[image1-right]This fall GSLIS master’s student Brandon Locke will take on the role of digital social science and humanities specialist at Michigan State University (MSU). In this new position, he will coordinate MSU’s new Lab for the Education and Advancement in Digital Research (LEADR). Located within the university’s Department of History, this digital initiative will launch under Locke’s leadership.
The goal of the new digital humanities lab is to help undergraduate students, primarily students of history and anthropology, become proficient users of digital research and publication methods. The lab will also collaborate with faculty to facilitate digital pedagogy. "It will be a state-of-the-art lab focused on engaging undergraduate students in digital research as part of their coursework, as well as larger, faculty-driven research projects," said Locke.
Locke is specializing in data curation at GSLIS, and he’ll complete his last semester of master’s coursework from a distance. Much of what he has learned in his data curation and publishing courses will be directly applicable to his new position at MSU.
Locke currently works as a pre-professional graduate assistant at the Grainger Engineering Library at the University of Illinois, where he assists with the Emblematica Online project to digitize some of the world's most significant collections of Renaissance-era emblem books. He has prior experience working with digital initiatives: he served as a project manager for the University of Nebraska’s History Harvest digital archive while earning his master of arts degree in history and a certificate in digital humanities.
Excited to embrace the next phase of his career, Locke is already beginning to make plans for getting LEADR off the ground. "My goal from the middle of my MA program in history was that I wanted to work in a digital humanities lab or center, so this is really what I’ve been looking for," he said.