Databases | Digital Humanities at Dickinson College

DICKINSON SCHOLAR CELEBRATES A BOOMING INAUGURAL YEAR

by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson

If you haven’t visited Dickinson Scholar lately, you haven’t visited Dickinson Scholar. Since its launch in 2014, the college’s ever-expanding digital collection of scholarly and creative work has grown from 64 items to 395 articles, theses and other scholarly works and counting, and the site has seen 28,000 page views and more than 10,000 downloads during the past 15 months.

“What this tells us is that once researchers, through whatever search tool or strategy they have used, arrive at a Dickinson Scholar page that includes a full-text article or thesis, they are likely to download that item for their personal use more than 1/3 of the time,” says College Archivist Jim Gerencser ’93, who spearheaded the project. “In other words, there tends to be much less browsing and window shopping than is typical with online sources.”

AN IMPRESSIVE START

Dickinson Scholar showcases faculty papers, honors theses, other student scholarship and creative works. Half of the site’s 395 articles are available for full-text downloads, and many of the remaining articles are simply embargoed until permissions are received from the publishers.

The most frequently downloaded papers span the full range of the Dickinson liberal-arts curriculum, from medieval studies to nanoscience, language to math, environmental studies to poly sci. Currently, the collection includes research in architecture (3 works), arts/humanities (335), business (2), education (7), engineering (1), law (5), life science (25), medicine/health science (12), physical science/mathematics (37) and social/behavioral science (93). New website features include a map on the homepage showing the location from which users have downloaded articles within the past week and a scrollable visualization of some of the works represented in the collection.

At the time of this writing, early adopters Karl Qualls, professor of history, and Stephen Erfle, associate professor of international business & management, have the most uploaded articles (13 and 12, respectively), and Qualls’ paper on Western influence on the Russian revolutions is the most-downloaded faculty paper overall. Emily Bowie ’14’s research on natural deworming methods for sheep remains one of the most-downloaded (full-text) papers on the site (based on number of downloads per day, since each paper was added to the collection), second only to Associate Director of Library Resources Theresa Arndt’s description of how the Waidner-Spahr Library staff altered its service model to suit the community’s evolving needs. Former women’s & gender studies major Sara Raab ’13’s study of gender-power dynamics in BDSM rounds out the top three.

Recent additions include Professor of Mathematics Lorelei Koss’ 2014 article, “Examples of Parametrized Families of Elliptic Functions with Empty Fatou Sets;” Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Heather Bedi’s 2013 article, “Special Economic Zones: National Land Challenges, Localized Protest;” and a study of patient satisfaction at the Sadler Health Center (Carlisle, Pa.), conducted by former health-studies students Jonathan Nieves, Marleni Milla, Alison Riehm and Molly Foltzer, each of the class of 2011.

LOOKING AHEAD

The Dickinson Scholar team is currently exploring ways to share works within a journal format, and has already digitized The Collegian, a student-authored publication from 1849, the earliest literary magazine known to have been produced solely by Dickinson undergraduates, and 16 issues of John and Mary’s Journal (1975-2003), a publication of the Friends of the Library that included articles by Dickinson College faculty and other scholars, says Gerencser. Once all technical issues have been worked through, the team will look into sharing these digitized publications and adding other student-authored publications—such as The Hornbook and Belles Lettres Revue—to the queue.

Library staff, meanwhile, are hard at work securing permissions to share published articles, senior theses and other exceptional student, faculty and staff work from the 2014-15 academic year.

That includes creative work—including art exhibition catalogs and digital representations of artwork, and results from community-based empirical research projects. To date, library staff have uploaded 29 fine-art and art-history exhibition catalogs, dating back to 2004 and 1998, respectively. Collectively, the catalogs have already been downloaded 320 times. The first video to be added to the collection is “Cumberlocal,” a short piece by Multimedia Specialist Brenda Landis that secured first place in the Carlisle Film Festival last February.

LEARN MORE

Dickinson Scholar
“Sharing Scholarship”
Archives & Special Collections
Research at Dickinson

[Published on the Dickinson College website June 10, 2015.]

by Jacob Sider Jost (assistant professor, English)

In the fall of 2014 I applied for a semester-long grant to pay a student assistant, Mary Naydan, to complete a spreadsheet listing the works of 133 English poets active during the years 1730-1740. This was a continuation of a project begun by Mary and me using a Dickinson summer student-faculty collaborative research grant in the summer of 2012. Over the course of the fall, Mary logged 64 hours of research, gleaning bibliographical and biographical information about poets from a range of online sources (particularly the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the English Short Title Catalogue, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). Although not able to complete the full roster of poets in the time funded by the grant, she did complete approximately half of them—an impressive one poet an hour.

I am confident that as with our work in the summer after her sophomore year, this experience will stand Mary in good stead as she looks ahead to graduate study in English or an allied field. While Mary was in the digital archive researching eighteenth-century poets, our digital humanities postdoc Patrick Belk took the lead on organizing the data in a way that would be not only useful but publicly accessible, building a Drupal database to hold the data stored in our spreadsheets.

This database is accessible at http://dh.dickinson.edu/18cpc/.

Thanks to Patrick and Mary, my goal of documenting, visualizing, and analyzing networks of print and patronage for eighteenth-century poetry has moved significantly closer to realization—with the unexpected benefit that thanks to Dr. Belk’s implementation of Drupal the project, while still in progress, is available to me and other researchers online.

With that said, further research work and technical tinkering remain to be done. My current timetable is as follows: this semester, Dr. Belk will smooth out the remaining problems with our data, not all of which imported successfully from our Excel spreadsheets into the online database. Over the summer, I will finish entering the biographical and bibliographical data from the 60 or so poets who remain undocumented. By the end of summer 2015, Eighteenth-Century Poets Connect will be complete as a publicly accessible online database documenting the poetic culture of Britain in the 1730s. In the fall of 2015, Dr. Belk and I will work together to find the visualizations and other tools of analysis that make this data most useful, and it will be the work of the following year, 2015-16, for me to write an article for peer-reviewed publication discussing my findings.

—Jacob Sider Jost

Digital Humanities at Dickinson College

the website of the Dickinson Digital Humanities Advisory Committee

Category Archives: Databases

Digital-Age Scholarship

Mellon DH Fund supports the creation and development of Eighteenth-Century Poets Connect