I spent the last week as an editor-at-large on dh+lib: where the digital humanities and libraries meet.
The work
If anyone else is flipping out a little because there's a lot of reading for this class and there's a lot of life outside of this class, I want to assure you that monitoring the feed, at least for dh+lib is no big thing. They ask for twenty minutes a day, and I don't know if I put in even that much time, despite viewing every single post and searching a few times for content that didn't show up in the feed. I know we're in grad school, but let's be real. Work/life balance is tricky enough even without school.
A few days before my week (I got to choose from a few on their web form), I got an email with instructions and a login. That was straightforward enough. I had to refer to the instructions a couple of times, more because I wanted to make absolutely sure that I was doing it right than because it was complicated.
The interface
A couple of times a day I would look at the feed (they use PressForward) and check each post to determine if I thought it would be of interest to digital humanities librarians. If yes, I added a comment and "nominated" it by clicking a forward arrow. A comment could have been a personal reaction, but more often was descriptive: "CFP" or "Job announcement" since the grownup editors introduce posts with those descriptors (this was all in the instructions).
I didn't get the full hang of reviewing the posts until a couple of days in--that you can do everything you need to do from the ad, including closing out of that function.
Once I had that down, I moved even more quickly--as quickly as the blog would let me that is. Backing and nexting through the posts was fast enough, but actions in the dashboard view, like navigating to PressForward and refreshing content, took a while.
The content
Making decisions about what content to recommend wasn't very complicated for me. It had to do with librarianship or it didn't. Except the last post I nominated, which compared Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tweets for most often used words, because I thought it was too interesting to pass up, and many librarians the US might agree.
There were a lot of straightforward job announcements and calls for papers/conference proposals. I would consider if they were both library and digital humanities related to click yea or give them a pass. I have to admit I skipped over most discussion list posts, as well as minor event announcements (like "come try out this widget at our college on Thursday" as opposed to "Giganto conference--register now").
I wasn't super excited about much of the content, so maybe it wasn't the best week? I'm looking forward to seeing what the grownup editors chose.
Outcomes
I was glad to get a better look at the power of PressForward, especially since I didn't attend the Digital Fellows workshop on the topic. I was also pleased to connect, even a little, with librarians with more experience than I have in DH, including blog cofounder Roxanne Shirazi, who I've long-admired and followed on Twitter, but whom I've only met IRL once. Same goes for lead editor Patrick Williams, whom I'd met at a zine event, but didn't full connect with librarianship at the time.
I like practical projects and doing helpful things, so I can imagine volunteering again sometime (maybe after I'm through this program and have a little more time?). If volunteer editing is a requirement for the spring praxis, I might try a different journal, just for variety and to get out of my library bubble.
