Overview
Learning objectives
Overall schedule and activities
Sample course outline
Bibliography
Acknowledgements

 

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Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship Overview

The Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship (DSSF) is a full-time, summer-long program where a group of three to four Amherst College student fellows work together and independently with library staff to conduct digital scholarship research with a focus on Amherst College digital and archival collections. The goal of the fellowship is to engage a group of students in investigating the potential of digital scholarship practices as a mode of learning and discovery, while also exposing students to the work of libraries and potential career avenues.

Fellows will have the opportunity to work with a small group of peers, librarians, archivists, and IT specialists to develop skills such as:

  • Assessing and choosing digital scholarship methods and approaches
  • Digitization, curation, information visualization, project management, and other specific areas of digital scholarship
  • Evaluating tools for digital scholarship
  • Collaboratively designing and developing a digital scholarship project built around one of the Library’s digital archival collections

At the conclusion of the fellowship, students will have:

  • Developed an understanding of the terms digital scholarship and digital humanities
  • Developed hands-on skills using various methods for digital scholarship
  • Worked with archival materials from the Frost Library collection
  • Created a unique digital scholarship project using Amherst College archives
  • Conducted a workshop on a digital scholarship tool
  • Delivered a presentation on their digital scholarship project to a public audience in the library
  • Participated in the work life of the library and gained hands-on library experience for the course of the summer

Learning objectives

The following broad categories shape the structure and activities of the DSSF, and at the conclusion of the fellowship students should be exposed to all of the following ideas and have exercised many of them in their work.

Team-Based Learning

  • Practice metacognition & self-critique
  • Learn about building trust with colleagues, allowing each their area of expertise
  • Gain experience in compromise for project goals
  • Explore methods of communication
  • Consider the advantages and challenges of collaboration
  • Have opportunities for experimentation
  • Learn and work in a safe and comfortable environment
  • Develop an understanding of norms, creating ground rules
  • Recognize own weaknesses, strengths, tendencies

Research Process

  • Be comfortable with ambiguity & failure
  • Build in time for iteration & failure
  • Explore what is a research question
  • Ask the question ‘So what?’
  • Develop an understanding of the value of exploration
  • Understand what the scholarly conversation is, how they might enter it
  • Connect to other digital humanities interns at other colleges
  • Gain understanding of the ecosystem of scholarly communication (mapping)
  • Research tools & understanding library systems (bibliographic knowledge)
  • Thinking about audience in critical ways
  • Consider how to surface all(?) relevant content

Archival & Digital Collections

  • Learn about the provenance of collections
  • Gain experience in archival tools such as finding aids, digital collections
  • Consider what is gained/lost in physical vs. digital
  • Know how to find ancillary/supplemental/secondary sources
  • Develop experience with the iterative process of research
  • Gain in-depth investigation skills through dissecting secondary sources and critical reading
  • Appreciate the value of exploration
  • Develop an understanding of the importance of metadata
  • Engage in conversations with scholars and library and archives practitioners
  • Value of people as resources [also Research Process]
  • Preservation, permanence of digital content
  • Data & ownership

Digital Humanities

  • Articulate and understanding of digital humanities
  • Bring together research, collection, and appropriate tool to make an argument/tell a story/curate materials/ other goal
  • Be able to evaluate digital humanities tools and projects
  • Distinguish digital scholarship differences and strengths in relation to traditional scholarship
  • Develop practical and transferable skills for school & other endeavors
  • Apply critical analysis to choices in technology and approach, and consider ramifications of such choices

Project Management

  • Understand how to create a work plan
  • Understand how to create a project prospectus
  • Develop experience in creating workflows and timelines
  • Gain experience in creating documentation
  • Hone their note-taking skills
  • Learn about how to run a good meeting
  • Learn how to make changes mid-project (collectively)
  • Consider how to define success & failure (collaboratively) & learn from failure
  • Gain experience in determining when to ask for help/get a fresh perspective
  • Build communication skills through working in teams and with library staff

Professional Development

  • Introduction and awareness of library/tech culture & profession
  • Imagine career possibilities based on interests
  • Develop an understanding of the digital humanities in alignment with their own interests/goals
  • Experience a professional work setting where invited as colleagues to library staff
  • Participate in and interact with a range of events, meetings, and people
  • Have an opportunity to learn new skills that interest them
  • Understanding range of relevant careers (librarianship, public history, e.g.)
  • Have an opportunity to develop their presentation skills
  • Create a body of writing reflections as a record of their experience
  • Develop a final project as an example of their digital humanities skills and experience
  • Collaborate with other interns on campus from the library and museums

Overall schedule and activities

Workshops and instructor-led events

Week 1:

