theory. There is (and I’m thinking about this from the library perspective) quite a bit of literature in library science and information studies that’s coming from a social sciences perspective, but there’s a lot of un-probed overlap with humanities thinking in critical theory that I feel like digital humanities fits into and has a role in helping us understand the sort of theoretical underpinnings of digital humanities from the library’s perspective. And I’d like to explore that.
MK: Regarding the digital humanities at an institutional level, some have programs, some have affiliate faculty; here we have a more or less loose working group. Do you favor one approach at an institutional level?
MD: I would definitely say it depends, and it depends on the goals as well. At Claremont the digital humanities internal course that was designed for librarians was mandatory for librarians, and, you know, there were varying opinions from the people who were mandated to take that course. It came with optional projects – so, for example, after taking the class (which met regularly for six weeks), you could opt in to continuing on the project that you had designed as part of the class, and that’s what I did. And I also was not mandated, I was in technical services, essentially, so I was not mandated to take it, but I was allowed to, and did (with gusto), and everybody who worked on the project after the course was voluntary – they could continue to participate or not. So I definitely feel like you can’t *make* somebody do digital humanities research; that would be a challenge. There are certainly some digital skills that benefit researchers to have, but taking a softer, more voluntary approach seems… happier, for everybody. But again, I’m not yet sure what the culture is here in terms of the appetite and desire for participation and access to this. DH is– there’s many opinions about it.
MK: So in your opinion it could be something similar to what has been going on; that may be a good fit with research environment here?
MD: Mhmm, and I can see just additional structure for learning, which I know that there’s been some, but I’m thinking about what exactly the role is that the library plays in supporting the research needs of the campus and what kind of learning objects that might mean, what kind of workshops that might mean. I have found that more than a single workshop can be effective: a short course or a summer institute or something along those lines. It gives a little more sustained exposure, and that having some kind of practical application for a new technology can help reinforce how to use it in a way that like a one-hour workshop doesn’t. So I would want to explore that kind of thing, in addition to maybe online modules that would be self-paced, that people could sort of tap into should they want to, and at a point of need, or even just curating existing things that are out there, which – there are lots of things already out there. But it’s really going to come down to outreach and meeting people and talking to people and understanding what people want and what they need and what holes there might be that need to be filled.
MK: So it sounds like you might be ambivalent about DH evangelism: “This is the future and we all have to be doing this or we’ll get left behind”?
MD: Yeah, I did say something along those lines during my interview [laughs], and I do think that digital research is the future – there’s no going back, we can’t pretend that there’s no such thing as digital research. But that doesn’t mean that it has to be at the forefront of *every kind* of research. It’s true, these methods are here, but we shouldn’t force them down everybody’s throat either. There’s a right time and a right place, and I think that’s part of the learning about digital humanities: when is it appropriate and when is it not. And also, specific types of tools: some people want to be making a Scalar book when really they should be making a Wix website. So there’s all sorts of scalability issues to talk about and trying to fit the right experiences to the right projects.
MK: Sometimes the point is made that what we refer to as the “Digital Humanities” now will just become “The Humanities.”
MD: Exactly, yeah. I feel like that’s going to be the way it is with all of the “Digital _____.” It just *is* scholarship, to a point. Same with publishing. We talk about ebooks; at some point they’re just books. But we’re in a transition period that will last who knows how long, and at some point I do think that we’ll be more likely to specify “print book” than “ebook” when we’re talking about books. Maybe not tomorrow. But I do believe that analog and digital will coexist for the foreseeable future. I don’t see a future in which print and analog is not important anymore. And in fact in many cases it will become more important.
Already in cataloging, there’s fields for the “carrier” of the information, which is “electronic resource” or “print book,” and electronic is considered a “mediated format” whereas print is considered an “unmediated” format because you don’t need a tool to access the information. So for an electronic resource you need a computer to read it. But for a book you don’t need any sort of device (other than a pair of glasses or something, but they don’t consider that “mediated”). So in the grand scheme of things, when we’re thinking apocalyptically, the book is the most long-term object in terms of access to information. Actually when I got my computer, Adobe wouldn’t let me open a PDF unless I signed up to pay for it. And I thought PDFs were supposed to be the best, safest future format, yet the book is the thing and it always will be, I think. And in fact I always bring my paper notebook with me wherever I go, I’m totally a pen and paper person.
MK: Sacrilege!
MD: Yeah I know! I can’t take notes on a computer, I don’t internalize information when I’m scanning it on a screen. I live very much in a dual digital-analog world, and maybe I’m not emotionally letting go of analog, but I don’t think so! But we’ll see.
MK: Anything you wanted to note or cover?
MD: Only that any opinions that I have, I’m open to changing them. I am eager to see how things develop and how things change and how culture shifts and how technology changes, and I think that’s what’s exciting about digital humanities and digital scholarship in general: it’s the bleeding edge and nothing is static. So I think we’ll be in a sort of perpetual beta all the time, and I love being in perpetual beta.
MK: That’s quite a metaphor to leave it on! Thank you for your time.
MD: Thank you.