DHTech January Newsletter

It’s a little late, but we still hope you had a happy new year! Clearly, it took us a while to get organized enough to send this “January” newsletter. Nevertheless, we hope it will bring some joy to your day (or at least some interesting pieces of information). And for the daily chuckle, here is the joke of the month:

Why did the integer drown?

Because he couldn’t float.

🙈

DHTech February Meetup

With AI coding agents and chatting computers the landscape of software development as a profession in DH is shifting. How does this shift reflect in the perspective for students, how are professionals adjusting their day to day business? How do we balance the potential loss of quality in research software with the benefit of making software development more accessible? In our February meetup we invite perspectives from the academic and for-profit sector with diverse levels of seniority to reflect on new challenges and old problems for research software development in the age of AI.

When? February 26 at 10am ET/4pm CET (find your local time).

Where? On Zoom (please register)

A Warm Welcome to our new Steering Committee Member!

We are delighted to welcome David Ragnar Nelson as a new Steering Committee member of DHTech!

David Ragnar Nelson serves as Digital Scholarship Programmer in the Center for Digital Scholarship at the American Philosophical Society, an independent research library and archive. His work focuses on integrating digital humanities methods into the library’s research agendas and collaborating with external researchers on digital scholarship. A self-taught developer, he holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures. He is also an active member of the DHTech Education and Training Working Group. On the technical side, he mainly works on network analysis and visualization, machine learning methods for extracting text and metadata from archival materials (largely Automatic Text Recognition and Automatic Speech Recognition), and web applications using static sites (Jekyll/Hugo) and Django.

ACH Request for Feedback

ACH is inviting feedback for ADHO’s ad-hoc peer review committee. If you have thoughts on ADHO’s peer review process and would like to share them, please respond using their Google form. This is also a chance to share some thoughts on the impact a chosen peer review model can have on technical submissions that include code.

Upcoming Deadline

Submit Code For Review! The next submission deadline for code review requests is coming up on March 31. A description of the process and what it takes to have your code reviewed can be found on the code review website.

Get Involved!

Tell us About Your Career Path: We believe that it is important to share the varied paths people have taken to the DH technical work we do now, in whatever capacity. We want to hear your story and share them on the DHTech website. Contact us in Slack or via dhtech.community@gmail.com if you’re willing to share what you do and how you got there.

Become a Code Review Facilitator: Do you want to get involved with DHTech’s community code review process, but are not yet ready to become a reviewer? Become a code review facilitator! It’s low effort but a really important job! You’ll be recognized as a facilitator on our website afterwards and will have everyone’s deep gratitude. You can sign up using our facilitator application form.

Contribute Lessons: The Education and Training Working Group is looking for contributors! Two planned lessons, one on documentation and one on project management with GitHub, are in need of authors. If you have some time to spare, please consider volunteering to write one of these lessons. All of our lessons go through a review process and receive a DOI. If you want some ideas of what our lessons look like, read our author guidelines and existing lessons. Please connect with us on Slack or write to dhtech.community@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing!

DHTech Job Board

If you have a job posting you think might be of interest to the DHTech community, consider submitting it using this form. We have added a new section to our website that lists current jobs. If you would be willing to help out with reviewing and adding job postings to the website, please get in touch on Slack or by emailing the Steering Committee.

DHTech Email Address

Email dhtech.community@gmail.com if you want to reach the DHTech Steering Committee.

Upcoming Newsletters

This is a bi-monthly newsletter. Do you have something to share with the DHTech community that you want included in the next newsletter? Please get in touch with us at dhtech.community@gmail.com or via Slack.

Yours truly,

The DHTech Steering Committee