Left to right: Joanne Bernardi, Joshua Romphf, Lisa Wright, Nora Dimmock
On 5 November, I embarked on a road trip to Cleveland with Nora Dimmock (Assistant Dean for IT, Research, and Digital Scholarship, UR River Campus Library), Lisa Wright and Joshua Romphf (both from the UR Digital Humanities Center). Our destination was Case Western Reserve University, where its Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at the Kelvin Library was sponsoring the Digital Scholarship Colloquium 2014: Pedagogy and Practices (6-7 November). Our panel, “Re-Envisioning Japan: A Faculty-DH Center Collaboration,” had been accepted for a morning slot on 6 November.
We began with my paper, “Introducing Re-Envisioning Japan,” which gave an overview of the project: Re-Envisioning Japan‘s development as technologically mediated scholarship; the way in which I use it as a teaching resource in my complementary “Tourist Japan” course; the rewards and challenges of building a Digital Humanities project; and plans for Re-Envisioning Japan’s development (a DH project is inherently ongoing). Nora Dimmock’s presentation, “Re-Envisioning Librarianship,” addressed the changing role of the research university library and its staff. She explained that for librarians, 21st century practice reflects a shift in priorities and a re-orientation toward a more collaborative relationship with faculty and their work. Library practice and faculty research increasingly involve seeking out and mastering different tools and new skill sets. Joshua Romphf demonstrated the layout and functionality of the new 16mm Timeline, and Lisa Wright detailed the workflow of scanning/photographing, editing, and digitization that results in a digital surrogate for the items in the Re-Envisioning Japan collection.
The colloquium opened with an engaging keynote lecture by Dr. Paul Fyfe, Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University, “The Scale of Digital Pedagogy.” It was an excellent opportunity to learn about innovative ways in which Digital Humanities projects can reshape the learning process by facilitating alternative approaches to teaching and research.