As of October 1st, 2020, I am working as senior academic librarian for digital research methods at the Humanities and Social Sciences (SSH) library at the University of Oslo! The position is newly created to meet the needs and challenges of today’s students and researchers in SSH and located at the section for reference and research. If you ever come visit the University of Oslo, I am sitting in the big black marble building on Blindern campus.
It’s been quite a journey for me and I am glad to say that this is a permanent job – the first I’ve ever had! I’ve been employed in various constellations since 2005 when I signed my first contract as a student research assistant with the Peter Weiss’ Notebooks project at Freie Universität Berlin. I’ve worked at universities and libraries in Germany and Norway and even tried my luck – shortly – in the private sector working in data quality assurance.
In all these years, I’ve been doing a lot of project consultation, teaching skill-building workshops, providing individual research consultation within Digital Humanities, doing community building, etc. in a voluntary fashion: it wasn’t officially part of my “jobs”, but it certainly was where my passion was and I had the strong drive to help where ever I could and felt I was needed. And now I am actually paid to do so!
I am grateful for all the learning opportunities and the many experiences I could gather on that journey. I’m especially grateful to all the people I’ve met during this journey: they are my friends, my colleagues, my mentors and mentees, my trainers and trainees, my brothers and sisters in DH-spirit, my inspirations, my sparring partners, and my critics: my network. Thanks to you all for your support along the way!
If you are a student, a researcher or research support at the University of Oslo – work in the Humanities and Social Sciences – feel free to get in contact with me for anything that relates to digital research methods (including data management, research dissemination, etc.) within SSH. You can find me in Georg Sverdrups hus, or online on Twitter, on GitHub or on one of my research blogs on Hypotheses.org. Happy to meet you!
