Sarah Eckhart
Library Assistant
Parrish Library
Hello everyone! I am excited to be joining the Purdue University Libraries as an assistant in the Parrish Library. My job will include managing HSSEB room reservations and course reserves, reference assistance, referrals and user services to patrons who use the Parrish Library, as well as assisting HSSEB faculty with Concur travel questions, and helping to maintain collections. I graduated from Purdue in May of this year earning a BA in Visual Communications Design.
I am originally from the small town of Boswell, Indiana (approximate population: 700) where my love for reading and all things library began. After almost five years in the public library world I decided to branch out a little and try my luck in an academic setting. Aside from library work I also work part-time as a freelance graphic designer, focusing on web design and am hoping to eventually work in web development.
When I’m not at work or working on a freelance project I enjoy spending time with my family, browsing Pinterest and binge watching Netflix. My office is located in Parrish, Room 203 so come say hi or give me a call at 49-66859. You can also email me at seckhar@purdue.edu.
Amanda Visconti
Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Specialist
Purdue University Libraries
Hello! I'm excited to join Purdue and begin connecting existing digital humanities (DH) projects and people, identifying campus work that hasn't previously been thought of as DH, and creating new projects, tools and digital humanists. “Digital humanities” is a research community that uses computers to teach, learn, and research literature, history and other humanities subjects. I'm available to help anyone think through a DH idea, regardless of your background or degree of technical knowledge. If you need someone with certain experience involved in your next project or course, check in with me and I'll try to connect you with potential collaborators.
My main research methods are designing, coding, and usertesting for the web, so a lot of my work is meta-humanities: thinking critically about interface design for DH projects, building tools for better online annotation and discussion, and helping the public participate in humanities research and reading. My latest project is InfiniteUlysses.com: an experimental “participatory” digital edition allowing social annotation (marginalia, comments, questions, interpretations, etc.) of James Joyce's challenging novel Ulysses, as well as attempting to personalize the annotations displayed to each reader's background, interests, and needs. It's meant to welcome readers from first-timers through scholars, so if you'd like to cross “read Ulysses” off your bucket list (or read it again), we'd love you to join us!
I grew up in the Midwest, but I'm coming from the University of Maryland (just outside of Washington, D.C.), where I completed a Literature Ph.D. in May. The dissertation had an unusual shape for the humanities — design, code, usertesting, and a whitepaper written in the final weeks before the defense, and no “chapters” — so I'm eager to help students you run into doing DH work, or trying to help their departments support digital projects as whole dissertations.
I also hold an Information MS from the University of Michigan School of Information, where I focused on DH human-computer interaction and ran a user study of popular scholarly archives and editions to look for the small design changes that could open these tools to an additional public audience.
I'm a big web nerd and spend both my research and free time building DH websites and tools, and talking about the same on my research blog (LiteratureGeek.com) and Twitter(@Literature_Geek). Some of my media interests are e-lit, video games, artists' books, and comics/graphic novels. I'm interested in taking up bicycling and rowing again, if anyone would like to join me!
My office is located in HSSE 347, and you can reach me at aviscont@purdue.edu or on Twitter @Literature_Geek. |