Image by Kyle Bean: “The Future of Books.”
One of the more exciting things to grow out of the Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative—the second cohort starts this week!—is Mary Kayler’s beautiful brainchild the Digital Scholars Institute. The Digital Scholars Institue is a way to continue the work started in the faculty initiative for those interested in sharing out the digital projects they are working on.
It’s a way to bring a small group of faculty (5-7) together to talk about what they’re currently working on in the digital realm. The institute can provide a space for faculty to share the details of their work, get feedback from their peers, and publish their ongoing reflections at the end of the year. We’re roughly thinking of this being a series of 5-7 meetings a semester, each of which discusses one faculty member’s digital project (kind of like a dissertation group). They’ll be a cohort of faculty that continues to provide feedback, support, and critique (online and off) so we can begin to more formally codify the identity we have fashioned as a university of the digital liberal arts amongst our faculty.
Mary and I have the pleasure of working with professors Sue Fernsebner and Betsy Lewis to frame this institute out, and hopefully it will be up and running soon. These are exciting times at UMW, and what’s been crystal clear to us at DTLT is that it all starts with faculty development. Last year we had 30 people sign-up for the Domain of One’s Own faculty initiative, this year we had another 19. Add to that 5-7 faculty continuing on with the Digital Scholars Insitute, and you’ve got just about 50 faculty (out of roughly 215) that have been experimenting with what’s possible through umwdomains—that’s awesome. Onward and upward!
