As an assistant I am doing exactly that: assisting. In the beginning I helped Lewis and Aleks, who are non-EU residents, with sorting out their residence permit, contracts and other administrative obligations they faced. Being the only native German speaker in the project comes in quite handy there - although bureaucratic German is an obstacle for us too! Especially immigration is a tough topic in Austria and the hurdles can become either quite high or frustrating...or both. Obviously, it should not be like that and I am happy to help so that these two can focus more on their PhD research than fighting the Austrian immigration system.
I made sure everybody had the equipment they needed or the contact to the person they could reach out to in case of a question. A university can be quite huge, especially the biggest university in the German speaking countries, so one can easily lose track of who to call or email. It was and is still a learning process for me as well, but the faculty staff are more than helpful and kind. I also remind my team to hand in paperwork that is crucial for the project, like timesheets or the form for the reporting periods. We just completed our first financial reporting period which comes 18 months after the start of the project. Declarations have to be filled out, invoices handed over and scientific milestones uploaded for the EU.
I am pretty much bound to those administrative tasks as I am neither trained in history, nor in digital humanities, so my scientific contribution would be quite feeble. This is why the meetings are always fun for me as I do not understand what any of these people are saying. I am just joking, even though I do not follow 100% I understand more and more each time and just enough to be proud of every single person. As an trained anthropologist I do, however, have an idea what research can and should look like so whenever my opinion is appropriate, I will give it. This is also why I was able to talk at the DH2022 conference. Unfortunately we were not able to travel to Tokyo but I would not want to miss this opportunity and now more and more conferences are starting to be on site again. Yes, it is nice to have a publication outside of one’s field but I gained so much from the experience of pouring my personal knowledge, especially about gender and gender bias, into the project.
Even though my work is more in the background, you probably read something by me - namely the tweets. Communication to the ‚outside world‘ is an important aspect of a project so we keep you updated about what is going on. I see the blog posts as a nice way to follow a researcher’s way through the process of their work rather than only presenting the results. In my opinion, it makes science way more tangible and it deconstructs the ivory tower many students, researchers or any other person affiliated to science criticised for decades.
I am happy to have been part of this team for the last year and I am looking forward to many more.