Given its features and the reasons why it is frequently pursued, public digital scholarship is necessarily broad and expansive. Projects that fall into this category often address topics and themes of memory, heritage, traditions, cultural practices and experiences, and civic engagement. Incorporating digital tools in these kinds of projects can be beneficial for expanding their reach and impact, broadening the scope and immediacy of the research questions they seek to answer, and ensuring the diversity of perspectives they incorporate.
Technology may serve as an integral part creating the project’s outcome, may facilitate forms of collaborative meaning-making and communication, or may do both. Digital tools and methodologies frequently incorporated in public digital scholarship work include:
mapping and spatial analysis
data visualization and data storytelling
interactive modalities including VR and AR
digital exhibits and archives
3D object modeling
digital forms of publishing text-based and audiovisual materials
digital collaboration software, including those for crowdsourcing and group annotation initiatives
The projects below are just a few examples of public digital scholarship. Though they vary widely in topic, audience, purpose, and approach, they all share several things in common: they are examples of scholarship that crosses institutional and disciplinary boundaries; they are/were created with and in service to the needs and priorities of specific public partners; and they use the advantages that digital tools and technologies have to offer.
Keywords: digital exhibit; collection of audiovisual materials
URL: https://schuylkillcorps.org/exhibits/show/grays-ferry-oral-histories
Creators: Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and residents of Philadelphia
Description: "The collection of Grays Ferry Oral Histories documents the lives of long-term residents in this South Philadelphia neighborhood after the explosion of the former nearby Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery on June 21, 2019. The oral history project is a collaboration between refinery fence line neighbors and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, where university and neighborhood partners co-imagined project goals."
Keywords: digitally-annotated collection of texts; language activism tool
URL: https://ticha.haverford.edu/
Creators: An interdisciplinary team of scholars centered at Haverford College and Zapotec community members
Description: "Ticha is an online, digital explorer for a corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts. (The name ticha — pronounced [ˈti.tʃə] — comes from the Colonial Valley Zapotec word for 'word', which can also mean 'language' and 'text'.) Zapotec languages are indigenous to Mexico. There is a large corpus of alphabetic texts written in Zapotec languages, the earliest dated to 1565 (Oudijk 2008:230). Reading and interpreting these colonial documents can be extremely difficult because of the challenges of early Zapotec orthography, vocabulary, grammar, and printing conventions, yet the documents contain rich linguistic, historical, and anthropological information.
Ticha allows users to access and explore many interlinked layers of these texts, including images of the original documents, transcriptions, translations into English and modern Spanish, linguistic analysis (including morphological interlinearization), and commentary. Ticha is innovative in bringing together data analyzed in FLEx (Fieldworks Language Explorer) a system for lexical and grammatical analysis, with current TEI standards (Text Encoding Initiative) for paleographic and translational representations of texts. Ticha seeks to make this corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts accessible to scholars in diverse fields (including linguistics, anthropology, and history), Zapotec community members, and the general public."
Keywords: podcast; journalism
URL: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/podcast-philly-under-fire/
Creators: The Philadelphia Citizen and Philadelphians
Description: "Philly Under Fire is a podcast of stories and solutions.
Philadelphia experienced a tragic surge in gun violence in 2020, with 499 of our fellow residents killed and another 2,200 shot. Like other cities across the country, there were several factors for the uptick in violence, including the Covid-19 pandemic, which devastated some neighborhoods and many residents physically and economically. But Philadelphia was already experiencing an uptick in shootings, even before the pandemic hit. That violence continues unabated today. Philly Under Fire attempts to understand the causes, effects and fixes for gun violence in Philadelphia and around the country.
Hear the stories of Philadelphians intimately affected by the city’s gun violence, those working to end it, those who have found solutions here and elsewhere—and those who have failed to step up to this moment when we most need them."
Keywords: map; walking tour; digital archive
URL: https://lib.utsa.edu/movimiento
Creators: University of Texas San Antonio Libraries and San Antonio community leaders
Description: "Mexican American civil rights activists took to the streets of San Antonio in the ‘60s and ’70s with rallying cries that resonated not only in Texas but throughout the country. The movement—or movimiento—took shape on the roads of the Alamo City. So, it’s only fitting that those same roads now serve to guide us in visiting this rich and storied past. Welcome to Mapping the Movimiento: Places and people in the struggle for Mexican American Civil Rights in San Antonio, an interactive tour of a selection of some of the important places that have significantly contributed to Latino progress. The 15 sites represent only a slice of the many places around the city that galvanized a generation of Chicano activists."
Keywords: digital archive; public interpretation initiative; text analysis
URL: https://bsudsl.org/edlmiddletown/
Creators: Researchers at Ball State University and citizens of Muncie, Indiana
Description: "Everyday Life in Middletown is a collaboration between Ball State and citizens of Muncie, Indiana, to record, represent, and discuss everyday life in our city. We do this in two ways: through day diaries, kept by volunteer writers who record their daily lives in detail and submit them to our archive, and through our blog, where we post commentary and discussion on everyday life in our community, including analysis of the diaries."
