My name is Lydia Klein, and I am in my final semester here at Conn (unreal)! I am working as an assistant in the library’s Digital Scholarship and Curriculum Center (DSCC). I am an American Studies major, concentrating on politics, society, and policy. I am also a PICA scholar, and am currently working on my senior project which will work to make more accessible knowledge about the violent role the World Bank has played in Africa. This will be a digital scholarship project, i.e., website coming soon! In addition, I am tutoring for a History/Economics class called The Globalization of Urban Poverty and am part of the Rethinking Economics club. When I am not working or studying, I can be found getting way too invested in bad TV (have you seen Too Hot To Handle? I hope not.) or cooking (and hoping that the kitchen will magically clean itself).
I became involved in digital scholarship and digital humanities this past summer when I worked with Interim Dean of Institutional Equity and Inclusion, Professor Ariella R. Rotramel, in the beginning stages of their projects: an oral history interview project about Atlantic City cocktail waitresses, and an open educational resource (OER) about sex work. Much of the research I did centered on best practices for OERs and testing software to find ones that were not only user-friendly but also sophisticated enough. The premise of digital scholarship, especially open-access projects, caught my attention: among other things, it aims to (1) make knowledge accessible in new ways, and (2) democratize knowledge that is otherwise institutionalized and guarded by higher education, two things that are really important to me. In the DSCC this semester I will be helping out with the Domains and Websites biweekly event, documenting instructions for using software, such as WordPress, Omeka S, and NVivo, and helping with Professor Nakia Hamlett’s and Professor Jefferson Singer’s Just Futures oral history project.
