Digital Humanities Commons^™

Digital Scholarship And Data Science Intersect In Libraries: A Needs Assessment Report, Halie Kerns

Library Created Resources

The following report summarized the results of a needs assessment completed in the fall of 2023 at Binghamton University by the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship team. The aim was to understand how data science-focused programming, as part of the digital scholarship’s offerings, would be utilized on campus. The report evaluates existing literature, summarizes findings from twenty-eight interviews done across campus, and lays out an action plan for the Digital Scholarship team’s future planning.

Bridging Communities Of Practice: Cross-Institutional Collaboration For Undergraduate Digital Scholars, Carrie M. Pirmann, R.C. Miessler, Clinton Baugess, Kevin Moore, Courtney Paddick

Faculty Contributions to Books

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 …

Layer Upon Layer: Starting Small, Thinking Big, And Building Sustainable Digital Projects, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

While many digital scholarship tools and computational methods can play an important role in digital humanities research at all stages, it’s usually the final output that is the most visible element of these projects. This talk will explore exhibits built using the Omeka platform with a particular focus on incorporating the Neatline plugin to create interactive maps. Continuing with maps, we will look at some possibilities for including these in projects built using the Scalar platform. We will also talk more generally about getting started with digital humanities projects and planning for sustainability.

From Bankers To Farmers: Finding A Sustainable Model For An Undergraduate Summer Dh Program, R.C. Miessler, Kevin Moore

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Librarians R.C. Miessler and Kevin Moore provide an overview of how summer Digital Humanities programs at Musselman Library entered their last year of grant funding with an eye toward securing a commitment of institutional support. The presenters will reflect upon the overall sustainability of Musselman Library’s Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship program and share their plans for ongoing management of the program.

Gathering Online: Leveraging Tools For Instruction And Group Work In The Classroom And Beyond, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This talk focused on the librarian-led activities for the course Community Engagement Seminar, highlighting collaboration, teaching and learning, outcomes, and other uses of Scalar. This course focused on ways that K-12 school personnel create successful learning environments. Incorporating mapping, data visualization, and digital publishing, we taught students how to use several online tools and create a Scalar book that presented their research. Through a mixture of Zoom instructional sessions and personalized consultations, we helped students use Scalar to collaborate with their group members and build skills to successfully communicate goals, strategies, and outcomes to a broader community.

We also focused …

Curators And Active Participants: Archives, Exhibits, Engagement, And Outreach Through Teaching, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This presentation focuses on how a set of digital humanities workshops offered to university faculty helped them incorporate new resources and methods into their teaching. The first workshop was an overview of digital tools that focused on getting started without feeling overwhelmed, ways to incorporate art and archival resources into projects, and approaches to facilitating meaningful experiences in the classroom. The second workshop refined this material by focusing on how the same idea and content could be used to create three different digital humanities projects—a collection database and map, an online exhibit, and a digital publication. The exhibitions and digital …

Findable, Impactful, Citable, Usable, Sustainable (Ficus): A Heuristic For Authors Of Digital Publishing Projects, Nicky Agate, Cheryl E. Ball, Alison Belan, Monica Mccormick, Joshua Neds-Fox

Library Scholarly Publications

We came together in Spring 2018 at a two-day think tank hosted by Duke University Libraries and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with dozens of other librarians, publishers, and scholarly communication stakeholders, to work on the question of sustainably publishing large digital projects. The outcome of that discussion turned into an extended project at TriangleSCI 2018 and culminated in the heuristic presented here.The heuristic can be used as a checklist to help authors (and their project team) assess their needs when it comes to making their digital projects findable, impactful, citable, usable, and sustainable (creating the acronym FICUS).

