+PhD student studying early modern European religious dissenting communities +Research, instruction, and outreach Librarian in the McKeldin Library Supervisors: Stefano Villani (advisor)
This presentation explores the successes and the challenges with cross-campus collaboration and t... more This presentation explores the successes and the challenges with cross-campus collaboration and the development of an active learning instruction workshop for first-year students. This presentation serves as a follow-up from an ACRL Assessment in Action project and uses the data previously presented at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco in 2015. Please find the abstract from that poster below: Citation Master is a game-based learning approach to teaching students about the importance of academic attribution. This workshop does not focus on idiosyncratic, style-based rules, but instead focuses on the broader skills, philosophies, and ethics behind proper citation and good writing. We assessed the students' ability to identify the need for citation through a pre and post-test writing prompt. Our goal was to understand if students had an increased understanding of attribution and a more sophisticated framework for understanding the process and ethics of academic writing. Ou...
My paper from the Slavery, Law, and Power Project panel at the Association of Documentary Editors... more My paper from the Slavery, Law, and Power Project panel at the Association of Documentary Editors Annual Conference (online), July 2021
Introduction: Citation Master is a collaborative effort between the McDaniel College Hoover Libra... more Introduction: Citation Master is a collaborative effort between the McDaniel College Hoover Library, Writing Center, and select faculty within the department of English to develop a game-based learning approach to teaching students about the importance of academic attribution. By design, this workshop does not focus on idiosyncratic, style-based rules, but instead focuses on the broader skills, philosophies, and ethics behind proper citation and good writing. Our goal is to have students take ownership of their research and to realize how the work of others can strengthen or weaken their own work. Citation Master was born out of necessity. Our college, like most institutes of higher education in this country suffers from a plague of plagiarism and a student culture of nonchalance with regard to research and writing ethics. It was the research and project team’s belief, however, that these instances were not wholly based on dishonesty. It is our on-going hypothesis that students lack...
Basic Notes: This talk introduces an idea, a thought, nascent plans and potential methodologies f... more Basic Notes: This talk introduces an idea, a thought, nascent plans and potential methodologies for a form of undergraduate research training – and a potential research project. A project that will highlight connective and investigative questioning that compliments and expands on the ACRL Framework but does so through a refocus on research philosophies found within the humanities. It strikes me, of course, that we are, all of us lightening-ers discussing how to exist and thrive in an information rich world, not in the post-information dystopia we’re entering in January, but maybe the next generation will have better training…maybe. What is humanistic thinking? It is many things, but crucially for this context it is a mode of questioning and of developing thoughtful and thought out research questions. Questions formulated, As Bertrand Russell writes, “not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically.” This is the crucial difference. ...
Libraries Innovative Practices Forum 3 June 2021 : 13.30 Opportunities and Challenges Facing Libr... more Libraries Innovative Practices Forum 3 June 2021 : 13.30 Opportunities and Challenges Facing Librarians in the Digital Humanities
This presentation explores the successes and the challenges with cross-campus collaboration and t... more This presentation explores the successes and the challenges with cross-campus collaboration and the development of an active learning instruction workshop for first-year students. This presentation serves as a follow-up from an ACRL Assessment in Action project and uses the data previously presented at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco in 2015. Please find the abstract from that poster below: Citation Master is a game-based learning approach to teaching students about the importance of academic attribution. This workshop does not focus on idiosyncratic, style-based rules, but instead focuses on the broader skills, philosophies, and ethics behind proper citation and good writing. We assessed the students' ability to identify the need for citation through a pre and post-test writing prompt. Our goal was to understand if students had an increased understanding of attribution and a more sophisticated framework for understanding the process and ethics of academic writing. Ou...
My paper from the Slavery, Law, and Power Project panel at the Association of Documentary Editors... more My paper from the Slavery, Law, and Power Project panel at the Association of Documentary Editors Annual Conference (online), July 2021
Introduction: Citation Master is a collaborative effort between the McDaniel College Hoover Libra... more Introduction: Citation Master is a collaborative effort between the McDaniel College Hoover Library, Writing Center, and select faculty within the department of English to develop a game-based learning approach to teaching students about the importance of academic attribution. By design, this workshop does not focus on idiosyncratic, style-based rules, but instead focuses on the broader skills, philosophies, and ethics behind proper citation and good writing. Our goal is to have students take ownership of their research and to realize how the work of others can strengthen or weaken their own work. Citation Master was born out of necessity. Our college, like most institutes of higher education in this country suffers from a plague of plagiarism and a student culture of nonchalance with regard to research and writing ethics. It was the research and project team’s belief, however, that these instances were not wholly based on dishonesty. It is our on-going hypothesis that students lack...
