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Home/ Bucknell Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by jatolbert

Contents contributed and discussions participated by jatolbert

jatolbert

Open Stacks: Making DH Labor Visible ← dh+lib - 1 views

  • DH librarians, whose highly collaborative work is dedicated to social justice and public engagement, may be one particularly vital community of practice for exposing the changing conditions that create knowledge.
  • like the fish who asks “what is water?”–most scholars are unaware of the extent to which their work, professional interactions, and finances are imbricated with the global technology Stack.
    • jatolbert
       
      Also not sure that this is true.
  • Many DH programs, initiatives, and teams have arisen organically out of social connections rather than centralized planning.
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  • the myth of scarcity
  • Scholars often presume that because libraries acquire, shelve, and preserve the print books that they write, that the same libraries will acquire, shelve (or host), and preserve digital projects.
    • jatolbert
       
      This is a natural assumption, and in fact is true in many cases.
  • digital scholarship
  • DH
  • digital scholarship
jatolbert

The one word that doubles liberal arts grads' chances of getting hired | EAB Daily Brie... - 0 views

  • Burning Glass reports that when liberal arts job seekers add the word "digital" to their resumes—or otherwise demonstrate digital competencies—they double the number of job openings they qualify for.
jatolbert

Trends in Digital Scholarship Centers | EDUCAUSE - 2 views

  • Although sometimes confused with digital scholarship centers, digital humanities centers are often specialized research centers led by a group of faculty and serving only select disciplines rather than a broad campus community. Also, libraries often play only a peripheral role in digital humanities centers.1 In contrast, libraries or IT organizations have a key role in digital scholarship centers.
    • jatolbert
       
      This is important.
  • Digital scholarship centers can build institutional capacity to address emerging and future scholarship needs.
  • Considering options for presenting or publishing completed projects
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  • A key attribute that distinguishes digital scholarship centers from more traditional research institutes (such as digital humanities centers) is that they are service organizations, staffed by individuals with specialized skills, who support work in the digital environment.
  • Whether a digital scholarship center needs a dedicated facility or can be a distributed set of physical spaces and services — or even a virtual service — are open questions. A physical center that brings together specialized equipment and services in one convenient place has the advantage of visibility and provides a venue for an array of programming, including workshops, guest lectures, and displays of completed projects. In other cases, an office or set of offices might serve as the hub for center staff, while equipment and services are dispersed in physically separate media production areas, GIS facilities, data visualization labs, and makerspaces.
  • The case studies also illustrate the importance of tailoring a digital scholarship program to the needs of the institution; there is no "one size fits all."
  • The Sherman Centre has taken a "design-build" approach: Spaces were rendered with maximum flexibility in mind — with minimal enclosed spaces and with a strong focus on moveable furniture and adaptable technology. Design work has continued long after the center was officially opened: Key service and space components have been added as the needs of the campus community have become more clear.
  • Thus, the Sherman Centre was not serving an established collection of self-identified digital scholars — it was growing its own.
  • First, we have learned the critical importance of clearly defining the Sherman Centre's scope and purpose for the campus community.
  • We often find ourselves having to turn people away when their work is not advancing the digital scholarship agenda. Saying no is not easy, but it must be done to protect the center's integrity.
  • Digital scholarship centers represent a model of engagement for libraries and information technology units. They both support and encourage new directions in research, teaching, and learning and provide the infrastructure (technical and human) to encourage experimentation in new areas of scholarship.
  • Experiences gained from existing digital scholarship centers can help uninitiated institutions better launch their own efforts and thereby increase support for the research, teaching, and learning needs of their campus communities.
  • Digital scholarship centers focus on relationships, extending the ways in which librarians and academic computing professionals relate to and work with faculty (and often students) and their scholarly practices.
  • Here, we examine centers that go by a variety of names — including digital scholarship center, digital scholarship lab, and scholars' lab — but that nonetheless share common features. These centers are generally administered by a central unit, such as the library or IT organization; serve the entire campus community (including undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty); and address the needs of a range of academic departments and programs.
jatolbert

