Pathways to tech with a liberal arts degree
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This presentation was part of the 2016 West Virginia Women and Technology Conference and argues that a liberal arts degree provides graduates with communication and writing skills that are essential in the tech industry.
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Pathways to tech with a liberal arts degree
- 1. Pathways to tech with a liberal arts degree Dr. Cheryl E. Ball West Virginia University @s2ceball
- 3. GTD
- 4. Then
- 5. Now
- 10. ms defined in collaboration with PWE students and design team in
- 11. Vega prototype - beta testing April 2017
- 12. ttp://dpi.lib.wvu.edu — built with 6 “English” majors (BA, MA, PhD
- 13. DPI staff
Notes de l'éditeur
- When I was 12, I learned one of the most important lessons of my life. My parents were out of town one weekend, so my two older sisters had to take me to the overnight camp where they worked in the kitchen. With nothing else to do, and so they could keep an eye on me, I was asked to pitch in. I was used to doing chores at home: vacuuming, washing the dishes, emptying the dishwasher, scrubbing toilets, etc., but in this new space of an industrial kitchen, I was lost. So Cathy Tuberson, the head cook, would assign me things to do: mix that kool-aid. And I would go off and ask three other people about each step in the kool-aid mixing process: Where to get the water from, which container to put it in, what utensil to use to stir kool-aid that was being made in, no joke, a 55-gallon plastic trashcan that turned my arm red or blue or purple with dye, until I realized I was using the wrong length of pizza spatula. After each task Cathy assigned me, I would return to her and ask “what next?” After an hour or two of “what nexts?” Cathy finally turned to me in a huff and said, “Cheryl, take some initiative.” It stunned me. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t known I could take initiative—that all I had to do was look around, see what needed to be done, and do it. Without asking. That was the beginning of my transformation into a person who Gets Things Done. [slide: GTD]
- However, GTD isn’t the same as having a vision that extends beyond individual tasks. I was really good at GTDs and quickly worked my way up in the ranks of the kitchen, and back in town, at the community theater where I transitioned from acting to stage managing adult productions and directing other teen productions. I had great mentors, and while I followed their lead, I didn’t always know where they were leading me.
- THEN: Throughout high school, college and even my graduate work, I was the kind of student who was more interested in GTD, but not necessarily when it came to my academics. In high school, I was barely an honors student. I paid more attention to my afterschool activities and my part-time job working at a restaurant than I paid to my studies. In part because studying came easy and in part because I am my parents’ daughter: more interested in the practicalities and logistics of work. As an undergrad, one of my regular customers at the coffee shop worked at the large, local newspaper and told me about a secretarial opening for an editorial assistant. As an English major, I knew I had the communication skills, so it was time to turn professional. I worked in the newsroom, the classifieds department, and later, once I started my MFA program in the late 90s, I worked at a glossy sports magazine, learned how to use a Mac, how to design web pages, how to edit in stages, and how to ask for more project-based work when I GTD too quickly.
- Over the last two decades, I figured out how to GTD towards a vision of digital publishing that puts my liberal arts background to work through digital technology. NOW: editor of leading international journal in digital writing, Fulbight scholar, director of a new Digital Publishing Institute with WVU Libraries, PI on a $1m grant from the Mellon Foundation to build Vega, an academic publishing platform.
- WHAT IS KAIROS?? - independent, peer-reviewed, webtexts (static HTML) - 20 years publishing. 30 staff. 50 editorial board members. When I teach editing classes, students are surprised to learn it’s not just line-editing. Learning to BE AN EDITOR and MANAGE a team is key to promotion.
- Training to GTD: - Began adapting the scholarly print processes from C&C to Kairos, - Creating training materials (copy-editing) & Began profdev workshops for Kairos staff. —> wiki, video screencaptures, professional web design and FTP programs, command line tools, Google Suite, Dropbox, etc.
- Students trained in the liberal arts can talk with designers, programmers, editors, researchers, teachers, and librarians about how this kind of publishing technology works. GLOSSARY example from 602 <—
- The glossary led the dev team eventually to this prototype, which is radically different and imo has better UX than any editorial CMS to date. I look at this deliverable and understand that it is a tight collaboration between humanistic researchers, developers also trained in the liberal arts and design, and students in professional writing and editing classes studying how to write and design documents to best reach the audience needed.
- These students and the interns who work with me outside of class produce amazing digital humanities projects, such as the DPI website shown here, and several major publishing projects we’ve been working on this past year. Team work, collaboration, and ethical thinking is required, and while they aren’t necessarily programming experts, they know enough to communicate with the subject matter experts and programmers in an organizational environment.
- These are the people you want to recruit at Career Fairs.
- Leave you with a picture of the Vega archipelago. Thank you.