From Coursework to Community of Practice: Realizing the Potential of Undergraduate Digital Fellows Programs

Along with colleagues from Grinnell College, Haverford College, and Carleton College, at HASTAC 2017, we proposed the following panel presentation:

The growth of digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has opened new methodological, pedagogical, and ethical horizons for undergraduate research: there are new tools to use and teach, new archives to approach with a transformative critical lens, and new commitments to ethical collaboration on the variety of labor and expertise that digital projects entail. At the same time, digital scholarship is likely to be funded and staffed contingently, with the most funding and prestige likely to gravitate toward large research-driven institutions. In this fertile and fraught environment, how can we create meaningful critical digital humanities experiences for students at small undergraduate institutions? We propose a roundtable of digital scholarship program coordinators in undergraduate liberal arts settings to share practices, experiences, and open questions. Our programs demonstrate a range of approaches to recruitment, compensation, curriculum, and funding. By sharing and comparing the origins and goals of our programs, we will outline a number of ways that the possible world of students as full collaborators in digital scholarly research and pedagogy can begin to be realized. We plan a highly conversational format, limiting presenters to a brief overview and moving quickly to a moderated discussion led by the session chair and opened to include those in attendance at the session, who will also include our own students. As an outcome of this conversation, we propose to generate a “lessons learned” open document that can be used as a basis for further networking across our various professional communities (library, teaching, DH). Some of the questions we anticipate opening include: how do we build sustainable programs in this field? What is more motivating to students: being paid or being supported in independent research or receiving academic credit? How do we get good work done while striving for ethical and sustainable practice?