  • General orientation
  • Intro to DH (group discussion of readings) (1 hr)
    • Reading (90 min)
  • Introduction to Amherst College Digital Collections (1hr)
    • Reading (1 hr)
  • Introduction to Archives & Special Collections (2hr)
  • Introduction to research topic/historical documents (1hr)
    • Research/reading (2 hr)
  • Introduction to Wordpress and the blog; Accessibility (1hr)
  • Library tour (30 min)
  • DH Project Evaluation (2 hr)
    • Reading: (1 hr)
  • Expectations and setting of group round rules (1 hr)

Week 2:

  • Introduction to Metadata (break into part 1 and 2) (currently 1 hr)
    • Reading (1 hr)
  • Digital Exhibits part 1 (3 hr) and 2 (2 hr)
    • Reading (90 min and 30 min)
  • GIS Mapping part 1 (2 hr) and 2 (2hr)
    • Reading (90)
  • Introduction to Research (90 min)
  • Documenting your research with Zotero (1 hr)
  • Learning Types (1 hr)
  • Project management techniques (1 hr)

Week 3 - 4

  • Data visualization (3.5 hr)
    • Reading (2 hr)
  • Visit to museum(s) to see what they have that missionaries brought back (2-6 hrs depending on locations)

Week 5 -7

  • Digitization workshop (90 min)
  • Getting the Picture Workshop (Finding and Using Images) (90 min)
  • Fellow-led Gephi workshop for library staff (90 min)
    • Prep time (3-4 hr)
  • Information Architecture and web design workshop (1 hr)
  • Project Planning workshop (1 hr)

Week 8 - 9

  • Wordpress workshop 2 (hands on hackathon) (1 hr)
  • Librarian feedback/final site testing part 1 (1 hr) and 2 (1 hr)
  • Fellow final project presentation (90 min)

(Add any campus or library events as they happen for the fellows to attend, including all staff meetings)

Weekly activities:

  • Team meeting (fellows and representatives from each library department) Day/Time: _______
  • Blog post at the end of each week, responses by fellows at the beginning of following week
  • Some kind of fellow group meeting (to be determined by fellows) at least once a week Day/Time: _________
  • Readings – given in advance of workshops or group discussions (see <bibliography/> and <syllabus reading lists/assignments/>)
  • Research time

DH tools taught in the fellowship:

  • Wordpress (webpage, digital curation/exhibition platform)
  • Timemapper (GIS)
  • Zotero (research data management)
  • Ngrams (text analysis)
  • Voyant or Lexos (topic modelling)
  • Tableau, Gephi (data visualization)
  • Scalar
  • Project planning tools
  • Others as discovered/necessitated by student projects

Typical work breakdown:

Weeks 1-2 75% workshop/discussion, 25% project research and development

Weeks 3-5 50% workshop/discussion, 50% project research and development

Weeks 6-9 25% discussion/group activity, 75% project research and development

Blog posts

Blog posts are written/completed at the end of each week in the Wordpress site, and are due by Friday.

On Mondays, read each others’ blog posts, and comment on at least one other post.

Week one: What questions do you have after the first couple of days? What are you particularly interested in exploring/learning this summer? What are you hoping to get out of this experience?

Week two: Reflecting on the Trevor Owens piece, how does the stage you're at now differ from your usual research process? What are your questions about the process of bringing together a research question, pieces of the collection, and a methodology? What possibilities seem especially cool?

Week three: How have the methodology workshops shaped your understanding of the early history of the College and your research questions? Do you feel ready to begin making the transition from the learning phase of the internship to the project phase?

Week four: What was it like to put proposals together? What questions do you still have? What do you find exciting about moving forward? Reflect on moving from individual proposals to the group project. What concerns do you have and how do you think you can allow for one another's interests?

Week five: Reflect on the research you have done over the past week. What is drawing you in the most? Is there anything you thought would be a fruitful avenue for research, but turned out to be a dead end? What questions do you still have that you'd most like to answer?

Week six: Which mini-project are you currently most excited about? What do you think it might look like in its final form?

Week seven: How did our field trips today impact yout? What components, if any, of those visits might you bring into your research?

Week eight: No blog post this week unless you want to write one … feel free to focus on your project instead!

Week nine: Reflect on what you’ve learned and done this summer. Do you feel satisfied with the final product? What surprised you about this journey? Do you think this will tie into whatever you do next in life?