Basic Notes: This talk introduces an idea, a thought, nascent plans and potential methodologies f... more Basic Notes: This talk introduces an idea, a thought, nascent plans and potential methodologies for a form of undergraduate research training – and a potential research project. A project that will highlight connective and investigative questioning that compliments and expands on the ACRL Framework but does so through a refocus on research philosophies found within the humanities. It strikes me, of course, that we are, all of us lightening-ers discussing how to exist and thrive in an information rich world, not in the post-information dystopia we’re entering in January, but maybe the next generation will have better training…maybe. What is humanistic thinking? It is many things, but crucially for this context it is a mode of questioning and of developing thoughtful and thought out research questions. Questions formulated, As Bertrand Russell writes, “not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically.” This is the crucial difference. ...
Libraries Innovative Practices Forum 3 June 2021 : 13.30 Opportunities and Challenges Facing Libr... more Libraries Innovative Practices Forum 3 June 2021 : 13.30 Opportunities and Challenges Facing Librarians in the Digital Humanities
[Clarification: This particular paper outlined aspects of this project and some of the history an... more [Clarification: This particular paper outlined aspects of this project and some of the history and rationale behind this investigation, but I did not present new research as I was unable to travel to the library ahead of this conference. I hope to continue this research in the near future]
In this paper, I am seeking to discuss the collection content, collection policies, and founding documents of the Waldensian library in Valdese, NC in an effort to understand the connections to the European and South American Waldensian churches. In other words, I am looking to understand if the collection of the American Waldensian library reflects the mythography of a persecuted medieval and early modern church or relies on a new-world narrative reflecting the global reach and diaspora of the modern Waldensians. Using notions relating to metahistory, emplotment, and the transference of myths to investigate enduring foundation myths surrounding the Poor of Lyons as well as frontier, model immigrant, and protestant American myths. In this talk I hope to cover a brief overview of the history of the Waldensians in their medieval, early modern, and modern forms; the role of Waldensians in modern Italy; the founding of Valdese, NC (a Waldensian town in North Carolina); and how the collections of this small museum and library reflect the global and local history of this church.
Outreach is one of those inaccurate words that can vary in meaning in different contexts. This pr... more Outreach is one of those inaccurate words that can vary in meaning in different contexts. This presentation will address the specific and tailored approach I have taken at the University of Maryland to define outreach in order to make it both a manageable goal and an impactful project. Specifically in this presentation I will outline and explain the methods I used to determine the “right-fit” for outreach efforts through assessment, research, and shot-in-the-dark guessing. While I will be focusing on a specific feature of the UMD campus, I believe the process is applicable to most academic librarians trying to find a good fit within diverse programs on campus. The bulk of my presentation will be on what we call “Living and Learning” programs, but I will also address work with other offices such as the student support office and the office for transfer students. I hope to share some methods for success as well as some areas for growth and how to learn from failures in order to find the right fit with other programs. I will be contrasting new and traditional forms of librarianship and discussing how “outreach” is and should continue to become a shared effort across all departments of the library.
This presentation will investigate the use of theory, in particular Pierre Bourdieu’s Habitus, in... more This presentation will investigate the use of theory, in particular Pierre Bourdieu’s Habitus, in researching library populations and developing a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of an important library community. By utilizing the framework of Habitus, we seek to investigate Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis of Habitus, which is to say, a social theory of determinism that centralizes behavior without essentializing groups. The aim of the project is to study first-generation students and the issue of retention. Habitus, in many respects, speaks to an unwritten language, sense, or code (le sens practique) in which certain members of a group are naturally and unconsciously conversant and which other members must constantly use cognitive energy to work within. The hope is to investigate some aspects of this language by studying both college-normative students (i.e., those for whom college was a foregone conclusion) and first-generation students to understand, perhaps, an aspect of the difference in experience and to use some of the findings to propose some sort of library intervention.
