With a year of Vivero experience under your belts, what advice do you have for new Fellows about the idea that this job involves learning how to do your job on the fly?

This not so much advice as it is a comment, but I would say that the digital humanities is supposed to be confusing.  This could just be me, but I think I will always be slightly stunned trying to bring myself to the WordPress website I need to work on.  I’m not sure if it’s just a me thing; maybe I need more experience. It’s also just my second year engaging with the digital humanities. Whether my journey through sites@Grinnell and cPanel becomes more route or not later on (and, of course, taking breaks from WordPress would be cause for some forgetting), I think being slightly stunned is a good thing.  To me, this is an indication that our interaction with the internet and technology is not exactly second nature.  Of course, this confusion can be mitigated by engaging with a particular digital tool and going to Tierney and Libby for help, but I think these feeling around technology can be used for a critical interrogation of these tools.

I would also say to have fun with it and to insert personal self into the work you do!  I thought that my Vivero profile had to be professional at the beginning.  I didn’t decide to decorate it more with color and some of my favorite artwork until my second semester (and this is still very iterative for me).  What you’re interested in personally can be cause for some actual critical digital humanities discussion.  For example, I used stills from the my favorite show Community for a training on Omeka.  I got to grab stills and think about how this formatting affected its citation method.