The University Library as Incubator for Digital Scholarship (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

"With origins in the digital humanities, digital scholarship in recent years has seen investigators from other disciplines — including the sciences and social sciences — embrace its tools and possibilities. New hybrid communities of inquiry are increasingly visual, collaborative, and spatial, or simply seek to make new connections possible in a digital world. Much of this is owed to advances and convergences in data visualization, mapping applications, and web development. Outstanding projects from the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab are forging new connections with history, geography, political science, sociology, and other fields through their Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States and Voting America portals. In public health, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care is visualizing variations in how medical resources are distributed and used in the United States today. In biology and ecology, digital initiatives — such as the Center for Conservation Biology Project Portal from the College of William and Mary and the Virginia Commonwealth University — are tracking regional concerns involving land use and bird species populations. In the hands of talented scholars, teachers, and technologists, this form of scholarship can be liberating for both creator and user. Melanie Schlosser, Digital Publishing Librarian at Ohio State University Libraries, has defined digital scholarship as 'research and teaching that is made possible by digital technologies, or that takes advantage of them to ask and answer questions in new ways.'1 Edward Ayers uses the term generative in his definition to describe digital scholarship's function and effect ..."