Welcome!

Welcome back – we’re excited about all that’s in store for 2023! In this newsletter, you’ll find information about all our upcoming events, workshops, and other ways to get involved. Our center has recently revised our mission statement, launched the Digital Humanities Doctoral Certificate, and accepted four new digital publication projects for development. Get in touch if you’d like to have a research consultation on a digital scholarship idea. Sign up for our workshops and come to our DH Salon series! Graduate students, consider applying for the 2023-2024 Digital Publications Proctorship, the 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Fellows program, and the summer 2023 digital humanities workshop series.

Upcoming events, workshops, and opportunities

There are many ways to get involved! 

Digital History and Theory: Changing Narratives, Changing Methods, Changing Narratives

On March 3 – 4, 2023, History and Theory, partnering with Brown University Library, will bring together the contributors to the December 2022 theme issue, “Digital History and Theory: Changing Narratives, Changing Methods, Changing Narrators,” to reflect on their contributions and offer concrete suggestions as to how the digital can change the way we research, write, and teach about the past—that is, the way we do history. The in-person and online event will be held in the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) in room 137, Rockefeller Library. Details and registration information (in-person and Zoom options) available here.

Theory to Practice: Context-Aware Systems Symposium

On March 10-11, 2023, The Context-Aware Systems Symposium, an immersive applied workshop series presented in collaboration with the Mellon Foundation, Black Beyond Data Project at Johns Hopkins University, Data Science Initiative, Department of Africana Studies, CDS at the Brown University Library, and Civic Software Foundation. Inspired by a “theory to practice” mindset, the event offers four sessions over two days and is designed to reach beyond discourse and criticism of the current data ethics landscape to offer tangible principles, methodologies, and frameworks for participants to experience what more equitable approaches to technology creation feels like in action. The event will be held in the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) in room 137. Registration is required. 

Other tools and resources 

Did you know that we offer research consultations? Please reach out to cds_info@brown.edu if you’d like to talk to someone about your scholarship! We’re happy to talk about how digital techniques might be useful to your project or to advise on the best tools for a digital project. You don’t need any prior experience with digital scholarship in order to reach out. There are no bad questions. 

CDS also offers hosting services to help you engage and experiment with new platforms on the web. Students, faculty, and staff may acquire a domain and web space to install software and create content. This service is designed to support teaching, learning, and research activities at Brown. It complements other Brown web services. Email reclaim@brown.edu or click “sign up” to get started.

Graduate Student Opportunities

Get started in digital scholarship

Workshops

CDS offers workshops on data, tools, and methods year round. Here's our schedule for Spring 2023. These workshops also count towards the Digital Humanities Doctoral Certificate.

Announcements

We have news!

Our new mission statement

We are pleased to announce our new mission statement! Mission statements are important in two ways. They let you (our public!) know what we do and how we approach our work. And they help us think through what we ought to be doing. Sometimes, that process is as important as the product itself.  Our new mission statement not only describes what we do, but also how and why we do it. Digital scholarship needs to be open and inclusive, and our new mission statement reflects that. We will do our best to live up to it. 

Mission: 

The University’s digital scholarship hub, the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS), provides inspiration, expertise, services, and teaching in digital scholarship methodologies, project development, and publication to Brown faculty, staff, and students.

Vision:

The Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) develops and stewards faculty and student projects that advance innovative scholarly ideas and the field of digital scholarship by fostering projects that are inclusive and open, responsive to diverse perspectives, and focused and intentional about ethical and cultural concerns and public impact.

Values

Collaboration: 

We believe that collaboration is essential to creating excellent and impactful digital scholarship. We encourage collaborative work that supports and brings out the best of all members of project teams. 

Inclusiveness: 

We seek to collaborate with faculty, students, and staff, and departments and centers across campus regardless of previous experience or expertise in digital scholarship. We especially encourage members of our community, including but not limited to people of color, women, LGBTQIA, neurodiverse, and first-generation, whose work has been systemically underrepresented, to pursue digital scholarship projects. 

