A Successful First Year and New Digital Scholarship Fellows Announced

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.

Keynote speaker Nicholas Bauch (University of Minnesota) presents “Toward a Graphic Re-Mediation of Spatial Thought.” Photo: Helen Fulmer ’21

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.

Sufia Uddin presents her project “Life in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest” during the Digital Scholarship Fellows panel. Photo: Miles Ladin

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.

Deadline Extended! Submit a Proposal to Join the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program in 2019

If you have ideas for a digital project related to your research and would like support for project development, consider joining the second cohort of the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program. The deadline for proposals has been extended to December 16. See our recent post for more details!

The program offers a learning community with other faculty doing digital scholarship and library staff who can help with technological, pedagogical, and theoretical aspects of embarking upon a digital scholarship project. You will also receive $2000 to support your project, funding to travel to a digital scholarship conference, and a $1000 stipend.

Contact Lyndsay Bratton, if you have any questions about the program or would like to discuss ideas.

2019 Digital Scholarship Fellows Program: Call for Proposals

Have you ever wanted to create a digital companion for a book project? Do you have collections of research materials collecting dust or physically degrading in your office, or large datasets you’d like to develop into maps or visualizations to accompany your written scholarship? Would you like your students to actively engage with Special Collections & Archives materials or your own research? Are you interested in engaging directly with new communities through crowdsourcing and public scholarship?

If any of these questions resonate with you, and you would like to involve students in the processes of digitization, analysis, and online publishing, please see the Call for Proposals and consider applying to participate in the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program. As a 2019 Digital Scholarship Fellow, you would have the opportunity to work with Information Services staff members and other faculty fellows to 1) gain new technological skills to support the production and broad dissemination of your research; 2) scaffold research projects involving digital technologies and collaboration with students and other partners; and 3) present the results of your participation in the program at speaking engagements at both Connecticut College and other institutions engaging in creative digital scholarship.

Digital scholarship offers liberal arts colleges opportunities to leverage the close working relationship between students and faculty and develop students’ research and technology skill sets through experiential learning. Digital scholarship tools and methodologies reflect a changing landscape in both teaching and scholarship, including innovations in instructional technology, content management platforms, humanities computing, and open-access publishing. The Digital Scholarship Fellows Program invests resources in faculty who want to both model these changes and help build a foundation of best practices for the campus. In support of the College’s commitment to enhancing academic distinction, the DSF Program will promote the research objectives outlined in the College’s Strategic Plan.

Not sure if your project ideas are a good fit for the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program? Contact the Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship, Lyndsay Bratton (lbratton@conncoll.edu, x2729), to talk about your ideas and hear more about the program.

To learn more about developments in digital scholarship at Connecticut College and other Connecticut institutions, you’re encouraged to attend the inaugural Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium, November 12. Hear from the first cohort of Digital Scholarship Fellows and see the products of their year in the program.

Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium, November 12

On Monday, November 12, join Information Services and the Office of the Dean of Faculty for the inaugural Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts Symposium at Connecticut College. You can see the full schedule and details here.

The symposium is the culminating event of the first year of the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, funded by the Office of the Dean of Faculty and supported by staff members across Information Services. This all-day event features presentations by faculty, technologists, and librarians on methods and outcomes of collaborative digital scholarship in the liberal arts. Learn about the possibilities of using digitization, mapping, crowdsourcing, and online publishing to conduct and share your research in exciting new ways. Hear about initiatives at Trinity College and UConn’s Greenhouse Studios, in addition to developments here at home.

We are pleased to present keynote speaker Nicholas Bauch from the University of Minnesota at 4:30pm in Olin 014:

The symposium is generously co-sponsored by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment, the Environmental Studies program, and the departments of Anthropology, Biology, and Religious Studies.

After the symposium, consider applying for the 2019 Digital Scholarship Fellows Program! Contact Lyndsay Bratton, if you’d like to discuss proposal ideas or questions. Proposals are due by Sunday, December 2.

