Last November I came to the Center for Digital Scholarship of Brown University as a Post-Doc and stayed until March. My stay was sponsored by the University of Barcelona and the CASB (Consortium for Advanced Studies of Barcelona) Fellowship Program. The experience has been so stimulating and a truly rewarding one thanks to the CDS team.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Mil i Fontanals Institution CSIC (the Spanish National Research Council). Our team is working, among other topics, on a lexicographical project calledGlossarium Mediae Latinitatis Cataloniae, a Latin Dictionary of Latin terms from the corresponding IX to XII centuries Catalan linguistic domain. This dictionary is a work in progress, printed and published since 1960 (currently, just letters A-D, F-G are published). Our current goal is to transform the printed edition into a new digital one but we also intend to publish the remaining letters directly in a digital format. The idea of coming to Brown was born from a need to improve my knowledge about encoding, transforming and publishing TEI data.

In the meantime I became aware of theWWP seminars on TEI, and I though it was a great opportunity to take advantage of that training, so I applied for the event. I got in touch with E. Mylonas, whose support and help was invaluable, and I succeeded in coming to Brown, sponsorship of S. Bonde (History of Art and Architecture) – a medieval archaeologist and digital humanist.

At the end of November, I participated in the seminar Taking TEI further: transforming and publishing TEI, where the main topic was XSLT, a programming language used to transform XML data into other formats. The workshop was very useful and I learned a great deal, for example I was able to resolve several problems I had transforming my GMLC TEI data. But this training was just the beginning of many other activities, because at Brown, and at the CDS in particular, every single day is full of new inputs.

I really enjoyed theDigital Scholarship LabsvSalon, a series of weekly meetings organized by CDS, where everyone shares their work; the topics were always so inspiring: 3D capture methods and related software, geolocation technologies and device orientation, taxonomies in HTML 5, among many many others. I also gave an informal talk about my project, receiving great feedback and having the opportunity to share some of my issues.

For me, another interesting features of the CDS is its close collaboration with Brown professors and researchers and I took advantage of that as I was able to. Of special interest was a DH presentation done by Prof. J. Egan (English) and J. Bauer for a group of students. The seminars taught by Prof. M. Riva (Italian) and S. Lubar (Public Humanities) were also of great interest, especially the final project presentations, most of which focused on data visualization.

The CDS takes part in a lot of projects, among them theTAPAS project, an amazing project lead by J. Flanders (Northeastern University) to publish TEI data. I had the chance to attend one of their meetings and to test the toolkit from my newbie perspective. I also participated in the activities of the Virtual Humanities Lab, a center where Italian Studies and new technologies have created a great environment of international collaboration.

Moreover, being at the CDS has allowed me to understand how a Digital Humanities center works, its workflows in starting up a project (from the grant application, to the real work with professors, students and programmers) and in the day-to-day work. In that sense, their epigraphic projects deserve a special attention since their results are very impressive. Another CDS activity is the fact that, as part of library lecture series, they invite researchers, artists and professors to present their digital projects. I had the opportunity to hearRoderick Cover(Temple University), who gave an overview of of his techniques of narrative visualization. Also astonishing, from my point of view, is the offer ofworkshops organized by the Libraryand the CDS; I did my best to attend all the workshops I could! I was especially interested in bibliographical management, so I signed up for workshops onMendeleyandZotero; I also attended the Gephi Workshop for data visualization (by J. Bauer) and two other about Geography Information System and Statistics (by B. Boucek).

Besides all these activities, I was so impressed by the stimulating Campus Life at Brown, and the activities organized by other institutions, as the John Carter Brown Library. The Morning Mail with its huge list of events and activities gave me every morning the feeling I was in the right place. I just hope to come back very soon and have the possibility once again to share knowledge with this great team!