Tag Archives: DH

Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean Studies Data Curation at UF

Guess what? The University of Florida is partnering with CLIR to offer a CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

RANK: Postdoctoral Fellow
REPORTS TO: Digital Scholarship Librarian
SALARY: Salary is $65,000
TIME-LIMITED: This is a time-limited position for two years, funded by the Council on Library & Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2017-2019.
JOB SUMMARY
The George A. Smathers Libraries seeks a Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean Studies Data Curation to serve the University of Florida (UF), a major, comprehensive, land-grant, research university, which is among the nation’s most academically diverse public universities. The successful candidate will, as part of a dynamic and collaborative team, develop data curation services for Caribbean Studies.[1] The candidate will develop new initiatives in data curation and forge new collaborations and relationships that extend the Libraries’ capacity to support the University’s interdisciplinary research and technology initiatives – building upon a foundation of library-campus collaboration to date and work of the Data Management/Curation Working Group, Latin American & Caribbean Collections, and UF’s role as a founding partner and technical host for the international collaborative Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).
Reporting to the Digital Scholarship Librarian (also the dLOC Digital Scholarship Director), the Postdoctoral Fellow will contribute to the development of long-term data management infrastructure for specific needs for Caribbean Studies; liaise with internal and external experts in Caribbean Studies to identify needs for data curation; liaise with the dLOC team to extend supports and content within dLOC; and serve as a consultant with researchers on Caribbean Studies data curation data issues. The Postdoctoral Fellow will collaborate with the dLOC Digital Scholarship Director, dLOC Technical Director, UF Data Management Librarian, and UF Latin American & Caribbean Collections Librarians and Archivists to develop and conduct trainings for librarians, archivists, and researchers on data curation practices, resources, and processes from a situated perspective for Latin American & Caribbean Studies.
The Postdoctoral Fellow will join the existing team that is building a full system (with training, outreach, liaison duties, policies, procedures, technologies, tools, workflows, etc.) of data curation, and will support extending and enriching the team by contributing subject-specific knowledge from Caribbean Studies. As part of the dynamic team, the Postdoctoral Fellow in Caribbean Studies Data Curation will serve as the primary liaison for and provide consulting support to identify, store, describe (curate), retrieve, and re-use data for Caribbean Studies, particularly data not available in public or government repositories and especially for creating the attendant intellectual infrastructure through a mix of activities ad products (e.g., database entries in dLOC, webinars, teaching, supervising interns, policy development, procedure and workflow development and refinement).
The Postdoctoral Fellow will have the opportunity to lead new initiatives, including the new partnership with the UF Press for supporting enhanced monographs by hosting data sets, online exhibits, archival research materials, and other research files within dLOC as part of new scholarly publications. The Postdoctoral Fellow will serve as a core contact with the UF Press to implement services and workshops on data curation as part of creating enhanced monographs, journal articles, book chapters, and other publications with dLOC as the data repository.
The successful candidate will perform outreach and facilitate communication between the Libraries and Caribbean Studies research groups at UF as well as Caribbean Studies researchers and partners in dLOC. The Postdoctoral Fellow will pursue professional development opportunities, including research, publication, and professional service activities in accordance with the standards for library faculty; serve as a Principal Investigator (PI), co-PI or grant team member on externally funded projects; and engage in research and professional activity at the national and international level.
RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Contributes to university-wide initiatives to develop and design policies, services, and infrastructure to enable faculty and students to preserve and make available, and thus maximize the utility of, their research data.
  • Collaborates on the development and delivery of onsite and online/webinar trainings in Caribbean Studies data curation.
  • Collaborates on the development and teaching of for-credit courses, as applicable, in Caribbean Studies data curation.
  • Provides training for UF students, faculty, and staff and dLOC partners on data curation best practices and standards, and available UF and dLOC services.
  • Serves as a member of the UF-dLOC team to facilitate campus-wide data curation activities and initiatives; and, serve as a member of the dLOC team to facilitate data curation activities and initiatives across the dLOC community.
  • Works closely with the Digital Production Services and other entities (e.g. dLOC, other partners, other organizations) on relevant digitization projects.
  • Collaboratively supports decisions or recommendations on cataloging, location, preservation, maintenance, and retention of library resources and data for curation.
  • Formally assesses, through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, campus-wide and dLOC community data curation needs and current support resources and activities.
  • Works with library departments, technical experts, and the dLOC community to develop infrastructures and services that enhance access to Caribbean Studies data.
  • Partners with UF units and the dLOC community to implement Caribbean Studies data curation and publishing services and workshops.
  • Partners with the UF Press to implement services and workshops on data curation as part of creating enhanced monographs, journal articles, book chapters, and other publications with dLOC as the data repository.
  • Performs outreach using a variety of methods and tools to actively promote activities, events, and initiatives.
  • Serve as a core library consultant to UF and dLOC community faculty, researchers, and project teams as a collaborative team member for data curation throughout the research process.
  • Develops and maintains awareness of current tools and methodologies for computationally centered, data-driven research (data mining, visualization, text mining, etc.).
  • Develops and maintains awareness of emerging trends and best practices in Caribbean Studies, digital humanities, data curation, and e-scholarship in all disciplines.
  • Participates in appropriate professional organizations on the state, regional, national, and international levels and pursues professional development goals, including publication.

