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Research Statement: Alex H. Poole
The digital universe doubles in size every two years. In 2013, it reached 4.4 zettabytes.
Less than 5% was analyzed, let alone reused. In 2014, there exists 1.7 megabytes per minute for
every inhabitant of Earth.1
Though perhaps unprecedentedly visible, public and scholarly concern with data overload
is hardly new. As early as 2009, Nature magazine decried the “shameful neglect” of research
data.2 Such neglect affected the humanities as well as the sciences. By the late 2000s, the cultural
record seemed not only unprecedentedly rich but also unprecedentedly fragile, in no small
measure due to digital technology. Lack of resources, technological obsolescence, a dearth of
standards and best practices—these factors imperiled humanities as much as science data.
My dissertation, “Forging a Cultural Commonwealth: The Importance of Digital Curation
in the Digital Humanities,” springs from this nexus between humanities data and its
vulnerability. It brings together the heretofore largely separate fields of digital curation and
digital humanities. An interdisciplinary concept coined in the early 2000s, digital curation
encompasses both preservation and management of information assets.
Digital curation centers not only on keeping but also on adding value to a body of data
for present and future (re)use. It targets the entire research lifecycle: ideally, digital curation
commences at the beginning of each research project. Finally, digital curation depends upon
collaboration among persons, among institutions, and among nations. It therefore implicates
broad cultural, economic, technological, and social concerns.
Like digital curation, the digital humanities are interdisciplinary and collaborative,
expansive in definition and ambitious in reach. Also like digital curation professionals, scholars
working in the digital humanities seek to develop new research questions and to cultivate new
audiences. Last, an integral part of digital humanities work involves sharing and reusing data.
Both the digital humanities and digital curation add value to digital assets.
Digital curators and digital humanists have much to gain from making common cause in
their training and education efforts as well as in their daily work. But the distance between their
work practices remains considerable, despite some indication of communication, coordination,
and even convergence. My dissertation examines not only the ways in which digital curation and
the digital humanities profitably can be brought together, but also how skills to manage
humanities data can be inculcated in digital humanists, information professionals, and other key
stakeholders.
Taking a user-centered approach, I focused on the actual working information practices
of digital humanities scholars by interviewing Principal Investigators, Project Managers, and
other key personnel of 20 recent (slated for completion by the end of 2014) Start-Up Grants
funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Office of the Digital Humanities. I
explored the types of data these scholars reused and created in their projects and the digital
curation skills and methods they employed in dealing with their data.
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EMC Digital Universe with Research & Analysis by IDC, The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and
the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things (April, 2014). http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idcdigital-universe-2014.pdf.
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— “Data’s Shameful Neglect,” Nature 461, 7261 (September 10, 2009).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7261/full/461145a.html. The Digital Curation Centre defines data as
“A reinterpretable representation of information in a formalized manner suitable for communication, interpretation,
or processing” (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/glossary#D).
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In line with my research focus, I elected a qualitative, naturalistic strategy. My research
design remained emergent: flexible, iterative, and interpretive. It revolved around a case study
that permitted me to conduct exploratory, evaluative, contemporary, in-depth, and contextual
research work. The case study was grounded upon semi-structured depth interviews that sought
to capture the meanings digital humanities scholars ascribe to the experiences, events, and
processes that steer their daily working lives.
To obtain rich, detailed, and nuanced information, I relied upon purposeful (snowball)
sampling. I interviewed 45 scholars in disciplines ranging from music history to archival
management, media studies to archaeology, library science to interdisciplinary studies. These
scholars included Master’s students and PhD students, “alternative-academics,”3 and senior
faculty members; they worked at institutions ranging from community colleges to Research I
universities. Their deliverables included workshops and prototypes, models and tools, databases
and summits. Documentary evidence culled from the 20 projects, namely project applications,
data management plans, and White Papers, complemented and checked my interview data.
Proceeding inductively, my qualitative analysis embraced iterative memoing, coding (using
NVivo), and (re)analysis. In so doing, I borrowed strategically and judiciously from
constructivist Grounded Theory methods.
