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.