Teaching Writing with Comic Books

Multimodal composition is core to the first-year writing curriculum at the University of Rochester. Alongside term papers, students create short movies, interactive websites, comic strips, and more. Comic Life (comiclife.com) is a software program designed to create everything from single-panel cartoons to comic strips to full-length graphic novels. It is relatively easy to use; usually …

Teaching Blender: Karp Library Fellows Experiences with Studio X

By Emma SchaaleKarp Library Fellow, Public Programs Coordinator for Studio XJune 2020 – October 2020Area of Focus: Varies between considering branding for Studio X, creating promotional materials, and conceptualizing workshop for Studio X’s fall programming For the past month, I’ve been working on an exciting project… a Blender workshop for Studio X, which took place on Wednesday, …

DigITaL: Digital Ideas for Teaching & Learning

DigITaL is an interactive and educational portal where instructors can share and access reviews, tutorials, and other materials related to bringing new technologies into the classroom, for use in their own teaching. Each case study will carry a Creative Commons license which allows for the open exchange of ideas and materials to be reused, remixed, …

Presenting on Mediate at ACH

ACH and Mediate The Association for Computers in the Humanities (ACH) Conference took place at the Marriott City Center in Pittsburgh, PA, July 32-26, 2019. While this conference might seem out of scope for me–an undergraduate studying Psychology and Language, Media, & Communications–I was there to present on work I had done as a teaching …

Imaging Ancient Roman Tablets

Supporting Research In the fall of 2018, I was part of a small research team, comprised of Classics Professor Nicholas Gresens, undergrads Elise Lia, ’20, and Shaim Mahir, ’21, that traveled to the province of L’Aquila in Southern Italy. The focus of the trip was to image ancient Roman writing tablets that had been found …

Digital Pedagogy Workshop 2019

Thoughtful Pedagogy, Innovative Projects The digital pedagogy workshop series began in August 2018 as a means to cultivate a learning community around digital pedagogy among the University of Rochester faculty and staff in an environment where faculty, librarians, and Digital Scholarship Lab specialists could work together to inspire new collaborations. Over the course of two …

Library Consortium Receives Grant to Support Data and Digital Literacy

Ninety percent of the world’s data is only two years old, and the tools, methods, and platforms to explore and use it are continually evolving. The overwhelming pace at which information and technology are created is making digital and data literacy both a high priority and a daunting task for librarians. These literacies are increasingly …

Dynamic Maps Using CSV, Google Earth, KML and ArcGIS Online

In Fall 2018, Professor Molly Ball’s History 252: Immigration in the Americas students developed original research based on archival and primary sources to explore how Rochester’s own immigrant history can not only enrich our understanding of the city’s history, but also further our understanding of transnational immigrant experiences throughout the Americas. One of the ways …

Digitizing on a Big Scale: the NAMES Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt

At the occasion of the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation collaborated with the Digital Scholarship Lab to create a new digital reproduction of the University of Rochester’s NAMES Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt. The 12’x12′ panel includes notes, tributes, and signatures collected in April 1994, when the national AIDS quilt …

Visualizing Sea Levels- GIS Class Exercise

The Digital Scholarship Lab collaborated with professor Carmala Garzione (Earth and Environmental Sciences) to create an exercise for her sedimentology course to examine sea level change’s impact on geologic formation. The goals for the exercise were: Must be completed in one course period Expose students to open source GIS tools Show students where to download …

Digital Pedagogy Workshop

Digital Pedagogy On August 9th and 10th, Stu Jordan (Faculty Director, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) and Emily Sherwood (Director, Digital Scholarship Lab) co-facilitated the Digital Pedagogy Workshop aimed at helping faculty develop a project for a course that utilized digital tools and methods. Ten faculty members from seven departments spent a day …

RCL Mini-Digital Scholarship Institute

ARL DSI The past few years, members of the Digital Scholarship Lab have helped teach classes at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Digital Scholarship Institute. The institute aims to introduce library professionals to digital scholarship methods and tools in order to broaden their knowledge base and help them understand the demands of supporting these …

Upgrading the Digitization Lab

In May 2017, to meet the demands for modern digital preservation standards, the River Campus Libraries and the Digital Scholarship Lab invested in a new digitization system. The University, advised by Lisa Wright, Digitization Specialist, and former director of DSL, Nora Dimmock, chose the best of what the market had to offer, a camera and copy stand from Digital Transitions, a company dedicated to imaging solutions for the …

Some Collaborations

Humanities Lab- ENG 283 Media ABC Spring 2009 This class had a separate lab section where students used digital tools to explore new modes of humanities scholarship.  Curriculum included the introduction to markup languages (xml, html and kml), website publishing, and photo editing for the web. Digital tools used included ftp, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, …