Brown University Library is one of the biggest student employers on the Brown University campus, and this post features one of the Library’s student employees who is graduating this Spring 2024: Ellen Huggins, an American Studies M.A. student. Over the past year, Ellen has worked for the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) as the Publicity Coordinator, a position that helps advertise and promote events.

She graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in Creative Writing in 2021, and spent last year at Davidson College as the Justice, Equality and Community Archives Fellow. She is currently creating an exhibit, LGBTQ Journals at Brown (1983-1998), along with fellow American Studies MA student, Anna Marti, and undergraduate student archivist, Anthony Boss, which will be featured at the Stonewall House and opens on May 29, 2024.

Ashley Champagne, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship, Interviews Ellen:

Ashley: It’s been great having you in CDS as our Publicity Coordinator! What did you enjoy most about this position?

Ellen: My job as Publicity Coordinator was to create social media posts for CDS events and workshops and to promote the events on Instagram, Today@Brown, and over email. I also attended events to take pictures for the monthly CDS round-up posts. My favorite part of the job was two-fold: for one, it was great going to CDS events throughout the semester. I felt like I really got to know more about the people in CDS from their areas of interest like critical and community-engaged digital humanities to the projects they are working on. I also got to learn about the larger conversations happening in the field of digital humanities. The presenters, from Brown and beyond, were also amazing to learn from. My other favorite part of the job was working on new designs for social media. It was really fun to play around on Canva with different colors, fonts, and art and then to integrate our signature Bruno bear at the computer on our designs.

Ashley: You made a big difference in streamlining publicity and amplifying our events. Can you speak to how you thought about creating a social media plan for CDS? 

Ellen: This is something that we talked a lot about together throughout this year. Right from the beginning, we prioritized putting a social media plan in place for CDS that could easily be taken up by others. An important part of that was being intentional about our decisions right from the beginning, and keeping it simple for ourselves. One part of this was creating templates for Instagram posts, since there weren’t any pre-existing ones for CDS. We experimented with different template layouts for Instagram based on the type of event (different colors and art depending on if it was a DH salon, workshop, or lecture series) so that our social media audience could visually differentiate between our various offerings just by looking at the Library’s Instagram feed.

I’m hoping that we made templates this year that the next publicity coordinator can pick up and edit. Maybe then the next person will change some things around too. I think there’s always room to improve social media, in terms of making the posts more visually interesting or easier to read, but I’m really proud of the groundwork that we established for CDS’s social media presence! 

Ashley: It’s been a great year. Can you describe the process of doing social media for our formal lecture series, New Directions in Digital Scholarship, and our DH Salons, which bring together researchers across the campus to talk about their work in digital humanities?

Ellen: Since the DH Salons were an on-going event series, with different scholars from a range of disciplines across Brown University, the outreach had to be as expansive as possible across campus. We were publicizing not only for the specific DH Salon happening in a given week, but the publicity was also intended to help people learn about what was coming next. So, we decided that, in addition to our regular messaging about a given event, we would also create “wrap up” posts at the end of the month with a variety of pictures from the event. These posts gave those who weren’t able to come to the event a view into what attending an event in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship lab is like.

I tried to take at least one picture at every Salon this year, which actually proved to be more difficult than expected. I think it’s always awkward to get up in the middle of an event to take a photo, especially in an intimate space like the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, and it took some getting used to. I also aimed for the back of people’s heads or their side profiles as much as I could, so that the focus of the picture was the event itself rather than anyone in attendance. Despite the awkwardness of the picture taking, it was well worth it in the end because we got so much engagement on those wrap up posts. I think people really responded to getting to see what a DH Salon looked like in person, and maybe it made them more likely to come to the next one.

Ashley: Definitely. Many of our events this year were standing-room only, which was in large part because of your publicity efforts. Thanks so much for all your work this year! You’ve been an integral part of the team.