Summer Institute for Digital Exploration at Schaffer
Lead Instructor: Adam Mazel (he/him/his), Digital Scholarship and Instruction Librarian
Schaffer Library Room 119mazela@union.edu
Description
The Summer Institute for Digital Exploration at Schaffer, or "Summer IDEaS," is a librarian-taught, extra-curricular, project-based, research opportunity that unites traditional research and digital humanities (DH), an increasingly ubiquitous approach to humanities scholarship that critically engages with data and computing technology. Through Summer IDEaS, you’ll learn both longstanding and emerging methods of scholarship that will enable you to achieve and share insight and ready you for an increasingly digital world.
The theme of Summer IDEaS 2021 is “Identity and Power at Union College.” You’ll learn about this theme, DH, and research by individually and collaboratively creating a digital edition in Manifold of the diaries of Jonathan Pearson (1813-87), whose connection to Union—as student (class of ’35), professor, librarian, and treasurer—spanned more than a half century.
In so doing, we'll think through the fundamental questions of DH:
- What is the impact of digital media? What does it enable / disable?
- How can digital media improve our scholarship?
- How can digital media make our scholarship usable by others?
- Who / what gets to be digital?[1]
- Where can digital items be found?
To do so, we'll create our own blogs (and blog about it); computationally trace trends across nearly a million words (and more); catch archive fever (and never want to be cured); make our scholarship open (and awesome); and ultimately write, edit, and publish our very own book.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of Summer IDEaS, participants will have learned the basics of:
- Digital publishing, including
- How to create a digital scholarly edition
- How to make meaning and contextualize and enhance information in a digital context
- Digital skills, including
- Computational text analysis and visualization
- How to create a static website and blog
- Markup and data-serialization languages
- The history of identity and power at Union College and beyond
- Archival, library, and web research
- What open scholarship is and why it matters, including
- Copyright and licensing
- How to think critically about new media