Welcome!
The Center for Digital Scholarship is celebrating 30 years and 10 years of Brown University Digital Publications! Throughout the year, you’ll see events and other celebrations around the foundations and futures of digital scholarship. Follow our hashtag at #BrownDS3010. This newsletter includes information on upcoming events, workshops, graduate student opportunities, and other announcements from the Center for Digital Scholarship at the Brown University Library. We hope to see you soon!
Join the Critical AI Learning Community!
The AI in Humanities Research Working Group is now part of the Critical AI Learning Community! Several staff at the Center for Digital Scholarship at working to lead a section of the community focused on AI and Humanistic Research.
The Critical AI Learning Community meets on Mondays at noon at the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, room 137, at the Rockefeller Library.
Register to join the community.
The Digital Humanities Salon
DH Salon Fall 2024 session with Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture
We had a great DH Salon series in the Fall of 2024, and the DH Salon series continues this spring. This regular, informal presentation series brings together digital humanities work across the Brown campus. The events from this Fall 2024 are listed below. Join us either in the Digital Scholarship Lab (Room 137) on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library (with a first come, first served lunch) or on Zoom again starting in February!
Spring 2025 Schedule
Select Thursdays at noon on Zoom or in the Digital Scholarship Lab (room 137) at the Rockefeller Library. Lunch and refreshments are provided.
The full schedule will be released in the new year. Below are two confirmed events:
February 13 at noon:
Kristen Reynolds, 2024-26 International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Africana Studies, Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities
February 27 at noon:
Lukas Rieppel, Associate Professor of History, Director of Science, Technology, and Society, and Craig Howe, Director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies at Arts Midwest
More to come!
Thank you to our speakers who participated in the Fall 2024 DH Salon!
September 26: Freedom Seekers (co-sponsored by Brown2026 and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study) with Simon P. Newman, Visiting Senior Fellow in the Brown 2026 Presidential Initiative; Honorary Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Sir Denis Brogan Professor of History, University of Glasgow (Emeritus)November 21: Mary McLeod Bethune in the Digital Age with Ashley Preston, Associate Professor of History at Howard University and Noliwe Rooks, Department Chair, Professor, Africana Studies
October 10: U2 Aerial Photographs with Laurel D. Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture.
October 24: Buried Singapore: Ghosts, Hallucinations, or Critical Fabulations in the AI? with Joshua Babcock, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University.
November 7: Celebrating the Launch of the New Frameworks: Preserving and Publishing Born-Computational Art Project with Cody Carvel, Digital Fellow, John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts, Ashley Champagne, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship, Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services, Khanh Vo, Digital Humanities Specialist, and Hilary Wang, Digital Archivist.
November 21: Mary McLeod Bethune in the Digital Age with Ashley Preston, Associate Professor of History at Howard University and Noliwe Rooks, Department Chair, Professor, Africana Studies
Workshops
Join us for our workshop series to learn new skills and critical frameworks in digital humanities. The workshop schedule will be released in early January! These workshops count towards the Digital Humanities Doctoral Certificate program.
Graduate student opportunities
The Doctoral Certificate in Digital Humanities
CDS and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities are pleased to partner together to offer the Doctoral Certificate in Digital Humanities. For complete information including how to apply, visit: go.brown.edu/DH
The Digital Humanities Summer Workshop Series
Please mark your calendars for the Digital Humanities Summer workshops series! This series is open to everyone at Brown University. The first week of the series will be held May 27-30, 2025 (hybrid with some sessions in person and some virtual) from 9 a.m.-noon EST and the second week will be held June 9-13, 2025 (virtual).
The series counts towards the Digital Humanities Doctoral Certificate program. Registration will be released in January.
The workshops will be taught by CDS staff: Ashley Champagne, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship; Tarika Sankar, Digital Humanities Librarian; Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technologies; and Khanh Vo, Digital Humanities Specialist.
News from Brown University Digital Publications
It’s been a busy period marked by project advancement, speaking engagements, and national training opportunities.
We’re delighted to announce the launch of our fourth multimodal open access publication, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, the inaugural title in the On Seeing series published in collaboration with the MIT Press. Authored by Kimberly Juanita Brown, inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College, Mortevivum is a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness.
With subject matter that may be triggering, particularly images of violence and harm done to Black bodies, the digital edition employs a Consentful Tech framework, or the intentional development and use of technology to create safety, to prioritize care, and to foreground consent in order to mitigate trauma.
By including images that do the work without doing the damage, the multimodal edition introduces a new form of visual literacy that comes through agency. According to Colin Edgington, writing for Aperture, the book “will change the way readers look at images of all kinds.”
The multimodal edition also offers readers a Community Engagement Toolkit, a guide to having open conversations about antiblackness, visual culture, and death. Other uniquely digital content includes video recordings of author Kimberly Juanita Brown in dialogue with Brown University professors Kim Gallon, Juliet Hooker, Kevin Quashie, and Avery Willis Hoffman; and with Vievee Elaure Francis of Dartmouth College.
Read more about Mortevivum here.
This period also saw the considerable advancement of two in-progress works: Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes, under contract with Fordham University Press; and Late Gathering: Poet Sagawa Chika, our first fully bilingual publication.
In July, BUDP hosted its second iteration of “Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps,” a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. We welcomed 15 scholars from less well-resourced institutions to the Library for intensive training and networking. The 2024 cohort represents a wide range of humanities disciplines, geographic areas, and career stages, and half of the participants represent Minority Serving Institutions.