Sample Course Outline

Weekly activities:

  • Team meeting (fellows and representatives from each library department) ]

Day/Time: ______________

  • Some kind of fellow group meeting (to be determined by fellows) at least once a week

Day/Time: ______________

  • Readings – given in advance of workshops or group discussions

(see <bibliography/> and <syllabus reading lists/assignments/>)

  • Research time/reflection time
  • Campus or library events as they happen, including library staff meetings

Week 1:

Workshops and instructor-led events

  • General orientation
  • Intro to DH (group discussion of readings) (1 hr)
    • Reading (90 min)
  • Introduction to Amherst College Digital Collections (1hr)
    • Reading (1 hr)
  • Introduction to Archives & Special Collections (2hr)
  • Summer researcher reception
  • Introduction to research topic/historical documents (Archives) (1hr)
    • Research/reading (2 hr)
  • Introduction to Wordpress and the blog; accessibility (Asha) (1hr)
  • Library tour (30 min)
  • Team strengths workshop
  • DH Project Evaluation (2 hr)
    • Reading: (1 hr)
  • Expectations and setting of group round rules (1 hr)

Blog post

What questions do you have after the first couple of days? What are you particularly interested in exploring/learning this summer? What are you hoping to get out of this experience?

Week 2:

Workshops and instructor-led events

  • Introduction to Metadata (break into part 1 and 2) (total 2 hr)
    • Reading (1 hr)
  • Digital Exhibits part 1 (3 hr) and 2 (2 hr)
    • Reading (90 min and 30 min)
  • GIS Mapping part 1 (2 hr) and 2 (2hr)
    • Reading (90)
  • Introduction to Research (Blake & Dunstan) (90 min)
  • Documenting your research with Zotero (1 hr) (dedicated for DSSF)
  • Learning Types (1 hr)
  • [Project management (1 hr)]

Blog post

Reflecting on the Trevor Owens piece, how does the stage you're at now differ from your usual research process? What are your questions about the process of bringing together a research question, pieces of the collection, and a methodology? What possibilities seem especially cool?

Assignments due

  • Metadata - create your own metadata, then find metadata in a digital collection that feels incomplete to you

Week 3 - 4

Workshops and instructor-led events

  • Text analysis part 1 (2 hr) and 2 (2 hr)
    • Reading (2.5 hr)
  • Topic Modeling (3 hr)
    • Reading (2 hr)
  • Data visualization (Tableau?) (3.5 hr)
    • Reading (2 hr)
  • Visit to museum(s) to see what they have that missionaries brought back (2-6 hrs depending on locations)

Blog posts

How did our field trips today impact yout? What components, if any, of those visits might you bring into

How have the methodology workshops shaped your understanding of the early history of the College and your research questions? Do you feel ready to begin making the transition from the learning phase of the internship to the project phase?

Assignments due

  • Digital Exhibits deliverables
  • Mapping deliverables
  • Data visualization deliverables

Week 5 -7

Workshops and instructor-led events

  • Digitization workshop (90 min)
  • Getting the Picture Workshop (Finding and Using Images) (90 min)
  • Fellow-led Gephi workshop for library staff (90 min)
    • Prep time (3-4 hr)
  • Information Architecture and web design workshop (1 hr)
  • Project management follow-up workshop (1 hr)

Blog posts

What was it like to put proposals together? What questions do you still have? What do you find exciting about moving forward? Reflect on moving from individual proposals to the group project. What concerns do you have and how do you think you can allow for one another's interests?

Reflect on the research you have done over the past week. What is drawing you in the most? Is there anything you thought would be a fruitful avenue for research, but turned out to be a dead end? What questions do you still have that you'd most like to answer?

Which mini-project are you currently most excited about? What do you think it might look like in its final form?

Assignments due

  • Topic modelling deliverables
  • Text analysis deliverables
  • Mini-project proposals

Week 8 - 9

Workshops and instructor-led events

  • Wordpress workshop 2 (hands on hackathon) (1 hr)
  • Librarian feedback/final site testing part 1 (1 hr) and 2 (1 hr)
  • Fellow final project presentation (90 min)

Blog post

Reflect on what you’ve learned and done this summer. Do you feel satisfied with the final product? What surprised you about this journey? Do you think this will tie into whatever you do next in life?

Bibliography

Zotero library

Introduction to DH

Metadata

Digital Exhibits and Research

Mapping

  • Knowles, A. K., & Hillier, A. (2008). Placing history : how maps, spatial data, and GIS are changing historical scholarship. Redlands, Calif. : ESRI Press
  • Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees : abstract models for a literary history. London ; New York : Verso, 2005. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-fLjxw3AIG6VzJsbkg1Q211d1U/view

Text Analysis

Topic Modeling

Project Evaluation

Data Visualization

Workshop guides (Amherst College)

Acknowledgements

The DSSF is the product of collaboration by Amherst College library staff in developing, teaching, and stewarding the program since 2014. More information about the program is available on the Amherst College Library website.

Thank you to the following people who have contributed to the DSSF curriculum:

Christina Barber
Kelly Dagan
Jessica Dampier
Blake Doherty
Kathleen Gerrity
Rachel Jirka
Michael Kelly
Dunstan McNutt
Amanda Pizzollo
Este Pope
Johanna Radding
Missy Roser
Kelcy Shepherd
Sara Smith
Sarah Walden McGowan