Enhancing Research through Digital Scholarship

The spring and summer saw many new developments in digital scholarship at Connecticut College. As the College seeks to “open new channels for groundbreaking research, scholarship, and creative work,” outlined in the 2016 Strategic Plan, digital scholarship offers new tools and methodologies to leverage open-access publishing and computational methods of analysis for the advancement of scholarly dialogues and undergraduate pedagogy. The Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, a collaborative initiative by the Office of the Dean of Faculty and Information Services, was launched in January to support faculty wishing to develop digital projects in their research endeavors.

Digital Scholarship Fellows Updates

The 2018 inaugural cohort of fellows were hard at work this summer on their projects. A team including Catherine Benoît (Anthropology), library staff Lyndsay Bratton and Diane Creede, and two students, Gareth Barr ‘19 and Darriana Greer ‘21, attended the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) at Occidental College in Los Angeles this June. The project team worked with web developer Gabriel Ortiz from Claremont Colleges Library to build the second iteration of Benoît’s St. Martin Project, featuring new image-filtering, crowdsourcing, and bilingual functionalities. In the fall, Benoît’s students will expand the project with an oral history component, conducting interviews with the Saint Martinois community in New London. Benoît will give a talk on her project at the Caribbean Digital V conference in December, hosted by the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.

 

Lunch in Occidental College’s Center for Global Affairs at ILiADS 2018

Working with our liaison from Claremont Colleges Library on developing a new website user interface for The St. Martin Project

Sharing our work at the end of ILiADS 2018

The St. Martin Project team at ILiADS 2018

Sufia Uddin (Religious Studies) led two ConnSHAARP summer research internships to develop the first iteration of her project site, Life in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest. Julia Neumann ‘20 and Avatar Simpson ‘20 spent four weeks engaged in intensive research to design a digital resource Uddin’s students will use in her fall ConnCourse. The team partnered with an external web developer to integrate interactive maps into the site. Uddin plans to expand the project in the future with the publication of her translation of a Bengali epic poem and new research to be conducted on-site in Bangladesh. She aims to present the mangrove forest and its inhabitants in ways that foster broader public awareness of deforestation and its effects on indigenous communities and the environment.

 

ConnSHAARP students Julia Neumann ’20 and Avatar Simpson ’20 worked with Professor Sufia Uddin on the Life in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest project

After years of recording the size, shape, and veins of fruit fly wings on paper during morphological research experiments, Phillip Barnes (Biology) developed a new workflow this summer to digitally image the wings at high resolution. As Barnes develops a large dataset of these images, in collaboration with his student researchers, he will build a project website to share the collection and metadata with researchers well beyond his field with the hope of enabling multidisciplinary collaborations.

Stay tuned this semester for project site launches from our fellows!

In early October, the fellows and program director Lyndsay Bratton will give a talk at the Digital Frontiers conference, hosted by the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS.

Fall Symposium

We will round out the first year of the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program with our inaugural Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts symposium, Monday, November 12, 2018. The symposium (8:30am-3pm in the Chu Room of Shain Library) will feature talks by the DS Fellows and Anthony Graesch (Anthropology), and by guest institutions Trinity College and the University of Connecticut’s Greenhouse Studios center for scholarly communications design. Cultural geographer, digital humanist, and artist Nicholas Bauch (University of Minnesota) will deliver the keynote lecture (4:30pm in Olin 014), which is co-sponsored by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology as part of their 2018/2019 colloquium speaker series, Creative Ecologies. Bauch’s 2016 Enchanting the Desert was the first born-digital interactive monograph published by Stanford University Press in their new series of digital scholarship publications.

If you are interested in learning more about digital scholarship or starting a project, join us for the symposium and consider submitting an application for the 2019 DS Fellows Program. A call for proposals will be posted later this fall.

We are grateful to Professor of Art and Director of the Ammerman Center, Andrea Wollensak, who designed the sleek new logo for digital scholarship.

First Cohort of Faculty Join the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program

This January, Professors Phillip Barnes (Biology), Catherine Benoît (Anthropology), and Sufia Uddin (Religious Studies) became the first Digital Scholarship Fellows in a new program generously funded by the Office of the Dean of Faculty and led by staff members in Information Services.

