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For the shortened month of March due to Spring Break, my primary focus for professional development this month was preparing to speak at the Iowa State University Digital Scholarship Symposium on March 25th. I presented on my work last semester on the Laetitia Moon Conard Legacy Project with Dr. Ferguson to complete an accessibility audit and provide copyediting and final design tweaks as part of a lightning round. The presentation went well, and it was a great opportunity to be in conversation with other students and scholars doing work in the Digital Scholarship field and represent the Vivero Digital Fellows in the process. 

The ISU DSS overall was an amazing opportunity to connect with other people in Iowa in the Digital Humanities, I got to meet two faculty members who teach in the Masters program at the University of Iowa where I plan to attend next fall. One of the most interesting panels was “Public Digital Arts and Humanities: Community Impact through Digital Projects,” where we got to hear how digital tools and methods are being using to engage with the public, from digital mapping in CollectionBuilder to critical description and metadata practices with the Haitian Art Digital Crossroads Project here in Grinnell.

During the month of February, I created a basic tutorial for getting started with the static exhibit site templates that make up CollectionBuilder for Vivero as my professional development activity for the month. This project was a great opportunity to delve further into CollectionBuilder and also think about how to present this tool to a novice audience. Throughout the process, I got to learn more about digital pedagogy by consulting relevant scholarship and evaluating the level of complexity that could be presented in a short training like this project. In many ways, this required me to think more creatively about what learning outcomes I should emphasize and what a student might be learning from an introductory training. 

This meant that the training teaches students more about how to work with metadata and the files that make up the core of a CollectionBuilder site, rather than things like HTML and CSS, which make up the structure of the site. While I wish a training could delve in deeper, this emphasis reflects what skills are most important for building a foundation for learning more about static site builders and minimal computing in a short timeline.

This semester, I’m really hoping to delve further into CollectionBuilder and other static site-building frameworks. I have been thinking a lot about the Lib-Static framework as a way of doing digital scholarship that uses minimal computing resources to be more sustainable and to build durable, flexible technology skills. Olivia Wilke and Evan Peter Williamson have written a number of articles on how the static web design framework can be more sustainable (article here) and be incorporated into the digital humanities classroom (article here).

The importance that they place on static web frameworks and minimal computing has honestly been a major influence on the path that my personal learning has taken. As I am in my last semester and preparing for graduate school, and then a hopeful career somewhere in library science, archives, and digital scholarship, I am thinking about how to adapt these frameworks into something that is accessible and productive for future students. This is guiding my professional development in February and potentially March as I develop a training on CollectionBuilder for the Vivero Digital Fellows training portfolio.

So if anything, while I continue to develop my own skills in web development with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I am also exploring digital pedagogy and how to build interest in deepening digital humanities skills for myself and my peers.s

I took on the Git version control system for my October Level-Up training to strengthen my knowledge of CollectionBuilder and other static site builders. This has really made static site building click in many ways, especially since I already have some basic training in HTML and JavaScript, two of the other technologies that really power static site generators. I ended up using a LinkedinLearning tutorial on Git, which walked me through the use cases for Git, how to it works on a conceptual level and then diving into the basic features of Git and the ways to utilize it. It covered how to “push” files with Git, in my case, pushing them to a Github repository, and things like making branch repositories and merging branches. These are all things I’ve heard about in creating static sites and seen referenced constantly in documentation, and in some cases had done via GUI interfaces and occasionally via code, but wasn’t fully confident in. I feel like this training has shored up my knowledge in Git and a hole in my knowledge around static sites as I start crafting a workshop on CollectionBuilder to give next semester.

I tackled the documentation training this week because I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of experience writing documentation this summer and have generally done a lot of documentation writing while at Grinnell. I felt like the training does a good job of showing fellows a baseline standard for documentation, but it might be useful to have more elaboration on the different kinds of documentation and how to effectively create them. I’m not sure the training would benefit from the step-by-step walk through that the other trainings have, it feels like it’s already pretty effective in the current form. I feel like it could also be helpful to include some guidance on writing slightly longer form documentation, as the simple documentation for one or two tasks while it can be helpful, for full-fleshed out digital humanities projects you often need more extensive documentation. I wonder if level up tasks could include drafting an outline for a longer set of documentation or something similar.

I think the biggest area of growth I’ve experienced since becoming a Vivero Fellow, aside from just general proficiency in a wide array of DH tools, is my project management and leadership skills. I ended up as the project manager and technical lead for the Georgia Dentel Project during my MAP this summer, and I feel like my time with Vivero prepared me well for that position, and was likely a contributing factor in getting me the spot on that MAP. On the side of areas of weakness for me as a Fellow, I feel like my weakest point, like many of the fellows who come into Vivero from the Humanities and Social Studies, is my coding skills and knowledge of coding languages. I’ve tried to develop some of those skills through working with CollectionBuilder and other static site generators, but I think they remain one of my weaker points. I also really always enjoy any learning process where I get to do research and find resources, especially if those resources can then be useful to others once I’ve compiled them. I think I’m really good at hunting up resources and finding information, and it’s really one of my favorite tasks. 