A Journey Through The Development Of A Dh Program For Undergraduates, R.C. Miessler, Clinton K. Baugess, John Dettinger, Kevin Moore

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In institutions that do not actively integrate DH into the curriculum, introducing undergraduates to DH tools and methods can be difficult. However, Gettysburg College has facilitated a summer research experience for undergraduates. This interactive workshop will introduce participants to the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship program and provide a high-level overview of its development and implementation. Workshop leaders will provide guidance on developing a summer program tailored to participants' institution's needs and aspirations. Participants will come away with strategies for identifying stakeholders and partners, developing program goals, selecting digital tools, designing workshops, and methods to incorporate aspects of assessment and sustainability.

Digital Scholarship: Current Challenges In Hiring, Promotion, And Tenure, Bridget Whearty

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric Faculty Scholarship

This is the performance script and slides (embedded) of my Oct 11, 2019 talk given at the University of Albany Library's Digital Scholarship Conference--Digital Scholarship: Opportunities and Challenges (see https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/dsconf/).

This talk examines how local conditions can strongly discourage pretenure faculty from engaging in innovative digital work. Arguing that individual faculty, larger institutions, local communities, and the humanities themselves lose out when digital scholarship is not adequately valued, I offer an "alternative universe tenure timeline," outlining some of the work I would have done in the past five years if digital scholarship was valued for promotion and tenure.

Undergraduate Digital Scholarship At Gettysburg College, R.C. Miessler, Kevin Moore, Emma K. Lewis

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Musselman Library’s Digital Scholarship Committee supports high-impact student projects that use digital tools and methods to interpret, analyze, and present humanistic research. In addition to facilitating an eight-week summer research fellowship, the Committee partners with faculty members to design and oversee digital projects introduced as course assignments. This poster provides an overview of the Committee’s activities from fall 2015 through spring 2019.

Thinking Digitally, Together: Models For Digital Scholarship At Gettysburg College, Amy E. Lucadamo, R.C. Miessler, Lauren E. White

R.C. Miessler

Systems Librarian R.C. Miessler, College Archivist Amy Lucadamo, and senior Lauren White, discuss how Musselman Library has been involved in digital scholarship conversations and activities at Gettysburg, and invite discussion on how a campus-wide model for digital scholarship could emerge.

Dreaming Big: Library-Led Digital Scholarship For Undergraduates At A Small Institution, Janelle Wertzberger, R.C. Miessler

R.C. Miessler

In the summer of 2016, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library piloted a student-focused, library-led initiative designed to promote creative undergraduate research: the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship. The fellowship is a ten-week, paid summer program for rising sophomores and juniors that introduces the student fellows to digital scholarship, exposes them to a range of digital tools, and provides space for them to converse with appropriate partners about research practices and possibilities. Unlike other research fellowship opportunities, the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship is programmatic, based on a curriculum designed to provide students a broad introduction to digital scholarship. Digital tools, project management, documentation, …

#Dssf16: Library-Led Digital Scholarship For Undergraduates At A Small Institution, R.C. Miessler, Keira B. Koch, Julia C. Wall, Lauren E. White

R.C. Miessler

In the summer of 2016, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library piloted the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship (DSSF), a library-led, student-centered introduction to digital scholarship. The Fellowship, a 10-week, paid, summer program for rising sophomores and juniors, is programmatic, based on a curriculum designed to introduce the student fellows to digital tools, project management, documentation, and the philosophy behind digital scholarship. The Fellowship aimed to create a digital scholarship community of practice at Gettysburg College, collaborating with educational technologists and faculty engaged in digital scholarship to support the needs of the first cohort; in addition, the Fellowship supported the digital scholarship activities …

Developing A Community Of Practice Among Undergraduate Digital Scholars, R.C. Miessler, Janelle Wertzberger

R.C. Miessler

In the summer of 2016, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library piloted the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship (DSSF), a library-led, student-centered introduction to digital scholarship. For 10 weeks, a cohort of three undergraduate student fellows were introduced to digital tools, project management, research skills, and the philosophy behind digital scholarship, with the culmination the creation and presentation of a digital scholarship project. While the DSSF program is a library initiative, it drew support from partners from across campus, leveraging instructional support and the experience of digital scholarship practitioners from multiple departments to implement a broad curriculum in digital scholarship. The partners—who included …

