Collaboration, Not Chaos: Managing Collaborative Project Work

The flexibility and small size of the liberal arts college library naturally leads to collaboration across institutional lines, and even more so in the creation of digital scholarship. This summer, Haverford College Libraries undertook multiple cross-departmental and institutional digital projects, each with its own challenges. Three of these projects serve as illustrative examples of collaborative digital scholarship at Haverford. The Cope Evans Project: a web-based data visualization project using transcribed special collections materials, involving undergraduates, library staff, and special collections staff. It was built using Django, the D3 and Mapbox.js Javascript libraries, and a Bootstrap theme. The Bridge: a teaching tool that allows Classics students and teachers to build customized Greek and Latin vocabulary lists developed by undergraduates, library staff, and a faculty member. It was built in Django with custom Bootstrap styling. The Solidarity Economy: a qualitative and quantitative social science research project, involving undergraduates, Haverford library staff, Haverford faculty, an outside technology consultant, and faculty and graduate students from other institutions. This project involves GIS mapping, a PostGIS database hosted on a local Geoserver, and the Qualtrics survey platform. Our work on these and other projects raised many questions surrounding the planning, management, and coordination of cross-departmental and cross-institutional project work. We learned valuable lessons about structuring and planning projects, managing stakeholder expectations (and our own), and how to support multiple technical frameworks for each project. We also learned how capable our undergraduates are when they are given significant responsibilities and allowed to learn new skills on the job. We look forward to sharing our experiences and lessons learned on working with faculty, staff, and students

Beyond grunt work : putting students at the center of digital scholarship

Amherst, Haverford, and Middlebury Colleges are all small, undergraduate-focused institutions wrestling with what Digital Scholarship and Digital Humanities means for us and our communities. One method we have used to focus our explorations is to create and support undergraduate employment and internships in Digital Scholarship. At Middlebury College, the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative (DLA) is a Mellon-funded, campus-wide opportunity for faculty to explore digital scholarship methods. Special Collections, an area of digital expertise within the DLA, received funding for a Digital Film Preservation Student Assistant. This position, occupied by the one of the founding members of the Student Darkroom Club, plays a key role in the digitization, indexing, cataloging, research, and outreach efforts associated with an ongoing project to digitize the Middlebury College’s archival films. During the academic year, Haverford College Libraries co-sponsor the Digital Scholarship Fellows program. Fellows engage in a series of workshops where they develop skills in the use of technology to ask scholarly questions and collaboratively plan, develop, and build a digital scholarship project over the course of the year. In the summer months, Haverford Libraries offers several internships to create digital scholarship projects involving both library collections materials and faculty research. The Amherst College Library’s Digital Programs Department sponsors and coordinates a Digital Scholarship Internship program for a cohort of three to four students over the length of the summer. The program introduces students to a range of methodologies and techniques, as well as research, archival and digital collections, team-based learning, and project management skills. By the end of the summer, they develop and build a digital scholarship project based around an archival collection. Our panelists will discuss the structures of their programs, similarities and differences between them, and offer advice for other institutions which may wish to begin similar initiatives.Non UBCUnreviewedFacultyOthe

From Coursework to Community of Practice: Realizing the Potential of Undergraduate Digital Fellows Programs

The growth of digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has opened new methodological, pedagogical, and ethical horizons for undergraduate research: there are new tools to use and teach, new archives to approach with a transformative critical lens, and new commitments to ethical collaboration on the many types of labor and expertise that digital projects entail. At the same time, digital scholarship is likely to be funded and staffed contingently, with the most funding and prestige likely to gravitate toward large research-driven institutions. In this fertile and fraught environment, how can we create meaningful critical digital scholarship experiences for students at small undergraduate institutions? We propose a roundtable of digital scholarship program coordinators in undergraduate liberal arts settings to share practices, experiences, and open questions. Our programs demonstrate a range of approaches to recruitment, compensation, curriculum, and funding. By sharing and comparing the origins and goals of our programs, we will outline a number of ways that the possible world of students as full collaborators in digital scholarly research and pedagogy can begin to be realized. Some of the questions we anticipate opening include: how do we build sustainable programs in this field? What is more motivating to students: being paid or being supported in independent research or receiving academic credit? How do we structure training, learning, and feedback to make these programs valuable for students? How do we balance the roles of supervisor, mentor, and collaborator? How do we get good work done while striving for ethical and sustainable practice

Broadwell et al. 2020, Ticha: Collaboration with Indigenous communities to build digital resources on Zapotec language and history

There are hundreds of alphabetic texts in Zapotec languages dating back to the 16th century. Today, however, Zapotec speakers are generally unable to read these texts, due to lack of access to the texts and an unfamiliarity with the orthographic practices. Moreover, significant changes have taken place in the grammar in the intervening centuries. This results in a situation where Zapotec people may not have access to history in their own language. Ticha is an online digital text explorer that provides access to images, transcriptions, analysis, and translations of the Colonial Zapotec texts. The Ticha project includes in-person workshops with Zapotec community members as part of an iterative development process. Feedback from these interactions inform design decisions for the project. Here we reflect on transnational collaboration with stakeholders in building a digital scholarship project that seeks to use the power of digital humanities to democratize access to materials and resources which were previously the exclusive domain of a few experts. When community members have access to important documents from their own history, archiving, scholarship, and community engagement can be brought together in a powerful synthesis

How Much Will This Place Cost? Creating and Maintaining Digital Scholarship Centers

The mushrooming of digital scholarship programs and centers in universities around the country and the world has led to a growing literature on the use of physical and virtual spaces in support of digital work. In this open-ended discussion a group of professionals with knowledge and experience in best practices in digital scholarship centers (DSCs) will offer insights into the process of forming functional DS spaces, including discussion of constructive failures in DSC planning. Participation in the discussion by all attendees is welcome and encouraged