For the first time since I started in my current position in 2020, I have officially asked for and got approved for 20% of my work time to be used exclusively for research. In 2023, I will mainly work on two projects:

Norwegian Correspondences: eMunch

An article accompanying a dataset of all correspondence metadata collected from the digital scholarly edition of Edvard Munch’s Writings, eMunch.no. I will write this article together with the chief philologist of the eMunch edition, Hilde Bøe, at the Munch Museum in Oslo and with the research software engineer Loke Sjølie at the University of Oslo Library, who created the code to extract correspondence metadata from eMunch.no and combine it with a yet unpublished dataset containing corrected and updated dates, places, and names. The metadata of 8527 letters to and from Edvard Munch are already incorporated into CorrespSearch, the search engine for scholarly editions of letters. The dataset we created will be archived on Dataverse.no, an open repository for research data in Norway. For the publication, I want to aim for a data paper: either a short data paper describing the data and how they were created or a research article focusing on the methods and challenges when extracting and consolidating the data. I plan to publish with the Journal of Open Humanities Data.

Digital Scholarly Editions Plattform: A Sustainable Solution for Long-Term Archiving, Accessing, and Maintaining Digital Scholarly Editions as a Library Service. Pre-study: The Landscape of Digital Scholarly Editions in Norway

I am also preparing a larger research project on aspects of sustainability of digital scholarly editions (DSE). I am focusing solely on Norwegian academic and cultural heritage institutions. For 2023, I aim to start the pre-study, mapping the landscape of digital scholarly editions in Norway. I will gather a small team of experts and practitioners and design a survey to be sent to all Norwegian research and cultural heritage institutions that create, host, maintain, or archive digital scholarly editions of any kind and from any discipline. The results of this survey will inform a recommendation for long-term archiving, accessing, and maintaining DSEs in Norway and serve as a starting point for an infrastructure grant application with the Norwegian Research Council.

22. November 2022 · Comments Off on The Great Migration Has Begun · Categories: General · Tags:

In July this year, I had my 10th anniversary on Twitter! Hurray! I joined a few days before the DH2012 conference and DHd Unconference in Hamburg in July 2012. Today, I have tweeted 5.449 times, I follow 314 people, primarily academics and alt-acs from the Digital Humanities and GLAM sector, and have a followership of 941. This number is dwindling. A mere two weeks ago, it was closing in on 1.000, a number that was making me proud even.

After the Twitter takeover, there has been a flight of DH academics to a different place: Mastodon. The social networking alternative is decentrally organised, where one joins a server and then connects with whom they find anywhere else in the ‘fediverse’.

So, a couple of days ago, I gave in and joined. My server of choice is fedihum.org, hosted and maintained by the Association of Digital Humanities in the German-speaking Countries DHd. You can find me there now at @arockenberger.

I have requested my Twitter archive but haven’t received it yet. I keep my Twitter account, at least for a bit, while I get used to grazing with the other prehistoric megafauna. Let’s see where the journey takes us! See you on the other side.

Since April 2022, I have been chair of the Association for Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries. I will serve in this role until my term runs out in March 2024. My focus for these two years will be on the DHNB community, the people that make DHNB what it is – and how we can make our community a sustainable one. The Board will support the two existing working groups (DH in Higher Education and DH at Libraries, Archives, and Museums) and help form new working groups.

Together with colleagues from the University of Oslo Library, the University of Bergen Library, and the University of Stavanger “The Greenhouse” research group, I will co-chair the next DHNB conference. The conference will be held online from March 8th-10th, 2023. The overall theme is “Sustainability: Environment, Community, Digital”.

During my term as chair of DHNB, we will also see our first DH conference in Iceland! DHNB2024 is planned as an in-person event, gathering the local DH community and the larger Nordic and Baltic DH community.

10. August 2021 · Comments Off on Team Lead: Digital Research Methods · Categories: Digital Humanities, Teaching & Coaching · Tags: , , , ,

I’m back from my leave – and starting right away with being the leader for the digital research methods team at the ‘new’ library for humanities and social sciences. The library has undergone a process of re-organization, changing internal structures, and making more room for cross-departmental collaboration. We’re now largely organized as teams instead of sections, and team members can be from any (former) department.