The Challenges of Digital Scholarship - ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

  • Scholars with digital projects often need to explain both their work and to justify the field of the digital humanities itself.
    • jatolbert
       
      Conflates digital scholarship with digital humanities. Also suggests (wrongly, I think) that DH is a singular, unitary field.
  • Traditional humanities scholarship rewards the solitary endeavor (such as the single-authored monograph) and looks askance at collaboration (e.g. edited volumes), but many digital humanities projects are often collaborative in nature.
    • jatolbert
       
      Again conflates DH with all of digital scholarship
  • In short: we are on the brink of a tipping point in history, where blogging is going to become the norm for the initial exchange of ideas.
    • jatolbert
       
      Overstating the point
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  • These challenges are both important and productive. They encourage new, heated and serious debate as to what constitutes standards of excellence in the humanities.
    • jatolbert
       
      Again, constant waffling between DH and digital scholarship more generally. They simply are not coterminous.
jatolbert

Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future? | EDUCAUSE - 1 views

  • Although the phrase sometimes refers to issues surrounding copyright and open access and sometimes to scholarship analyzing the online world, digital scholarship—emanating, perhaps, from digital humanities—most frequently describes discipline-based scholarship produced with digital tools and presented in digital form.
    • jatolbert
       
      A couple of points. First, there's no reason to assume that DS comes from DH. "Digital" was a term and concept before DH claimed it. Second, I would suggest that DS can be produced with digital tools OR presented digitally OR both. It isn't necessarily always both. I did digital scholarship that was both printed in a conventional journal and published online. Semantic difference, but still important.
  • Though the recent popularity of the phrase digital scholarship reflects impressive interdisciplinary ambition and coherence, two crucial elements remain in short supply in the emerging field. First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take risks limits the impact and excitement generated by boldly innovative projects.
    • jatolbert
       
      I'm not sure about any of this. There's plenty of innovation happening. Also, galloping towards innovation for its own sake, without considering the specific needs of scholars, seems like a mistake.
  • Digital scholarship, reimagined in bolder ways, is cost-effective, a smart return on investment. By radically extending the audience for a work of scholarship, by reaching students of many ages and backgrounds, by building the identity of the host institution, by attracting and keeping excellent faculty and students, by creating bonds between faculty and the library, and by advancing knowledge across many otherwise disparate disciplines, innovative digital scholarship makes sense.
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  • Yet, other aspects of the changing digital environment may not be encouraging digital scholarship. The large and highly visible investments being made in MOOCs, for example, lead some faculty to equate technology with the diminution of hard-won traditions of teaching and scholarship. Using new capacities in bandwidth, MOOCs extend well-established patterns of large lectures to audiences otherwise out of the hearing range of those lectures. Unlike digital scholarship, however, MOOCs make no claim to creating new disciplinary knowledge, to advancing the scholarly conversation, to unifying research and teaching.
    • jatolbert
       
      I don't see why any of this is necessarily a problem--unless you reject the notion of lectures as useful pedagogical forms entirely
  • In other words, digital scholarship may have greater impact if it takes fuller advantage of the digital medium and innovates more aggressively. Digital books and digital articles that mimic their print counterparts may be efficient, but they do not expand our imagination of what scholarship could be in an era of boundlessness, an era of ubiquity. They do not imagine other forms in which scholarship might live in a time when our audiences can be far more vast and varied than in previous generations. They do not challenge us to think about keeping alive the best traditions of the academy by adapting those traditions to the possibilities of our own time. They do not encourage new kinds of writing, of seeing, of explaining. And we need all those things.
    • jatolbert
       
