I interviewed Trevor Owens, a digital archivist with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) in the office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. While working at the Library of Congress Mr. Owens is finishing his PhD in social science research methods and instructional technology at George Mason University. His list of accomplishments is more than a little intimidating but when I tweeted him about doing an interview he replied within minutes.
Owens spent his years in school and in his career getting involved with different projects that interested him. While an undergrad he joined a group of people working on studying video games. While working for the Center for History and New Media he was able to combine his degree in the history of science, a masters degree in American History, and his interest in digital media. He worked on Zotero (an open-source bibliographic database that I downloaded as soon as I figured out how it worked) and the NDIIPP that he archives for is dedicated to “develop a national strategy to collect, preserve, and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created exclusively in digital form.”
He was very encouraging to an aspiring digital historian. What started as an interest in separate subjects such as video games and history turned into a career in which he is “in a position of always being a student in that there is always new things to learn and explore. He said that digital history is a “do it yourself mindset”, a “pervasive kind of scrappiness.” Digital humanities is such a new field that it has room for growth and interpretation. There is no set direction for a career path, and at the same time a lot of holes to fill in the industry. It is encouraging to know that if I see a problem or a need in my field I should feel free to ‘fix it.’ Owens, as an example, is the co-chair for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Infrastructure Working Group which is “focused on the design, maintenance, and support of the tools and services that make digital preservation possible.” When he saw historians run into problems with preserving digitally born materials he set out to find a solution.
While the Digital Humanities field is exciting and new, Owens warns that there are complications to such growth, “Everything continues to change so rapidly that some things that were good ideas five years ago can be terrible today.” In class the other day we talked about the difficulty of preserving websites and digital material for future historians. With new methods and technology will their methods of preservation be helpful innovations or create more problems in the future. The digital world is also growing at a rapid pace. No matter how quickly issues are solved new ones appear.
Historians going back to Bloch in the 1940s and Carr in the 1960s have commented on the need for interdisciplinary cooperation. The same issue affects digital humanists. Owens commented “finding the infrastructure that enables people to work together is a really big tricky problem.” However, historians may be facing an age where interdisciplinary communication is made possible. With new programs like Zotero and Viewshare, it is easier to access, preserve, and share data than ever before. Owens mentions a couple Digital Humanists that have been instrumental in his life. The common factor between his former boss Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig were their approaches to history, “Both are very pragmatic technologists with a strong bent to do public projects that have some connections to social good.” Historical preservation and interpretation no longer have to stick to their own disciplines and people. Digital Humanists work towards solving long standing issues and involving the public as well as other professions in their work.
Trevor Owens was extremely encouraging to talk to. He is a young and successful historian who managed to find a profession that utilized his major passions. Digital History has so many opportunities for new students that haven’t even been developed yet. When asked for advice he told me to get engaged. “Get a Twitter… start a blog… Spend a lot of time talking to your users and watching people use the things you make.” I think the most useful thing I learned from him was that we’re not alone. It is easy to feel outnumbered as a historian in a lonely library. While Digital Humanities is relatively new, it is also upcoming. All I have to do is work on my “scrappiness” and move forward.
If you want to know more about Mr. Owens here’s a link to his blog: http://www.trevorowens.org/