I will be leading the team for digital research methods, or better: research activities – with a special focus on the humanities, social sciences, and pedagogy. In the next couple of weeks, all new team leaders together with the department leaders will define the new roles and responsibilities and look into new ways and modes of working together in and across teams to best serve our patrons: the students and researchers of the University of Oslo.

I am looking forward to my new role – and the challenges and possibilities it entails!

In the meantime, there is a new weblog for digital research activities that will publish a new blog post at least once per month, hopefully, every other week. And we have created a new resource site on text mining which will be complemented with a series of information and resource sites on key methods.

Together with the Digital Scholarship Center, I expect to teach and host a couple of workshops this fall, too, with a focus on research data management and introductory coding.

11. January 2021 · Comments Off on On leave · Categories: General

I am on leave until August 2021 and will mostly stay offline. See you after summer!

18. December 2020 · Comments Off on End-of-Year Recap 2020 · Categories: General

What a year 2020 has been! For many of us, I suppose, it has been disrupting, frightening, challenging, frustrating – or at least odd. For me, it’s been a blast.

Today is my last day of work – not just for this year, but I will be on leave until August 2021: That’s seven months off – and if things go as planned – offline. To which I am looking very much forward to!

As one of my last tasks, I have been going through the last three months in my daily work log (which I started in August 2019), looking for open To-Dos and checking them off, or moving them to today, or cancelling them altogether. Pleasantly, there were only three open To-Dos, and they were all from the week before, and one of them was writing the end-of-the-year recap for 2020! Looks like I’ve been managing to keep my To-Dos reasonable and allocate enough time for them – or cancelling them when it was just too much. I count that as a great success.

Going through my daily log, even though I limited it to the last three months (I started in my new position on Oct 1), also gave me a chance to see what I have accomplished: I recommend this practice of logging your daily (work) tasks and reviewing the log regularly, e.g. weekly or monthly, especially for those of us who are constantly having the feeling they are not doing enough, not accomplishing enough or underperforming while they at the same time exhaust and overstretch themselves. It’s a good check-in with yourself, and it helps to make more realistic plans. If there are too many To-Dos in your list that are still open after weeks, they need to go. Say “no” more often, especially to yourself. Not every good idea needs to be made into a project, not every request needs to be confirmed, and it is perfectly fine to tell your boss or project lead that you cannot take on more tasks, or need some tasks removed.

I’m listing a couple of things I accomplished this year and that I am especially proud of and happy about:

I certified as a Carpentries Instructor Trainer – and with that joined the global community of Software, Data, and Library Carpenters for real! I’ve been involved with the Carpentries since my first workshop at the University of Oslo in summer 2015, soon after became a helper and co-instructor, and certified as an instructor in 2018. It’s been one of the most giving and satisfying engagements I’ve had in my life and I am happy about being part of this magnificent community!

I completed the Creative Commons Certificate – and with that got much better at understanding and using their licenses for my own work as well as giving (non-legal) advice to my colleagues and fellow researchers. I’m advocating for Open Science and Open Research strongly; I believe it is our duty as researchers, teachers, and technicians in public institutions to share our work openly, widely, and barrier-free. Using CC licenses can be a big part of it.

I developed and taught workshops on research data management – and with that did I not only build up and improve my own data management practice but also contributed to better practice among my fellow researchers and colleagues. It also gave me the opportunity to join other communities and meet great people, namely the DARIAH working group on Research Data Management and the RDA Nordic Hub. I had the pleasure of working with an incredibly competent team here at UiO, and even if I since have changed positions, I will continue learning – and teaching! – research data management as an essential practice. A small(?) side-effect is that I have spent quite a bit of time and effort on improving data organisation for all my projects. Setting up rules and routines for data collection, structuring directories and files, documenting, and version control. I believe it made my daily tasks more effective and made for a better overview and less stress in total.

