###Going Glam
Notes from a talk I gave at the HistoryLab+ organised 'Life After the PhD' event at the Institute of Historical Research, 5 June 2014
The following text represents my notes rather than precisely what was said on the day and should be taken in that spirit.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/going-glam
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/b84881664c3ae7e34255
####From...
In March last year I went GLAM; or, to explain the acronym, I joined the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums sector, specifically the British Library, where I am now a Curator of Digital Research.
First though, short background of the Digital Research team at the British Library. We exist to help the library exploit the changes in research practice being enabled by digital transformations in society and culture, and with the repositioning of the library as a place full of data as much as a place full of books. We are a multi-disciplinary team with broad skill set S sense of importance of open S more than resource discovery, situate turn toward digital research within a response to external forces S deluge of data et al S libraries changing - web archive ingest activity S new contexts for scholarship in HSS - distance reading S - technology to study physical stuff S - non-Humanists developing services that challenge our models of work.
The year has flown by. S I’ve helped researchers get at our digital stuff, hosted hack days, worked closely with Wikimedia S given papers, talks and open lectures of various kinds to various groups in various places across the UK and Europe, designed a conference poster, S helped publish clear information on open access, organised a series of panel discussions, been awarded a year of free cloud storage and compute, written two collaborative grant applications (neither successful, but hey), S released over one million images (and counting) into the Public Domain for unrestricted use and reuse, got on with some historical research using our digital stuff, S launched platforms for serendipitous discovery of our digital content, set up a project with MSc students from UCL Systems Engineering, S wrote a chapter for the Programming Historian, became a PhD supervisor, assessed funding proposals, became an Honorary Research Fellow, S trained students from across UK Higher Education and colleagues at the British Library on digital scholarship practice, and had innumerable conversations with interesting, creative and forward-thinking people about all things digital research.
All told, it’s been a blast.
But given that I have a background in eighteenth-century satirical prints, a research interest I’m able to keep up alongside my job, how did I get here? How did life after my PhD propel me towards this particular job.
I completed my PhD at the University of Kent in September 2010. Around that time, having parked various additional research threads in preference to getting the thesis done, I became interested in the 'digital' as a preface to the 'humanities' and to 'history'. I couldn’t programme, I had never used data in my research (apart from searching databases and the like), and I’d never worked on a digital project, but I wanted to know more. I started following a bunch of people on Twitter and I starting reading blogs about research that used data and technology to approach humanities problems. Around that time I was invited by Professor David Ormrod at the University of Kent to join the City and Region project, first to scan 500 or so beautiful maps from the Rochester Bridge Trust archive, then to help wrangle the project data into shape, and later to project manage the website build. A few months after I joined the City and Region project, I took on another part-time role, this time in the Templeman Library at the University of Kent, becoming Academic Repository Coordinator. This role brought me into the world of open access, and with it through the ethos of openness into the digital humanities community once more. Between the two roles, I began embedding digital elements into my teaching: assessed blogging, exercises built around digital research tools such as Google Ngram and Voyant Tools.
In sum, I was the classic postdoc: combining various, seemingly disparate roles with some sense of cohesion but little overall plan.
The real change came in July 2011 when at an interview (this time for a short-term archive cataloguer role to cover that ever troublesome gap between terms when a sessional teacher) my interviewer looked at my CV and asked me: "So, you’ve been building a portfolio career then?". Up until that point I had thought of my postdoctoral activities as driven by survival, not as career building. But the interviewer was right, I had managed to build a portfolio of roles around something approximating digital research. This revelation was a key part of what followed: a successful application for a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, a fellowship which gave me the time and space to both augment my PhD research and to develop my digital research skills. Data now forms a key part of my research, I can muck about with bits of code (though never as well as I’d like to), part of my toolkit is the ability to query my sources computationally to provide new perspectives on the historical phenomena I am interested in, every talk I give and every note I take at conferences and the like is online, networked, and open by default, I write in markdown, I've started to install Linux on my devices, proliferating them with stickers along the way.
This has been my journey. But what have I learnt from this that I can meaningfully share?
Well, to start with a negative, something that is terribly unhelpful, as everyone who comes out of the end of the tricky postdoctoral years will say - I got lucky. The right job came up at the right time, and I had happened - somehow - to put together the relevant experience to get the job; in particular, though something of a Catch-22, libraries like people to have worked in libraries previously. Getting GLAM experience on your CV can be valuable to life after your PhD.
More positively, I’ve discovered just how enjoyable working outside of higher education can be. Yes, I miss teaching and the experience of watching students develop across a term (which I know those of you who've been staring at piles at exam scripts recently might find odd, but I do). What I've now realised is that there is something terrifically liberating about looking at higher education from the outside, of performing a non-academic, or alt-ac, role that supports a variety and breadth of research, and of being an independent scholar in my free time, of taking real pleasure again from my own research. For whilst I once saw an academic career as the only thing I could do and find satisfying, I now realise it is just one of a number of things I can and find satisfying.
And so I guess sharing my somewhat accidental experience of getting into the GLAM sector is an important part of what History Lab Plus is about: empowering early-career historians to cast their gazes beyond the academy and to ascribe value to the alt-ac activities they will inevitably get involved in, some briefly, many for the rest of their careers, after their doctoral study ends.
S
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