Expert faculty, graduate students and librarians across Iowa’s higher education institutions will discuss digital methods to open research to a broader audience and develop literacy skills in the classroom. 

The second annual Digital Scholarship Symposium will occur on Wednesday and registration closes at 5 p.m. on Monday. 

“We opened it a little more this year, so last year we had panelists from just Iowa State and the University of Iowa, which was great, but this year we have a much more diverse panel representation,” Olivia Wikle, head of Digital Scholarship and Initiatives, said. “We have faculty, grad students and librarians talking from Iowa State and University of Iowa, but also University of Northern Iowa, Grinnell and Cornell College and Ames High School.”  

The symposium will feature two-panel discussions, including the public digital arts and humanities, which will discuss the community’s impact through digital projects. 

“For the public digital arts and humanities panel, we have grad students, faculties and librarians that are talking about digital archives in all different ways,” Wikle said. “All are centering around collaborating with a variety of communities and students to publish cultural material online and the kind of work that creatively goes into that.” 

The first panel will be held from 10:30 a.m. to noon. 

“We will start in the morning with a public digital arts and humanities panel,” Wikle said. “It is raising awareness for community impact and opening research to a wider audience.” 

Panels and panelists include:

• Hobo Archive: Digital Archiving American Hobo History and Culture by Laura Carpenter, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Iowa
  • Focusing on building community-led archival collections using American Studies highlighting Hobo Archives, a digital repository documenting hoboing and tramping culture. 
• Creating Beautiful Online Stories with the New, Open Source FotoStory Tool by Bettina Fabos, a professor in interactive digital studies at the University of Northern Iowa.
  • An overview of the powerful new “FotoStory” digital storytelling tool. 
•  Developing Undergraduate Students as Collaborators on Public Humanities Projects by Tierney Steelberg, a digital liberal arts specialist at Grinnell College. 
  • Focusing on how the Vivero Digital Fellows Program at Grinnell College develops undergraduate students as collaborators on projects through a training model. 
• Pedagogy and Digital Humanities: Iowan Latina/o Memoirs by Lucía Suárez, director of U.S. Latino/a Studies and professor of Spanish and USLS at Iowa State. 
  • Engagement in community outreach and the classroom. Learning practice for today’s world. 

“In the afternoon, we are going to have a digital pedagogy panel,” Wikle said. “Which talks about using digital tools and methods to teach creativity and digital literacy in the classroom.”

The second panel will be held from 1:30 to 3:00 p.m. 

“The afternoon panel is much more about teaching, so again, that connection between digital tools and methods in the classroom,” Wikle said. “We have a very wide range of topics that I am excited about, including music compositions, cookbooks and art.” 

Panelists include: 

• Deeper Learning with Digital Humanities, by Erin Lane, the digital liberal arts coordinator at Cornell College. 
  • Reflecting on the use of digital humanities and how DH tools, methods and projects allow students to interact differently. 
• Creating Digital Music: Arts Thinking for Techno Geeks, Tech Geeking for Artistry Types by Christopher Hopkins, professor of music composition and music technology at Iowa State. 
  • Philosophical perspectives and practical techniques of teaching creative digital music to non-majors, primarily those majoring in computer science or engineering. 
• Computers Reading Cookbooks: Exploring the Iowa Community Cookbook Collection with Natural Language Processing by Erin Ridnour, the digital scholarship librarian at Iowa State. 
  • Overview of Computers reading Cookbooks in progress and share examples and visualizations from the cookbooks that have been digitized already. 
• Make Positive Impacts on Your Community with Art by Lindsay Wede, art teacher at Ames High School. 
  • Sharing lesson ideas and tools to use with students to build more connections and contributions to their community with art. 

“Faculty and librarians talking about projects in the classroom that go beyond traditional research papers or exams and get students to think in new ways about publishing material or working with technology in ways they haven’t before,” Wikle said. “Gaining digital literacy skills out of that experience.” 

Lunch will be provided between the two panels from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Rotunda, the library’s second floor. A brief program will occur during lunch beginning at 1 p.m.

The event is welcome to faculty, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, and anyone interested in learning about digital scholarship and connecting with the growing community.

The Digital Scholarship Symposium will run from 9:45 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.. The event will take place in “The Catalyst,” which is dedicated to digital research in Parks Library. Symposium attendees will have the opportunity throughout the day to connect with others interested in digital scholarship and celebrate the panelists. 

If a parking pass is needed, check the “need parking” box during registration to grant free parking in general staff lots on the day of the Symposium. 

Students can register here.