DLF Forum 2015

What if Nobody Shows up to Your DH Course?

This case study explores the challenges in developing a digital humanities curriculum at a small liberal arts university. In 2015 we launched DH Studio, a series of one-credit courses taught by library faculty on specific topics within digital scholarship, such as scholarly text encoding or digital history. This year librarians also were asked to teach a 4-credit DH 101 course. With strong university leadership and faculty support behind the emerging DH program, what could go wrong? 

As a lab course for the humanities, each DH Studio is paired as a co-requisite with a humanities course. Functioning as a lab component, DH Studio addresses the need for in-depth learning of digital topics without sacrificing class time from the humanities courses. The aim is to provide students with the conceptual foundation and practical experience to understand why they’re using certain digital methods and tools in their assignments and research projects. 

Our pedagogical innovation is failing in one key area: enrollment. Even with a highly collaborative faculty and the dean of the college as a champion for DH, logistical concerns like registration and degree requirements curtail enrollment in the new courses. 

The lessons we learned while developing and teaching DH Studio and a more extensive DH 101 course have refocused our attention on student engagement. This presentation will cover motivations and practical considerations for developing curriculum based on digital scholarship in a liberal arts environment.

Presenters: Mackenzie Brooks, Jeff Barry

Building a DH Community of Practice in the Liberal Arts College Library

At the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of five undergraduate liberal arts colleges and two graduate universities, the library is not just a container for Digital Humanities events. Claremont librarians have made it a vital center to foster digital scholarship among librarians, faculty, and students interested in integrating digital technology in their instruction and research. Through planning and facilitating symposia, workshops, a summer institute, and an introductory short course for faculty, librarians have become an integral part of the DH community and digital skilling process at the Claremont Colleges. 

To meet the needs of interested but inexperienced faculty members, the library offered a six-week course to introduce Digital Humanities methodologies. Each week we examined a different trend or methodology, including data visualization, spatial and temporal pattern finding, network analysis, and topic modeling. Through our conversations, we interrogated the underlying epistemologies of the theories and technologies under investigation, as well as how those tools and approaches might support our own scholarship and pedagogy. Librarians were also actively involved in planning the Claremont Colleges’ inaugural DH Spring Symposium and Summer Institute this year. Sharing their expertise with the interested and growing DH community at the colleges, they offered workshops on digitization best practices, copyright and fair use, sharing scholarship online, digital pedagogy and instructional design, responsible digital citizenship, and developing one’s digital identity. 

In this way, Claremont Colleges librarians are offering services, in alignment with the library’s traditional mission. Just as importantly, they are positioning themselves as experts in their own right, as well as potential digital scholarship collaborators on faculty projects. What is more, over the next two years, the library will launch several of its own digital scholarly projects based on special collections materials to participate in knowledge production and to train undergraduate and graduate students in digital humanities research and publication.

Presenter: Ashley Sanders, Ph.D

Supporting DH/DS at Liberal Arts Colleges: Organizing for Sustainability

As digital humanities (DH) and digital scholarship (DS) proliferate at liberal arts colleges (LACs), librarians have become engaged with DH/DS projects on their campuses. As such, now is a good time to reflect on our varied roles and ask questions about the efficacy of our organizations for DH/DS. This presentation will explore the tensions between the organizational structures of LAC libraries and the myriad ways that DH/DS is currently supported at LACs. Drawing from a survey and analysis of models among LAC libraries, the presenters will explore the considerations that can inform a successful DH/DS framework. 

While the mission and values of LACs present unique opportunities to engage with innovative scholarship and pedagogy, our infrastructures present some specific challenges to supporting and providing leadership for team-based, labor-intensive projects. Among other issues, we will consider how perennial challenges facing LAC libraries -- the evolution of the librarian’s role from narrowly defined to expansive and fluid, technological and infrastructural limitations, the roles of undergraduate students in supporting faculty research and teaching -- translate into the realm of DH/DS support. 

Further, the traditional organizational models of libraries generally create barriers for fostering a robust DH/DS program. While the prospect for changing organizational structures may seem remote, we argue that librarians have the experience and perspective to optimize support for DH/DS, especially given the relationship-driven nature of LAC culture. Finally, we raise questions about how collaborations based on factors besides geography may be particularly fruitful for addressing skill and infrastructure gaps on LAC campuses.

