Category Archives: Research

Seeking Contractor for Front-end UI Development

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We’re looking to contract a Front-End UI Developer to help complete the prototype for a Digital Humanities project.

Contracting Front-end UI Developer (3-4 months)

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA

3-4 month front-end job, beginning April 22, 2019 (remote work considered, Pittsburgh preferred)

Front-end developer with UX design experience sought to build a custom theme/user interface for a digital humanities project. The project requires an interface to display custom HTML5 elements with ReactJS. This person will work closely with the back-end developers to implement an existing design mock-up and will need some creativity to translate designs to be responsive to a variety of devices and screen sizes. The interface is envisioned to be targeted for tablet-first delivery. Total contract for up to $5,000 USD.

The theme must be finished no later than 4 months after the contract begins. Development will require some discussions for iterative adjustments. We will require virtual or face-to-face meetings every two weeks with the team to provide feedback and testing of the stable interface; otherwise the schedule is flexible.

Required:
-Strong knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3
-Strong knowledge of responsive design.
-Experience with templating paradigms, React JSX is preferred.
-Experience with UX design.

Preferred:
– Experience working with XML-based projects.

Submit a brief cover letter, resume, and links to some of your work to Rikk Mulligan (rikk@cmu.edu) and Scott Weingart (scottbot@cmu.edu). Not accepting new applications after 04/15/2019.

Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. We do not discriminate on race, religion, gender, etc., and particularly welcome members of underrepresented communities.

Community Processing Day 2019

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Please consider attending Community Processing Day, a series of digital arts workshops, panels, artist lectures, and lightning talks that are taking place at both Pitt and CMU on January 25-26. You may already be familiar with Processing, a programming language/software that was developed by artists who are devoted to making coding accessible. While working with my fellow organizers Lindsey French, Golan Levin, and Tom Hughes, I’ve learned how committed the Processing community is to making these events inclusive, with lots of opportunities for beginners.
 
As a part of this 2-day event, I am planning a curiosity discussion, “Curiosity + Unfamiliar Spaces” on Friday January 25, 6-8pm, at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU. We will explore how people create with and contend with seemingly inaccessible languages, vocabularies, scripts, social spaces, and wild spaces. As always, we welcome audience questions throughout the discussion. Please Register here, under the CMU heading. Learn more about the previous curiosity discussions here.
 
Our panelists for Curiosity + Unfamiliar Spaces will be:
 
Nina Barbuto is the founder and director of Assemble, a community space offering daily educational STEAM programs to youth throughout Pittsburgh, and a platform for experiential learning, open creative processes, and building confidence through making. On her own, Nina works in a variety of media and often explores the idea of recycling noise into a system or elevating the vernacular to the spectacular.
 
Marijke Hecht is currently a PhD student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Science and Policy program. Her research looks at how the urban environment can best be used as a platform for civic engagement through science, art, and other disciplines. Before graduate school, Marijke led community based environmental education and stewardship programs in Pittsburgh’s parks.
 
Darrell S. Kinsel is a creative entrepreneur, cultural agitator, and community organizer. D.S. is the co-founder of BOOM Concepts, a creative hub dedicated to the advancement of black and brown artists representing marginalized communities. BOOM Concepts focuses on youth, community artists, and neighborhood partners to identify contemporary expressions of social justice through drama, dance, music, visual art, and technology.
 
Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He is a contributor to open source arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks, and builds tools that allow artists to use new algorithms in creative ways. He creatively subverts networked communication and computation, explores glitch and systemic bias, and extends these concepts to reversal of everything from identity to relationships.
Kate Joranson
Head, Henry Clay Frick Fine Arts Library
University Library Sysytem
University of Pittsburgh

Visiting Speakers: Mark Newton and Alex Gil, February 15

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Digital Scholarship at Columbia University Libraries:
Past, Present, and Future

Thursday, February 15
4:30 – 6:00 pm
The Den in the Sorrells Library
4400 Wean Hall
Carnegie Mellon University

Description:

Over the course of several years, the Columbia University Libraries have built a comprehensive program of digital scholarship across its campuses—connecting with faculty and student scholars to support learning needs and research agenda with access to technologies, systems, and expertise in digital workflows. From scholarly communication to computational support to the emergent methods and tools of the digital humanities, the libraries have moved from innovation and experimentation to maturing models for doing this work. Mark Newton will explore select scholarly projects and technical development around digital publishing and archiving workflows, highlighting the outcomes for library and scholars in partnership to advance knowledge from both within the institution and communicated to broad audiences beyond.

