Bailiwicks

Below is a selection of my activity across some of the professional territories I roam. The projects and initiatives listed below are all collaborative. I play/ed a significant role in all of them listed below, but not necessarily the lead role. Dates indicate my involvement in a project.

For the more official record, download my CV.

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• The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH)
• Library Publishing & Scholarly Communication
• Digital Humanities Projects
• KU Libraries
• Global Outlooks
• Current Work and Interests

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The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH)

The IDRH was established in 2010 to provide resources and training in the practices and tools of the digital humanities, and to facilitate interdisciplinary academic collaborations and externally funded research. I have co-led the IDRH since it’s founding, working with a stellar cast of co-directors, postdocs, students, and librarian and faculty colleagues across KU and beyond. (See a brief history of the IDRH here.)

In addition to providing consultations and guidance on DH projects, and to offering workshops, classroom sessions, we have several significant initiatives, some of which are listed below.

• Digital Humanities Forum

  An annual conference held every Fall from 2011-2019 at the University of Kansas. The Forum consists of several days of hands-on workshops, research paper and poster presentations, and prominent keynote speakers, each year addressing a different digital humanities theme.

• Seed Grants

  The IDRH Seed Grants are intended to support KU faculty and academic staff as they plan or pilot a collaborative digital humanities project.

• HASTAC Scholars

  The IDRH has supported 22 graduate and undergraduate students (and counting) in participating in this national program for students working at the intersection of technology, arts, humanities and sciences. Students receive mentorship and opportunities for professional development.

• Digital Humanities Fellows

  Launched in 2020, the DH Fellows program brings together a cohort of faculty members and graduate students from across the university committed to thinking and working together for an academic year to explore issues in the digital humanities and develop research projects.

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Library Publishing & Scholarly Communication

• Journals@KU
  (2005-2010)

  KU Libraries’ journal publishing initiative, providing journal editors with the technical infrastructure to publish their journals online and manage the entire publication process from editorial management and peer-review to publication and preservation.

• KU ScholarWorks
  (2005-2010)

  The digital repository of the University of Kansas. It contains scholarly work created by KU faculty, staff and students, as well as material from the University Archives.

• Envisioning a World Beyond APCs/BPCs: An International Symposium
  (2016)

  A 2-day symposium held in Lawrence, Kansas, on November 17-18, 2016, that brought together a group of internationally respected scholars, publishers, university librarians, and executives from foundations and organizations, to address a fundamental question in the OA movement: can the global scholarly community create an OA publishing system that works equitably for everyone across the global community, without costs to readers or authors?

• OAnarchy
  (2017-present)

  An occassional group blog with some of my OA-passionate colleagues at KU. OA for “open access,” and “anarchy” because we feel that some disorder and fundamental rethinking would do the field quite a bit of good.

• Scholarly Publishing Office / University of Michigan Library
  (2000-2005)

  The Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO, now branded as Michigan Publishing) was a unit of the University of Michigan Library devoted to developing innovative and economically sustainable publishing and distribution models for scholarly discourse, one of the earliest library-based publishing initatives. I served as Electronic Publishing Librarian at the SPO from it’s founding until I left Michigan in 2005. In this role I supported numerous publishing projects, small scale and large scale. Our team published over a dozen journals and scholarly digital projects, provided hosting for non-profit academic organizations’ subscription products, and developed a suite of services and that helped establish and sustain scholarly publications and expand the possibilities for library-based publishing.
  
  A selection of some of my favorite SPO projects are listed below.

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Digital Humanities Projects

• Indigenous Critical Media Lab

  A collaborative research and teaching co-op for the exploration of digital arts and research based in Indigenous methods, cultural expression, and language revitalization.

• Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP)

  A collaborative research project that seeks to increase the number of black-authored texts available for digital research, develop new metadata schemas for the study these texts, and establish and support a community of scholars.

• Margaret Cavendish: Philosophical and Physical Opnions (1663 edition)
  (2019-2020)

  The first version of this text to be hand transcribed and available to the public. The text was transcribed by 70+ participants in a transcribe-a-thon in the Fall of 2019, and published online using the Ed platform for static, minimal digital editions.

• Huellas Incomodas (Uncomfortable Footprints)
  (2020-present)

  An international collective of students, scholars, community members dedicated to documenting, contextualizing, and digitally preserving the traces of local social protest movements in the Americas.

• African Digital Humanities
  (2019-present)

  The African Digital Humanities initiative at the University of Kansas is headed by James Yeku in the Department of African and African-American Studies in partnership with the IDRH, and presents opportunities for engaged discussions that center on African perspectives and projects in the digital humanities.

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KU Libraries

• Jesuati Book of Remedies

  TEI-encoded, bilingual digital edition of a 16th-century manuscript of medicinal recipes compiled by the Order of the Jesuati Friars of Saint Jerome in Lucca, Italy in 1562. Text in Italian. Translated to English and with notes by Stata Norton.

• Keeler Fellowship: A Report on Library-Museum collaboration at the University of Kansas
  (2010)

  This report stems from my Fall 2010 semester as Keeler Family Intra-University Professor at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. The report provides background information about library/museum collaborations in general; lists previous collaborations and potential future areas of collaboration between the Spencer Museum and KU Libraries; and makes some suggestions for future steps to promote further collaboration between the two organizations.

• Research Sprints

  Research Sprints offers faculty and academic staff the opportunity to work intensively with a team of expert librarians on a specific project for a full week. The intent is for the entire team–faculty and librarians–to work without distractions to produce a tangible product or outcome.

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Global Outlooks

• Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH)

  A special interest group of ADHO that recognizes that the perspectives of the Global South are vital for shaping the future of digital humanities.

• The Faces of Haiti: Resolute in Reform, Resistance and Recovery

  This report describes the activities and findings of the University of Kansas Haitian Research Initiative team that travelled to Haiti in July 2011 to assess the current research and educational environment in Haiti, and to form professional connections in order to develop further ties between KU and Haitian institutions.

• Report on Open Repository Development in Developing and Transition Countries

  This study, conducted wtih EIFL.net, created an inventory of current (as of 2010) digital repository activities in developing and transition countries at both the infrastructure and services level.

• Fulbright Scholar, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
  (2003-2004)

  My Fulbright year included working with colleagues at the Institute of Computer Science to evaluate digital publishing and repository platforms, and teaching a class at the Department of Information and Library Studies. This established a foundation for future work in the Czech Republic in subsequent years.

• Kyrgyzstan Higher Education Professional Development Program
  (2001)

  In 2001 I participated in the creation of a professional development program for administrators at Kyrgyz Universities. Participating in meetings and presentations in Bishkek and Osh, I brought a libary and information science perspective to this program led by the University of Michigan School of Education.

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Current Work and Interests

• Public Digital Humanities

• Shadow Libraries

• Minimal Computing

• Digital Storytelling

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