$800k Grant Awarded for Digital Scholarship

Digital scholarship and research has become crucial to a liberal arts education and the College has started to take significant steps to implement it more fully. The College recently received an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project entitled “Galvanizing Digital Liberal Arts at Middlebury”.

The grant was proposed by a group of faculty and staff including Professor Tim Spears, vice president for academic affairs, along with Professor of Film and Media Culture and American Studies Jason Mittell, Professor of Geography Anne Knowles, Dean for Faculty Development and Research and Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research (CTLR) Jim Ralph, Dean of Library and Information services and Chief Information Officer Michael Roy, and Director of Collections, Archives, and Digital Scholarship Rebekah Irwin.

“We want to think about how technology is being used on our campus,” Spears said. “We’re paying particular attention to the Davis Family Library and we want to make a space that is literally more visible [as a place for technological innovation and usage].”

Davis Family Library will be the center of the project’s work in hopes that the project will reach many different people on campus. In addition, various departments will benefit greatly from the grant.

“[The Film and Media Culture department] is fully invested in the use of digital technologies in their teaching and research,” Spears said.

Mittell also believes the Film and Media Culture department, as well as others, will take their status as leaders among liberal arts colleges and improve even more with the help of the grant.

“The Geography department is a leader amongst liberal arts colleges for using GIS … What’s unique about our program here is that [it] is really interdisciplinary [because] we have people who are social scientists and people who are humanists,” Mittell said.

Geography is another department that will be able to use the grant to expand its already extensive digital simulations and mapping systems.

In addition to bolstering the Davis Family Library and various departments, the grant will allow for other important projects to take shape. One such project will implement a Digital Faculty Fellows program and a Digital Research Assistants program for students.

These programs will encourage faculty to do research in different areas as well as provide collaborative opportunities for students with their professors. There will also be four “innovation hubs” created as part of the project. These include geospatial visualization, video and audio production, digitization of special collections, and multimedia art.

The group who proposed the project was passionate about incorporating digital humanities because they are such a rapidly growing field in the world of liberal arts education.

“Everyone had a piece in the development of the ideas for the grant and the writing of it but [the office of Corporate and Foundation Relations] pulled the proposal together and sent it off to the Mellon Foundation… with the president’s signature. Really, a great team effort, all the way around,” Spears said.

“What can we learn about history that digital maps can teach us that we can’t otherwise know just by using more traditional research methods? How can we communicate to people using tools like video and audio on a website that’s different from the written word? What types of analysis of culture can emerge by using computational methods?”

Professor Mittell posed these questions as a way of thinking about the possibilities of digital humanities. He and the other professors involved in proposing the grant have successfully made this field of study an important presence at the College.