DISH: Digital Scholarship Hub

What is DiSH?
Middlebury’s Digital Scholarship Hub (DiSH) aims to provide an infrastructure to connect faculty, staff, and students interested in creating digital scholarship. We conceive of digital scholarship broadly, including the use of computational methods in typically non-quantitative fields (often called Digital Humanities), open-access online distribution of writing & research materials, use of innovative digital publishing formats (such as video essays, podcasts, and interactive visualizations), and academic analysis of digital media and platforms. We hope to create regular events and meetings to foster collaboration, share questions and answers, develop internal resources to support digital scholarship, connect our efforts to regional and national networks of digital practitioners, and promote public visibility of the innovative digital work being done at Middlebury. We particularly hope to serve a supportive role to faculty who are interested in digital experimentation but may not have direct support within their departments or programs, creating a network of like-minded scholars working in tandem and/or collaboration across the college and its affiliates, and with local, national, and international partners.

Since one of the interesting features of digital practices is how they blur boundaries between pedagogy and scholarship, as DiSH takes shape, we will attend to how the work of DiSH overlaps and complements the direct classroom pedagogical support currently provided by LIS and CTLR and others.

Key readings & resources:

• http://chronicle.com/article/No-More-Indiana-Jones/135884/ – on DH in undergrad
• http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/10/01/essay-opportunities-humanities-programs-digital-era – overview of DH for outsiders/administrators
• http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital – Key tenure issues
• http://blogs.nitle.org/category/humanities/ and http://www.nitle.org/help/digital_humanities.php NITLE’s digital humanities hub

Small Liberal Arts Colleges Digital Humanities resources/examples:

• Occidental Center for Digital Learning & Research: http://www.oxy.edu/center-digital-learning-research
• Hamilton DH Initiative: http://www.dhinitiative.org/
• Tri-Co DH: http://tdh.brynmawr.edu/
• Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond http://dsl.richmond.edu/
• Vassar digital media program
• Five College DH Center: https://www.fivecolleges.edu/dh
• Individual contacts at Connecticut College, Carleton, Pitzer, Austin,

Upcoming Events
Building Digital Archives, Sam Liebhaber (Arabic) and Holly Allen (American Studies)
December 7, 2012: 12:15-1:15 PM, Axinn 103
LIS has been working with a number of faculty to support and help create digital publishing opportunities for faculty. We want to highlight two such projects that have created online archives of primary source materials. Sam will describe his work building a digital sound archive of poetry in the Mahri dialect and Holly will describe her ongoing, collaborative effort to build the American Studies Web Museum with her students.

Transforming Scholarly Publishing: Open Access, New Forms of Peer Review, and Building Academic Communities
Save the Date: January 8, 2013
Nationally renowed digital humanists Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona and MLA’s Director of Scholarly Communication) will be joined by Middlebury’s Jason Mittell (Film and Media Culture / American Studies) and Alison Byerly (English and American Literature) for a panel that will explore new innovations in scholarly publishing. Issues explored will include rethinking peer review for a digital age, potentials of open access and public scholarship, and fostering academic communities via digital publication.

Stay Informed and Get Involved

Join the DISH mailing list to keep informed about the work of the group. To do so, just send an email to mdroy@middlebury.edu .