      Somewhat melodramatic. What kind of innovation does he want, exactly? And what doesn't he like about the formats he mentions here? He lists things that scholars do, suggests they need to change, but makes no compelling case re: WHY they need to change.
  • Interpretation must be an integral and explicit part of the fundamental architecture of new efforts. Insisting that colleges and universities broaden their standards and definitions of scholarship to make room for digital scholarship is necessary, but it is only a partial answer. To be recognized and rewarded as scholarship in the traditional sense, digital scholarship must do the work we have long expected scholarship to do: contribute, in a meaningful and enduring way, to an identifiable collective and cumulative enterprise.
  • By way of example, the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond is attempting to build one model of what this new scholarship might look like. The lab combines various elements of proven strategies while also breaking new ground. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the historians Robert K. Nelson and Scott Nesbit and their colleagues are creating a digital atlas of American history. The first instantiation of the atlas, Visualizing Emancipation, will soon be followed by an amplified, annotated, and animated digital edition of The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. Over the next three years, chapters of original and dynamic maps and interpretations will focus on key aspects of the American experience since the nation's founding. The digital atlas will allow scholars to see patterns we have never been able to envision before while at the same time it will make available to teachers of all levels visualizations of crucial processes in American history.
    • jatolbert
       
      This one example doesn't seem all that innovative--story maps, etc. have been around a long time. Also, what he's doing is still basically a repackaging of print scholarship. It could be useful, but it's not nearly as radical as he seems to think.
  • Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?
    • jatolbert
       
      A problematic think piece about digital scholarship in general. Has some useful definitions. Unfortunately Ayers is doing a lot of hand-wringing over what he sees as the lack of meaningful innovation in digital scholarship. It's not at all clear, though, what he means by this. He argues that what innovation has happened isn't sufficient, then gives an example of a project--a digital atlas of American history--that he seems to think is radically different, but isn't in any way I can discern from his description.
jatolbert

Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work | Pe... - 1 views

    • jatolbert
       
      The existence of an office like DP&S mitigates this.
  • The variable pace of technological adoption and change within higher education can be seen as the result of several factors: education has more components than a pure content industry, such as assessment and accreditation; that higher education qualifications such as the undergraduate degree have a social capital that is not easily changed; that there is a fundamental conservatism in and around higher education.
  • These studies demonstrate some evidence for the existence of disciplinary differences in technology adoption, which suggests that there is not a homogeneous form of “scholarship” within academia.
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    • jatolbert
       
      Digital tools facilitate collaboration
  • These kinds of figures far exceed the sales of scholarly books and journal article access; so we can see that new technologies are facilitating access to a new audience that is disintermediating many of the conventional channels. Key to realizing a personal brand online is an attitude of openness. This involves sharing aspects of personal life on social network sites, blogging ideas rather than completed articles, and engaging in experiments with new media.
  • From the individual scholar’s point of view using open educational resources allows access to high quality materials although this might require a new skill set in re-appropriating these tools to meet local and course specific contexts. There is also the question of recognising and valuing the creation and recreation of these learning resources as academic outputs, in a way that is analogous to the value of producing physical textbooks previously.
  • It is clear from the foregoing discussion that new technologies hold out very real possibilities for change across all facets of scholarship. In each case these afford the possibility for new more open ways of working. Academic work has always contained a significant element of collaboration within academia but now it is increasingly easy to collaborate with more colleagues within but also beyond the academy and for the varied products of these collaborations to be available to the widest possible audience.
  • These new web based technologies are then a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a radical opening up of scholarly practice. In this sense digital scholarship is more than just using information and communication technologies to research, teach and collaborate, but it is embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking and wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society. Digital scholarship can only have meaning if it marks a radical break in scholarship practices brought about through the possibilities enabled in new technologies. This break would encompass a more open form of scholarship.
  •  
    Makes the important argument that "digital scholarship" as a term is only meaningful if it denotes something radically different from other types of scholarship. Their argument is that what should distinguish DS is its openness, as digital tools enable open processes, collaboration, etc.
jatolbert

The Differences between Digital History and Digital Humanities | Dr Stephen Robertson - 0 views

  •  
    A useful article that challenges the "big tent" model of digital humanities and has important implications for digital scholarship more generally.
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