The first year of the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program was celebrated with an all-day symposium on campus to highlight the project work of the 2018 Fellows (Phillip Barnes, Catherine Benoît, and Sufia Uddin) and Anthony Graesch (Kw’ets’tel Project, funded by Diane Y. Williams ’59), and to introduce more of the campus community to emerging practices in digital research tools and online publishing. The fall semester also saw the Fellows and program director present their work together at the Digital Frontiers conference at the University of Kansas in October, and Benoît presented her St. Martin Project at the fifth Caribbean Digital annual conference, held in Trinidad & Tobago in December.
Digital Scholarship & Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium
On November 12, 2018, Information Services hosted the first Digital Scholarship & Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium. The event included presentations by the 2018 Digital Scholarship Fellows, Anthony Graesch, Trinity College’s Educational Technology team, and UConn Greenhouse Studios. Nicholas Bauch, PhD delivered the keynote lecture. A cultural geographer currently working on an MFA at the University of Minnesota, Bauch published the first project, Enchanting the Desert (2016), in Stanford University Press’s pioneering born-digital publication series. His talk focused on argument-driven design in the processes of transforming information from one medium into other media on digital platforms leveraged for scholarly publishing.
Around 70 attendees joined us throughout the day from institutions across Connecticut, including Wesleyan University, Yale University, Southern Connecticut State University, and Fairfield University Art Museum. Several departments, centers, and programs generously co-sponsored the symposium: the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies, as well as the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.
We hope to hold similar events in the future to share digital scholarship developing at Connecticut College, as well as to continue dialogues and potential collaborations with institutions across the state.
The symposium livestream footage can be viewed online.
Cohort of 2019 Fellows
In December Information Services and the Dean of the Faculty announced the 2019 cohort of Digital Scholarship Fellows. We are excited to work again with faculty from a diverse range of disciplines and with a variety of research objectives, as we continue to experiment with digital scholarship at Connecticut College.
Benjamin Beranek, Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, is analyzing experimental economic data on social preferences from within a singular society, which was collected on a digital platform using spatial econometric techniques. The project Within Society Variation in Social Preferences will associate the geographic location of participants in online social preference experiments with other variables of interest, such as economic development, voting patterns, or density. These associations will be analyzed, mapped and visualized on a project website exploring several related research questions.
Danielle Egan, Professor of Gender, Intersectionality and Sexuality Studies, is working on an experimental research project, Transmitting Dominance, which explores ways of structuring arguments in non-linear, multi-modal formats, when integrating digital processes and tools into the scholarly process from a research project’s conception. The project’s website will make use of a range of media to visualize transmissions of dominance in society.
Christopher Steiner, Professor of Art History and Anthropology and Director of the Museum Studies program, is developing a digital archive and website for the Nut Museum collection owned by Connecticut College. Elizabeth Tashjian (1912-2007) was an artist who lived much of her life in Old Lyme, CT and established the Nut Museum in her home. The collection featured her own paintings of nuts, as well as a collection of nuts, nutcrackers, and nut-related memorabilia and ephemera. The project website will make the collection accessible to the public again, and students in the Museum Studies program will gain hands-on experience working with this collection, including conducting research, archiving and digitizing materials, working on physical and/or virtual exhibition projects, and publishing collection highlights online.
It is our pleasure to announce that the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will continue to support the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program for a third cohort next year. Faculty interested in digital scholarship should contact program director Lyndsay Bratton. Stay tuned for updates about all the exciting projects currently in production.
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