Our Research

We began our work in summer 2021 by conducting research on successful digital scholarship projects in diversity, equity and sustainability, and on principles and findings that inform these successful models. Our initial research looked specifically at two areas:

Peer practices: Our initial research identified several digital scholarship labs that appear to be examples of digital scholarship "with purpose," among them the University of Utah’s sustainability-focused Digital Matters Lab (Cummings et al., 2020, DHQ v. 14 n. 1); Rensselaer’s Tactical Humanities Lab (Malazita et al., 2020, DHQ v. 14 n. 3), and CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Scholarship Lab. Also among digital scholarship labs with a high level of focus on diversity, equity, and sustainability are the digital scholarship labs at Cornell (“people over projects”), the University of Virginia (“cultural heritage thinking”), Columbia University’s SafeLab, and the University of Richmond.

Place and a community of practice: We also explored research on the role of library laboratories as “place” rather than as “space.” Our early research found that Pawlicka-Deger argues that “place is an extremely important resource, seeing as it is endowed with the power to drive new practices, institutionalize a community, and consolidate a discipline” (2020, “Place matters: Thinking about spaces for humanities practices,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1177/1474022220961750). Similar findings are echoed by Katy Kavanaugh Webb (2020), who identifies an “emerging model [for digital scholarship labs]…of the community of practice, where interdisciplinary faculty teach each other about the work and complete it together” (2020, Journal of Learning Spaces, v. 9 n. 2).

Other digital scholarship practitioners in libraries have demonstrated the same finding: it is the relationships and the community of the laboratory that are key to its success – not the million-dollar investments in visualization walls. Another key insight from research is “the importance of “feeling reflected” by student researchers from marginalized communities, in part through tackling issues and research problems related to those communities (see Youth Action Researchers at the Intersection, as reported by Javeria Salman in The Hechinger Report, 1/28/21, “When students research the inequality in their own schools").

Throughout the course of the project from fall 2021 through spring 2022 we conducted research on best practices and prior work to inform our experiments and initiatives, and gathered new evidence and experience with what types of activities were successful, or not successful, in our community. Our report, completed and shared in July 2022, provides additional detail on these evidentiary findings and on how they informed our next steps towards our goals of supporting more inclusive and representative digital scholarship practices.