Presenters: Jason Paul, Heather Tompkins

The Institution and Communal Project Development

Liberal arts colleges that are engaged in digital scholarship, be it aspirationally or actually, have an opportunity to reframe what we have come to recognize as "collaborative" digital scholarship. Because their campuses and populations (spatially speaking) are generally more condensed, the opportunities are greater (probabilistically speaking) for serendipitous interdisciplinary and interdepartmental exchange of ideas. As many practitioners and pedagogues will attest, however, the answers to our questions both technological and theoretical are rarely found in this way. I want to suggest that we might usefully reconsider "collaborative" work on digital projects as, instead, "communal" work.

Presenter: Jacob Heil

No Limits?

What are the limits of digital scholarship centers in the liberal arts college environment? From the past few years of conversation we know that our organizations are consulting on the use of digital scholarly tools, developing new learning spaces, advancing forms of scholarly communication, creating and managing digital resources, and defining information and media literacies. In this session I will ask whether it is strategically wise to tackle all of these challenges simultaneously, if there is a “natural order” for development, and if there are limits to the role that centers may play in a liberal arts context.

Presenter: Daniel Chamberlain

Ways and Means toward a Digital Projects Committee

Entering the digital realm can be a challenge for any institution; technology is constantly advancing, digital preservation strategies are not always clear, and resources are limited. This can be especially true for liberal arts colleges where library staffing is often smaller and as a result staff are constantly balancing competing priorities while wearing multiple hats.
At the University of Puget Sound we have developed a decentralized committee to oversee digital projects with the goal of making our unique material available electronically. Three staff members from the library with the appropriate skill sets were tasked with forming the committee in 2013 and since that time have researched and implemented policies on collecting born digital content, digitizing existing material, and assigning metadata to digital objects. The committee is made up of the Archivist and Special Collections Librarian who oversees digitization and content from the Archives & Special Collections and coordinates the work of our committee, the Metadata Librarian who advises on metadata, and the Business Liaison Librarian who coordinates outreach efforts around the institutional repository.

We will discuss the formation and work of our committee, including the development of workflows, guidelines and policies; how this decentralized model works and how it might be adapted by other institutions; and ways that we are working to further decentralize this model by empowering our librarian colleagues to begin discussions and promote use of the digital collections, lead future projects, and create metadata for collections affiliated with the departments in their subject areas.

Presenters: Katie Henningsen, Hilary Robbeloth

Sometimes You’re the Boat, Sometimes You’re the Wave: Responding to and Initiating Change in Digital Collections Stewardship

Rachel Vagts, Head of Special Collections & Archives, and Daniel Weddington, Technology Coordinator for Special Collections & Archives, are both recent hires at Berea College, a small liberal arts work college in central Kentucky. They will use their experience navigating a dramatic digital collections refocus at Berea College as a case study for how to leverage the opportunities and challenges presented by organizational transition to better position a Special Collections & Archives at a small liberal arts school to serve its responsibilities for digital stewardship. 

After a near decade-long grant-funded digitization effort, Berea College Special Collections & Archives had over 100TB worth of audio/visual material housed on 50 external hard drives with no plan in place for long-term storage, preservation, or access. Additionally, if found itself under new leadership, with multiple new staff hires, and a renewed grant-funder directive to increase digital access. Special Collections & Archives had become not only an organization with major digital collection responsibilities, but one in the midst of significant organizational transition. 

Rachel and Daniel’s talk will highlight how they were able to use organizational transition as an opportunity to attempt new, innovative, and necessary approaches to meet the challenges of managing a large digital collection at a small liberal arts institution. They will illustrate how effectively reacting to and initiating change led to new approaches in work processes and arrangements; increased communication and collaboration; and, ultimately, more strategic, efficient management of digital collections. Finally, they will discuss, more broadly, the challenges of managing high expectations for digital content within an organization in flux.

Presenters: Rachel Vagts, Daniel Weddington

Creating a Culture of Experimentation: The Studio@Butler

The Studio@Butler is a space where students, faculty, librarians, and technologists come together in structured and unstructured ways to nurture a culture of exploration and interdisciplinary collaboration to solve research problems in the humanities and social sciences, share technological expertise, and generate new services and technology for the larger Columbia University community. Models for how this space is organized are the artist’s studio, the science lab, and the startup loft. These types of spaces are characterized by open, grass-roots architecture, a variety of working surfaces, the presence of projectors and whiteboards—all requirements that are inexpensive to maintain in the long term. 

