Microsoft Word - miami cover letter.docx


June 2, 2015 
 
 
 
Human Resources Manager 
University of Miami Libraries 
P.O. Box 248214 
Coral Gables, FL 33124-0320 
 
Re: Digital Humanities Librarian staff position 
 
To Whom It May Concern: 
 
I am writing to apply for the position of Digital Humanities Librarian at Richter Library. I began working 
with digital humanities while finishing my Ph.D. in English. In the process, I became involved in building 
DH activity and infrastructure across multiple departments on campus. That focus on infrastructure and 
community building led to my current library-based position supporting digital scholarship at McMaster 
University. I am seeking a permanent library-based position because I am energized by the work of 
helping people discover local and non-local resources and collaborators and develop effective plans for 
short and long-term projects; and I believe that the library is the best fit for my skillset and expertise. 
 
I completed my Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in 2014. While writing my dissertation, I 
founded the Demystifying Digital Humanities workshop series (DMDH, http://www.dmdh.org) with my 
colleague Sarah Kremen-Hicks in 2012. DMDH provides participants with an introduction to major 
trends and practices, working with programming languages, and project ideation and development. Our 
participants have included undergraduates and graduate students, faculty, and staff from twenty-one 
departments and degree programs. I worked closely with staff from the UW Simpson Center for the 
Humanities, UW Libraries, and UW Information Technology in order to ensure that the workshops 
promoted networked growth of DH activity across campus. Starting and running DMDH provided me 
with invaluable experience in administration and marketing. Perhaps more importantly, facilitating 
DMDH provided me with invaluable knowledge about what DH means in a wide range of academic 
disciplines, what sorts of research questions students and faculty were framing, and the challenges they 
encountered.  
 
In my current role in the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship in McMaster’s Mills Library, I developed 
and taught McMaster's first undergraduate DH course, collaborating with McMaster's Maps & Data 
Department and Special Collections so that the course subject matter would highlight the library's 
extensive collections of WWI maps and documents. My other duties at the Sherman Centre have included 
consulting with faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students to find proper tools, think through issues 
of sustainability and adapt to new genres and mediums for scholarly communication. Students and faculty 
are often unaware of the range of services that places like the library and Sherman Centre offer to support 
digital humanities learning and research. Increasing the Sherman Centre's visibility (and thus clarifying 
the role that libraries play in supporting digital scholarship) has been one of my main goals as a 
postdoctoral fellow. My efforts have resulted in several new collaborations with faculty and students in the 
departments of English, History, French, Languages & Linguistics, and Communications. 
 
My own entry into the digital humanities was in 2009, when I came up with the idea for Visible Prices 
(VP, http://www.visibleprices.org), a tool to help readers understand the significance and purchasing 
power of prices that appear in literary texts. Working to take VP from an idea to a reality has been an 
excellent education in several fundamental areas of digital scholarship. I have learned how to find 
potential platforms and experiment with them in order to effectively assess their suitability and 
sustainability for my particular objectives. I have also learned how to clearly articulate the objectives of VP 
for both general and specialist audiences, and to explain how VP integrates with traditional research 
questions.  
 
In the process of building Visible Prices and training as a digital humanist, I have dealt with a range of 
obstacles. Figuring out how to surmount these obstacles has been one of the most significant aspects of 



my DH education. My own experiences in problem-solving mean that I am rarely surprised by the 
questions that students and faculty ask. Even when questions involve tools where I have little or no 
expertise, my experience with VP combined with my work with participants in the Demystifying 
workshops have given me broader knowledge of the digital humanities that allows me to think through 
questions in terms of the data involved, and identify resources and search keywords that will lead to 
solutions.  
 
A robust digital humanities community supports multiple levels of engagement with digital scholarship: 
some people build tools and projects, while others produce more traditional scholarship that engages with 
digital sources and projects. I envision working in a role that helps members of the University of Miami 
community attain sufficient informational and technological literacy to pursue their individual goals. Such 
a role would cultivate networked support and participation from a range of academic programs and 
departments. This will help to ensure the sustainability of University of Miami digital humanities 
resources. Equally importantly, it will help academic programs develop a better understanding of what 
digital scholarship involves, and support student research featuring digital components. I am 
tremendously excited about the possibility of helping to develop digital humanities at the University of 
Miami from within Richter Library, and look forward to discussing the Digital Humanities Librarian 
position further.  
 
 
Best, 
 
 

 
Paige Morgan