BGSU University Libraries News

Dr. Andrew Schocket, project manager for three upcoming Scholar’s Dashboard workshops, released a call for participants last week.

Pairs of collaborators (humanities scholars, librarians and technologists) are invited to attend one of three two-day “design and build” workshops that will focus on creative and innovative applications of the humanities collections in the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons – a statewide shared platform for digital collections.

The full announcement is as follows:

Scholar’s Dashboard: Creating a Multidisciplinary Tool Via “Design and Build” Workshops

Call for Workshop Participants:

Librarians/Archivists and Humanities Scholars in Ohio

The Scholar’s Dashboard project is a series of three two‐day “design and build” workshops, teaming humanities scholars, librarians, and technologists in innovative application development to optimize use of humanities collections from the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons (DRC). The DRC is a 500,000+ item open access collection from Ohio academic and cultural heritage organizations. Dashboard users will select and combine collections, add descriptions and metadata, and re‐visualize and re‐present information. DRC collections with relevant information (oral histories, narratives, records, documents, images, e.g.) will form the design base. “Design and build” workshops allow researchers and scholars to specify features needed to rapidly expand DRC functionality. This model will then be used as a magnet for further digital humanities collections, as scholars, librarians, and archivists contribute collections in order to benefit from the Scholar’s Dashboard design and capabilities.

Each workshop will address a particular theme, and consist of ten pairs of people: a humanities scholar and a librarian or archivist from ten different OhioLINK institutions with relevant collections that are either already in the DRC or are candidates for inclusion.  In order to ensure broad participation and a range of ideas, we hope to have a different set of people for each of the workshops.

We’re not looking only for experts, or only people who have extensive experience in the digital humanities.  We’re also looking for people who are curious and willing to talk through the challenges that we face in making Ohio’s digital resources accessible and useful to humanities scholars.

• Workshop 1: Space.  How can we best analyze and visualize the spatial distribution and dimensions of the artifacts in our collections, of their creators, and their content? November 8 and 9, 2012.
• Workshop 2: Time.  How can we best analyze and visualize the chronological distribution and dimensions of the artifacts in our collections, of their creators, and their content? February 7 and 8, 2013.
• Workshop 3: Identity and community networks. How can we best analyze and visualize the ways that artifacts, their creators, and their content were or are socially and culturally embedded? April 4 and 5, 2013.

All workshops will be held at Ohio Supercomputer Center’s Bale Conference Room and Theater.  Participants will be provided with a parking pass and a $100 travel reimbursement.

To participate, please send the following information to Andy Schocket, project manager, at aschock@bgsu.edu: names and cv’s of the pair of participants, and a brief statement of interest, including the relevant DRC collection.  Should there be more applicants than is availability, applicants will be chosen so as to provide a range of interests and experience.  Please also direct any questions to Andy Schocket.

The Scholar’s Dashboard is funded through a grant from the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities.   Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed as a result of this workshop do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.