Hannah Scates Kettler is the Head of Digital Scholarship & Initiatives at Iowa State University. In her role, she leads a team of professionals who shepherd digital humanities projects from inception to preservation, managing the process of creation as well as providing research, and development support. She is active in concerns regarding 3D creation and preservation, diverse representations in cultural heritage collections and digital humanities about which she has published, taught and presented widely.
She is also the Owner and Farmer of Minerva’s Meadow, LLC, a no-till, organic flower farm in central Iowa.
In 2018-2019 Scates Kettler was the elected inaugural Vice-Chair Elect of the ACRL Digital Scholarship Section to support digital scholarship in all its forms at the professional level over which she assumed leadership as Chair during 2019 – 2020. She is also the founding member and current chair of the Digital Library Federation Cultural Assessment Interest Group which was formed in February 2016 to discuss ways by which one may assess how well digital collection represent and present diversity and allow for the discoverability of cultural artifacts in said collections. In 2017, Hannah and her colleagues Jennifer Moore (Washington University in St. Louis) and Adam Rountrey (University of Michigan Museum of Palentology) were awarded a Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant for the Libraries to hold two national forums dedicated to the issue of 3D data preservation in 2018. The result of this work will be a widely collaborative edited volume on the current state of 3D preservation standards and where the field may develop to support preservation of 3D data. Scates Kettler is also an Advisor to the Internet Archive’s Open Library and Library2020 project and a regular reviewer for CLIR’s Hidden Collections granting program.
Scates Kettler holds a BA from the University of Iowa in Anthropology with minors in Art History and Classics. She also holds a MA from King’s College London in Digital Humanities where she specialized in virtual cultural heritage. She is also on the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA), and a member of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and the American Library Association (ALA/ACRL).
My Favorite thing about what I do; it is wonderfully multifarious which is why I can be a gamer, an archaeologist, a web developer and art historian with no fear of anyone asking ‘too much?’ It is also magnificently metamorphic, exciting, and challenging, and I will continue to evolve and change with DH. I am often asked what “Digital Humanities” is without regard to what DH could be. I find little point in arguing for a definitive and perfect definition of DH, “it would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.”
Hannah Scates Kettler 