HASTAC

Last week, Josh Finnell, Jessica Clemons, and I presented a digital poster, Integrating Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum at the HASTAC Conference in Ann Arbor. This blog post is a short description of our experience at the conference and presenting our poster.

Josh:
At her keynote address, Cathy Davidson distributed pencils and notecards to the audience and asked everyone to write down the skills we think students need to succeed in the 21st century. She then asked us to talk with a neighbor about what we wrote down. Even though she didn’t say it, everyone worked on the first step alone. This isolated approach to thinking and learning is very much a standard of an older model of education. As Davidson points out, we are more likely to retain information when we work collaboratively. Hence, the audience was more likely to retain our conversation with our neighbor than what we wrote down on a notecard. Davidson’s point is that our institutions should foster collaboration and stimulate learning.

With Davidson’s keynote, in conjunction Dan Atkins and Siva Vaidhyanathan, the theme of scholarly communication was the umbrella topic of the conference. So it was with great pleasure to share the ways in which the colleges of the Ohio 5 have been fostering collaboration and stimulating learning through the Next Generation Libraries Grant. The conference was an excellent confluence of scientists, professors, administrators, digital humanists, technologists, and librarians. However, though a cross-section of the academic community was represented, most of the attendees and presenters spoke from the position of R1 research institutions. Our poster presentation Integrating Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum gave us the opportunity to showcase the ways in which smaller institutions can also contribute to the conversation of digital humanities

Jessica:
I was pleasantly surprised about the interest regarding our project. Many people saw librarians as necessary collaborators in digital projects and were pleased to have that presence at the conference. While sometimes left out of the conversations, library involvement in digital projects are essential from several perspectives, especially preservation. I spoke about the COW farmer oral history collection and had someone ask me for tips regarding interviewing. She was very interested in my work in the classroom helping students prepare to interview people they had never met before.

I was able to attend several lightning talk series that had a holistic approach to innovative uses of technology. Faculty and students are researching in new ways. Assessment of digital projects is not the same as evaluating the standard research paper of essays. Seeing how all of these pieces fit together will help me develop new proposals for digital collections.

Catalina:
The theme of Digital Scholarly Community at the HASTAC conference was seen in both the key notes addresses, concurrent sessions, and poster demonstrations. The keynotes provided a detailed look how traditional academic fields are changed (and in the case of Josh Greenberg new fields emerge) by the application of digital tools. The concurrent lightening sessions and posters brought together innovative projects from the social sciences, humanities, arts, and sciences united by their use of the digital. These quick sessions presented new and often groundbreaking ways scholars are gathering, mining, sharing, creating and representing data.

Our poster was one of few that focused on student involvement in digital scholarly communication. While the collections we've created as part of the NGL are not as cutting edge as much of what we saw at HASTAC, we were able to convey the importance of our work by discussing the classroom and how the NGL is contributing to curriculum and student scholarship. In addition, there was interest in our poster for the practical approach to creating digital collections we outlined, as opposed to other presentations focused only on the results. Overall HASTAC offered us a great opportunity to see what other digital projects are coming, while presenting our own perspective on what we have accomplished at The Ohio Five.