Presented at the MD ACRL and MILEX Conference Considering #CritLib: Inclusion and Diversity in Li... more Presented at the MD ACRL and MILEX Conference Considering #CritLib: Inclusion and Diversity in Libraries, Columbia, MD November 2016
This project illustrates how the use of data-driven visualizations of sixteenth and seventeenth-c... more This project illustrates how the use of data-driven visualizations of sixteenth and seventeenth-century title page imprint information can illuminate aspects of the recusant printer network in the era of high-recusancy, c.1558-1640. This period represents the era of the Recusancy Acts which made non-conforming- that is non-Protestant- practice of faith illegal. Recusant literature, therefore, represents the body of literature designed to maintain the faith (through both materials for hidden priests and or personal devotion) of the Catholic communities in England to actively work to subvert the message of the Protestant Church). This project is largely one of experimental remediation with the goal of investigating whether new insight into an established field can be gained by collating, analyzing, and graphically displaying like information —in this case Recusant literature— that is distinct from traditional forms of scholarship. I argue that by removing the impediments of shelf-bound and geographically separated volumes and by quantifying elements of their creation, the network and nature of recusant literature is made more immediate by illustrating trends and anomalies at the same level of access and visibility and thereby potentially opening new avenues of research. Additionally, the aim is to combine methodological approaches of traditional book history — in this case merging bibliographic studies with quantitative history— and also utilizing new methods of corpus mining and data visualization to help make the obscure known. While much has been written about recusancy, there are still new stories to be told by investigating new forms of evidence made available through newer methods of humanities scholarship. New methods can potentially lead to new evidence to help settle old historiographical debates such as the lingering tails of the John Bossy and Christopher Haigh debate that still consumes much of the scholarship on recusancy.
As social and political winds change, librarians can find themselves in a precarious position dep... more As social and political winds change, librarians can find themselves in a precarious position depending on the nature of this change. Professional librarians adhere, at least in theory, to the ALA Code of Ethics—a document that outlines our general philosophies on access and censorship with regard to library users. While these guidelines are general, they provide a reasonable framework for handling challenges we are likely to face in the normal service of our jobs. At politically fraught times, however, these guidelines serve as a critical backbone for the ethical practice of our profession. As an example, the passing of the wide-sweeping Patriot Act following the September 11 terrorist attacks created direct practical and ethical dilemmas for librarians across the county by requiring compliance with investigators’ requests for protected documents such as patron borrowing records. When challenged with this circumstance, a group of library directors in New England, the “Connecticut Four” as they became known, stood up for the rights of users and defied the federal government’s order seeking records that, if obeyed, would have conflicted with professional values and ethical standards. The example of the “Connecticut Four” presages one of the aphoristic and disarmingly blunt instructions—“remember professional ethics”—presented in Timothy Snyder’s recent short work On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Dear all , This has been a difficult year for everyone in this research group. It is truly sad th... more Dear all , This has been a difficult year for everyone in this research group. It is truly sad that we have not been able to gather and celebrate each other's accomplishments, scholarship, and publications as colleagues and friends as we have in years past. We hope this retrospective newsletter attempting to pull together collective accomplishments from this annus horribilis will somewhat suffice. This has been a year of learning new ways to share and collaborate through virtual conferences, meetings, classes, book launches, and strained cocktail hours. We want to congratulate our colleagues who were able to make the most of this year through their scholarship despite immense personal and professional challenges. This list is unfortunately incomplete as the sheer number of online book talks, conferences, and more make it impossible to fully account for the presence of our group members, but we hope this listing allows for a glimpse into the terrific work of our colleagues and serves as a platform for further discussion and sharing. To all we wish you the happiest of holidays and a very happy new year. Sincerely, The EMoDiR Newsletter Team
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In this paper, I am seeking to discuss the collection content, collection policies, and founding documents of the Waldensian library in Valdese, NC in an effort to understand the connections to the European and South American Waldensian churches. In other words, I am looking to understand if the collection of the American Waldensian library reflects the mythography of a persecuted medieval and early modern church or relies on a new-world narrative reflecting the global reach and diaspora of the modern Waldensians. Using notions relating to metahistory, emplotment, and the transference of myths to investigate enduring foundation myths surrounding the Poor of Lyons as well as frontier, model immigrant, and protestant American myths. In this talk I hope to cover a brief overview of the history of the Waldensians in their medieval, early modern, and modern forms; the role of Waldensians in modern Italy; the founding of Valdese, NC (a Waldensian town in North Carolina); and how the collections of this small museum and library reflect the global and local history of this church.