The Professional Practice Fellowship, sponsored by Research Libraries UK and the AHRC, is a grant programme designed to give librarians the time and capacity to carry out significant research projects aligned with their professional interests. My name is Hope Williard and I am one of the fellows for 2022-2023. This is the second in a series of posts about my project, The Lifelong Researcher: Supporting Doctoral Students’ Development of Digital Literacies.
As part of my research, I am planning to interview PhD students, supervisors, and librarians about their use, perceptions, and development of digital skills. Research involving human being requires ethical approval from my university’s research ethics board and I am aiming to submit my application within the next two weeks. While application procedures will different from university to university, I hope that a look behind the scenes of this process might be of interest for future fellowship applicants or fellow newcomers to the interview research scene.
Learning Experiences So Far
The first thing that surprised me about the ethics application is how extensive it is! The form asks for fairly extensive information about my project–a detailed description of the research, written in non-specialist language suitable for a lay reading, a breakdown of my research questions, and a justification of the research. much of this can be pulled from my original fellowship application, but it does require a little bit of rewriting for a new audience. Once I realised how much I was going to have to write, I created a separate word document to work on the text-heavy parts of the application offline–firstly, because I find it easier to spot typos, repetitions, or other infelicities in a Word document rather than the textboxes of an online form. And secondly, having the text saved in a file on my computer, will make it easier to take what I write and use it for future blog posts, presentations, and publications. Waste not, want not, and all that.
The form also requires a summary of any issues I anticipate will arise. For the first time, I have to think about confidentiality. The gold standard of interview and survey research seems to be fully anonymised results, so respondents cannot be identified by their replies. But in the case of the research I am doing on digital skills, knowing the name of the institution where a respondent works or studies will provide necessary context on digital infrastructures or resources. On the other hand, the specifics of someone’s research topic, plus the name of their institution, could make it very easy to identify them. I’ve found the essays in the The Sage Handbook of Interview Research extremely helpful for thinking about the ethical issues of confidentiality and anonymity, but it’s definitely the part of the application I am finding trickiest to write.
My application must include copies of all materials I will send participants, which means writing up drafts of recruitment messages, participant information sheets, and consent forms–in triplicate, since I will be interviewing three groups of respondents (PGRs, supervisors, and librarians). My application is also required to include a copy of any interview questions I will ask and surveys I will distribute, so a big part of my work on the ethics application is getting those ready to go.
this Week’s Learning Experiences
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to any research question, of course, and the humanist needs to know what tool might best fit, what kind of results they are curious to uncover and what specific cautionary notes they need to have front-and-foremost in their minds…we think that we are already all digital scholars. As Google searches, databases, and digitized primary sources become increasingly common, we believe that scholars need to be more self-reflective in their use of these everyday tools. ~ Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, Scott B. Weingart and Kim Martin, Exploring Big Historical Data (London, 2022), p. 36
To get meaningful answers, one has to try to ask good questions. An extremely useful informal response I’ve had to my research so far is tech-sceptical questions about whether historians really do use or really do learn digital skills. This response has made me think about the best way to begin my interview conversations–establishing a mutual understanding of digital skills seems like a good place to start. So my first draft question (for supervisors and students) is:
[Researcher reads a short definition of ‘digital skills’]. Can you tell me about a time where you have used digital skills in your research as historian?
I’m not entirely happy with this–librarians tend to speak of digital skills in very different terms than academics do, so I’m contemplating a more general opening question, something like,
Could you tell me about how you use computers / the internet in your research?
Thinking about the quote from Graham et al, which I loved when I read it, and immediately copied into my notes, a third possibility might be along the lines of:
What does digital scholarship mean to you? Do you see yourself as a digital scholar–why or why not?
What I like about the first version is that it leads naturally into a follow-up question about skills development:
Can you tell me more about how you learned those skills?
With supervisors, my hope is that this question then leads into a broader conversation about how their own skills influence how they support students’ development. My draft pair of questions is on this topic is:
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- Can you tell me about a time where one of your students has needed to learn a digital skill?
- How did they go about learning that skill?
Wording-wise, these two questions seem like they might cover similar ground. Plus, they presume a respondent who is comfortable with using skills language to describe research. The language of skills seems like it would work with research developers and librarians, who–in the completely unscientific Spidey-sense of my own experience–are more comfortable speaking about research in abstract terms than researchers themselves, who prefer to speak about specific projects, sources, or questions.
My next draft question for supervisors asks respondents to zoom out and take an institutional view:
What do you see as the strengths and weakness of training and support offered to historians at your institution?
This question also needs revision. Since I will be conducting my interviews on Teams or Zoom, it’s probably a better idea to break this down into two separate questions, one about strengths and one about weaknesses.
And my final draft question at the moment, even though the wording is not perfect, is the one I’m most excited to hear answered:
How has the pandemic changed the use of digital resources in research?
The wording is predicated on the assumption that the pandemic did change how historians do research but I feel like that’s a pretty safe assumption to make..
I’ll keep working on my draft questions over the next few weeks as I complete my ethics application–in the meantime, feedback or reactions are most welcome! I would be very grateful for any comments you have time to give.
Lastly…
As I refine and develop my definition of digital skills, I’ve been reading the second edition of Exploring Big Historical Data, which is fantastic and has supplied me with a wealth of further reading about digital history. One of the editors, Kim Martin, wrote her doctoral thesis about how historians do research. I’m also planning to read the Ithaka S + R report, Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians. I look forward to sharing what I find out.
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