 QUALIFICATIONS
Required:

  • PhD in a relevant field
  • Fluency in English as well as Spanish and/or French
  • Ability to significantly contribute to the development and implementation of a vision for a Caribbean Studies data curation program
  • Ability to creatively develop, assess, and promote the use of library services, technologies, and collections
  • Excellent interpersonal skills including the ability to work effectively with individuals at all levels
  • Excellent oral and written communication skills
  • Ability to initiate and manage collaborative projects including the development of policies
  • Strong interest in collaborating on grants
  • Strong interest in the development and delivery of training
  • Capacity to work creatively in a complex, rapidly changing academic environment and to respond with agility to changing needs and priorities
  • Instruction or teaching experience
  • Successful track record of collaboration regarding scholarly issues and/or technologies
  • Strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion

Preferred:

  • Successful track record in project development and management
  • Grant experience
  • Knowledge of funding agency requirements for data management plans
  • Professional experience with issues and technical challenges related to the life cycle of research data and digital curation
  • Demonstrated experience employing data curation and digital curation practices and technological applications to enhance library management and access
  • Experience with digital preservation standards and best practices and knowledge of repository platforms
  • Experience with web technologies
  • Experience with metadata issues related to the discovery of academic resources

GUIDANCE AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT

  • Regular meetings with supervisor
  • Regular team meetings with digital scholarship, data management, digital libraries, Latin American & Caribbean Collections, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
  • Introductions to national and international leaders through participation in conferences
  • Grants Management training and support from the UF Libraries’ Grants Manager
  • UF’s and the Libraries’ Professional Development opportunities
  • Support for development and delivery of training from the UF Libraries’ Instruction Consultant and Training Program Coordinator
  • Opportunities and support as part of the collaborative team on the campus-wide Data Management/Curation Working Group and the Digital Humanities Working Group
  • Opportunity for joint appointment with the Center for Latin American Studies and affiliate faculty with the UF Informatics Institute, each with additional grant and professional development opportunities

THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
The University of Florida (UF) is a major, public, comprehensive, land-grant, research university. The state’s oldest and most comprehensive university, UF is among the nation’s most academically diverse public universities. UF has a long history of established programs in international education, research and service. It is one of only 17 public, land-grant universities that belong to the Association of American Universities. UF traces its beginnings to a small seminary in 1853 and is now one of the largest universities in the nation, with more than 50,000 students. For more information, please consult the UF homepage at http://www.ufl.edu. UF launched the UF Rising initiative in 2014 to bring UF to national preeminence with strategic hires and investments across the university. UF Rising’s largest single investment is in the new UF Informatics Institute, with other strategic investments in bioinformatics and other areas that leverage UF’s excellence for its diversity, complexity, and comprehensiveness. For more on UF Rising, see: http://rising.ufl.edu/.
GEORGE A. SMATHERS LIBRARIES
The libraries of the University of Florida form the largest information resource system in the state of Florida. The UF Libraries consist of seven libraries; six are in the system known as the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The libraries hold over 5,800,000 print volumes, 8,100,000 microfilms, 630,000 e-books, 121,016 full-text electronic journals, 889 electronic databases, 1,300,000 documents and 766,000 maps and images. The libraries have built a number of nationally significant research collections, including the Latin American & Caribbean, Judaica, Florida History, Children’s Literature, and Maps and Imagery Collections. The Smathers Libraries are a member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), and LYRASIS. The library staff consists of more than 400 FTE librarians, technical/clerical staff and student assistants. The organizational chart is available at http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/orgchart.pdf.
The UF Libraries have a long-standing history of excellence in digital curation with the UF Digital Collections along with collaborations across campus for digital humanities, digital scholarship, and data management and curation activities. For recent news, see: http://acrl.ala.org/dh/2014/07/23/intertwingularity-digital-humanities-university-florida/. The UF Libraries led creation of the campus-wide Data Management and Curation Task Force which started in 2012 (which became the Data Management and Curation Working Group in 2016) with representatives from the Libraries, Research Computing, and the Office of Research.
DIGITAL LIBRARY OF THE CARIBBEAN (dLOC)
UF is a founding partner and the technical host of the international Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). Since creation in 2004, dLOC has into the largest open access collection of Caribbean materials with over 2 million pages of content, 42 institutional partners, and over 3 million views each month. dLOC is founded on a core of shared governance where all activities are governed by partner institutions with an equitable and partner-driven model where partners retain all rights to materials and determine all materials to contribute. dLOC partners commit to shared values for community and capacity development. Now in its second decade, dLOC focuses on digitization, digital curation for collection development, and skill and capacity development to support building intellectual infrastructure, teaching resources, integrated approaches to teaching, digital scholarship, and collaboration with scholars for new initiatives and programmatic supports. dLOC provides training and collaborates with partners to pursue new funding opportunities and initiatives, including data curation.
RESEARCH COMPUTING AND THE OFFICE OF RESEARCH
UF created Research Computing in 2011, with the vision to enable radical collaboration across campus. UF was the first university to fully connect to the Internet2 Innovation Platform’s three components. Research Computing is home to HiPerGator, the state’s most powerful supercomputer. For more on Research Computing, see: http://www.rc.ufl.edu/. In 2013, the Office of Research supported the over 5,000 funding awards for a total of over $640 million in sponsored research funding. For more, see: http://research.ufl.edu/.
COMMUNITY
Gainesville, Florida and the surrounding community are home to approximately 257,000 people and both the University of Florida and Santa Fe College. Situated just over an hour from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, the city is surrounded by over 40 nature parks, including many spring-fed lakes and rivers. In 2015, Gainesville was named the “Best Midsize College City in America” by WalletHub and ranked no. 7 on Livability.com “Top 10 College Towns”. Gainesville is known as an innovative municipal government and an innovative city. Gainesville continues to receive national recognition as a top-rated city. Some of Gainesville’s accolades are listed at the Gainesville Awards and Recognition link. The Guide to Greater Gainesville combines award winning photography and compelling articles that capture all of the reasons for calling Greater Gainesville your next home. The area has numerous cultural institutions and is a haven for sports fans. Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, Tallahassee, and St. Augustine are all within a two-hour drive.
BENEFITS
Vacation days, paid holidays, and sick leave days; retirement plan options; insurance benefits; tuition fee waiver program; no state or local income tax. Prospective employees should review the information about employment and benefits at UF available at http://hr.ufl.edu/benefits/.