I became senior academic librarian for digital research methods in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Oslo Library – and with that got my first permanent position ever in the field I have been dreaming of: Perhaps my greatest accomplishment this year! This position combines my strong interest in digital humanities and research methods with my love for teaching and mentoring while it also gives me the opportunity to contribute to strategic development of these fields here at UiO – and in Norway and the Nordic Countries. I’m excited to start this adventure for real when I will be back from my leave after summer. The library will become a crucial method partner for the Faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education. We hope to finally find a home for the #DHOslo network and go all in with teaching foundational digital skills, programming, and data management. Since my position includes research, I will be able to continue my work as PI for the Norwegian Correspondences project and the Ethica Complementoria project!

There are more things I have accomplished in 2020, many of them small and seemingly unimportant, but they still add up to quite a few! I’ve uploaded all unpublished papers, talks, posters, and presentations I held and that had a script to Zenodo.org. I did major restructuring of many of my GitHub repositories for research and coding projects. I updated and improved many of the UiO-Carpentry GitHub repositories and documents and made a big step towards improving efficiency of communication and hosting workshops. I held several Teaching Demos and Discussion Sessions for the Carpentries, and taught my first Instructor Training. I supervised and evaluated two Digital Humanities masters theses at the University of Stuttgart, both related to the NorKorr project. I published an article with a colleague from the National Library on Historieblogg.no and edited an anthology in digital musicology with another colleague from the National Library. I taught many workshops, both on-site and online. I served on two Boards (DHNB and UiO-Carpentry), moderated a poster slam and exhibition for the online DHN2020 conference. I joined a COST action and contributed to two major applications to the Norwegian Research Council’s call for research infrastructure projects, and will lead a work package in each of them in the event of receiving funding. I contributed to a UiO internal application for research infrastructure which has been successful and will massively support the digital strategy of the University Library. I’ve collected all publications of DHN during its 5 years of conferences (the data will be published in dataverse.no) and created a bibliography.

As I said initially, 2020 really has been a good year for me: despite the COVID-19 pandemic and all its challenges. Norway has been faring quite well, with relatively low infection rates and a really low total of infections and COVID-19-associated deaths. Moving from office on campus to home office had been easy, and after summer I could continue working from office because I could bike to work safely, avoiding public transport altogether. Even after moving back into home office in the beginning of December, it’s been quite alright.

I didn’t travel much (my last trip was in early March to the DARIAH teach event at Maastricht University), neither for work nor for leisure. I participated in a few conferences and seminars online, but less and less so since it felt like it didn’t give me much. I generally slowed down and it became me very well. With my leave approaching, I’m looking forward to slowing down, even more, staying offline for most of it. Let’s see how the world will look when I have reemerged after summer 2021. So long, see you & stay well!

06. October 2020 · Comments Off on New Job: Senior Academic Librarian for Digital Research Methods · Categories: Digital Humanities, General

As of October 1st, 2020, I am working as senior academic librarian for digital research methods at the Humanities and Social Sciences (SSH) library at the University of Oslo! The position is newly created to meet the needs and challenges of today’s students and researchers in SSH and located at the section for reference and research. If you ever come visit the University of Oslo, I am sitting in the big black marble building on Blindern campus.

It’s been quite a journey for me and I am glad to say that this is a permanent job – the first I’ve ever had! I’ve been employed in various constellations since 2005 when I signed my first contract as a student research assistant with the Peter Weiss’ Notebooks project at Freie Universität Berlin. I’ve worked at universities and libraries in Germany and Norway and even tried my luck – shortly – in the private sector working in data quality assurance.

In all these years, I’ve been doing a lot of project consultation, teaching skill-building workshops, providing individual research consultation within Digital Humanities, doing community building, etc. in a voluntary fashion: it wasn’t officially part of my “jobs”, but it certainly was where my passion was and I had the strong drive to help where ever I could and felt I was needed. And now I am actually paid to do so!

I am grateful for all the learning opportunities and the many experiences I could gather on that journey. I’m especially grateful to all the people I’ve met during this journey: they are my friends, my colleagues, my mentors and mentees, my trainers and trainees, my brothers and sisters in DH-spirit, my inspirations, my sparring partners, and my critics: my network. Thanks to you all for your support along the way!

If you are a student, a researcher or research support at the University of Oslo – work in the Humanities and Social Sciences – feel free to get in contact with me for anything that relates to digital research methods (including data management, research dissemination, etc.) within SSH. You can find me in Georg Sverdrups hus, or online on Twitter, on GitHub or on one of my research blogs on Hypotheses.org. Happy to meet you!

