HASTAC 2015: The Art and Science of Digital Humanities

Building digital archives, digitizing and managing born-digital special collections material, and all of the preservation sustainability concerns that go along with these undertakings, have been a topic of conversation at information professional gatherings for nearly two decades. However, though cultural heritage has become progressively digital and potentially available to greater audiences, these materials are often not used or experienced to their full potential.

As an increasing number of academic institutions engage in digital initiatives and curricula, the role of archives and special collections has barely begun to be addressed. This panel brings together six professionals in a variety of roles, from a diverse set of higher educational institutions, engaging students and the local community with digital archives and special collections in innovative ways.

Chella Vaidyanathan (Johns Hopkins University) will focus on the first part of the Archiving Student Life project, a digital exhibit created by students to document the experience of undergraduate students at JHU. The online exhibit features archival materials that the students selected and contextualize through research and writing.

Caitlin Christian-Lamb (Davidson College) will discuss experimenting with new ways of engaging the college community with archives and special collections, focusing on curricular-based projects. These include: student-authored entries in the Davidson Encyclopedia, an environmental studies capstone born out of an archives crowdsourcing map project, visualizing archival data, and a collaborative mobile library design project.

Charlotte Nunes (Southwestern University) will describe planning and executing a digital-archives-based undergraduate English course, “Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition.” The course provides opportunities for students to learn about digital archives by building them, engaging with initiatives including the Texas After Violence Project and the American Prison Writing Archive.

Robin Wharton (Georgia State University) and Elon Lang (University of Texas at Austin) will share their experience founding a long-term collaborative digital archive for a medieval English poet. The Hoccleve Archive (www.hocclevearchive.org) is developing methods for facilitating digital editing projects that create overlapping "communities of practice"--comprising experts, students, and community members--assembled through the study of texts.

Engaging students and communities with archives and special collections not only increases visibility of a repository’s material by sharing knowledge with new audiences, but also serves an important pedagogical purpose. By sharing these five different experiences of outreach, community-building, and instruction using digital archives and special collections materials, we aim to start conversations about creative methods for collaboration, breaking institutional boundaries, and educating students and the wider community about special collections.