By Marjorie Mitchell
This has been a busy May and June conference-wise for me. Fresh off the amazing week at SFU campuses in Vancouver immersed in all things SpokenWeb, I came to Berlin for their Erasmus + International Week. At both conferences I had the opportunity to present on Research Data Management in a Digital Humanities perspective.
The SpokenWeb Institute and Symposium, back-to-back events, were the chance for many of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb participants to hear from each other in an in-depth fashion about the progress that has been made on this multi-faceted research project. All the students had an opportunity to present during the Institute portion, and component projects, such as the Metadata Scheme and ingest system shared the progress they had made so far. Some of the exciting plans (who loves podcasts?) were also outlined in some detail to the group.
The SpokenWeb Symposium followed and a wider variety of scholars interested in Spoken and Sound recordings presented and received work covering multiple topics and perspectives. Felicity Tayler and I gave a workshop on Data Curation for Communities of Sound in which we suggested that the adoption of a common file naming convention for all the digital files being created by the SpokenWeb project would be yet another form of community building within the Canadian digital literary research community.
In Berlin, I was invited to present on Research Data Management initiatives at UBC and across Canada. As I listened to the presentations and information from our host institution, Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), I saw immediate connections between the research data management work they are doing with projects like Das Interview-Archiv “Zwangsarbeit 1939-1945”, Forced Labour Memory and History 1939-1945, and SpokenWeb.
Auf Wiedersehen from Berlin.
Marjorie Mitchell is the Research Services Librarian at UBC Okanagan Library; she is also a Co-applicant on the SSHRC funded SpokenWeb project).