The activities of the Studio@Butler complement the broad support services provided by the Digital Humanities Center (DHC). The DHC in the Columbia University Libraries is a space where software and peripherals are made accessible to the research community, and where faculty and students can come to receive consultation and guidance at the intersection of subject expertise and the use of technology in the humanities, The Studio@Butler builds on that foundation as a BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) space for more advanced users to explore emergent technologies and emergent forms of collaboration. Where the DHC is a place of focused work—somewhere in between the quiet reading cubicle and small group-study sessions—the Studio@Butler is a place of disruption and creative ex-centricity, often involving heated debates around a whiteboard, and a place with the freedom of movement and voice needed for collaborative creation. 

The space has been open for two years and this presentation will focus on the projects and collaborations that have been made possible as a result of this low-tech, flexible, library-based space.

NW5C Research Data Management & Curation Workshop: A Collaborative Model for Liberal Arts Colleges

In this presentation, we discuss a team-based workshop on data management and curation organized by librarians from the five liberal arts colleges in the Northwest Five Consortium: Willamette University, Whitman College, University of Puget Sound, Reed College, and Lewis & Clark College. The consortium supports collaborative sharing of experience and expertise in support of the core value of integrating teaching and scholarship. Liberal arts data management support faces many of the same challenges, such as issues of scalability and outreach, that other innovative projects face in such environments. We envisioned this workshop as a place to take advantage of the close-knit community structures of liberal arts colleges and bring many of the stakeholders in research data management together to collaborate at a broader consortial level. The model for the workshop was a team from each institution connected to a specific research project: a faculty researcher, one or two student researchers, a librarian, and, optionally, a representative from IT or other technical support. Pre-workshop preparation in the form of a Data Curation Profile interview was used to elucidate the data issues of their team and to help shape the workshop structure. The workshop presented the big-picture challenges and best practices of research data management, and then allowed teams to work on applying these ideas to their own projects. Central to our conception of this workshop was the involvement of undergraduate student researchers in the discussion and implementation of research data management within their groups’ research projects. By involving undergraduate students as well as researchers, IT/tech support, and librarians in a collaborative, cross-campus discussion of research data management best practices and their applications for current research projects, we hope to improve the research data management infrastructure and implementation on our campuses and to consider new avenues for collaboration.

Playing to our strengths: Collaboration and maximizing resources to build the RDC platform.

For years, Reed College has been struggling with a digital asset management system that didn’t quite meet the unique needs of our campus. Faculty often request extensive interface customizations for their digital collections, the proprietary software (CONTENTdm) no longer fits our environment, and technology infrastructure issues have created a pyramid of unsustainable workarounds. In 2013, Reed College began to explore alternatives. After surveying the landscape by talking to other liberal arts colleges, national vendors, and local academic institutions, no existing platform seemed to be the right fit. We decided to tap into the expertise on our campus and build a flexible, scalable platform that is customized to our campus environment. Reed Digital Collections (RDC) is a collaborative effort between the Library, Technology Infrastructure Services, and Web Support Services. 

Specifically, this panel will discuss:

• Why Liberal Arts Colleges are in a unique position to tap local expertise to creatively solve problems.
• Criteria for the new system, options considered, and reasons why we chose to build a homegrown system.
• Challenges and benefits of the system design and implementation process.
• Negotiating time for personnel, establishing effective communication, and sustaining a flexible environment in order to maximize limited resources to best serve the local community.
• Technical aspects of design: architectural decisions, major components, and system data model.

Collaborating Liberally, Creating Critically: Experimenting With Undergraduate Digital Project Assignments

Liberal arts college librarians are increasingly collaborating with faculty on course design to incorporate creative digital media projects into their syllabi, supplementing or replacing traditional writing assignments. This presentation describes a collaboration between Smith librarians and a Department of Art faculty member to develop a unique digital assignment for students, creating digital tours of a pre-Columbian site in Latin America. 

We believe innovative partnerships like this fit squarely into liberal arts traditions of interdisciplinarity and criticality. Librarians and faculty collaborated to design an assignment and instruction session on the affordances, ideology, and limitations of four digital platforms -- Twine, Wordpress, Omeka, and iMovie -- and help students decide which one would be most suitable for advancing their “digital argument,” creating a praxis of course concepts, thesis, information architecture, and user experience for the digital project. Student projects were extremely diverse, from building a critical Twine mobile tour of Chichen Itza for Chinese tourists to 3D scanning artifacts from the Smith College Museum of Art for inclusion in a virtual gallery. 

Undergraduate digital scholarship work forces us to work across traditional departmental lines, develop experimental collaborations with a wide range of campus units, and engage students as partners in research and creation. The emerging academic discourse around Critical Making encourages us to consider the designed nature of digital systems and interfaces, then analyze and deconstruct them through hacking, playing, and creating new interfaces of our own. 

