An inaugural Digital Scholarship Symposium will be held April 10, 2024, in the Catalyst, the dedicated digital research and learning space in Parks Library. The event will be cohosted by the Iowa State University Library Digital Scholarship and Initiatives department and the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH) and cosponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa.
The symposium will feature two panel discussions:
Expert faculty and librarians from Iowa State and U of I will compose the panels and discuss creative examples of developing digital literacy skills in the classroom and using digital methods to open research to a wider audience. Iowa State and U of I faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and members of the Ames community who are interested in learning more about digital scholarship and connecting with a growing community of practice are encouraged to attend.
Symposium attendees will have opportunities throughout the day to connect with others interested in digital scholarship and to celebrate the panelists at the closing reception. Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be served.
9:45-10:30 a.m. | The Catalyst (Parks Library room 199)
Start the morning off with coffee and pastries in The Catalyst.
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. | The Catalyst
Expert faculty and librarians from Iowa State University and the University of Iowa will discuss
creative examples of developing digital literacy skills in the classroom.
Iowa State and U of I faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and members of the
Ames community who are interested in learning more about digital scholarship and connecting
with a growing community of practice are encouraged to attend. Registration required.
12:00-2:30 p.m.
Join your fellow attendees for dine-arounds at one of several lunch options around the Ames area, or head off for some downtime on your own.
2:30-4:00 p.m. | Parks Library room 198
Expert faculty and librarians from Iowa State University and the University of Iowa will discuss
creative examples using digital methods to open research to a wider audience.
Iowa State and U of I faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and members of the
Ames community who are interested in learning more about digital scholarship and connecting
with a growing community of practice are encouraged to attend. Registration required.
4:00-5:30 p.m. | The Catalyst
Join Iowa State Library staff for a reception for further conversation and collaborative
exploration over appetizers. Dean Hilary Seo will welcome everyone at 4:30pm. Registration required.
Moderator: Hannah Scates Kettler, Associate University Librarian for Academic Services, Iowa State University
Teaching Art History with Generative AI (Björn Anderson)
Generative AI is transforming the classroom experience and pedagogical approaches throughout academia. The use (and misuse) of AI varies widely across disciplines, however. Art History, with its emphasis on image analysis and historical context, presents both challenges and opportunities for the application of AI.
The World at Their Fingertips: ArcGIS StoryMaps in the Spanish Classroom (Megan Jeanette Myers)
Students in Spanish for Global Professions use ArcGIS to create StoryMaps and explore countries across the Spanish-speaking world. This talk considers introduces the group project, shows student examples, and discusses how digital projects benefit students in Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) courses.
Iterative Design of Digital Exhibit Instruction (Nikki JD White)
Developing digital exhibits incorporates a wide range of skills: primary source research, managing metadata, integrating media and text in a narrative, and wrangling exhibit software. This case study discusses the journey of collaborating with instructor Dr. Jen Sterling to finetune the balance of these target skills in a yearly archival history course, in which students develop Omeka exhibits using materials in the Iowa Women’s Archive.
Storytelling with Digital Maps: Introducing Honors Students to Geospatial Humanities (Erin Ridnour)
Geospatial humanities applies GIS technology and quantitative methods to humanistic inquiry. This talk discusses introducing honors seminar students to mapping as a method of storytelling and cultural and historical analysis while also strengthening data literacy and project planning skills.
Moderator: Matthew W. Sivils, Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Professor and Director, Center for Excellence in the Arts & Humanities, Iowa State University
Beyond Carver and Trice: The Importance of Recognizing Black Students at Iowa State College (Gloria Betcher)
The names “Carver” and “Trice” are well known to Iowa Staters, but more than 100 Black students enrolled at Iowa State College during the decades from 1890 to 1950. The project “The Black ISC Student Experience to 1950,” part of the Tracing Race at ISU Initiative, explores who those students were and why their histories matter in the 21st century as we seek to inspire young students of color at Predominantly White Institutions. Attendees will learn how public digital scholarship offers a point of access to this history and an inspiration to pursue academic excellence and civic engagement.
Mechanisms for Actualizing Speculative Soundscapes: making nature sound accessible and data experiential through collective listening experiences (Alex Braidwood)
Sound, and more importantly listening, is underappreciated in our visually dominant society as we continue to design systems that remove us from nature. The series of projects presented use field recordings of nature sound and sonification of high-frequency research sensor data to remind us that we are part of nature, not separate from it.
