The spring and summer saw many new developments in digital scholarship at Connecticut College. As the College seeks to “open new channels for groundbreaking research, scholarship, and creative work,” outlined in the 2016 Strategic Plan, digital scholarship offers new tools and methodologies to leverage open-access publishing and computational methods of analysis for the advancement of scholarly dialogues and undergraduate pedagogy. The Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, a collaborative initiative by the Office of the Dean of Faculty and Information Services, was launched in January to support faculty wishing to develop digital projects in their research endeavors.
Digital Scholarship Fellows Updates
The 2018 inaugural cohort of fellows were hard at work this summer on their projects. A team including Catherine Benoît (Anthropology), library staff Lyndsay Bratton and Diane Creede, and two students, Gareth Barr ‘19 and Darriana Greer ‘21, attended the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) at Occidental College in Los Angeles this June. The project team worked with web developer Gabriel Ortiz from Claremont Colleges Library to build the second iteration of Benoît’s St. Martin Project, featuring new image-filtering, crowdsourcing, and bilingual functionalities. In the fall, Benoît’s students will expand the project with an oral history component, conducting interviews with the Saint Martinois community in New London. Benoît will give a talk on her project at the Caribbean Digital V conference in December, hosted by the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
Sufia Uddin (Religious Studies) led two ConnSHAARP summer research internships to develop the first iteration of her project site, Life in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest. Julia Neumann ‘20 and Avatar Simpson ‘20 spent four weeks engaged in intensive research to design a digital resource Uddin’s students will use in her fall ConnCourse. The team partnered with an external web developer to integrate interactive maps into the site. Uddin plans to expand the project in the future with the publication of her translation of a Bengali epic poem and new research to be conducted on-site in Bangladesh. She aims to present the mangrove forest and its inhabitants in ways that foster broader public awareness of deforestation and its effects on indigenous communities and the environment.
After years of recording the size, shape, and veins of fruit fly wings on paper during morphological research experiments, Phillip Barnes (Biology) developed a new workflow this summer to digitally image the wings at high resolution. As Barnes develops a large dataset of these images, in collaboration with his student researchers, he will build a project website to share the collection and metadata with researchers well beyond his field with the hope of enabling multidisciplinary collaborations.
Stay tuned this semester for project site launches from our fellows!
In early October, the fellows and program director Lyndsay Bratton will give a talk at the Digital Frontiers conference, hosted by the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS.
Fall Symposium
We will round out the first year of the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program with our inaugural Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts symposium, Monday, November 12, 2018. The symposium (8:30am-3pm in the Chu Room of Shain Library) will feature talks by the DS Fellows and Anthony Graesch (Anthropology), and by guest institutions Trinity College and the University of Connecticut’s Greenhouse Studios center for scholarly communications design. Cultural geographer, digital humanist, and artist Nicholas Bauch (University of Minnesota) will deliver the keynote lecture (4:30pm in Olin 014), which is co-sponsored by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology as part of their 2018/2019 colloquium speaker series, Creative Ecologies. Bauch’s 2016 Enchanting the Desert was the first born-digital interactive monograph published by Stanford University Press in their new series of digital scholarship publications.
If you are interested in learning more about digital scholarship or starting a project, join us for the symposium and consider submitting an application for the 2019 DS Fellows Program. A call for proposals will be posted later this fall.
We are grateful to Professor of Art and Director of the Ammerman Center, Andrea Wollensak, who designed the sleek new logo for digital scholarship.
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