DHRoles

Digital Humanities tools, techniques and services add to the already complex mass of potential problems that help desks deal with. By understanding this challenge we can make life easier for everyone.

This is the role that coordinates the rest of the team and the tasks they need to complete. But it is often misunderstood, and seen to be more complicated than it is. This article considers a simple and effective PM method.

The people in charge of running IT systems in universities combine two hard to reconcile attitudes: on the one hand they are advocates for tech, they want people to be able to do amazing things; but at the same time they are deeply risk averse. They do have ways to come to balanced decisions, and we can all use those techniques.

Formal IT training seems to have become unfashionable. We either expect software to be so well designed we can just use it, or we learn just-in-time from Youtube. But the IT trainer’s perspective is still valuable, with its focus on knowing how people make sense of and habitiuate often complex and hard to remember systems.

Working in raw code and data is no fun. We need interfaces! Views that help us to access just what we need when we need it, and then do clever stuff with data. The UX Designer’s job is to make these interfaces so that they work well for us.

In this article we explore the world of the programmer, what they care about, how they think. Whenever we structure data, or create processes to apply to it, we are programming. If we use the programmer perspective we can do this better.

In this article we explore what researchers want, how they work, and how they think, so as to understand how they can work well with the other 6 roles in the Digital Humanities team.