When I travel to conferences I often get questions about my title (Associate Director of Digital Scholarship) and what I do at Chapman, but I also get questions about what I do from within the university. So I thought I would explain a bit more about that in my blogpost today…

First, let’s start with a wikipedia-ish definition of Digital Scholarship (DS):
Digital scholarship is the use of digital evidence, methods of inquiry, research, publication and preservation to achieve academic and research goals.
Digital scholarship encompasses both scholarly communication using digital media and research on digital media.

But what do I do?  Well, I do a lot of different things.  Here is a sample, taken from this past week on my calendar:

  • Met with library staff to refine the digitization workflow for our grant project
  • Completed a pilot project for the student use of Qualtrics software
  • Participated in the IS&T Communications team meeting to discuss how we might build a better technical Knowledge Base for our constituents to access self-help resources
  • Collaborated with my team to do a card-sorting exercise in preparation for an Academic Technology Services website redesign project
  • Attended a vendor webinar about an ePortfolio software for faculty and students
  • Supervised staff who are leading the rollout of an in-class polling software
  • Discussed a possible integration between our course evaluation software and our Faculty Annual Reports, with IT staff and the Director for the Institute of Excellence and Teaching and Learning
  • Taught a History course
  • Setup an online training module for a professor who is using WordPress for student blogging
  • Led the team meeting for our Learning Management System, which includes Academic Technology staff and programmers from IS&T
  • Supported a faculty member who needed technical help with building their Tenure Dossier
  • Crafted lesson plans for a graduate student workshop on Digital Research Methods in the Humanities
  • Held a meeting with two faculty members who are interested in having VR workstations for pedagogy and research

As you can see from this list, my work is wide-ranging and touches on the classroom, the infrastructure, and the research needs of the university.  But perhaps most importantly, it is a “people” job where I serve as an ally, an explainer, a go-to contact, a convener, a sounding board, a leader, and an example to others who are attempting to move the leviathan of academia into the 21st century (not single-handedly, of course!).

I am often asked if DS is the same thing as Digital Humanities (DH), which is my academic discipline (I teach the “Introduction to DH” course here at Chapman).  They are different, but overlapping areas, with many of the same concerns about how the landscape of academia is changing due to digital modes of research and expression. However DS is a much broader tent than DH.  At most universities DS lives in the library, but has a strong relationship with both IT and academic leadership.  This is because those who work in DS need to be involved in grant research and the scholarly activities of the faculty, oftentimes to galvanize IT resources to disseminate faculty research and publication.  Additionally, those who work in DS often hold a managerial or decision-making role in the Digital Repository for academic publications at their campus.

Chapman is unusual in that I work in the Office of Academic Technology and report to the CIO, on the operational side of the university rather than on the academic side.  However, I am also an adjunct faculty member, I worked for four years in the Chancellor’s Office, and I administer an NEH-funded grant project for the library, so I have strong ties to the academic and service units of the university as well as having a direct reporting line in Operations.

Above all, I should say that this work is incredibly satisfying.  I get a hand in the success of teaching and research and business processes across the campus, and I am learning/teaching/implementing new things every single day.