22. September 2020 · Comments Off on My Doctoral Dissertation Published Open Access · Categories: Research Dissemination, Textual Scholarship

I handed in my Ph.D. dissertation “Interests and Arguments. Towards an Analytic Philosophy of Textual Scholarship” in September 2017: almost to the day 3 years ago. I defended in April 2018 – and immediately moved on to a new job that had nothing to do with what I had been researching during my Ph.D. period. I admit I was a bit fed up with both my topic and the academia at this time. My thesis was properly printed as a book, and the copies I received for my personal use were quickly stored away in a moving box in the basement.

Some time had passed when I decided to submit the pdf version of the book to the University of Oslo’s Research Archive – so it could be accessible for anyone interested, without having to ask me for a copy or trying to get a copy of the book via cumbersome interlibrary loan. Once you have submitted your thesis at UiO, there will be a review process discerning whether it can be published openly: many of current day theses are article-based, and there might be copyright-issues with re-publication. My dissertation is – partly – article-based, so I was expecting to have to wait until it will be released.

Again, time passed, then COVID-19 happened and I shifted my focus to other things, not checking in on the review process. When I finally did, I couldn’t find the thesis in the research archive, thinking it was likely due to the articles not being released yet. Or me having made a mistake when submitting the digital version.

However, since I work door-to-door with one of the admins of the research archive, I thought it would be good to investigate why it was still “stuck”. Turns out it wasn’t stuck after all! I had just been unlucky in finding it… So, I am happy to announce that my dissertation is available for download via the University of Oslo’s research archive via a stable link. The format is pdf, the file is quite large (ca. 33MB). The pdf version has not been changed or edited and mirrors the physical book publication, except for the book cover. There’s a summary in English, however, the thesis itself is written in (academic) German, so be warned. It’s also 600+ pages long and there are 1.443 footnotes…

Feel free to get your digital copy of “Interessen und Argumente” here: http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-80732.

I might, at some point, re-publish parts of it in a different, re-worked format, not least my bibliography of almost 7.000 items: as a re-usable data set as well as an open Zotero library.

12. May 2020 · Comments Off on Certified Carpentries Instructor Trainer · Categories: Teaching & Coaching · Tags: ,

I did it! I certified as instructor trainer for the Carpentries!

Design by The Carpentries.
This is the personal certificate issued to Annika Rockenberger. All rights reserved.

During the first quarter of 2020, I was one of roughly a dozen successful applicants that got a spot on the Trainer Training that the Carpentries holds once per year and for 8 weeks my group and I worked through a packed syllabus. In addition to weekly discussions and learning how to get good at using Zoom as a teaching platform (before anyone else had to become a pro, too, thanks to COVID-19) as well as taking on different roles in an online discussion setting, we got to be observers of teaching demos and an online instructor training.

Even though the workload was heavy (I was taking the Creative Commons Certificate at the same time thanks to very ambitious scheduling…), being part of the Carpentries community is such a joy! There’s such an incredible niceness and kindness in this community: It really feels like home.

As a certified trainer I will host four teaching demos per year. Teaching demos are a mandatory part of the instructor training checkout process, which all of our aspiring Carpentries instructors have to do after their two-day training. It’s about showing that you can handle the lesson material, have gotten the core idea about how we teach in the Carpentries, and a really valuable opportunity to get feedback on your teaching and participatory live-coding.

I addition to hosting teaching demos, I have pledged to co-teach at least two online instructor training events per year. The Carpentries do the majority of their instructor training (i.e. where you learn how to teach Carpentry-style and get to know the community and the spirit of the Carpentries) online. There are always a fair number of open training events to which you can apply, but there are also quite a few training events that are held for applicants from member institutions. In addition to these online training events, some member institutions will host on-site training, too. I did mine at the EMBL in Heidelberg.

Lastly, I will also host two or more discussion sessions during the year. Discussions are a vital community part of the Carpentries: they are the place for instructors to talk about upcoming workshops they’re going to teach or do a short recap of past teaching experiences. Discussions can also be on specific topics – or put a region or local community in the focus. Participating in a discussion session is a mandatory part of the instructor checkout, too, but apart from the formalities, it is really where the global community of the Carpentries meets!

