Granting Collaboration, What’s Next?– Paper
Download as DOC, PDF1 like242 views
The document discusses various initiatives funded by the Mellon Foundation aimed at enhancing digital scholarship and empirical reasoning in liberal arts education across several colleges. Programs such as Barnard's empirical reasoning lab, Emory's Digital Scholarship Commons, and Hamilton's Digital Humanities Initiative focus on collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and integrating digital tools into the curriculum. The overarching goal is to cultivate a stronger capacity for empirical evidence usage among humanists and encourage collaborative research methods among students and faculty.
Granting Collaboration, What’s Next?– Paper
- 1. Granting Collaboration, What’s Next? NITLE Symposium, April 17, 2012 Barnard College (Lisa Norberg-- lnorberg@barnard.edu) Critical and Empirical Approaches to Problem-Solving in the Liberal Arts Curriculum (CEAPS) The systematic production, use, organization, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data should be a skill that rises to the same level that writing does in the liberal arts college curriculum. In order to build the curriculum and support this faculty development, Barnard is strengthening the College‘s intellectual infrastructure by establishing an empirical reasoning lab that will serve all disciplines, including the humanities. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the lab will provide foundational and advanced support for the exploration and application of new tools and methods of inquiry. A new data librarian will work closely with an interdisciplinary faculty task force to develop curriculum and train a cadre of “empirical reasoning fellows” to support the use of everything from GIS to textual analysis. A hoped-for outcome of this project is that Barnard will produce humanists with more interest in, respect for, and capacity to use empirical evidence, while producing social and natural scientists more likely to critically question the assumptions behind evidence. Emory University (Stewart Varner--stewart.varner@emory.edu) Digital Scholarship Commons From its home in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, The Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) works with scholars to plan collaborative projects and coordinates with copyright experts, metadata librarians, subject liaisons and technologists. DiSC is funded by the Mellon Foundation, and its mission is to support, produce and sustain innovative and interdisciplinary work and to help train and inspire the next generation of scholars and librarians. DiSC is working with Emory scholars to build an interactive map of ancient Rome, develop an online community for scholars of Postcolonial studies, map and study lynching in Georgia, and create a process of cataloging digital items from the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace. Additionally, DiSC has held workshops on a variety of topics including managing your online identity, using content management systems in scholarship, and using Prezi to animate your presentations. As a hub of digital activity on campus, DiSC has hosted guest speakers and held a symposium on disability studies. DiSC is managed by the Digital Scholarship Coordinator and staffed by two post-doctoral fellows, three graduate fellows, and four undergrad employees. It occupies a physical space in the Library’s Research Commons which is an open and flexible area designed to facilitate collaboration and community. Hamilton College (Janet Simons--jsimons@hamilton.edu) The Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) at Hamilton College: Creating a Collaboratory for Digital Humanities in a Liberal Arts Setting DHi at Hamilton College is a collaboratory where new media and computing technologies are used to promote humanities-based teaching, research, and scholarship across the liberal arts. DHi creates opportunities for new interdisciplinary models and methods of collaboration in order to 1) support a fundamental shift in humanities research at Hamilton and, potentially, in partnership with other institutions, and 2) lead to the generation of new knowledge. Hamilton’s DHi models collaboration across academic and administrative units and prioritizes sustainable curricular integration and student/faculty collaborative research. Co-Directors Angel David Nieves, Ph.D.,
- 2. Associate Professor & Chair of Africana Studies, and Janet Thomas Simons, M.S., ITS, unite faculty research goals, technology and library science resources to build upon Hamilton’s significant strengths in teaching and research. DHi also builds on the existing foundations of Hamilton’s Information and Learning Liaisons group (HILL), a collaboration of instructional technologists and reference librarians to support learning; an existing humanities curriculum as well as a new Cinema and New Media Studies (CNMS) program; and institutional support for humanities research involving undergraduates. Occidental College (Marsha Schnirring--mschnirring@oxy.edu) Building Capacity for Digital Scholarship Occidental is in the midst of an ambitious, forward-looking effort to re-imagine its library building as an Academic Commons: a premier scholastic environment that makes visible our commitments as a 21st century liberal arts and sciences college. When fully realized, this project will include delivery of new services to strengthen student and faculty scholarship, emphasizing public/participatory digital scholarship, new or re-skilled professional staff able to assist in this work, and development of an integrated academic support system for students -- all within a renovated structure. While the Academic Commons will have a “traditional” library of books and quiet study areas in it, spaces for collaboration, digital content creation, and experimentation in pedagogy and scholarly work will be central. With great fanfare and intention, we have decided to privilege the use of resources (teaching, learning, research) over the resources themselves and access to them. A $700K grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2010 has us well on our way to building Oxy’s “capacity for digital scholarship.” Funding supports three postdoctoral fellows, three annual week-long Digital Scholarship Institutes for faculty, a Digital Scholarship Symposium and Speaker Series, assorted workshops, and outreach to regional and national communities of interest. Ohio Five (Denison, Kenyon, Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan, Wooster; Alan Boyd--alan.boyd@oberlin.edu) Integrating Digital Collections into the Liberal Arts The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Five Colleges of Ohio project, Next Steps in the Next Generation Library: Integrating Digital Collections into the Liberal Arts Curriculum, has allowed library and archives staff to work with faculty to create over 30 digital collections, most designed to support student research or to be actively used in the classroom. These encompass work in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences. The grant supports a Digital Projects Coordinator position and a part-time Interface Specialist Programmer, both shared by all five institutions. Our projects are tightening the collaboration among our institutions, digitizing and opening access to materials that were largely unused, creating a digital projects “mainstream” within our institutions, and shaping statewide strategic planning for all OhioLINK DSPACE-supported digital collections. Wheaton and Partners (Patrick Rashleigh--rashleigh_epatrick@wheatonma.edu) The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) Encoding texts in machine-readable, standardized formats (particularly the TEI standard) forms a cornerstone of the practice of digital humanities. Many scholars have put considerable effort into learning encoding standards and transcribing their text into XML for the purposes of dissemination and machine conversion into multimedia formats. Having made that effort, however, there are few avenues available to the scholar who does not have the expertise or technical skills to convert XML into human-readable formats (such as HTML or PDF), and who does not have ready access to long-term, accessible, archival digital storage. TAPAS seeks to address that need by allowing a scholar to upload, store, and publish their TEI data in a variety of forms — including a project website — with minimal technical knowledge. Wheaton’s partners in TAPAS are Brown University, Dickinson College, Hamilton College, Mount Holyoke College, SHANTI at the University of Virginia, University of Chicago, University of Puget Sound, Vassar College, Wheaton College (Massachusetts), and Willamette University.