 

Dr. Alex Gil will follow Mark Newton’s presentation with an introduction to the life and mission of the Butler Studio. The Studio was founded five years ago as a tech-lite, co-working library space in order to foster digital scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Though the United States boasts many digital humanities and digital scholarship labs, centers and now library divisions, the Studio is one of the few to have achieved the much desired active intersection between faculty, students and librarians—a true hybrid space of intellectual production within a large research library. In this presentation, Gil will offer perspectives on what makes that achievement at Columbia particularly unique, how it was accomplished and what other collectives may learn or avoid from it.

Bios:

Mark Newton is the Director of Digital Scholarship at Columbia University Libraries. His work focuses on the development of the library’s scholarly publications partnership program, the Academic Commons institutional repository, and a variety of faculty- and student-led digital scholarship projects. He currently serves on the project staff for Humanities CORE, an NEH-funded digital humanities project with the Modern Language Association, pairing repository infrastructure with the MLA Commons community hub.

 

Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries and Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He collaborates with faculty, students and library professionals leveraging computational and network technologies in humanities research, pedagogy and knowledge production. He is among the founders of several ongoing, warmly received initiatives where he currently plays leadership roles: Co-director of the Studio@Butler at Columbia University, a tech-light library innovation space focused on digital scholarship and pedagogy; faculty moderator of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, a vibrant trans-disciplinary research cluster focused on experimental humanities; current chair of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, an interest group connecting scholars around the world; senior editor of sx archipelagos, a journal of Caribbean Digital Studies, and co-wrangler of The Caribbean Digital conference series. Current projects include Ed, a digital platform for minimal editions of literary texts; Aimé Césaire and The Broken Record, a minimal computing experiment in long-form digital scholarship; and, In The Same Boats, a visualization of trans-Atlantic intersections of black intellectuals in the 20th century.

Scoping Digital Scholarship @CMU

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Digital scholarship at CMU is not a field or discipline, but rather a collection of research practices using web-facing tools and methods that generate research products with online interaction or consumption as required modes of use. Digital scholarship may be born-digital content, depend on digitized content, or use materials and data taken from online interaction and asynchronous activity, networked information, or digitally native interpretation. Methods can include, and are not limited to: data visualization and analysis, GIS data and digital mapping, text encoding and computational analysis, 3-D modeling, curating digital collections and exhibits, or adapting and creating custom digital tools. The affordances of datasets and digital tools can increase access far beyond traditional print publications and generate new possibilities for interactive use and reuse: they allow for hybrid scholarship that uses multiple channels to present research and that can combine print and web-based text, video, audio, and still images, as well as interactive annotations and new modes of multithreaded, nonlinear discourse that can exist only online.

Digital scholarship often involves multidisciplinary teamwork and collaboration to craft tools and systems, as well as its argument, narrative, and scholarly discourse environment. This work requires an iterative process that increasingly turns to library expertise, subject matter experts, and similar resources throughout the research lifecycle. While CMU is known for its computer science and engineering programs, it has fostered the creation of digital tools in numerous departments and interdisciplinary programs including DocuScope (text analysis) and the User Experience Lab of the Department of English and the Knowledge Accelerator (crowd sourcing) of the Human-Computer Interface Institute (HCII) provides information processing support. The Entertainment Technology Center and HCII focus on crossing college and disciplinary boundaries to combine the humanities, arts, and computer technology; models that the library can emulate and expand upon to foster a digital scholarship community at CMU.

Through dSHARP, the University Libraries and the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences are working to support and enlarge the digital sphere of activity at CMU: digital humanities, research product and data management, and scholarly communications and digital publishing, all of which intersect with digital scholarship. Over the coming months, we hope to explore more of these methods, tools, and projects as examples along different points of research lifecycles.

Digital Scholarship Summer Internship

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Carnegie Mellon University’s digital scholarship center, dSHARP, is offering an eight week summer internship to occur between May 29th and August 24th, 2018 (exact dates flexible).

The Summer Intern will be expected to work on two to four pre-existing projects during their tenure, with the projects determined based on how their skills and interests best match with current center and faculty projects. Example projects they might work on include the Bridges of Pittsburgh (databases, GIS, graph theory), the Carnegie Mellon Encyclopedia of Science History (history of science, web publishing, editorial work), or Digits (digital preservation). As appropriate, the Summer Intern may also work collaboratively with center faculty to develop digital resources for the dSHARP website (WordPress, digital pedagogy).

Qualifications

  • currently or recently enrolled in a Ph.D. or a terminal master’s degree such as a MLS/MSIS program
  • previous experience in digital scholarship, digital humanities, or digital publishing
  • ability to work both independently and collaboratively in an innovative and interdisciplinary environment
  • excellent communication and interpersonal skills

Salary

  • $4,000

Dates

Applicants should submit the following by February 15, 2018 to jotis@andrew.cmu.edu

  • cover letter
  • C.V.
  • names, emails, and phone numbers for two people who can speak to your previous experience in digital scholarship, digital humanities, or digital publishing

Applicants will be notified by March 31, 2018.