Building on the success of the Technology Fellows Program (2014-2018), the Digital Scholarship Fellows program supports faculty engaged in digital scholarship projects to scope and design their projects, integrate aspects of the projects into their courses, collaborate with student researchers, acquire new technological skills, and build platforms for sharing their scholarship in innovative ways online. The program works toward the College’s strategic plan objectives to offer new opportunities for student/faculty research and to build a community of practice in digital scholarship.

Catherine Benoît’s project will be a multilingual digital companion to her book, Au coeur des ténèbres de la friendly island: sida, migration et culture à Saint Martin [In the Heart of Darkness of the Friendly Island: Migrations, Culture and AIDS in St. Martin] (2015). Students in Benoît’s Anthropology of the Caribbean course are currently engaged in digitizing a portion of her primary research materials gathered in St. Martin in the 1990s. Across the semester, each student will conduct research on one of the thematic threads of the project—tourism, hurricane Luis (1995), St. Martin as an international tax haven, immigration and undocumented migrants, and the AIDS epidemic—and curate a related collection of images, as well as publish an introductory text for inclusion on the public project website. A project team of faculty, students, and staff from Connecticut College has been accepted to attend the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) in June, hosted at Occidental College, to work on the next iteration of the project. At ILiADS, Benoît hopes to build a crowdsourcing feature that allows site visitors to submit documents and oral histories for inclusion on the website. She will also implement assignments in future courses that will add oral histories, maps, multimedia, and new research to this multi-year project.

Students in Benoit’s Anthropology of the Caribbean course (ANT260) are building a collection of digitized photographs in Omeka, a web publishing platform for image collection management.

As part of the program, Sufia Uddin will create a multimodal website about the Sundarbans Mangroves to present the forest and its inhabitants in ways that foster broader awareness of deforestation and its effects on indigenous communities and the environment. Uddin translated the Bengali epic poem that tells the story of Bonbibi (Lady of the Forest), which she will publish online as a component of this project. Digital methods of working with the poem, including textual analysis, digital annotations, the addition of images, maps, and related scholarship, will provide the means by which different ways of knowing this forest will emerge. Uddin plans to work with students this summer to build an interactive map of the mangroves using ArcGIS software.

Through digital scholarship, Phil Barnes hopes to discover other colleagues around the world working on experiments similar to his own and potentially develop collaborations by sharing his data online. He plans to digitize drawings of insect wings created by his students over the years and develop a new workflow to capture more visual data through digital imaging of the wings. This digital process will yield richer information that Barnes and his students can use in future studies, expanding the original intent of the experiment and making data available that other researchers may be able to use.

In summer 2018, students working with the faculty fellows will conduct some or all of their work in the library’s Technology Commons, developing aspects of the individual projects in conversation with each other. Students will have access to advanced software, and library staff will be available for advising on project development.

Stay tuned for blog posts from the DS Fellows, as well as information about a digital scholarship symposium on campus in the fall!

A call for proposals to participate in the 2019 cohort of Digital Scholarship Fellows will go out in fall 2018.

2018 Digital Scholarship Fellows Program: Call for Proposals

Have you been thinking about creating a digital companion for your book project? Do you have collections of research materials collecting dust or physically degrading in your office, or large datasets you’d like to develop into a digital archive, maps, or visualizations to accompany your written scholarship? Would you like your students to actively engage with Special Collections & Archives materials to create a digital project?

If any of these questions resonate with you, and you would like to involve students in the processes of digitization, analysis, and online publishing, please see the Call for Proposals and consider applying for the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program. As a 2018 Digital Scholarship Fellow, you would have the opportunity to work with Information Services staff members and other faculty fellows to 1) gain new technological skills to support the development and broad dissemination of your research; 2) scaffold research projects that involve digital technologies and collaboration with students and other partners; and 3) present the results of your participation in the program at speaking engagements at both Connecticut College and other institutions engaging in creative digital scholarship.

