Now that the snow days have concluded (fingers crossed), I’m joining a group of colleagues in kicking off a collaborative project at the University of Mary Washington titled “DSI” or “Digital Scholars Institute” (any relation to “CSI” purely coincidental…) Working with Mary Kayler, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation at UMW, and Jim Groom, director of our Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, who together initiated the project, along with my excellent colleague Elizabeth Lewis, we’ve organized two pilot cohorts that began meeting just this week.
The focus is also two-fold at the start, though I’m sure the conversation will develop in more diverse directions. Participants are all veterans of last year’s “Domain of One’s Own” project in which faculty on our campus explored their own digital scholarship and identities through domain creation as part of a university initiative. Now, this semester, we’re building on that experience through a bi-weekly conversation in which participants in small cohorts will be sharing individual projects in digital scholarship for close feedback.
At the same time, we’ll also be engaged in a broader, “meta” conversation about digital scholarship itself. What are the standards by which our diverse fields define it — or are beginning to define it? How does digital scholarship relate to, differ from, or overlap with supposedly more “traditional” forms? How is digital scholarship influencing our work in the classroom and in curricular development? These questions are just starting points, and the conversation will be evolving as the semester continues. I’m very much looking forward to digging into the details…
Image: Skier making a cornice jump near Edith Creek, southeast slope of Mt. Rainier. Photographer: Dwight Watson. N.D. Property of MSCUA, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, PH Coll 165. Link: http://content.lib.washington.edu/u?/watson,33.
