Reading Critically from the Archives: James Merrill Linn’s Diary as a Gateway to the Past

Archival research and reading from the archives have long been embraced as a scholarly research practice in humanities disciplines. While scholars may spend weeks or months poring over hidden treasures found in archives, undergraduate students are often not exposed to these materials in a hands-on way. However, college and university libraries often have archival collections tucked away that can facilitate learning when used in thoughtfully crafted assignments. In this chapter, we discuss how we used Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and archival materials to provide students with an opportunity to engage in a close and critical reading of excerpts from the Civil War era diary of James Merrill Linn

You Built It, but Can You Talk About It?

Gettysburg College and Bucknell University have adopted library-led summer research fellowships for undergraduates that focus on teaching research skills with digital methods. In the summer of 2017, Gettysburg and Bucknell\u27s student cohorts met to learn how to create elevator speeches for their research topics; R.C. Miessler (Gettysburg), and Carrie Pirmann and Courtney Paddick (Bucknell), talk about the structure and goals of their summer programs, with a focus on their combined session and the importance of helping students learn how to talk about their research

From the Ground Up: Building a Student-Centered Digital Scholarship Program

In Summer 2017, Bucknell’s Digital Scholarship Student Research Fellows (DSSRF) program welcomed its inaugural cohort. DSSRF is a librarian-led program which introduces students to digital scholarship tools and methodologies, and equips them with the skills necessary to undertake an independent, digitally-based research project. In this presentation, co-facilitators Courtney Paddick and Carrie Pirmann will discuss how the idea of DSSRF was brought to fruition, lessons learned from the first year of the program, and the importance of collaboration (both on campus and interinstitutional) in facilitating a meaningful learning experience for students. Rennie Heza \u2718, Justin Guzman ‘19, and Minglu Xu ‘20, members of the first DSSRF cohort, will talk about their experiences in the program and what drew them to digital scholarship

Bridging Communities of Practice: Cross-Institutional Collaboration for Undergraduate Digital Scholars

At Bucknell University and Gettysburg College, an increasing focus on supporting creative undergraduate research as intensive, high-impact experiences has resulted in both institutions implementing library-led digital scholarship fellowships for their students. Gettysburg’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship began in 2016, and Bucknell’s Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellowship in 2017. While academic libraries have emerged as leaders on college campuses for digital humanities (DH) services, the programs at Gettysburg and Bucknell are distinctive in their structured curricula, a focus on independent student research, and the development of a local community of practice. In this chapter, we explore the development of cross-institutional communities of practice grounded in the digital humanities, and the ways in which we brought students in our two programs together

Bridging Communities of Practice: Cross-Institutional Collaboration for Undergraduate Digital Scholars

At Bucknell University and Gettysburg College, an increasing focus on supporting creative undergraduate research as intensive, high-impact experiences has resulted in both institutions implementing library-led digital scholarship fellowships for their students. Gettysburg’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship began in 2016, and Bucknell’s Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellowship in 2017.1 While academic libraries have emerged as leaders on college campuses for digital humanities (DH) services, the programs at Gettysburg and Bucknell are distinctive in their structured curricula, a focus on independent student research, and the development of a local community of practice. Each program situates undergraduate research in the field of digital humanities, providing methodological and technological support as students explore their own topics of humanistic inquiry and develop public-facing digital projects during the summer. [excerpt

Assessing the Impact of an Undergraduate Digital Humanities Summer Research Program

This presentation examines the lasting impacts of an undergraduate digital scholarship research program on the participants. We surveyed past Digital Scholarship Summer Research Fellows (DSSRF) to understand how their participation and the skills they acquired were applicable to their subsequent coursework and career paths, and how the program influenced their thinking about scholarship. DSSRF is an eight week, librarian-led summer fellowship which introduces students to digital humanities tools and methodologies, and equips them with the skills necessary to undertake an independent, digitally-based research project. Thus far, there has been limited research on the impact of digital humanities summer research programs. We have previously relied on informal assessment of the program, but through this survey will conduct a more formal assessment and gather student reflections. We believe sharing this information with the broader digital humanities community will be informative to others facilitating or considering developing undergraduate summer research programs

Packwood House Digital Archive

The Packwood House Digital Archive of the Personal Papers, Ephemera, and Photographs of John and Edith Fetherston Professor Janice Mann (Art History) and Rebecca Reeve (Art History ’17) collaborated on a research project during the summer of 2016 to digitize archival materials in the Packwood House Museum. The Packwood House was the residence of Bucknell graduate Edith Fetherston and her husband, John. Reeve worked with Courtney Paddick and Carrie Johnston to learn how to scan, digitize, and write metadata for the collection of postcards that Edith Fetherston received from friends traveling the globe in the early twentieth century. Reeve and Mann are generating an Omeka exhibit that will showcase these postcards and eventually serve as an online repository and virtual museum for the entirety of the Packwood House papers and collections. This research collaboration grew out of Mann’s fall 2015 course, “The West Imagines the Rest,” in which students learned about the ways westerners interpret and collect eastern art. During the course, students worked alongside Emily Sherwood to create a virtual guide for the museum, which featured Edith Fetherston’s collections from her travels in Asia. Site: http://packwood.omeka.bucknell.edu/omeka