Not to be confused with the phrase, “thinking outside the box,” of course.

As Laurie Allen (@librlaurie) and I continue to build our support for digital scholarship at Haverford College, we are frequently asked by faculty and staff members to describe exactly what we mean by the phrase “digital scholarship.”  While the both of us are willing to speak theoretically on the topic all day long, we think a more effective strategy in “selling” our services to faculty is to show examples of what we’ve done and what we can do.  To this end, we have begun (with the help of our highly-skilled student workers) to develop templates for several web-based platforms like Omeka and WordPress for various types of digital scholarship projects that can be built quickly and simply.  I often refer to these as our “out-of-the-box solutions.”  Laurie frequently uses the phrase “digital toolboxes,” but whatever moniker we use, we feel that providing some parameters for our services will help encourage faculty to dip their toes into the digital scholarship pool.  Once we’ve worked with faculty members on simpler projects, the door will hopefully be open to more ambitious projects in the near future.

My hope is that our THATCamp@Penn experience will provide exposure to additional platforms or tools that would allow us to expand our suite of “out-of-the-box” solutions, and I would like to discuss the viability of this approach in general.  Does this seem like an effective strategy for building library support for digital scholarship, particularly at a liberal arts college?  Or do we run the risk of severely limiting the types of work we can do in the future?

I look forward to discussing these questions with fellow THATCampers in April!

Digital Humanities covers a lot of ground.  I often assume that each new project must be a highly customized creation for a specific research interest and will have little in common with other projects.  But I want to challenge that assumption.  I’ll be listening to identify ideas for new tools or services that can be applied to a variety of projects in the future.  For example, I sometimes hear about the need to create interactive maps, including those showing borders that no longer exist.  Or tools that allow researchers to create text overlays on high resolution images of historical documents – making it easy to see both the original and translated text.   So, what are the tools that would be really useful to a variety of interests?  That’s what I want to find out.

Even though there are now countless example projects to point to in the world of Digital Scholarship, I’m still looking for more ways to encourage faculty to think about the opportunities for their own research and teaching on our own small campus. As we build a program to expand our capacity to partner with faculty and students in the creation of new forms of scholarship, my colleague (@MikeZarafonetis) and I have been working with our awesome student workers on creating “Digital Toolboxes”. I’m hoping these toolboxes will serve two functions. First, by providing a couple of models for each tool (Omeka and WordPress to start), we’ll help faculty see clear, local examples of the kinds of projects they can engage in (using material from our own Library Special Collections). And secondly, by experimenting in small sample projects and documenting our process, we’ll increase our skill and ability in working with those tools. I’m hoping THATCamp@Penn can help us discover more “use cases” for these toolboxes, maybe find some local partners, and/or throw the whole notion up in the air and help us discover something new!

THATCampers might be interested in this conference hosted by the Center for the Humanities at Temple, where I’m currently a fellow. It will be a great opportunity to listen to really smart people talk about the politics of digital representation from a different angle!

Through THATCamp Philly, I became interested in using Omeka as a platform for presenting my own research and gathering materials from interested readers to effectively create a user-generated digital archive. Since I work on a topic of public interest in the very recent past (my dissertation is on African American AIDS activism) I think this would probably be a good way to present my work online while producing the raw material for others to do history on the same topic. Recent examples of this approach that I’ve seen include the Bracero History Archive and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Historian’s Eye. Perhaps we could talk about the pleasures and perils of merging our own research with such a platform, or theoretical and methodological issues related to curating user-generated content.

I would like to investigate attributes such as: how many encounters with a given technology are necessary before an individual becomes comfortable using it? Is this truly an individual characteristic or is it possible to identify a general threshold? In what ways should introduction to a given technology be tailored to increase individual self-efficacy? In cases, where a technology is adopted as a supportive tool for content knowledge, how do we know whether it is in fact increasing an individual’s understanding of the content? E.g., how does representation of knowledge through a web based medium change understanding of content? Finally, I am interested in exploring what makes people resist use of technology and why?