DSPLA Symposium (2018)

On November 12, 2018, we hosted the inaugural Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts symposium at Connecticut College. The symposium featured presentations by faculty, technologists, and librarians on methods and outcomes of collaborative digital scholarship in the liberal arts.

Watch the Livestream footage now.

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Schedule

9:15-9:30 Introductions in the Charles Chu Asian Art Reading Room

Jeffrey Cole, Dean of the Faculty
Lee Hisle, VP of Information Services

9:30-11:00 Connecticut College Digital Scholarship Fellows Panel

Lyndsay Bratton, Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship
Phillip Barnes, Associate Professor of Biology
Catherine Benoît, Professor of Anthropology
Sufia Uddin, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

The DSPLA symposium is the culminating event of the first year of the Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, funded by the Office of the Dean of Faculty and supported by staff members across Information Services. In this panel, you will hear from program director Lyndsay Bratton, as well as each of the Fellows, about what brought them into the realm of digital scholarship, their experiences and results of participating in the development of this new community, and their ongoing work for the future. Through digital scholarship, the Fellows are expanding the possibilities for their scholarship in exciting new ways, from Benoît’s crowdsourcing testimonies on the AIDS epidemic and the aftermath of destructive hurricanes in St. Martin, and Uddin’s exploration of the intersections of environmental science and the ethical and ritual practices of the peoples of the Sundarbans Mangroves through mapping and textual analysis, to Barnes’s efforts to connect with potential colleagues in related scientific fields of inquiry, such as genetics, by publishing his datasets online.

11:15-11:45 Kw’ets’tel Project

Anthony Graesch, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Connecticut College

Graesch will present his latest project in experimental archaeology, which is funded through a donation from Diane Y. Williams ’59 and supported through collaboration with Digital Scholarship staff. The goal of this partnership is to augment the traditional faculty-student research project (in-class research and analysis, culminating in conference presentations and/or publication in a peer-reviewed journal) with digital scholarship tools and methodologies, which will enhance learning outcomes and expand the impact of the study. The scholarship at the center of the project concerns anthropological research addressing the cognitive underpinnings of Indigenous stone tool production. This course-centered research, conducted by Graesch and five Connecticut College undergraduate students, will specifically examine how Stó:lö-Coast Salish of pre-colonial southwestern British Columbia manufactured slate fishing knives, one of the most archaeologically visible tools used to process seasonally available salmon.

12:00-1:00 Break for Lunch

1:00-2:00 Trinity College Panel:
“Recognizing Digital Scholarship Where It Already Is”

Jason Jones, Director of Educational Technology & Research Services
Luke Phelan, Instructional Technologist
Mary Mahoney, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities

Our panel will cover the digital initiatives at Trinity that encompass undergraduate and faculty outreach, and our current research into establishing an undergraduate credential in digital humanities. We have been a Domain of One’s Own campus for one year, and we will discuss the work we’ve done to inspire both undergraduates and faculty to take advantage of its many resources. We will present our current research on best practices in offering digital competencies to undergraduates on our campus either through workshops or voluntary trainings, and/or through the development of credentialing in digital humanities. Lastly, we will present on our digital scholarship program in exploratory coding which offers faculty a space to explore the possibilities of computational thinking for their research.

2:15-3:15 University of Connecticut Greenhouse Studios Panel
“Collaboration in Digital Scholarship”

Sara Sikes, Associate Director, Coordinator
Tom Lee, Design Technologist
Wes Hamrick, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities
Brooke Foti Gemmell, Design Technologist

Greenhouse Studios is a scholarly communications organization based in the UConn Library that seeks to forge a new model of collaborative, transdisciplinary research inspired by the processes used in design thinking and agile software development. Greenhouse Studios’ primary motivation is to experiment with new approaches to creating and disseminating scholarly work, and in doing so create a new community focused on research that speaks to broader audiences. In this session, members of Greenhouse Studios will discuss their perspectives on collaborative scholarship production and where they see potential for growth and innovation in this space.

4:30-5:30 Keynote Address in Olin 014
“Toward a Graphic Re-Mediation of Spatial Thought”

Nicholas Bauch (University of Minnesota)

Nicholas Bauch presents some of his work in the digital humanities, focusing on argument-driven design, web-based publishing, and non-linearity. Building from a born digital publication called “Enchanting the Desert: A pattern language for the production of space” (2016, Stanford University Press), Bauch has begun a line of inquiry focused on the process and philosophy of re-mediation. Digital publishing is opening new ways of thinking, working, and expressing arguments, topics he expands upon in the second part of his talk. There, he presents geographically-inspired work he is doing in graphic media that is not necessarily digitally-driven. As he merges his practice as a geographer with his current training in the visual arts, emergent questions center on the value of the re-mediation process itself: what congruities may be found among the challenges posed by making “not-books”? How does medium act in the production of knowledge? And where–in a looming post-Zuckerberg age–does this leave the digital?

Nicholas Bauch is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Minnesota, where he is building a practice that weaves together geography with the visual arts. He holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California-Los Angeles, and was founding faculty director of the Experimental Geography Studio at the University of Oklahoma. Recent publications include A Geography of Digestion (2017, University of California Press) and the born-digital Enchanting the Desert (2016, Stanford University Press). He has designed and taught classes at the intersection of geography and various creative media, including digital/web, photography, video, and sculpture.

This event is co-sponsored with the Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology.

5:30-6:30 Reception in Olin Lobby

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Co-Sponsors

Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology

Anthropology

Environmental Studies

Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment

Information Services

Office of the Dean of the Faculty

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#dspla2018

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