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Name(s) of programs (e.g. Scholars’ Lab) and URL(s) associated with your DS program:
- Center for Digital Scholarship (https://library.brown.edu/create/cds/)
- Brown University Digital Publications (https://library.brown.edu/create/digitalpublications/)
If you have a mission statement or similar description of your program, please include it here:
- Mission: The University’s digital scholarship hub, the Center for Digital Scholarship
(CDS), provides inspiration, expertise, services, and teaching in digital scholarship methodologies, project development, and publication to Brown faculty, staff, and students.Vision: The Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) develops and stewards faculty and student projects that advance innovative scholarly ideas and the field of digital scholarship by fostering projects that are inclusive and open, responsive to diverse perspectives, and focused and intentional about ethical and cultural concerns and public impact. - Values
- Collaboration: We believe that collaboration is essential to creating work that supports and brings out the best of all members of project teams.
- Inclusiveness: We seek to collaborate with faculty, students, and staff, and departments and centers across campus regardless of previous experience or expertise in digital scholarship. We especially encourage women and people of color whose work has been systemically underrepresented o pursue digital scholarship projects.
- Innovation: We support transformative approaches to research and learning, and to the creation of innovative scholarship that raises new questions, reaches broad audiences, and impacts communities. To do this, we encourage and guide intellectual exploration and creativity.
- Community: We seek to build and nurture the digital scholarship community at Brown University and beyond. We believe that scholarship should make a positive difference in the world, and we encourage our academic partners to consider how their work can improve the lives of individuals and communities. Training the next generation: We are committed to training the next generation of digital scholarship practitioners and scholars. The digital humanities doctoral certificate program provides a framework for graduate students to learn and grow their digital humanities skills and knowledge. Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, involved in the project work gain experiences and training relevant for a wide range of careers where knowledge and skills with digital media are central.
Consultation
- Digital technologies and tools = Offered by Library
- Project planning = Offered by Library
- Project management = Offered by Library
- Building databases and archives = Offered by Library
- Class projects/assignments = Offered by Library
- Copyright, intellectual property = Offered by Library
- Data management plans = Offered by Library
- Metadata = Offered by Library
- Locating and selecting data sources = Offered by Library
- Researchers’ grant writing = Offered by Library
- Digital publishing and dissemination = Offered by Library
- Digital preservation/curation = Offered by Library
Education/Training
- Workshops/bootcamps on tools/software = Offered by Library
- Course-related sessions related to digital projects = Offered by Library
- Credit courses on digital scholarship topics = Offered by Library
- Certificate programs in digital scholarship or related topic = Offered by Library
- Symposia = Offered by Library
- Events, e.g. GIS Day = Offered by Library
Facilities
- Training/classroom space = Offered by Library
- Consultation space = Offered by Library
- Collaborative project space = Offered by Library
- Computer/data lab = Offered by Library
- Media production studio = Offered by Library
- Visualization studio = Offered by Library
- Makerspace = Offered by Library + Partner(s), Offered by other campus unit(s)
- VR/AR studio = Offered by Library + Partner(s), Offered by other campus unit(s)
- Data science lab = Offered by Library + Partner(s), Offered by other campus unit(s)
Infrastructure/Enterprise Servies
- Digital preservation = Offered by Library
- Large-scale data storage = Offered by Library
- Digital publishing services = Offered by Library
- Repositories = Offered by Library
- Programming, writing APIs = Offered by Library, Offered by Library + Partner(s)
- Computational processing of data = Offered by Library
- Data recovery/migration = Offered by Library
- Software licensing = Offered by Library
- Virtual computing = Offered by Library
- Security = Offered by Library + Partner(s)
What would you like to offer next?
Our CDS has recently started offering a digital humanities certificate to more fully integrate our curricular offerings with the university. We are working on launching the certificate now. In terms of what’s next: we’re working on refining our strategic direction. As a historic center, formed in the 1990s, we have done a lot of different projects and contributed to scholarship in many ways. Going forward, we want to specialize in community-based, critical digital scholarship.
What type of staff are employed by your program?
- Librarians, archivists, library staff
- Information technologists, including programmers
- Faculty from academic departments
- Multimedia professionals
- Instructional technologists
- Data scientists/analysts
- Postdocs
- Graduate students
- Undergraduate students
What constituencies are served by your program?
- Faculty
- Postdocs
- Graduate students
- Undergraduate students
- Community members
- Local high school students
- Individuals external to the university and local community
What disciplines are served by your program?
- Humanities
- Arts
- Social sciences
- STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)
- Professional (health sciences, law, business, etc.)
Please provide pointers to additional materials that may be helpful in understanding the structure and work of your program.
CDS received notification of two significant grants recently. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded the Library $20,000 to build models to preserve the born-digital work of five multimedia artists. Brown University has had a very strong program in electronic writing for many years, and that long history means an increasing concern with preservation of experimental work. The preservation of stable digital work is complicated, but pales in comparison to the preservation of work that is not stable at all. Read more in the press release. (https://blogs.brown.edu/libnews/nea-grants-for-arts/).
Our second major grant is from the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas,” a community-based collaborative database project on the history of Indigenous enslavement in early New England, won a three-year grant of $350,000. Read more in the press release. (https://blogs.brown.edu/libnews/stolen-relations-neh-grant/)
Recent publications include:
- Ashley Champagne (CDS) and Justin Uhr (Digital Technologies)
co-authored a publication with Cristina Menghini, Shahrzad Haddan, Björn Sandstede, and Sohini Ramachandran, “The Drift of #MyBodyMyChoice Discourse on Twitter.” The paper won Runner Up for Best Paper Award at WebSci’22. The study looks at how the hashtag #MyBodyMyChoice changed during the pandemic in terms of messaging and users.
(https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.04898) - Ashley Champagne, Justin Uhr (Digital Technologies), and Patrick Rashleigh (CDS) co-authored a paper with Professor Diana Grigsby-Toussaint, Elizabeth Silva, Madeline Noh, and Adam Bradly, “US Black Maternal Health Advocacy Topics and Trends on Twitter: Temporal Infoveillance Study” in JMIR Infodemiology in April of 2022. The article shares the major results from their study, which looks at the public discourse of advocates for Black maternal health on Twitter. (https://infodemiology.jmir.org/2022/1/e30885/)
- Allison Levy co-authored Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community, which reports the findings of a spring 2021 summit co-hosted by Brown University and Emory University that convened scholars, academic staff experts, and representatives from university presses. The report features case studies of eight recently published or in-development works that provided the basis for in-depth, evidence-based discussions about the most pressing concerns and challenges facing stakeholders in digital scholarly publishing today. (https://multimodal-digital-monographs.pubpub.org/)