POST: Digital Scholarship at Bucknell University – It’s about Student Engagement

Param Bedi, Matt Gardzina, and Emily Sherwood (Bucknell University) have written a post about the central role student engagement plays in digital scholarship at Bucknell University. Robustly defining digital scholarship “as any scholarly activity that makes extensive use of one or more of the new possibilities for teaching, learning and research opened up by the unique affordances of digital media,” the authors describe how their merged Library and Information Technology division plays an integral role in cultivating digital scholarship on campus with a Digital Scholarship Center, campus partnerships, and infrastructure. A liberal arts college, Bucknell held its first annual Digital Scholarship Conference to highlight student engagement with faculty research, a facet of digital humanities scholarship and practice not as often highlighted in the DH community:

 While other conferences emphasize large digital humanities projects, specific tools, or may touch on pedagogy, our focus remains student-centered. Repeatedly, back channel Twitter discussions praised the student presenters from various institutions. The broad range of skills students acquired, the professionalism with which they spoke about their subjects, and their enthusiasm for their research affirmed our beliefs that students are highly capable of and will greatly benefit from this type of work.