The thing is that all these events are online-events, and they are time-zone based. Which means that you get the chance to meet people you would otherwise probably never have met. Oslo being in UTC+1 means that you will likely be meeting people from all over the African continent. With many other academic events being incredibly Europe and Northern America centered, this is such a refreshing change. It not only means having the chance of discussing workshops or learning with each other, but it also means that we can teach each other – and together with each other!

In the spirit of Greg Wilson, founder of Software Carpentry and the Carpentries spiritus rector:

Be kind! All else is details.

Greg Wilson: Teaching Tech Together. https://teachtogether.tech/#the-rules
06. May 2020 · Comments Off on I am the New Vice-Chair of DHN · Categories: Digital Humanities · Tags: ,

DHN – Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries – was supposed to have its 4th International Conference and Annual Members’ Meeting in beautiful Riga/Latvia in March 2020. Then COVID-19 happened and the conference was postponed to late October 2020 – and with it the Members’ Meeting and the announcement of the results of the Board election and the election of the officers of the Board.

Nevertheless, work for the Board did not stop – with very short notice, serious and long-sighted decisions had to be made in times of great uncertainty, stress, and worry. So, it was without the appropriate festive framing and severity that we said farewell to our retiring Vice-Chair and long-standing Board member Bente Mægaard who had substantially shaped DHN and chaired the DHN2019 conference in Copenhagen/Denmark last year. And it was under equally modest circumstances that we welcomed our new Board member, Costanza Navarretta, and to welcome our re-elected Board members Olga Holownia and Ditte Laursen for three more years. Due to Bente’s retirement, the office of Vice-Chair had become vacant and the election of officers by the Board members was to be held during a virtual meeting, too.

I have been on the Board of DHN since its foundation on April 23, 2015, in Oslo/Norway. I had been one of the small group of people who had been working on getting the first Nordic DH conference going and who came to the assumption that it would be good to have an association officially backing a conference of that scale and to serve as a meeting place for all the disparate Nordic digital humanities scholars and ‘alt-acs’.

During the 5 years of serving DHN, I have been serving as deputy treasurer, then as treasurer and helped consolidating DHN financially and in this capacity also helped organising the membership management. I have been the EADH AO Forum liason and served in this role for more than two years. I’ve been handling a plethora of tasks as a Board member of a young association, and boy has it been a ride!

Since Monday, May 4, 2020, I have been elected as Vice-Chair of DHN! It was not an easy decision for me. I had stepped in as a deputy treasurer in 2017 and when I was officially elected as Treasurer in 2018, I set out to sort out DHN’s financial obligations, the membership management, the intricacies of DHN’s membership affiliation with EADH and the day-to-day business of a medium-sized, international association that has to handle a budget. My aim was to tidy up the workflows of the treasurer business and the membership management, to document tasks, and establish good routines. Even though I think I succeeded, it still feels like there is a lot to do. It’s no easy task if you are an association dealing with international membership and lots of cross-border payments (exchange rate fluctuations…) and the challenges that come with DHN being officially registered in Sweden but the treasurer is a German citizen living permanently in Norway.

So, when I was asked if I would consider becoming Vice-Chair of DHN, I felt that while I was acknowledged for my many contributions to DHN throughout the years and offered more responsibilities but also more visibility, that I was abandoning the treasurer office without having achieved everything I set out to do. Objectively, that is not the case. However, human nature is such that the person who has been working on a task long enough often only sees all the tiny threads they were not able to gather instead of the sturdy rope they have been twisting. I’m happy to be handing over the treasurer task to fellow DHN Board member Veronika Laippala whom I trust completely in that she will be doing an awesome job handling DHN’s account and membership obligations.

With this being said: I am proud to be now the Vice-Chair of the association that I helped bringing into life. I will be continuing the former Vice-Chair’s work on the DHN constitution and together with the other Board members shape DHN’s strategy and its short and long-term objectives. DHN-members should not expect anything less from me than passion, dedication, and excellence in fulfilling the office of Vice-Chair. It is my pleasure!