Elementary, My Dear Watson: An Undergraduate Comic Books Course Using Enterprise Ai And Tei, Steven W. Holloway, Brian Flota

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Two librarians taught an Honors course at James Madison University titled “Comic Books, Analysis, and Digital Scholarship.” This non-coding-requirement course introduced students to the critical study of comic books by way of DH and online tools like IBM Watson. JMU Libraries has a growing collection of comic books (more than 10,000 single issues) and a commitment to foster DH research, hence rationale for the course. Students were introduced to online annotation platforms and comic-book-extended TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), using spreadsheet entry to code a Golden Age comic book in the public domain. In addition, the students used enterprise AI (IBM-Watson) …

Student As Expert: Peer Learning To Support Digital Scholarship In The Classroom, Clinton K. Baugess

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Libraries and librarians have adopted a variety of approaches to support digital humanities (DH). Rooted in a small college environment, this poster will detail a peer-learning model adopted by one library to support classroom digital projects with trained students, who have completed an 8-week summer digital scholarship fellowship. Similar to other peer learning models in libraries to expand instruction and reference services, trained students can expand a library’s support for DH by teaching in the classroom and providing consultations, enhance their own digital and presentation skills, and support student learning as both expert and peer.

This is a modified PowerPoint …

Using A Content Management System For Student Digital Humanities Projects: A Pilot Run, Amy E. Gay

Library Scholarship

Content management systems (CMS), a phrase that is defined pretty much how it reads--they are systems that manage digital content. If you have worked within a library’s archives, special collections, history and genealogy department, or within museums, you have probably used one either on the front end or managed digital collections on the backend. For this use case, I will share a pilot project using a newly developed content management system, Omeka S, for an undergraduate History class’ digital humanities projects.

Engaging The Archive And Its Absences: Futures Of Digital Scholarship And Teaching, Kelley Kreitz

Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference

Kelley specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. and Latin American literary studies, Latinx studies, digital humanities, and comparative media studies as an Assistant Professor of English at Pace University. In her research and teaching, she explores the role of media change past and present in enabling and inspiring shifts in the way we tell stories about current affairs. Kelley is also the co-founder and co-director of Babble Lab, a digital humanities center at Pace that seeks to reimagine how we teach the humanities through the use of data, design, and code and through the study of the new media of the …

Ted-Style Talk: It Takes A Village: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Supporting And Facilitating Digital Scholarship Initiatives, Jeffrey P. Emanuel

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The continued increase of digital tools and methods in both teaching and research has created a need for initial and ongoing support within institutions. While each institution has its own specific needs, we can learn a great deal from each other’s approaches and experiences. This presentation offers as a case study Harvard University’s recent (and ongoing) experience working across groups and divisional boundaries to support digital scholarship, digital methods-related courses, and the integration of digital components into courses and assignments through training, consultation, and the development and implementation of digital tools and methods.

3 Secrets Of The Digital Humanities That You Never Knew, Jennifer Hootman

Library Presentations

No abstract provided.

You Built It, But Can You Talk About It?, R.C. Miessler, Carrie Pirmann, Courtney Paddick

All Musselman Library Staff Works

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's 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.

Our Marathon: The Role Of Graduate Student And Library Labor In Making The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, Alicia Peaker, Jim Mcgrath

Library Staff Research and Scholarship

Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships brings forward ideas and reflections that stay fresh beyond the changing technological landscape. The book encapsulates a cultural shift for libraries and librarians and presents a collection of authors who reflect on the collaborations they have formed around digital humanities work. Authors examine a range of issues, including labor equity, digital infrastructure, digital pedagogy, and community partnerships. Readers will find kinship in the complexities of the partnerships described in this book, and become more equipped to conceptualize their own paths and partnerships.

