The digital humanities offer libraries an exciting opportunity to foster participatory knowledge production and critical digital citizenship on campus. Emerging, easy-to-use, and often free digital tools enable students, scholars, and librarians to transform private research and learning into interactive, collaborative, and public facing research projects that utilize or contribute to library collections. Simultaneously, the facilitation of these projects grants libraries the opportunity to train participants in critically assessing the ethical, political, and intellectual implications of digital tools that shape both our research and everyday lives.
In this talk, I will describe several digital humanities projects at UC San Diego that align with these directives such as KNIT (a digital commons for institutions of higher education in San Diego), the Race and Oral History Project (a student-driven, digitally-accessible archive about race in San Diego), and the Digital Humanities Research Group. I will offer suggestions for how these projects and their underlying principles might be repurposed at other institutions and hope to end with a discussion about the ongoing challenges and opportunities of cultivating digital humanities practices within a library context.
Erin Rose Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the UC San Diego Library, where she helps academics critically understand, apply, and shape digital technologies used in knowledge production. Her recently-completed dissertation, Software of the Oppressed: Reprogramming the Invisible Discipline, examines the politics and history of digital technology at the often overlooked site of academic and student writing. As an advocate for community driven software, she directs KNIT, a digital commons for UC San Diego, the San Diego Community College District, and San Diego State University that facilitates publicly-engaged, participatory, and collaborative research and teaching. She is also co-founder of Social Paper, a non-proprietary platform for socializing student writing and feedback funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.