Looking forward, I’d really like to develop my coding skills/knowledge of static sites further, as that process has a lot of transferable skill development in it. I’d like to specifically get more familiar with using git, as well as developing some fluency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to apply some of the tutorials I’ve gone through on my own time during academic breaks towards the creation of static sites. I’d also like to further develop my mentoring & teaching skills- all the fields that I’m considering going into would benefit from developing that. It’s also something that, while I’ve done it before and have a bit of experience with it, I think I’d benefit from more practice with. I think it’d be fun to do a workshop to teach folks how to create a barebones (Google Sheets-based) version of CollectionBuilder, something I feel a bit more comfortable with than the CSV version, which requires familiarity with Jekyll, some front-end coding skills, and a tad of Liquid knowledge. I’d probably start with reading up on pedagogical design models for teaching workshops and other such resources, then building off those. To build my skills with CollectionBuilder/static sites, I’d probably lean on the CollectionBuilder official documentation, Libby’s internal documentation, and Programming Historian tutorials on building Jekyll sites.

I picked up the accessibility training, which while it is part of the fall training regiment now, I don’t believe it was during my first semester as a Vivello. One of the tasks that my project lead requested I complete for the Laetitia Moon Conard site as we’re gearing up towards launching it is conducting an accessibility audit of the site to ensure it’s meeting accessibility standards. This is probably one of my bigger tasks to work towards before I meet with her again, so it felt appropriate to incorporate the relevant training into my Vivero training regiment.

I’ve had training in HTML and CSS before but had forgotten about ARIA structures so that was a helpful reminder of some of technical affordances of website design that add to accessibility. All the resources that were included as part of the training were super helpful, but I wonder if it’d be possible to create a step-by-step checklist of the standards that Grinnell adheres to and the process of conducting a digital accessibility audit as part of the training rather than linking out to external resources that aren’t quite as tailored to our institution and the tools we primarily use.

I’m hoping and expecting to really get to flex my digital humanities skills and muscles a bit this semester/year with the Missing Voices project between helping with the launch and finalization of the Laetitia Moon Conard (LMC) website and building up a new website to cover the history of the Sociology department more broadly. I’m expecting I’ll get to continue diving into WordPress- or maybe Omeka, who knows! The primary platform will depend on decisions that will be made with Dr. Ferguson later in the process, once the LMC website is wrapped up. I’ve been told that there will be oral histories on the history of the Sociology department project, so that’ll hopefully be a fun and exciting opportunity to dive into my favorite little static site project, learning more about CollectionBuilder.

I’m also expecting to get to dive into the less digital parts of digital humanities work that are so important, like project management, promoting a project, etc as part of the launch process for the LMC website. Overall there’s a lot to do this year, and I’m looking forward to helping lead the charge on the project alongside Dr. Ferguson!

• With a year of Vivero experience under your belts, what advice do you have for new Fellows about the idea that this job involves learning how to do your job on the fly?

In digital humanities work, you should never be afraid to ask for help and not know things. It’s always ok to walk a student through your process of finding information, call in another fellow on shift, or make a referral to another staff person at the college. We’re always learning, and the field is always evolving in a way that makes it nigh impossible to know everything that’s going to come flying at you. The important thing is knowing how to find out information once you realize you don’t know it, and that is often the most valuable skill you can impart to your peers during peer mentoring as well. Give a man a fish, and he will be fed for a day, teach a man to fish and he will be fed all his life or something like that.

Likewise, because you’re learning all the time, you have to find strategies to retain the information that’s being thrown at you, and pass it on to anyone that comes after you. This is where documentation comes in. This can look like formal documentation, which you’ll learn how to make as part of the Vivello program, but it can also look like an informal work log and journal where you make note of what you did and why you did it that way. Keep a commonplace journal if you want! Find what works for you, and never let perfection get in the way of creating something good.

• What are you most excited about building out on your own portfolio website? And in your own domain?

I’m looking forward to building out a professional portfolio site that I can use going forward in my career beyond simply using it as a space for Vivero, building on the skills I’ve learned in Vivero to create a site that aligns with my personal vision.

• What questions do you still have about WordPress, cPanel, or your domain?

I’m generally pretty clear on WordPress and cPanel after working with them this year, but I am curious how to transfer which domain is my primary domain on cPanel/the hosting platform. I assume that I can just email Mo about it, but wonder if it’s possible to do on my own.

• How do you think this experience could help inform your work helping your peers learn how to use digital tools?

Going through the process of creating a WordPress site, especially in pairs with your peers in Vivero is really important in my opinion because it provides a good starting baseline for what the process of website creation at Grinnell often looks like. It’s also one of the most common platforms for digital scholarship at the college, likely right behind ArcGIS Storymaps in frequency so it’s a good hard skill to develop as well. It also provides a good idea of what the process of working through a Vivero tutorial looks and feels like, so you can guide your peers on completing the process.