Iowa’s Covenants Project: Preliminary Findings on Race Restrictions in Linn and Polk Counties (Colin Gordon and Ashley Howard)
We will present an overview of our project including the advantages and disadvantages to each county’s research method (Linn-digitized deed images, Polk-archival sampling) As previous research in Black Hawk and Johnson indicate, each county’s approach to racial restrictions is respondent to their own political economy. Researchers Gordon and Howard will share preliminary findings for such patterns in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, as well as detail the relationship between the Great Migration research seminar, Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, and community partnership
Creating Community in Digital Scholarship: Leveraging CollectionBuilder for Multilingual Collaboration (Olivia Wikle)
Digital scholarship historically has had a tendency to prioritize English-language projects, which excludes valuable contributions and perspective from non-English speaking communities. This talk will present the use case of the static web digital exhibit framework CollectionBuilder as an accessible tool for building a free multilingual exhibit website, made more approachable through community-building and documentation efforts.
Björn Anderson, Associate Professor, Art History, School of Art, Art History, and Design, University of Iowa
Björn Anderson received MA and PhD degrees in Classical Art & Archaeology from the University of Michigan. A specialist in the study of material, cultural, and visual interaction in the ancient Mediterranean and Western Asia, he has taught a variety of courses in ancient art and archaeology. His publications focus on the art and archaeology of ancient Arabia and Persia. He is a co-director of the new Exploring Continuity and Transition in Southern Jordan Project, which aims to investigate the long-term changes and continuities in the region from the Iron Age to the Islamic period.
Gloria Betcher, Teaching Professor, English, Iowa State University
Ames City Councilmember Gloria Betcher heads a team researching Black Iowa State College (ISC) students to 1950 for the Tracing Race at ISU Initiative. In 2022, her civic leadership and historical research resulted in the renaming of Ames Municipal Airport for ISC student and Black flight pioneer James Herman Banning.
Alex Braidwood, Associate Professor and DoGE, Graphic Design, Iowa State University; President, World Listening Project
Alex Braidwood is a sound artist, media designer, and educator who maintains a practice exploring issues of sustainability at the intersection of art and science.
Colin Gordon, Professor, History, University of Iowa
Colin Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. He is the author of several books most recently, Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restrictions, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality. His digital projects include Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality; Dividing the City: Race-Restrictive Covenants in St. Louis and St. Louis County; Citizen Brown; and Mapping Segregation in Iowa.
Ashley Howard, Assistant Professor, History and African American Studies, University of Iowa
Ashley Howard is assistant professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Howard’s first book Midwest Unrest is under contract with UNC Press. Her work has appeared in numerous other scholarly and media outlets. In 2021, she was recognized for her public-facing scholarship in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings with the university-wide Faculty Communicating Ideas award.
In 2023, Howard and Gordon were awarded a Mellon Foundation grant to examine race-based property restrictions in Iowa.
Megan Jeanette Myers, Associate Professor, Spanish, Iowa State University
Dr. Megan Jeanette Myers is the author of Mapping Hispaniola: Third Space in Dominican and Haitian Literature (2019) and co-editor of The Border of Lights Reader: Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic (2021). Myers directs the Languages and Cultures for Professions program at Iowa State and was a 2021-2022 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to the Dominican Republic. Myers recently co-edited a special issue of Hispania on Digital Humanities in Spanish and Portuguese.
Erin Ridnour, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Iowa State University
Erin leads the Tracing Race at ISU initiative and was the coordinator and co-PI for the CLIR-funded digitization project Avian Archives of Iowa Online (avIAn). She collaborates with students, faculty, and staff on digital projects and teaches workshops and class sessions on geospatial humanities, text analysis, and digital storytelling.
Nikki JD White, Digital Humanities Librarian, University of Iowa
Nikki has been supporting student and faculty DH projects in the UI Libraries for over 10 years. She has led workshops and 1-sh courses on data visualization, data preparation, research poster design, and digital exhibits, and given trainings on data handling, web development, and text analysis in faculty-taught courses.
Olivia Wikle, Head, Digital Scholarship and Initiatives, Iowa State University
Olivia supports a team focused on digital collections, the digital repository, and digital scholarship, and is passionate about fostering collaboration to strengthen digital initiatives within the library and beyond. She is a co-developer of the CollectionBuilder static web framework, and her research interests include sustainability in digital libraries and digital literacy instruction.
