Dsg 2015-02-12
Announcements
- Sarah and Jim announced upcoming plans for DissCo: specifically, a meeting scheduled at the end of February to check in with graduate students on their writing output for the semester and year. At least one additional event is planned for the semester.
- Members of the DSG Staff will be working on a project that the library has as one of its immediate priorities: the creation of museum-style plaques and a digital exhibit space for materials donated to the library. Amanda, Sarah, and Eli are involved in this work, which also involves getting related materials from the project into the DRS.
- Julia: met with two reps from the music department, Ronald Smith and Hillary Porris, to discuss bringing DH to their department. Smith has made use of computational methods in the analysis of music and worked with David Smith (Computer Science) on analysis and workflows (OMR: Optical Music Recognition). Porris has a collection of documents tied to a particular composer that they want to digitize, analyze, search, etc. Julia encouraged them to join the NULab, come to DH Office Hours, look at the DRS Project Toolkit CFP, etc. There's also an interest in doing something with the pedagogy around DH; an intro to DH for musicologists and/or Python for musicologists.
- The latter discussion of pedagogy and DH led to a conversation about how the DSG might provide formal and informal opportunities for students, faculty, and staff. There's a desire to emphasize the instruction of "programming" rather than, say, "Python," in an attempt to get interested parties thinking more generally and productively about the role programming might play in their academic work. One suggestion was the creation of an informal drop-in / clinic where people with expertise in particular programming languages could drop by.
Discussion of Data Management
Sarah Sweeney walked us through a discussion of data management, focusing primarily on data management planning in the DRS, the DSG's responsibilities as a group / responsibilities to projects, and the avenues of communication for discussions of data management between staff and projects. The main bulk of this discussion stemmed from materials documented here in the DSG wiki:
Additionally, Sarah discussed her experiences with the DMP(Data Management Planning) tool used in sciences but not much with humanities yet at Northeastern. In considering applications of the DMP with humanities work, the WWP and/or the ECDA were suggested as potential test projects / ideal candidates.
Sarah’s experiences with the DMP highlighted that the tool is primarily used to fill out grant applications, which can make it frustrating to use in other contexts. There may be ways to tailor the tool / change its focus or language, or to reframe its potential use in soliciting ideas about data management on DSG projects as more of a diagnostic than a plan of attack. The tool does seem to require some revision in order to appear more user-friendly with DSG projects.
Sarah also asked whether is the DMP tool is the right approach for the DSG when interested in diagnosing data management plans. Other options are Google Forms, Survey Monkey, or Xforms. This conversation also focused on the kinds of questions the DSG might ask when implementing such a form: questions related to particular standards or conventions, storage, etc.
Sarah will synthesize the discussion of these questions, put them into a template via the DMP tool, and give DSG staff access to the form so they can provide additional feedback.