[1] Caribbean Studies as defined by the Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL) as “within the area of the Caribbean archipelago, the mainland countries including the Guianas, and the states of the United States which border on the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico” (https://goo.gl/DHSrxa).

Thank You. Merci.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to thank everyone who has accessed, shared, or used the World War I diary of my great-grandfather Albert Huet. Since February, it has been viewed more than 1,700 times. I can’t believe it. And neither can my grandfather, who is amazed that his dad’s story would be interesting to so many people.
In an effort to further enhance the project, I would now like to know how colleagues are using Albert Huet’s diary. I’m therefore requesting that anyone who has used the diary in her/his research or teaching to let me know (hhuet at ufl.edu) how it has helped you. I’m eager to learn about your experience and to link your projects/assignments/articles/books on my website.
Merci d’avance.

ThatCamp Philly: when is the next one?

I had a great time at ThatCamp Philly. This was my first ThatCamp ever, and I learned so much. Everyone was really nice and helpful. The amenities were pretty nice, too. In the morning, “Angels” helped us set up the software for the workshops we were attending. The organizers provided tea, coffee, sodas, water, and snacks all day long (people do need their caffeine). And for lunch, participants could sign up to go to a specific restaurant with 5-6 people. It was a great way for attendees to get to meet and talk to new people outside of the camp. Other conference organizers should take note!
As I already said on Twitter: thank you so much for such a great weekend.
Day 1
Friday was devoted to workshops. The three morning sessions included: 1. Mapping Your World: Exploring Free Web-Based Tools to Map and Visualize Your Data and Tell Your Story to the World (Scott Rutzmoser, Lehigh University), 2. WordPress Essentials (Michael Tedeschi, Interactive Mechanics), 3. Video Editing on the Cheap (Nicole Scalessa, Library Company). I attended the one on mapping, since my digital humanities project involves mapping the social networks and relationships of French decadent writers and their publishers (this will be for another blog post). For the moment, my map is hosted on cartoDB, but thanks to this workshop I discovered ArcGIS, which seems like a better fit for what I want to do with my map. I am now considering transferring my data to ArcGis, and I have to thank this workshop for the discovery.
The second set of morning workshops were as follows: 1. WordPress Beyond the Basics (Michael Tedeschi, Interactive Mechanics), 2. Wikipedia 101 (Mary Mark Ockerbloom), 3. Intro to Programming with the Processing Language (Katherine Lynch, Temple University).
I attended the one on programming and learned how to create circles, rectangles, and shapes that were changing colors.
In the afternoon, the workshops included: 1. Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon (Mary Mark Ockerbloom), 2. The Anatomy of a Project: project design for Digital Humanities (Delphine Khanna and Matt Shoemaker, Temple University), 3. Hands-on Programming Demonstration with the Processing Language (Katherine Lynch, Temple University). I decided to take another shot at programming, thinking that a hands-on demonstration might help me understand things better.
Day 2
As I wrote in my previous post, ThatCamps don’t have a formal schedule for Day 2. Participants are asked to suggest sessions ahead of time and then get to vote for the ones they would be interested in seeing organized and attending. That’s why, when I arrived on Saturday morning, I was given stickers. There were posters with the names of the discussion sessions that had been suggested on the ThatCamp Philly website. We were then asked to affix stickers to posters for the sessions we were interested in. To help us choose, there were 30 seconds presentations about the prospective sessions by the people who proposed them. At 9:15, the voting was over and it was time for the organizers to decide on the schedule. To make sure people would benefit from all of the discussions, it was decided that there would be one note-taker per session. The notes would then be shared on Google documents. That way, I was able to know what had been discussed in the sessions I could not attend. The topics ranged from DH in the classroom and visual ethics to how to curate digital exhibits.
I really enjoyed the fact that this “unconference” favored discussion so heavily. People came in with their questions, their issues, their solutions, their projects, or asked for advice and opinions. There was no judging; just healthy discussions. I had such a great time, learned so much, and met such great people. I can’t wait to go back or help organize another ThatCamp one day!