The Power and Process of Digital Scholarship

Last time I wrote for this blog was a year and a half ago, and I’m so excited to be back working on Globally Elite Project! As a senior, I often find myself looking back at the most influential aspects of my Colby experience (hint: Adam’s Global Elites class makes the list!) The other crucial impact has been my involvement with digital scholarship and discovering firsthand how powerful digital and creative work is as modes of research. That is why I have decided to complete this semester’s project analyzing the social aesthetics of Kongens International School in Denmark. This process involves choosing 20 photographs of the campus and writing a paragraph informed by historical, cultural, political, and theoretical contexts that help understand what these images say about privilege and elite reproduction within KIS. To fully create an immersive online visual essay, I will be using ArcGIS’s StoryMaps, a platform that allows users to create a media rich series of maps or cascading narrative to help tell stories which will add a more interactive dynamic to the social aesthetics of KIS.

I started working on digital projects my sophomore year at Colby and loved the challenge of writing for a different audience and learning how to create significant works on different platforms. Since then, I’ve been hooked and have worked on projects ranging from creating websites to interactive maps and online exhibits within Digital Maine, a site dedicated to telling stories by and about Mainers. In collaboration with faculty, staff, and students from Colby and other colleges at a national level, the Digital Maine team had the opportunity to go to a conference in 2016. It was there that I met an inspired group of undergrads and joined the steering committee of the Undergraduate Network for Research in the Humanities (UNRH). This February, I attended the UNRH conference I had been helping plan for the past year. We had approximately 30 students from all over the globe whose projects ranged from oral histories and podcasts to interactive mapping projects, social media campaigns, and websites. The breadth, depth, and significance of each of the participants’ very different projects, as well as my own experiences with digital scholarship, left me thinking about three of its most defining aspects: process, collaboration, and access.

1// While more traditional scholarship often requires a set format and methods, digital scholarship opens up a broad range of activities that can be tailored to specific projects- in our class, this can be seen in visual essays, a documentary, art, a mixtape, and podcasts. Each type of medium will help the researcher and audience gain a different understanding of the material. As seen in these blog posts, the process of creating the scholarship is just as important, if not more important, than the end result. This pedagogical shift from final product to the importance of process is all about constantly evaluating and being self-aware of your progress and how you engage with the material and the subject matter.  

The blogs we are writing for Globally Elite are a prime example of this. Collectively, they keep track of our experiences and help us informally reflect and connect our academic backgrounds, personal backgrounds, and lived and perceived experiences. I’ve also found reflection in simply talking to people about my work. Not many people, it seems, know much about digital humanities or digital scholarship, so explaining my work or presenting at conferences has truly been the best way to advocate for the process and how it has changed the way I think about research and scholarship.

2// Secondly, digital scholarship allows for collaboration in new ways. Traditionally, academia and scholarship seems to be a very solitary and independent act. In my experiences, because it is such a recent field and everyone is figuring it out together, digital scholarship allows room for and encourages collaboration to create the most dynamic, informed, and interesting projects.

The ability to work in Digital Maine’s collaborative group with Digital Maine alongside my professors, ITS and Special Collections staff, and other students was an eye opening experience, as I had previously felt like my work was not as highly valued. This model is also reflected within the Globally Elite project as students working with Adam, not for him. I think collaboration is an aspect of scholarship that is not often focused on enough in undergraduate research, and my participation in this practice has filled me with confidence and inspiration.

3// I also believe that digital scholarship allows for greater access. While papers written for classes and other research projects often go unread by anyone who is not the professor, being able to showcase your work in the form of a website, Youtube video, social media page, etc. allows for a greater population to see and understand your research. In class the other day, we were discussing how writings about understanding eliteness are almost always written in a level or way that non-elites cannot comprehend. Thus, I think by putting our work on a website (while certainly still inaccessible to a certain population), and informing our work by who we want our audience to be, we are actively working to make understanding eliteness more accessible then, say, reading Bourdieu.