Welcome Alyssa, Digital Scholarship Consultant!
Alyssa Fahringer started at DiSC as the Digital Scholarship Consultant in early February. Before coming to Mason Libraries, she worked as a Graduate Research Assistant and Digital History Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media from 2014 through 2019 on various digital history projects, including the Papers of the War Department, the September 11 Digital Archive, and Omeka Classic and Omeka S. Alyssa also served as a Project Associate for two digital humanities teaching institutes. She has worked as a public librarian and in Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh, in addition to interning at the Library of Virginia. Alyssa has degrees in history and political science from Virginia Commonwealth University, an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MA in history from George Mason University. She was accepted into GMU’s history PhD program in 2014, and is currently in the process of completing her dissertation. She is excited to be a part of DiSC and Mason Libraries.
Recap of Recent DiSC Sponsored Events
Carpentry Workshops
DiSC hosted two Carpentries workshops. They were held on December 13-14, 2018, and January 25-26, 2019. Those who attended the Library Carpentry workshop were eligible to sign up for The Carpentries instructor training. Three library staff took advantage of this opportunity and are currently going through the instructor training process. They are: Peggy Griesinger (now at Notre Dame), Debby Kermer, and Wendy Mann.
January’s Data Carpentry workshop covered its Social Sciences curriculum. This workshop was co-sponsored by the Schar School and held at the Arlington Campus. A combination of library staff, Schar School and S-CAR students participated.
Both workshops were at capacity with an average of 40 attendees each day.
We couldn’t have successfully carried out these workshops without the help of our helpers and organizers: Rohan Bidarkota, Peggy Greisinger, Debby Kermer, Margaret Lam, Wendy Mann, Chris Magee, Helen McManus, Andrew Stevens, and Joy Suh.
The December Library Carpentry workshop fee was sponsored by an IMLS grant and attendees included staff from Mason and WRLC Libraries.
Thank you to University Libraries and the Schar School for covering the workshop fee for the Data Carpentry workshop.
DiSC Research Connections
On February 5th, Steven Weinberger, Associate Professor of Linguistics presented, “The Sound of Your Voice: The Speech Accent Archive.” Dr. Weinberger discussed the history of and current state of the speech accent archive.
LaTeX Workshop
On Thursday, March 14, 2019, Professor Stephen Scott from the Department of Computational & Data Sciences taught an introductory workshop on LaTeX, a free document preparation system for high-quality typesetting, to library faculty and staff in the DiSC lab at Fenwick Library. Professor Scott is a proud Mason alum, and he is currently teaching CSI 500: Computational Science Tools as an online course. In the two-hour workshop, Professor Scott presented four weeks’ worth of course content. He gave an overview of LaTeX, which is pronounced «Lah-tech» or «Lay-tech», and showcased the numerous benefits of using LaTeX with hands-on exercises, from incorporating complex mathematical equations into your document to creating a bibliography in a particular citation style. He recommended the book, LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, by Leslie Lamport, as a great resource to learn more about this software system. All who attended enjoyed learning from him and appreciated his thoughtful and candid style of teaching.
More information about LaTeX can be found here: https://www.latex-project.org/.