Using examples from student work, we will show how students learned to deeply read and critique digital work, work across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and then make arguments through digital design and interface, along with text and images. Finally, we will discuss Smith’s Design Thinking and the Liberal Arts Framework and future directions for collaborations with faculty members at Smith.

Presenter: Brendan O'Connell

Beyond A Cabinet of Digital Curiosities: Collection as Praxis

How can librarians in a liberal arts setting collaborate with faculty to deepen student engagement with digital collections while also teaching about the process of collecting? Despite challenges faced by many small, liberal arts colleges—understaffing, limited technological resources—we are committed to developing programmatic efforts to help support and sustain digital pedagogy on campus. For the past two years, in partnership with an instructional technologist, an archivist and instructional librarian at Whitman College have attempted to promote innovative assignments that move beyond the research paper by promoting the deployment of Omeka across the curriculum at Whitman College. 

We will discuss two courses that have made extensive use of Omeka. One required students to create their own digital racial archives to see how this project of collecting reproduced or resisted traditional understandings of race in the American context. In subsequent iterations of the course, students have been asked to make some kind of intervention to an extant collection, thus helping underscore students’ own roles as knowledge creators not merely knowledge consumers. Another course required students to create exhibits from pre-populated content that was digitized with the support of a modest institutional grant. Both courses attempted to introduce students to the crucial concepts of provenance and metadata and to the archival practices of arrangement and description as they apply to digital collections and digital collecting. 

Our hope is to demonstrate how others, especially those with limited technological resources, can promote similar types of collaborations on their campuses. We also discuss our strategy for small scale promotion of local digital collections and the ways in which they can be mobilized to support undergraduate research and digital literacy across disciplines. Finally, we will describe possible future directions for ways to continue to reuse and repurpose the collections created through these types of collaborations."

Presenters: Melissa Salrin, Ben Murphy

Digital Scholarship & The Liberal Arts in a Newly-Merged Library

**10/25/15: Please note: this first portion of the session has been canceled.**

In December, Trinity College announced that it was partnering with edX to produce MOOCs; in March, our president announced the merger of the library and IT organizations, with the CIO taking over both. While either development might well have elicited concern from the faculty, taken together they raised real concern about the library's role on campus. Meanwhile, within the organizations, areas of overlap and shared responsibility have caused both concern and confusion. This paper will discuss some initial efforts of the educational technology (IT) and research education (library) groups to use a shared interest in digital scholarship to give new focus and energy to outreach efforts. Revivifying work in open access and in open educational resources, as well as productive ways of mobilizing digital resources in the classroom, are helping the newly-merged organization to think through both questions of structure and of self-representation.

Presenter: Jason B. Jones

Digital Scholarship at Bucknell: It's About Building Relationships

Charged with creating a digital humanities initiative that was innovative, intentional, and collaborative, Library and Information Technology realized that we required an inclusive approach that opened up digital scholarship to all divisions at Bucknell while emphasizing the liberal arts’ commitment to student engagement. Short answer: it’s about building relationships. 

Ten years ago Bucknell’s Digital Initiatives group, Instructional Technology (ITEC), and Research Services were responsive service providers, but did little to drive innovation. Today, a reimagined ITEC, comprised of instructional technologists, GIS and multi-media specialists, postdocs, and digital scholarship coordinators leads digital scholarship efforts on campus by moving from transactional to transformational interactions in order to foster lasting partnerships. 

As an instructional technology group, we have found that our first interactions with faculty are often helping to develop an assignment for a course. Even in these early conversations, we consult on pedagogical design when discussing timelines, training, digital literacies, privacy, and assessment of multi-modal projects. Moving forward, the relationships we build with faculty and students often involve collaborations on scholarship, multi-semester projects, summer research grants (for students to work with faculty and members of ITEC), making connections across disciplines and divisions, and faculty course redesigns, all of which impact students and their engagement in coursework and scholarly research. 

While there are challenges for building digital scholarship efforts at a LACs, ITEC maintains a unique position as a hybrid group--with strengths in academics and technology--within a merged L&IT division. This allows us to draw on the expertise of our research librarians, web programmers, and systems integration team. Building a cohort of digital practitioners hasn’t been all unicorns and rainbows, there have been learning curves, failures, and workflow challenges arising out of our own success. We’ll be sure to cover it all in twenty minutes and include a picture of a puppy.

Presenters: Emily Sherwood, Matthew Gardzina