An exploratory study, my work raises awareness among stakeholders of the relevance of
digital curation to digital humanities work. Second, it serves as a baseline study for future
research. Third, it helps identify needed best practices, skills, and competencies among digital
humanists and those collaborating with them. Finally, it sets forth a framework—premised on the
DigCCurr Matrix4 and on the Digital Curation Centre’s lifecycle model5—for digital curation
education aimed at digital humanists. Such education may be situated in various information
science contexts, for instance iSchools, undergraduate curricula, and professional continuing
education. I intend such pedagogical suggestions to address digital curation pedagogy in the
social and natural sciences as well as in the humanities.
Complementing my dissertation, I have published a number of scholarly articles related
to digital curation:
 “How Has Your Science Data Grown? Digital Curation and the Human Factor, a Critical
Literature Review,” Archival Science (forthcoming).
 “Now is the Future Now? The Urgency of Digital Data Curation in the Digital
Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, number 2 (2013).
 “’Curate Thyself’” and the DigCCurr Experts’ Meeting: Communication, Collaboration,
and Strategy in Digital Curation Education,” D-Lib Magazine 19, No. 5/6 (May/June
2013).
 “Digital Curation Preparation: A Survey of Contributors to International Professional,
Educational, and Research Venues,” UNC SILS Technical Report 2013-01. April 15,
2013.
Bethany Nowviskie puts it, “The #alt-ac label speaks to a broad set of hybrid, humanities-oriented professions
centered in and around the academy, in which there are rich opportunities to put deep—often doctoral-level—
training in scholarly disciplines to use.” See http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-alt-ac-track-negotiating-youralternative-academic-appointment-2/26539
4
http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/digccurr-matrix.html
5
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/curation-lifecycle-model
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Poole, Alex H., Christopher A. Lee, and Angela P. Murillo, “CurateGear: Enabling the
Curation of Digital Collections,” D-Lib Magazine 18, No. 11/12 (November/December
2012).
 Poole, Alex H., Christopher A. Lee, and Angela P. Murillo, “AERI 2012 Digital Curation
Pre-Conference,” D-Lib Magazine 18, No. 9/10 (September/October 2012).
In that vein, my work in digital curation jibes with my work as a Teaching Fellow and as a coinstructor in digital curation and in archives and records management. Indeed, my DigCCurr II:
Extending an International Digital Curation Curriculum to Doctoral Students and Practitioners
fellowship (2010-2013) (PIs: Helen R. Tibbo and Christopher A. Lee) proved an incubator not
only for my research, but also for my teaching. I am eager to mentor undergraduate and graduate
students of my own, particularly by involving them in my grant projects as well as in my
teaching.
My work in digital curation and the digital humanities points to a complementary area in
Library and Information Science in which I have long invested: archives and records
management. Indeed, archival principles such as provenance, appraisal, authenticity and
reliability, integrity, trust, and risk management play a central role in digital curation, as do
considerations involving standardization, best practices, sustainability, costing, planning and
policy, raising awareness and education and training. What is more, digital curation occurs in
similar institutional contexts as archiving and records management, for instance archives,
libraries, institutional repositories, and centers.
Future work I will tackle includes, first, developing my dissertation’s learning framework
into a full-fledged curriculum model and extending that model to cover the social and natural
sciences. Digital curation efforts in the sciences and the humanities share common goals and
involve similar principles and practices, albeit in different contexts. Thus I shall examine actual
researcher practices—both individual and collaborative—in variegated domain and
subdisciplinary areas. Similarly, I intend to broaden the educational model’s coverage to address
other audiences such as researchers, faculty members, and graduate students both Masters’ and
doctoral in various disciplines. Finally, my research and teaching will continue to focus on
raising awareness of the urgency of digital curation.
Second, diversity will play a pivotal role in my future work. A lack of racial, ethnic, and
gender diversity remains a crucial problem in digital curation, the digital humanities, and
archives and records management, not only in the persons involved, but also in the data itself and
thus in the types of scholarly products that can be produced. My scholarship and teaching will
underscore the need to pluralize these three fields. Building on my past scholarship on diversity,
including a prize-winning article, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Archives: Race Space, and
History in the Mid-Twentieth-Century American South,” I am working on a project focusing on
the first African American professional archivist at the National Archives, Harold T. Pinkett.
This project both underlines the contributions of a remarkable archivist, scholar, and
administrator and provides a usable past for those who follow in his footsteps. I hope to instill
the same appreciation for diversity in digital curation and in the digital humanities. Committed to
a life of research and teaching and a staunch believer in the academic calling, I shall help others
attain their own intellectual and social goals.