Scholarship at UNCW

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>

The 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.

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

of the project team, workshop participants, and external project collaborators. Overall, the seminar series was successful at introducing new methods, tools, and concepts to faculty, students, and staff and helped to foster collaborative research across all three areas of practice. For example, the computational text analysis workshop supported separate ongoing interdisciplinary research projects conducted by Digital Soundings co-PI Jennifer Lozano and Digital Soundings faculty partner Jeremy Tirrell.11 The workshops also fostered interdisciplinary research collaborations at UNCW by bringing researchers affiliated with existing initiatives, projects, and campus-wide working groups together with Digital Soundings workshop participants. The workshops played a role in supporting innovative, collaborative teaching at UNCW as well. The Introduction to Digital Mapping workshop session on StoryMaps was especially helpful at fostering collaborative teaching efforts in multiple departments, including the departments of English, Sociology and Criminology, and Earth and Ocean Sciences.12 Following the conclusion of the seminar series in May of 2021, the PIs continue to work together to support interdisciplinary digital scholarship at UNCW by building and expanding on the collaborative partnerships that were formed over the course of the seminar series. One example of this evolving support within the library is Scholarly Research Services’ new workshop series, which includes workshops on topics, methods, and tools covered in the seminar series.13 Other examples of ongoing support for interdisciplinary digital scholarship within the library include active participation in research collaborations by members of the SRS team, the creation of a new Digital Scholarship Faculty Fellows funding program, and support for inter-institutional programming and events centered on digital scholarship projects and related initiatives.14 Going forward, the authors are excited to explore new opportunities to expand support for interdisciplinary digital scholarship at UNCW via library services and resources.

Optimizing Library Services continued from page 63

Technology With Literacy Pedagogies, edited by Pamela M. Sullivan, et al., IGI Global, 2020, pp. 72-96. https://doi. org/10.4018/978-1-7998-0246-4.ch004 Stevenson, Carolyn N., editor. Enhancing Higher Education Accessibility Through Open Education and Prior Learning. IGI Global, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-7571-0 Zhou, Molly Y., editor. Open Educational Resources (OER) Pedagogy and Practices. IGI Global, 2020. https://doi. org/10.4018/978-1-7998-1200-5

Column Editors’ End Note: If you are interested in learning how you can support your faculty in OA publishing efforts and IGI Global’s Transformative Acquire & Open Initiative, visit www.igiglobal.com/e-resources/read-publish/ to learn how to collaborate on receiving OA funding through Publish & Read or Read & Publish models. For questions or assistance on fully integrating IGI Global’s Open Access Collection or other collections into your system, contact eresources@igi-global.com.

1. UNCW at a Glance, https://uncw.edu/aboutuncw/facts.html. 2. Seahawk Points of Pride, https://uncw.edu/aboutuncw/ pointsofpride.html; Jenkins, V. (2018, December 20).

UNCW elevated to “Doctoral Universities: High Research

Activity” by Carnegie. University of North Carolina. https:// uncw.edu/news/2018/12/uncw-elevated-to-doctoraluniversities-high-research-activity-by-carnegie.html. 3. Kauzlaric, M. (2022, January 27). Cultivating the collaborative campus: The QEP for 2023-2028. University of North

Carolina Wilmington. https://uncw.edu/aa/2022-qeptopic.html. 4. UNCW Office of Research and Innovation, IRSS, https:// uncw.edu/research/irss/irss_seminar_series.html. 5. Randall Library: By the Numbers, https://library.uncw.edu/ facts_planning. 6. Randall Library, Scholarly Research Services, https://library. uncw.edu/scholarly_research_services. 7. Randall Library, Digital Soundings, https://library.uncw. edu/digital_soundings. 8. Both lectures were prepared and delivered by Paul Fyfe, Dept. of English, North Carolina State University. The recorded lectures are accessible via the Digital Soundings website, https://library.uncw.edu/digital_soundings. The

PIs would like to acknowledge and thank Prof. Fyfe for his contributions to the seminar series. 9. https://oceanicexchanges.org/. 10. The workshop leaders were as follows: Introduction to Computational Text Analysis, Nathan Kelber, JSTOR Labs; Introduction to Data Visualization, Fiene Leunissen, Duke University; Introduction to Digital Mapping, Jeff Essic and Walt Gurley, North Carolina State University Libraries. The

PIs would like to acknowledge and thank the workshop leaders for their contributions to the seminar series. 11. Jennifer M. Lozano, “Podcasting the Global South: Radio

Ambulante’s ‘Latin American Stories’ and the ReMaking of a Transnational Latin/x Cultural Sphere,” Radio

Cultures of the Global South, special issue of The Global

South, vol. 16, no. 1., https://www.jennifermlozano.com/ researchandpublication; Jeremy Tirrell, “Following Mechanical Turks: Articulating the Human in ‘Human Intelligence Tasks,” intermezzo, https://manifold.as.uky. edu/projects/following-mechanical-turks. 12. One example of this was Profs. Katie Peel and Jeremy Tirrell’s team-taught course, Ghost Maps: Visualizing

Disease Narratives, which focused on the London cholera epidemic of 1854. As part of the course requirements, students worked together in groups to research a local public health issue and create a digital map that presented their findings. To learn more about the course and to view the student projects, visit https://library.uncw.edu/ ghost_maps. 13. SRS spring 2022 workshop schedule: https://library.uncw. edu/srs_spring_2022_workshops. 14. For information about the Digital Scholarship Faculty Fellows program, visit https://library.uncw.edu/guides/ digital_scholarship_project_consulting; On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance, presentation by UNC Libraries project team co-sponsored by Randall

Library and the Digital Humanities Collaborative of North Carolina, https://library.uncw.edu/news/books_jim_crow_ and_algorithms_resistance.