Learning on the Job
Data Curation by Humanists, Librarians, and the Public
The research environment within which professional humanists and librarians have been accustomed to working is being reshaped by both internal and external pressures. In different ways, scholars’ debates about publishing, tenure and promotion systems, libraries’ straining budgets and physical spaces, and funding agencies’ new mandates require that all these communities engage with basic research on and professional practice of data curation in order to fulfill their missions. In the sciences, the expectation that data supporting published research will be available for review and re-use is becoming more common and any fundamental reform of peer review in the humanities would hopefully encompass a similar position on the relationship between data and publications. Moreover, the acceptance of digital projects as scholarship depends on the data for these projects continuing to remain available. In an era of abundant, networked information, a crucial part of the value proposition of libraries will depend on their ability to steward unique local resources and invent new services to meet the evolving needs of students and research faculty. Funding agencies have begun to mandate data management plans in order to protect their investment of public funds in research but these agencies will need advice from the scholarly community and libraries to refine and fully operationalize these mandates. For humanists, librarians, and the public, which remains deeply invested in the subjects and materials of the humanities, data curation is not a passing fad or a temporary innovation; data curation is an important part of the solution to many key challenges in the conduct and support of innovative research in the humanities. This talk will explore how humanists, librarians, and members of the wider public might all learn “on the job”, as it were, to participate in the curation of data through changes to core courses in humanists’ professional training, through inflecting numerous existing positions throughout libraries with a new data curation focus, and through open sharing of tools, strategies and best practices in a manner that acknowledges the opportunities for peer-to-peer training.
Speakers
Trevor Muñoz is the Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). In this role, he provides management and strategic direction for MITH's portfolio of digital humanities research, community building, and teaching activities. His own current research is centered in a community-university collaborative dedicated to preserving and sharing the heritage of the historic African American community of Lakeland in College Park, Maryland, through community members' own voices. His previous work has focused on humanities approaches to data curation, the strategic opportunities and challenges of doing digital humanities work within the institutional and cultural structures of academic research libraries, and on the design and sustainability of interdisciplinary research collaborations. Muñoz is a member of the founding team of the African American History and Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative and has served, since 2017, as a Co-Principal Investigator for the major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that supports AADHum. With Jennifer Guiliano, he serves as Co-Director of the Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching (HILT) Institute. Before assuming the full-time leadership role at MITH, Muñoz previously served as the center's Associate Director and also as Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research in the University of Maryland Libraries. Muñoz holds an MA in Digital Humanities from the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and an MS in Library and Information Science from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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