Innovation: 

We support transformative approaches to research and learning, and to the creation of innovative scholarship that raises new questions, reaches broad audiences, and impacts communities. To do this, we encourage and guide intellectual exploration and creativity.

Community:

We seek to build and nurture the digital scholarship community at Brown University and beyond. We believe that scholarship should make a positive difference in the world, and we encourage our academic partners to consider how their work can improve the lives of individuals and communities. 

Training the next generation:

We are committed to training the next generation of digital scholarship practitioners and scholars. The digital humanities doctoral certificate program provides a framework for graduate students to learn and grow their digital humanities skills and knowledge. Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, involved in the project work gain experiences and training relevant for a wide range of careers where knowledge and skills with digital media are central. 

News from Brown University Digital Publications

There’s no shortage of exciting news to report in the area of digital publishing!

The first two born-digital publications developed by BUDP have received major prizes:

Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), co-edited by John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History Tara Nummedal and Independent Scholar Donna Bilak, has been awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association.   

Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), by Professor of Italian Studies Massimo Riva, has been named winner of the 2023 PROSE Award in the category of eProduct. This major award is presented by the Association of American Publishers and recognizes the very best in professional and scholarly publishing.

Congratulations to the authors and all who contributed to the design and development of these outstanding, path-breaking digital publications!  

In December, four new projects were selected for development by BUDP: 

• “Going through the Motions: Animations of Black Being in the Breaks” by Rebecca Louise Carter, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies

• “In Networked and Programmable Media: Language Art with Personal Computation” by John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts

• “The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence” by Christopher Grasso, Professor of History

• “Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes” by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies

Watch this space for project updates!

Also last fall, BUDP released five new volumes in the “Race & … in America” digital book series. Now complete with 13 volumes, this open access publication delves into comparative perspectives on the roots and effects of racism in the U.S.

The NEH Institute on Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps, offered in July 2022, continued to garner interest. In December, Project Director Allison Levy presented “Diversifying Digital Publishing: Lessons from Brown University Library’s National Endowment for the Humanities Institute” at the fall meeting of the Coalition of Networked Information. This project briefing followed the release of the full curriculum on the institute website, over 18 hours of foundational knowledge taught by internationally recognized digital human ities scholars, librarians, and technologists, authors of born-digital publications, and leading university press directors, acquisitions editors, and production managers—all selected for their expertise and demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion. 

PublicationsR

Read all about it

Staff publications

Media by Neil Mehta | The Brown Daily Herald

CDS in the news

Reflections from our Faculty Director Steve Lubar

Photo by Ben Tyler, Publications and Design Specialist

Join the conversation

One of the most pleasant aspects of the Faculty Director’s job is sitting in on consultations. Consultations are an important part of CDS work. A faculty member or student has an idea for a research project or a class project that they think might benefit from a digital component, and they send an email outlining it to cds_info@brown.edu: Can CDS help? 

We want to know more, and so we set up a consultation meeting, inviting CDS staff with expertise that might be useful. We hear a brief description of the project. Might there be a way to use digital tools to gather evidence, help visualize an argument, to present findings? These meetings are fascinating - it’s rare to get insight into a project as it’s being shaped. 

We can usually help. Sometimes we can answer the questions in a single session. We might suggest using digitalscholarship.brown.edu, our web-hosting platform, which can support Omeka, WordPress, and a range of other solutions. We can help set up projects with this platform. Some other tool might nicely solve the problem, like TheirStory, the newest tool in our tool chest. TheirStory, an end-to-end platform designed specifically for oral histories, will help the many researchers who come to us with relevant projects. Sometimes we can suggest a workshop to attend, or other folks at Brown to talk to. 

But sometimes we find an opportunity to establish a long-term relationship. If a project fits nicely into our mission, and we have the expertise and time to help out a project in a significant way, we can work together. Some of our long-term projects started in just this way.

So: get in touch! Let us know if we can help. If nothing else, we can have a good conversation about your project.

Note: Digital publication projects have a different intake process. To learn more, please reach out to Allison Levy, Director of Brown University Digital Publications (BUDP)

Best,

Steve Lubar