Participant Voices: "My world of publishers and digital publication has expanded extensively, pushing me to think about my project in new ways" ... "It's rare for my own university to offer such an opportunity to speak with editors/directors of academic presses and get insider knowledge on pitching proposals" ... "Absolutely invaluable in terms of considering next steps. Thank you!"
Read more in the News from Brown article, “With focus on supporting HBCU faculty, Brown library expands access to scholarly digital publishing.”
In other grant news, BUDP staff and cohort members from the the IMLS-funded program, “Advancing HBCU Scholarship, Diversifying Digital Publishing,” spoke on “Building Inclusive Community-Based Models for Open Humanistic Scholarship” at the annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishing held in Boston this past May.
A collaboration with the HBCU Library Alliance and the University of Michigan Press, this initiative aims to diversify digital scholarly publishing, strengthen HBCU libraries, and promote HBCU faculty scholarship. Pictured: The Prairie View A&M University author and librarian team of Marco Robinson and Jordan Signater, alongside Editorial Director from University of Michigan Press Sara Jo Cohen, and BUDP Assistant Editor Clare Jones.
Other opportunities to speak about BUDP’s novel approach to digital scholarly publishing were plentiful. In May, the Getty Research Institute and Getty Publishing invited Director Allison Levy to speak on “The Digital Monograph Today and Tomorrow.”
Her new essay on born-digital books and experimental publishing models, "A New Vision for Scholarly Publishing: Access, Agency, Impact," was published in July on The Immanent Frame, a forum of the Social Science Research Council for ongoing exchanges among leading thinkers from the social sciences and humanities.
Further to industry-level contributions and participation, the Library Publishing Coalition has extended membership to BUDP. LPC is an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries and library consortia engaged in scholarly publishing.
In related news, Allison Levy now serves on the Association of University Presses Library Relations Committee and the Renaissance Society of America Digital and Multimedia Committee.
Welcome to CDS!
Please join us in welcoming our new proctors and postdoctoral fellows!
Tara Dhaliwal joins BUDP as the 2024-25 Digital Publications Proctor. Tara is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies. Her work is concentrated on folklore and storytelling in 19th-century Punjab (North Indian Subcontinent), with a particular focus on landscapes, non-human animals, and gender. Her research aims to understand how stories help us make sense of the world around us.
Andrea Zoller holds the newly created Digital Monograph Proctorship appointment. Andrea, a graduate student in the Italian Studies department, researches regional identity and language diversity in the Italian Alps, focusing on Romance varieties in Trentino-Südtirol and among the Trentino diaspora in the U.S. He also works on translation theory and, with support from Dartmouth College’s Leslie Center for the Humanities, is editing and translating five short stories by Russian writer Vasily Shukshin. The book, titled Lo Svitato e altri racconti, is set to be published by early 2025.
Kristen Reynolds, International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Africana Studies, Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities (2024-26)
Project: “The (Hu)man in the Machine: Black Speculative Visions for Technology Beyond Man”
Kristen Reynolds is International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Africana Studies, the Center for Digital Scholarship, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2024. Her research utilizes Black speculative literature and culture to interrogate how digital and computational technologies reproduce antiblackness through their coherence around Sylvia Wynter’s articulation of “Man, overrepresented as the human.” Her work thereby seeks to demonstrate how Black speculative literature and culture posits new frameworks for developing technologies that promote Black futures. She is interested in teaching courses focused on Black digital humanities and science and technology studies, speculative literature and culture, and courses that allow students to develop and experiment with speculative methods.
Staff Spotlights
In collaboration with Lukas Rieppel (Associate Professor, History, Brown University) and Craig Howe (Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies), Tarika Sankar, Khanh Vo, and Patrick Rashleigh launched the In and Out of Place Project: Tracking Resource Extractions from Treaty Lands. Tarika and Khanh collaborated with Lukas and Craig to envision a Lakotan-centered project within existing digital mapping technologies. The StoryMap is the first mapping project to track the day-by-day movements of Custer’s infamous 1874 expedition to find gold in the Black Hills. In order to develop and launch the project by the 150th anniversary of the expedition in July 2024, the team developed the solution of a Github-hosted Leaflet map linked to Scalar pages populated with extensive content from primary sources.
The Leaflet StoryMap utilized a template by Hands-On Data Visualization, developed by Llya Ilyankou and Jack Dougherty of Connecticut Humanities and Trinity College. Khanh customized the StoryMap with the dataset created by Lukas, Craig, and undergraduate research assistants and contents of the 1874 expedition built out on Google Sheets. A basemap of pre-rendered tiles from the Consortium of Ancient World Mappers was used to show the lands before colonization, overlayed with the boundaries of the 1868 Treaty Territories. Undergraduate RAs mined primary source documents for information about the expedition’s movements and created geolocations for their camp each night as well as descriptions of their activities.
Interested in how CDS works?
Our practices are documented in a handbook, both for ourselves and for those who are interested in working with us. This is very much a living document, with some areas more polished than others, but we hope that it is useful for those who are wondering what working at or with CDS looks like.
Some highlights:
For those who are curious about how we handle projects, see Project Guidelines, Planning, and Management
For those interested in how we approach teaching, see Teaching and Learning
For the technically-oriented who want to get into the weeds, see Development Practices
Note that there’s more to come. Feel free to send along feedback to cds_info@brown.edu
We hope to see you soon!
About the
Center for Digital Scholarship
The University’s digital scholarship hub, the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) provides expertise, services, and teaching in digital scholarship methodologies, project development, and publication in order to: advance the state of digital scholarship; activate and guide intellectual exploration and creativity through collaboration with faculty, students, and staff, and with departments and centers across campus, and; support the creation of new scholarship, learning, and innovative scholarly communication.