Digital scholarship offers liberal arts colleges opportunities to leverage the close working relationship between students and faculty and develop students’ research and technology skill sets through experiential learning. Digital scholarship tools and methodologies reflect a changing landscape in both teaching and scholarship, including innovations in instructional technology, content management platforms, computational analysis, and open-access publishing. Building upon the successes of the Technology Fellows Program (2014-2018), the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program invests resources in faculty who want to both model these changes and help build a foundation of best practices for the campus. In support of the College’s commitment to enhancing academic distinction, the DSF Program will promote the research objectives outlined in the College’s Strategic Plan.

Participation in the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program provides up to $2000 to be used toward expenses related to a project (e.g. software, hardware, data storage, student labor), funding to present at a digital scholarship conference, and a stipend of $1000.

Proposals of no longer than 1000 words should be submitted to Lyndsay Bratton (lbratton@conncoll.edu) by Sunday, December 3, 2017. All proposals will be reviewed by the Office of the Dean of Faculty, the Vice President of Information Services, the Digital Scholarship Faculty Advisory Board, and the staff who lead the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program. Fellows will be announced by December 15, 2017.

Not sure if your project ideas are a good fit for the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program? Contact Digital Scholarship Librarian Lyndsay Bratton to talk about your ideas and hear more about the program.

New Interdisciplinary Image Content in ARTstor’s Digital Library

Connecticut College Libraries’ subscription to the ARTstor Digital Library provides the campus community with access to over two million downloadable images. Created to meet the image needs of art and art history departments, ARTstor has radically expanded its interdisciplinary content in recent years. Subject guides point users to content in more than 22 disciplines, including anthropology, women’s studies, American studies, Middle Eastern studies and other area studies. The recent addition of collections by Magnum Photos, Panos Pictures, and Condé Nast brings ARTstor’s photographic collection to over 350,000 pictures and extends the database’s coverage to include documentary photography of historical and recent events, such as political demonstrations worldwide and the ongoing refugee crisis.

Once a database for art historical images, ARTstor now provides image content covering a wide range of topics across multiple disciplines, as well as subject guides and other teaching resources to help you make use of these interdisciplinary collections.

ARTstor’s webinar offerings provide training and ideas for using the Digital Library to teach with images in many disciplines. The platform’s image-group functionality allows you to create and share collections with your students and download PowerPoint presentations with captions included. If you have any questions about using ARTstor, contact Lyndsay Bratton, Connecticut College’s ARTstor administrator.

Debates in the Digital Humanities Reading Group, Fall 2017

 

Should liberal arts campuses do digital humanities? What is the role of teaching and learning in digital humanities? How are the digital humanities impacting your field? How does DH engage with, improve, and/or perpetuate problems of social justice? Debates in the Digital Humanities addresses these questions and many more. In the reading group, we will read and discuss some essays together and others of your choosing, based on your own interests.

Attend one session or all three! Please let Lyndsay Bratton know if you are interested in attending any of the meetings, so that planned readings can be communicated.

Thursdays 2:30-3:30: September 21, October 26 & November 30
Advanced Technology Lab, Shain Library, Lower Level
Texts Available Online

Active Engagement and Group Work at the Visualization Wall

The Visualization Wall can instantly and wirelessly display up to five smartphones, tablets, and laptops at once, or one device full-screen. Pictured above: dual display of a MacBook Air and an iPhone.

The Diane Y. Williams ’59 Visualization Wall in the Technology Commons of Shain Library offers new possibilities for group work and classroom engagement. With just a few clicks on one’s own smartphone, tablet, or laptop, the wall wirelessly displays up to five devices at once.

Biology Professor Martha Grossel used the Visualization Wall weekly for her Accelerated Cell Biology class, asking students to work on problems in groups. One member of each group then displayed their work simultaneously for discussion and comparison of all the groups’ results as a class. Theater Professor Sabrina Notarfrancisco takes part in the Instructional Technology team’s DELI program to provide her students in Costume History with iPads each semester and meets regularly at the wall with her class. Whenever relevant to the discussion, students can easily display and compare examples from the visual portfolios that they build on their iPads, encouraging active engagement in discussion.

The furniture in the Technology Commons is all flexible and can be arranged to be most conducive to your class activities.

Interested in how this feature can be used in your own class? Email Lyndsay Bratton to discuss ideas or to schedule class meetings at the wall!