Event Title

Creating Digital Scholarship; Collaboration Across Countries and Disciplines

Presenter Information

Liza Potts
Anne von Petersdorff, Michigan State University

Location

NSC-148

Start Date

3-11-2017 10:00 AM

End Date

3-11-2017 11:00 AM

Description

Creating Digital Scholarship: A Demo of How WIDE Built a Digital Book Using Scalar and Project Management Tools

Building a digital book is a process in which the author must do the scholarly work of an extended article or monograph plus the application work of building a website, app, or other kind of interactive system to display the scholarship. Like many digital humanities projects, building a digital book can take a team effort. This project demo will illustrate the culmination of several years of research and a year of building the digital book. Working in a Digital Humanities lab with strong backgrounds in user experience and digital scholarship, the team leaders will share their reasoning behind technology choices, their methods for managing processes, and their efforts in implementing the project. Benefits and drawbacks for tools will be discussed, as well as lessons learned for their next large-scale team project.

The decision to research, design, make, and build a digital book should not be taken lightly. Without a doubt, doing this kind of scholarship takes far more time, energy, resources, and people than traditional academic scholarship. Being able to do this kind of work requires several decisions to be made upfront, including how to present the research and how to select appropriate tools. And, of course, the work of researching and writing itself.

While the team has experience building websites using HTML, they wanted to explore what different content management systems might do to support digital scholarship.We decided to use Scalar, a content management system built with the support of Mellon Foundation grant funding. Scalar was chosen for this project because it was built for use by academics, is open source, and especially because it could push our team to think creatively for ways to disrupt the organization and experience of the digital book, especially since this project wanted to foreground multimedia content for a non-academic audience.

Collaboration Across Countries and Disciplines: The Possible Worlds of Hybrid Dissertations

Today's humanities PhDs pursue careers in many different fields - both inside and outside academia. In an effort to transform the culture of graduate education, an increasing number of humanities departments seek to design doctoral education, which can both transform the understanding of what it means to be a humanities scholar, and advance the integration of the humanities in the public sphere. This development finds its ultimate expression in calls for expanding and reimagining the form of the dissertation and how this final work can prepare humanities PhDs for a broad range of careers beyond traditional academic positions.

Drawing on the process of proposing, developing and (almost) defending my own hybrid dissertation, this talk/project demo seeks to highlight the most exiting possibilities and most unexpected challenges, while also suggesting ways through which faculty and departments can best support PhD students in these endeavors. My dissertation project titled "Body, Voice and Collaboration: Re-Framing the Woman Traveler in Autobiographical Film and Filmmaking" deals with female bodies in transit and aims to undermine and complicate the current economies of representation of women travelers. It consists of two equally weighted parts: Wanderlust, a critically acclaimed feature documentary, and a theoretical-historical exploration of film aesthetics.

Since I was working with an Argentinian filmmaker to produce the film, I will pay particular attention to the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration in enriching our scholarship (not only with people outside my discipline, but also from non-academic contexts). Moreover, I will address some of the obstacles I have encountered working across different cultures and languages. I will also explore the specific challenges of integrating creative works of art into humanities dissertations and suggest ways in which these can be productively framed as integral parts of one's scholarship. Finally, I will address the logistics of embarking on the path of a hybrid dissertation and the way it challenges us to revisit traditional ideas of academic labor and ideas of ownership/authorship.