Biz of Digital — Digital Soundings: Fostering Interdisciplinary Digital Scholarship at UNCW By John Knox (Digital Projects Specialist, Randall Library, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 601 S. College Rd., Wilmington, NC 28403-5616; Phone: 910 962-3680) <knoxj@uncw.edu> and Ashley Knox (Digital Initiatives Librarian, Randall Library, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 601 S. College Rd., Wilmington, NC 28403-561; Phone: 910 962-3680) <knoxa@uncw.edu> Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Acquisitions and Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-6754; Fax: 410-455-1598) <flinchba@umbc.edu>
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he University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) is a public university with more than 18,000 enrolled students, 1,100 faculty and 1,400 staff members.1 The university has been a part of the University of North Carolina System since 1969 and was recently designated a “Doctoral Universities: High Research Activity” (or Carnegie R2) institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.2
In January of 2022, university leaders officially announced that interdisciplinarity would be the focus of its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for 2023-2028.3 This decision reflects a growing interest and investment in interdisciplinary research and teaching across the university in recent years. Some notable examples of this commitment include the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Studies degree program in 2018, the development of interdisciplinary academic minors in multiple colleges, and increased support from the Office of Research and Innovation for interdisciplinary research through internal funding opportunities such as the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series (IRSS) program. 4 UNCW’s Randall Library supports interdisciplinary research and teaching in a variety of ways as well, including through its newly-formed Scholarly Research Services (SRS) team which provides the university community with access to expertise and resources in the areas of scholarly communications, research data services, digital scholarship, emerging technologies, and media production.5 The SRS team is comprised of five faculty librarians and two library staff members.6 Building on the increased interest in interdisciplinarity in the library and across the university, SRS team members Ashley Knox, Digital Initiatives Librarian, and John Knox, Digital Projects Specialist, collaborated with a team of UNCW researchers on a successful IRSS grant with the goal of growing and supporting interdisciplinary digital scholarship at UNCW. The team included PIs Kemille Moore (Art & Art History), Ashley Knox (Randall Library), Jennifer Lozano (English), and John Knox (Randall Library) and faculty partners Gene Felice (Digital Arts), Mark Lammers (Math & Statistics, Data Science), Brittany Morago (Computer Science), and Jeremy Tirrell (English). The resulting seminar series, Digital Soundings: Expanding Digital Networks and Scholarship at UNCW, was designed to foster interdisciplinary research success at UNCW by providing faculty with opportunities to participate in handson workshops, collaborative working groups, and lectures with leading practitioners in the fields of computational text analysis, data visualization, and digital mapping over the course of the 2020-2021 academic year.7 The following article describes the events and activities that comprised the seminar series along with observations on various outcomes and opportunities.
64 Against the Grain / April 2022
The Digital Soundings year-long seminar series consisted of two recorded lectures, a synchronous Q&A event, and three virtual workshops, each supported by a dedicated virtual working group. The lectures and accompanying Q&A session provided the UNCW community with an opportunity to learn from and engage with a leading digital humanities practitioner and scholar whose research and teaching overlap with the three areas of practice that were the focus of the seminar series.8 The first lecture was delivered early in the fall of 2020 and helped to set the stage for the rest of the seminar series by prompting viewers to wrestle with some of the challenges inherent in building and sustaining interdisciplinary work at an institutional level, especially in relation to digital scholarship. The second lecture was delivered early in the spring semester and followed shortly thereafter by a virtual, synchronous Q&A session that was open to the entire university community. The second lecture provided viewers with an opportunity to learn more about a large-scale, collaborative digital humanities project involving an international team of collaborators.9 Providing asynchronous access to the lectures extended their reach and impact, and the synchronous Q&A session provided participants with an opportunity to engage with the speaker in a more sustained and thoughtful discussion. The intensive multi-session workshops on computational text analysis, data visualization, and digital mapping took place over the course of four consecutive weeks during the fall and spring semesters.10 Each workshop consisted of virtual, synchronous instruction sessions (1.5-2 hours per session) and independent, asynchronous exercises. The workshop cohorts were capped at twenty to ensure that all participants received individualized assistance from the workshop leaders. All three workshops reached capacity shortly after registration opened, and participation in the individual workshop sessions was collegial and collaborative. The synchronous sessions were recorded and made available to participants via a dedicated Microsoft Teams site to support independent work and to enable those who missed a session to keep pace with the group. The success of the workshop series confirmed that faculty, students, and staff are eager for opportunities to engage in interdisciplinary digital scholarship. In conjunction with the workshops and to help foster collaboration over the course of the year-long seminar series, the Digital Soundings project team also organized and facilitated three virtual working groups via the seminar series’ Microsoft Teams site. The working groups were effective channels for disseminating information to participants and for fostering collaboration between participants and the workshop leaders. Each working group included the workshop leader(s), members
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