Scholars as Students: Outcomes from Doing Digital History 2014

During the summer of 2014, Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan, joined by a team of graduate assistants and expert scholars, oversaw one of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s most recent efforts to offer professional development for mid-career scholars: the Doing Digital History (DoingDH) summer institute.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, the institute offered 23 American Historians an opportunity to undertake a two-week immersion in the theories and methods of digital history. The results of the institute were impressive, with participants increasing their technical skills, their digital literacy, and their comfort with evaluating digital work:

As a follow-up to the face-to-face institute experience, we are now publishing a whitepaper that lays out the pedagogical approach to DoingDH, evaluates the experience, and includes the detailed curriculum employed during the institute: Scholars as Students: Introductory Digital History Training for Mid-Career Historians (PDF).

This work builds upon over a decade of innovation and experimentation with professional development at RRCHNM. Just as our workshop sessions at disciplinary conferences, bootcamp sessions at THATCamp unconferences, and a range of longer training experiences have been designed to offer replicable models, we hope that DoingDH will be a jumping-off point for those working to build the digital capacities of our communities of practice. We invite you to review the work and outcomes of the institute and consider the ways that you might put these materials to good use in creating training opportunities for mid-career faculty, curators, librarians, archivists, and staff in your own institutions.

Finally, based on the success and lessons learned in the 2014 DoingDH institute, RRCHNM is offering another DoingDH institute in the summer of 2016, again with the generous support of NEH-ODH.  Soon, we will post a form for anyone interested in being notified when applications open for the 2016 institute. We will announce it on the RRCHNM blog and tweet it from @chnm.