Digital Scholarship Seminars

Bob Kieft, College Librarian, Occidental College

Bob Kieft, College Librarian, Occidental College, invites members of the NITLE community to join Occidental College, Hamilton College, Wheaton College and Willamette University in exploring digital scholarship.

At the NITLE Summit in March of 2010, three colleges, Hamilton, Occidental, and Wheaton (MA), conducted a session entitled “Digital Humanities and the Liberal Arts College.” Each presented on work they are doing to foster exploration and use of digital scholarship techniques for teaching and research. This session followed a discussion at the 2009 Summit at which these colleges, together with Willamette University, started an informal series of discussions about how to promote and institutionalize digital scholarship in liberal arts colleges and how to use NITLE as a medium for cultivating cooperation among interested schools.

Out of the 2010 Summit came a plan to hold a series of monthly online sessions for the NITLE membership called the “Digital Scholarship Seminar Series.” The series will consist of interactive discussions showcasing projects or undertakings, often in the humanities, that integrate digital technologies into scholarship. The series may also involve sessions by digital scholarship practitioners from Universities in order to introduce platforms that might be applicable in the liberal arts college environment and to explore the possibilities for partnerships with them.

Although the series will showcase a variety of projects and issues in digital scholarship, these important themes will be addressed by each session:

• connection to the undergraduate curriculum,
• collaboration between faculty, technologists and librarians, and
• strategies to cope with limited resources on liberal arts campuses.

The series will be delivered online via NITLE’s multipoint interactive videoconferencing environment. It is designed to build a community of practice among NITLE members, connect faculty and staff who have similar interests, and help faculty, technology staff, librarians, and others explore the possibilities of digital scholarship for teaching, learning, and research. Participants are invited to join these lively discussions from the convenient location of their campus office.

Working with Rebecca Davis, who has been tasked by NITLE with developing digital scholarship cooperation among members, Hamilton, Occidental, Wheaton, and Willamette have volunteered to present one-hour sessions on the following dates during the fall of 2010:

• September 17
• October 22
• November 12
• December 10

Specific times and topics will be announced soon. The organizers hope that other members of NITLE will propose sessions for 2011 featuring their own work, a technology, or an organizational or planning issue about which they would like to learn from other colleges. For the first year, sessions will be held regularly on Fridays in the middle of each month.

If you’d like to propose a session, suggest a topic or express your interest, please contact Rebecca Frost Davis at rdavis@nitle.org or 512.863.1734 or any of the series organizers, Bob Kieft and Marsha Schnirring of Occidental College; Scott Hamlin and Kathryn Tomasek of Wheaton College; Janet Simons and Angel Nieves of Hamilton College; and Mike Spalti of Willamette University.