Tag Archives: DDH-AdminService

My DH Day Afternoon and Evening

It would have been great had I done some blatantly DH work on DH-Day, but that was not likely to happen under current circumstances. My work as museum director is, presently, focused on basic bread and butter, nuts and bolts issues. We have DH goals and are working toward them, but they are on a summer/fall time horizon to begin in earnest.

My standard issue DH work was evoked in the morning in my open access conversation. For the last few years, that was (such as it is) my DH calling card. The future museum DH work could be glimpsed around the edges of some of the day’s work. The museum has a new policy committee that is now considering a new strategic plan. If endorsed and adopted, that plan lays out our “museum informatics” goals–ambitions that will begin to be worked on starting this summer. I will be writing about those on my blog in the weeks and months ahead. Today, they were simply present in the background as I communicated with the new policy committee members and prepared for its first meeting.
During the afternoon, I continued work writing to museum stakeholders in preparation for our big 50th anniversary exhibition, invitations for which will be going out this week

I also hired a new managing editor for the Journal of Folklore Research, for which I serve as interim editor. He is great and I am excited to begin working with him.

Email and letters of recommendation. Those are the main genres of scholarly writing for me and for many, many of my colleagues. They occupied the remainder of the day.

Dinner and swimming lessons with my five-year old was the highlight of the non-work part of the day.

To escape the boredom of my posts and see what was happening on the other side of my campus, among my wonderful library colleagues, check out Michelle Dalmau’s Day of DH blog.

 

My DH-Day Morning at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures

When I got in today, I started work handwriting notes to museum donors. (It is o.k. to find that an ironic beginning to DH Day.) This was followed by our regular Monday morning staff meeting. That in turn was followed immediately by an excellent discussion with an IU undergraduate (and museum volunteer) who is taking a course on activity anthropology and doing a research project on the activist motivation in the open access movement. Very gratifying to speak with a motivated and well prepared student! Now lunch and more handwriting…

The “About Me” Post

I am a folklorist and cultural anthropologist at Indiana University, where I serve as Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures (MMWC) and am an Associate Professor of Folklore in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.

My DH involvements have mainly centered in the scholarly communication realm. I have become an advocate on open access issues and I work on a number of (often linked) scholarly communications and scholarly publishing projects. I am the founding editor of the gold OA journal Museum Anthropology Review, a journal which was the first title in the now thriving IUScholarWorks Journals program led by the Indiana University Libraries. I am also a principal on the Open Folklore Project, an effort promoting, and building tools and resources for open access in the field of folklore studies. I am a member of the Publications Committee of the American Folklore Society and the Faculty Advisory Committee for Indiana University’s new Office of Scholarly Publishing. I am in the middle of a year of service as Interim Editor for the Journal of Folklore Research. In all of these roles, I am trying to participate usefully in the transformation of scholarly communication characteristic of our current digital moment.

In January of this year, I was named Director of the MMWC. In this new role, I am returning to the core focus of my career over the longer term–research, teaching, and public program development in museum contexts. In my new work as MMWC Director, a significant amount of attention is being devoted to developing plans for new DH (and Digital Social Science) work at the museum. This summer, the museum will begin planning an interconnected set of digital resources and projects. A few early items are already coming online. Museum Anthropology Review is being transitioned into the museum as a museum publishing project and last week a new IUScholarWorks Repository collection was established as a central location for the (interoperable, harvestable, durable) deposit of museum research contributions. If my schedule allows tomorrow, I will write a post describing some of the museum’s digital project goals.

A key factor in my DH day activities is my schedule as a new administrator. Unlike many of my friends working in DH, it is a rare day in which I am actually able to steal time to work on a project of my own. This situation is now intensified as I get up and running with administrative duties at the museum.

My usual online home is at www.jasonbairdjackson.com
On Twitter I am @jasonjackson2