Dreaming Big: Library-Led Digital Scholarship For Undergraduates At A Small Institution, Janelle Wertzberger, R.C. Miessler

Janelle Wertzberger

In the summer of 2016, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library piloted a student-focused, library-led initiative designed to promote creative undergraduate research: the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship. The fellowship is a ten-week, paid summer program for rising sophomores and juniors that introduces the student fellows to digital scholarship, exposes them to a range of digital tools, and provides space for them to converse with appropriate partners about research practices and possibilities. Unlike other research fellowship opportunities, the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship is programmatic, based on a curriculum designed to provide students a broad introduction to digital scholarship. Digital tools, project management, documentation, …

Digital Scholarship, With Undergraduates, In The Library, R.C. Miessler

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Three different Pennsylvania liberal arts colleges, Lafayette, Gettysburg, and Bucknell, have adopted library-led summer internship models as part of the effort to teach students about research using digital methods. Panelists from these colleges discuss perspectives on designing, leading, and adapting such programs, and on collaborating within and between institutions.

From The Ground Up: Building A Student-Centered Digital Scholarship Program, Courtney Paddick, Carrie Pirmann, Justin Guzman, Rennie Heza, Minglu Xu

Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference

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 '18, Justin Guzman ‘19, and Minglu Xu ‘20, …

Successes And Challenges In Growing And Sustaining An Undergraduate Digital Scholarship Program, R.C. Miessler

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In July of 2017, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library completed the second iteration of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship, a library-led, student-focused program that introduces students to digital scholarship tools and methodology. Librarian R.C. Miessler discusses the successes and challenges of supporting a growing digital scholarship program, with a focus on its future sustainability and a vision of its expansion into a campus-wide initiative.

Thinking Digitally, Together: Models For Digital Scholarship At Gettysburg College, Amy E. Lucadamo, R.C. Miessler, Lauren E. White

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Systems Librarian R.C. Miessler, College Archivist Amy Lucadamo, and senior Lauren White, discuss how Musselman Library has been involved in digital scholarship conversations and activities at Gettysburg, and invite discussion on how a campus-wide model for digital scholarship could emerge.

Developing A Community Of Practice Among Undergraduate Digital Scholars, R.C. Miessler, Janelle Wertzberger

Janelle Wertzberger

In the summer of 2016, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library piloted the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship (DSSF), a library-led, student-centered introduction to digital scholarship. For 10 weeks, a cohort of three undergraduate student fellows were introduced to digital tools, project management, research skills, and the philosophy behind digital scholarship, with the culmination the creation and presentation of a digital scholarship project. While the DSSF program is a library initiative, it drew support from partners from across campus, leveraging instructional support and the experience of digital scholarship practitioners from multiple departments to implement a broad curriculum in digital scholarship. The partners—who included …

Developing A Community Of Practice Among Undergraduate Digital Scholars, R.C. Miessler, Janelle Wertzberger

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In the summer of 2016, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library piloted the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship (DSSF), a library-led, student-centered introduction to digital scholarship. For 10 weeks, a cohort of three undergraduate student fellows were introduced to digital tools, project management, research skills, and the philosophy behind digital scholarship, with the culmination the creation and presentation of a digital scholarship project. While the DSSF program is a library initiative, it drew support from partners from across campus, leveraging instructional support and the experience of digital scholarship practitioners from multiple departments to implement a broad curriculum in digital scholarship. The partners—who included …

Bringing Stories To Life By Sharing Archival Material, Christina M. Noto

Student Publications

Last summer I researched the experiences of women at Gettysburg College during the pivotal decade 1965-1975 with the support of a college grant, the Koble Fellowship, a ten-week humanities based faculty-mentored research project. I tracked women's experiences at the college during this period and designed a digital scholarship project to share their stories. As a history major and as a feminist, a project about the history of women and their activism on campus nicely complemented by interests. (excerpt)