With a grant from the Council on Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and additional support from the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies and Alice Schreyer ‘68, we created the Summer Digital Humanities Institute. The initiative was led by Miriam Neptune, Director of Teaching, Learning, and Digital Scholarship in collaboration with former Archives Director Shannon O’Neill, Archives Associate Director Martha Tenney, as well as Digital Scholarship Librarian Madiha Choksi. Our goal is to develop an annual institute as a model for creating a community of digital scholarship practice. 

From May - August 2019, we brought together a cohort of five student, staff, and faculty researchers to explore DH practices, and receive individualized technical support with an on-going research project. Each participant received a $500 mini-grant to support project costs, and customized tutorials and consultations with staff across the Milstein Centers and Library. Student participants were provided summer employment in the Digital Humanities Center or the Archives. This multi-faceted support enabled researchers time and resources to explore new methods and processes. Together we explored how to build a framework for digital humanities that takes up the invitation by feminist DH scholars to centralize questions of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability in DH work, and to valorize community-based work that is not often recognized as scholarship. 

Participants were encouraged to share their experiences and expertise as researchers with each other through discussion and blogging, and to discover the connections in methodology, research questions, and positionality as they make decisions about the focus, scope, and presentation of their projects.  In our process discussions and report backs, we focused on sharing equitably to erode the status divides that sometimes exist between student, staff, and faculty researchers.

The institute consisted of 8 workshop sessions and excursions, culminating in a works-in-progress presentation in early August. Participants will formally present their projects on September 19th. 

Janet Jakobsen, Fatima Koli, Alisa Rod, Vani Natarajan, Marko Krkeljas, Alex Gil, Jennie Correia, Kristen Hogan, Albert Scott, Karl-Mary Akre, Ruby Mastrodimos, Nick Wolven, Jade Levine, Georgia Michalovic, Desirée Rodriguez, Jen Brown, Monica Mercado, Barnard Center for Research on Women