Digital Scholarship Retreat

About the Retreat

Digital Scholarship applies an evolving set of methodologies and modes of engagement to existing scholarly inquiry. It also invites opportunities for new collaborations across disciplines. The organizers of the Digital Scholarship Faculty Retreat seek to contribute to this dialogue by hosting an intensive workshop designed for faculty and graduate students to engage with concepts, methodologies, and tools while, at the same time, build community and identify support networks. After attending, attendees will be able to incorporate new digital concepts, methodologies, and tools directly into their own teaching and/or research.

Goals

• Define digital scholarship and situate its role at Tulane University

• Consider and explore a select set of tools and methodologies and their applicability in research and pedagogy

• Establish a community of practice in digital scholarship

• Produce a directory of campus resources (both human and technology)

• Create a roadmap for digital scholarship at Tulane University

Audience

Open to all faculty, postdocs, and graduate students working in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences at Tulane.

Cost

The program is free for all participants.

Readings

Attendees will be provided recommended readings ahead of the Retreat to prepare them for meaningful participation.

Partners

• Center for Engaged Teaching & Learning (CELT)

• Newcomb College Institute

• Tulane Information Technology

Where

The Retreat will take place in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library room 308, a digitally-equipped smart classroom offering several large digital displays, projector, microphones, the ability to record, and 30 WIFI-enabled laptops with charging station.

Who

The Digital Scholarship Retreat is an event hosted by H-TML with support from campus partners: Tulane IT, Newcomb College Institute, and CELT. Sessions will be facilitated by experienced librarians at Howard-Tilton Memorial Library along with invited campus partners.

Lightning Talks

• Digital Scholarship Opportunities at Howard-Tilton Memorial Libraries
  Discover new services at your library as we develop and expand digital scholarship services, spaces, and programming to collaborate, create, explore, and engage with the Tulane community. Facilitator: Sean Knowlton (he/him/his)

• Digital Scholarship Opportunities at Newcomb College Institute
  A brief introduction to resources available for faculty, staff, and students at NCI. Will cover Digital Research Internship program, HASTAC program, information technology internship program, and Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing grants. Facilitator: Jacquelyne Thoni Howard (Newcomb College Institute)

• Digital Publishing at Tulane University
  An overview of the services and digital platforms offered for publishing a variety type of materials: digital library collections, online exhibits, peer-reviewed academic journals; non-academic publishing. Facilitator: Jeff Rubin (Digital Initiatives and Publishing)

Hands-On Workshops

• Build a Digital Timeline
  In this session, participants will use TimelineJS, an open-source tool to build, as a group, an engaging timeline using a Google Sheet spreadsheet. Participants will consider benefits for timeline-based assignments in their courses. Facilitator: Sean Knowlton (he/him/his)
   
• DIY Digital: Classroom and Exhibit Applications
  In this session, facilitators will demonstrate recent uses of Google Cardboard, AR, MakerSpace resources, and cell phone apps in the university classroom and in physical exhibits that foster interactive and engaging experiences with archival materials. Participants will brainstorm, discuss, and develop potential DIY activities for a course project or a digitally-enhanced exhibit based on their own subject areas of expertise. Facilitator: Christine Hernandez
   
• Introduction to GIS
  In this session, participants will define geography and GIS, describe basic concepts, and use GIS software while considering its application in teaching and research. Facilitator: Melissa Chomintra
   
• Introduction to Text Analysis and Hathi Trust
  Participants will gain knowledge of the concepts, terms, and research outcomes of digital text analyses. Participants will distinguish the concept of distant reading from close reading, as well as describe the benefits of analyses like word frequency, collocation, pattern recognition, named entity recognition, and n-grams. In this session, participants will use select software applications (JSTOR Text Analyzer and the Hathi Trust Research Center) and consider implications for teaching and research. Facilitator: Jane Marie Pinzino
   

• Manage Your Sources for Research and Teaching
  In this session, participants will use one option for managing sources, Zotero, and consider implications for their research and teaching. Participants will learn how to download, install, and use Zotero and the Zotero Connector to import, organize, and manage sources. Participants will create a bibliography in a citation style of choice and will also use a plug-in for Word or Google Docs to dynamically generate a bibliography as part of the composition process. Facilitator: Sean Knowlton (he/him/his)

• Using Visualization tools in the Classroom
  Attendees in this session will learn the fundamentals of using Palladio (Humanities + Design, a Research Lab at Stanford University) and RawGraphs to visualize datasets. Attendees will state the benefits and limitations of creating data visualizations.Attendees will prepare a dataset for uploading into Palladio and then create their own visualizations using the tool. Datasets will be provided. Facilitator: Jacquelyne Thoni Howard (Newcomb College Institute)

Demos and Overviews

• Methods for Cleaning and Enhancing Your Data
  A quick run-through of select tools for examining and enriching data, including facet, filter, and cluster tools, finding linkable concepts in raw text, and some options for data cleanup and control in Microsoft Office. Facilitator: Rachel Tillay (they/them/theirs)
   
• Using Online Exhibits in the Classroom
  Attendees at this session will learn approaches to using Tulane’s Online Exhibition platform in the university classroom. The session will cover the basics of integrating a digital exhibit into your curriculum and demonstrate how to organize materials, topics, and students to create an efficient structure and workflow for a semester-long (or shorter) project using WordPress.
  Facilitators: Jeff Rubin and Elisabeth Price (Digital Initiatives and Publishing)

Panel Discussion

Next Steps: Carrying New Skills Into The Classroom
This session will conclude the Retreat and act as a "next steps" idea generator to build concrete action plans around the information attendees have learned. This will tie in with the work of the Innovation Council and other initiatives around Academic Technology. Facilitators: Mike Griffith, Bobbie Garner-Coffie, Blaine Fisher, and Kate Johnson (Tulane Information Technology)