DSG

Design for Diversity Project Releases Toolkit for Inclusive Information Systems

Design for Diversity logo The Design for Diversity project team is excited to announce the Design for Diversity Toolkit. The Design for Diversity initiative, supported by an IMLS National Forums Grant, is based in the Digital Scholarship Group at the Northeastern University Library. It focuses on the ways in which information systems embody and reinforce cultural norms, and asks how we might design systems that account for diverse cultural materials and ways of knowing. Both the Toolkit and the final grant report (forthcoming) provide samples of the different kinds of information, actions, and next steps that can help achieve more equitable information systems in libraries, museums, and archives.

The Toolkit itself is a prototype collection of learning resources and strategies, designed to explore methods for empowering cultural heritage practitioners advocating for more inclusive information systems. These resources, gathered between 2016 and 2018, can be used in a classroom, professional development workshop, or workplace task force or study group. The Toolkit serves as an example of how libraries, archives, and museums might educate and organize for change.

The grant team commissioned two forms of original writing for the Toolkit: case studies and study paths. (We are deeply grateful to our case study and study path authors.) Case studies are specific analyses of information and computer systems, using inclusivity as a frame. Study paths combine those case studies with readings and a learning activity to animate the Toolkit, giving learners a way to engage with the ideas; for example, through performing a detailed analysis of systems at their workplace. These case studies and study paths are brought together with a selection of impactful readings and videos focused on inclusive information systems and categorized into major topics.

The members of the grant team are eager to receive feedback, which may be provided via Twitter, email, or the Toolkit website. Over the coming weeks and months the team will be promoting the Toolkit on Twitter; follow @Des4Div for the latest updates.

The Design for Diversity Team, 2016-2019: Des Alaniz, Mattie Clear, Julia Flanders, Nancy Loi, Cara Marta Messina, Amanda Rust, Sarah Sweeney

This project is made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [LG-73-16-0126-16]. The views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

2019 Call for CERES Proposals

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) invites Northeastern faculty and staff to submit project proposals for new research projects using the CERES Exhibit Toolkit. We also welcome proposals for using CERES in classroom assignments. The deadline for proposals is April 19, 2019 for projects beginning in the fall of 2019.

CERES enables the creation of complex scholarly narratives and exhibits through websites that dynamically integrate images, text, video, and other digital materials into a range of page layouts and possibilities for contextualization, while keeping those base digital materials preserved in a long-lasting archive. Visit our projects page for a full list of sites and exhibits that have been built using CERES.

CERES is designed to be easy to use, and our goal is to empower you and members of your project to be self-sufficient. Accepted projects receive in-depth consultation and training, but we also expect project teams to provide labor for things like digitizing items or creating content for the website. Part of the proposal process will be discussing with you ways to find sources of labor, so please don’t let a current lack of labor be a barrier to application. If you already have work study or interns, that is a bonus.

CERES supports many different features and activities, including:

  • Preservation and publication of long-term digital collections of primary source materials like documents, videos, letters, or interviews, such as the Holocaust Awareness Committee at Northeastern University or the Lower Roxbury Black History Project.
  • Classroom assignments where students contribute exhibits (singly or in groups) to a long-term cumulative space persisting from year to year, such as Literature and Digital Diversity, or adding to an existing CERES project that invites thematic contributions, such as the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac.
  • Exploration and integration of items from other existing digital collections, like the Digital Public Library of America, expanding a project’s ability to investigate concepts across collections.
  • Creation of long-term online research portals and exhibits that couple contextual scholarly narratives with special interactive features like maps, timelines, or image carousels, such as Thoreau’s Journal Drawings or the Northeastern University History timeline.
Over the summer and fall, we will be making some major improvements to CERES and adding new features, including connections to additional data sources (like Europeana and Wikimedia Commons) and podcasting support, so projects can also be imagining how they might take advantage of those options.

Applicants will be notified by May 17, 2019, and we will schedule planning meetings in early summer. We are happy to meet with anyone interested in submitting a proposal to talk about possibilities. For more information, please contact us at dsg@northeastern.edu.

Apply here: http://dsg.neu.edu/projects/new-projects/project-application. We look forward to working with you!

 

About CERES

 

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group is currently engaged in a long-term strategy to build a repository infrastructure that supports community engagement with digital materials: the Community Enhanced Repository for Engaged Scholarship (CERES). The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is a WordPress plugin and theme developed by the Digital Scholarship Group. This research and publishing platform will support what we have identified as the most common tasks in the digital humanities workspace: annotating, cataloging, text encoding, proofreading, transcribing, translating, and publishing. The end result will be a contributory and collaborative repository environment for many different types of users, which ideally will encourage community engagement with digital objects. The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is one component of this expanding repository infrastructure that will allow CERES project teams to easily publish their materials on the web. Read more here.

2018 Call for CERES Classroom Proposals

Call for ProposalsIt’s that time of year again – time for the CERES Call for Proposals! This year the Digital Scholarship Group is looking for faculty to submit project proposals for classroom use of the CERES Exhibit Toolkit in Fall 2018 or Spring 2019. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2018.  Deadline: April 30, 2018

Apply here 

The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is a WordPress plugin and theme developed by DSG staff. CERES is used to create websites that dynamically integrate images, text, video, and other digital materials into complex scholarly narratives and exhibits, while keeping those base digital materials preserved in a long-lasting archive. Visit our projects page for a full list of sites and exhibits that have been built using CERES. Classroom use of CERES might take many forms, including:
  • Having students contribute exhibits (singly or in groups) to a long-term cumulative project that might persist from year to year: for example, focusing on a particular set of archival materials
  • Having students work on curating a set of archival materials relating to an existing CERES project: for instance, adding georeferencing information to enable the creation of dynamic maps
  • Having students contribute exhibits to one of the existing CERES projects that invites contributions, such as the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac
To support classroom use of CERES, DSG offers training for faculty and teaching assistants in using CERES, and can visit the class and provide instruction or lead discussion about the exhibit-building process and tools. We have an extensive set of supporting materials including step-by-step instructions, how-to guides, and sample assignments. We are also happy to work with faculty on planning out syllabi and lesson plans that make imaginative use of these digital tools, at whatever scale works best for the learning objectives of the course. We are happy to meet with anyone interested in submitting a proposal to talk about possibilities. For more information, please contact us at dsg@neu.edu. Apply here. We look forward to working with you!