Q: You work with LSA Technology Services as the Digital Scholarship Research Consultant. Tell us about your role. What does a typical day look like for you?
A: I am positioned halfway in between the IT and academic side, so I do a lot of translation and helping folks understand one another. A major portion of my job is helping bring together the resources that are needed to actually complete a digital scholarship project, making connections between scholars and partners, and knowing about and connecting with services. By "digital scholarship" we mean any project in the humanities, arts, and qualitative social sciences that has any digital component, such as a website, digital collection, online gallery, web application, or physical exhibit with a digital component. Examples can be found at Digital Scholarship @ UM.This is all under the umbrella of the Digital Scholarship Studio that consists of staff from across LSA Technology Services, which include research consultants, user experience designers, user interface designers, developers, folks who do accessibility reviews, and so on. The work we do is in close partnership with the U-M Library’s digital scholarship unit. I am also an affiliate faculty member at the Digital Studies Institute, working on research with them.
A typical day might include consultations with faculty and scholars, helping them conceptualize and plan projects, work with designers and developers helping them interpret and understand research goals, and some project management work. Another portion of the day may be spent on event planning and coordination. Relationship-building is also important as I develop relationships between key stakeholders across the university for digital scholarship.
Q: What was your career path to get here?
A: I was doing web design and database creation as contract work in the 1990s, and then started working part-time at the university in Desktop Support. From there I worked full-time in desktop support with MPathways (where my job was to run around campus with floppy disks and install software on people’s computers), and then worked my way through systems admin, systems architecture, capacity planning and architecture, and process management. Around 2016, I was hired by [what is now] LSA Technology Services because there was a need for more support and engagement with the humanities, and this eventually became digital scholarship support.
Throughout this time I also continued learning, starting with an Associates degree from Washtenaw Community College all the way to a Masters and Ph.D. in Technology Studies from Eastern Michigan. For about five years I taught at EMU and sometimes Cleary College as an adjunct lecturer for grad students and M.B.A.s on topics ranging from research methods, to business analytics, to technology and society. During this time I was also doing my own research and working in the arts, creating electronic music and visual arts, and working with local galleries and exhibit spaces.
Q: What’s a project you’ve worked on that was particularly interesting or rewarding?
A: The Crafting Democratic Futures Project, with Earl Lewis as the Primary Investigator. The three-year project consisted of a network of humanities scholars and community fellows around the country working together on the topic of regionally-specific community-based reparation plans. They were awarded a $5 million Mellon grant to support the work, and partnered with nine colleges and universities, as well as WQED, who created a documentary based on the work called The Cost of Inheritance.
I appreciated seeing how Earl Lewis had organized such a large number of schools. It was a good example of how our LSA Technology Services teams worked with a project from the beginning in architecting and planning it, providing input on grant proposals, all the way to the very end. Some of the user experience work that our team did was included in the final grant report because some of the materials were usable for completing the requirements of the grant. It was a good opportunity to help IT security understand the specific needs and requirements of folks doing social justice oriented research, where the needs for security are intertwined with IT but not always necessarily technical. For example, hate groups will try to identify and dox individuals involved in social justice work by using social and technical means to harass and intimidate them. In response to this, LSA Technology Services worked with ITS and developed a guide sheet for addressing Online Harassment.
Q: What do you like most about working with your team?
A: Among the team members there is a wide diversity of interests, skills, and experiences. Every time you turn around someone has something really cool to contribute that you might not have thought about. I feel like I’m always learning from my colleagues. They also have an unmatched level of professionalism and expertise. When I talk with scholars from other institutions they’re always impressed by our level of support within the team. Also the personal connections and lived and shared values are important to me.
Q: How do you like to spend your time outside of work?
A: On any of my many hobbies, and spending time with family and friends. I am a board member for a nonprofit called the North Coast Modular Collective, which aims to expand the accessibility and knowledge of electronic music in the region. I also enjoy making electronic music. Aside from music, I enjoy the visual arts (video, mixed media, paint) and dabble in architecture and construction. I am a fifth generation Ann Arborite, and come from a long line of skilled tradespeople, so a lot of my childhood was spent doing architecture and construction for the family businesses.
