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Center for Digital Scholarship

This document describes how the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) is organizationally structured.

As is the case with all parts of the Handbook, this is a living document in which changes are encouraged as our practices mature and develop. This is version 2024.1

Contents

  • Overview
  • Brown University Digital Publications
  • People, Roles, Responsibilities
  • Project Intake Process

Overview

The Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship is structurally situated as a unit within the Library, and the staff who work at CDS support faculty-led projects, the digital humanities certificate program, and researchers across the University working within and/or wanting to learn about the field of digital humanities. 

Within faculty-led projects, there are two primary areas: CDS digital humanities projects and Brown University Digital Publications projects. The CDS projects encompass digital humanities projects that have a variety of outputs and aims (e.g., database projects, data visualization, oral history projects, etc). The Brown University Digital Publications projects are longform interpretive works developed for publication by university presses. In some cases, projects can be both or have multiple components that include a digital publication and a digital humanities project. 

Digital humanities projects are highly collaborative and faculty rely on CDS’ expertise in digital humanities and digital scholarship to help scope and shape projects—not just implement. As such, CDS is a partner with faculty rather than a service provider. All kinds of work on a project are equally deserving of credit even if the amount of work may differ, and all collaborators should be able to take credit for their work by presenting at conferences on the project, publishing papers, including the project on CVs, etc as outlined in the “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” (Clement et al, 2021). On every project website, staff at the CDS who are on the project should be listed and given credit. This should include current staff and past staff with dates of employment. When appropriate, CDS staff should be listed as co-PIs on grants and in receiving project credit.

Structurally and organizationally, our partnership usually means that CDS staff meet regularly with the faculty member—often every other week when working on an active project. The reason for this is that technology is political and inextricable from the research questions, goals, and scholarly methodologies of the project. Technical implementation forms an important part of research methodology. For example, CDS staff do not produce a database on demand; rather, we work with the faculty member and think through all the ramifications and impacts, and review the advantages and disadvantages of different technical approaches. Every decision and deliverable requires discussion, and we require the faculty member to be part of these discussions for multiple reasons:

  1. the faculty member should be able to talk about the technical methodologies on a project;
  2. CDS staff depend on the content specialist skills of the faculty member; to do our job well, we need the PI to serve as the subject matter expert;
  3. CDS staff are contributing to and shaping the direction of the project in meaningful ways that are equally deserving of credit in terms of the project, and staff should be given the opportunity to share their ideas and progress with the rest of the team and directly interface with the PI. 

Works cited

Clement, Tanya E., Douglas Reside, Brian Croxall, Julia Flanders, Neil Fraistat, Steve Jones, Matt Kirschenbaum, et al. “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights.” Accessed August 16, 2023. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:31187/.

Brown University Digital Publications

BUDP provides faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with expert support for developing enhanced born-digital scholarly works that present research and advance arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional format. These multimodal scholarly works undergo rigorous peer review and are published by some of the most distinguished university presses.

BUDP co-publishes, with the MIT Press, the On Seeing book series, which centers the lived experience and knowledge of diverse authors.

The capabilities of BUDP have been critical in advancing non-peer reviewed but nevertheless consequential scholarly publications, including the expanded digital second edition of Brown’s landmark 2006 Slavery and Justice Report and the 13-volume Race &…in America series.

People, roles, responsibilities

Every project has a project manager, and every person on a project has a specific role that defines their primary responsibility. The project manager is charged with communicating across the project team, leading meetings, and more (as outlined in respective project charters). 

Staff who serve in more technical specialist roles should have the opportunity to interact directly with the PI but also must work directly with the project manager to ensure that their work aligns with the overarching project goals, milestones, and deliverables. 

Student workers

Students hired through CDS have the opportunity to work on respective projects under the frameworks designed by CDS staff. CDS appreciates and encourages student workers and actively seeks opportunities to work with students. At the same time, student workers often work on projects for short amounts of time, and our projects require durable frameworks and consistent, reproducible practices. Student work, therefore, must be directed by (or—in the case of students directed by a faculty project PI—in consultation with) CDS staff to ensure that their work can be used and maintained by staff long-term. This, in turn, helps students as their work on projects is central to the long term deliverables on a project. CDS hopes that students gain skills and experience relevant to their specific work at CDS, and also in digital humanities and digital scholarship broadly. 

CDS Staff development

CDS staff need to maintain existing skills and develop new skills that will be useful for projects and teaching. This requires that staff keep up to date on developments in the field of digital scholarship and related areas, and for CDS to allocate time and resources for this professional development. CDS should set aside time in staff meetings and other forums for discussions of emerging methodologies, perhaps with invited guests. It’s also important to align professional development goals with innovative incoming projects.

Project Intake Process

CDS offers robust support for faculty-led projects across the campus, and it’s important to ensure that our services are equitable. Typically, CDS digital humanities projects, unlike Brown’s BUDP, support projects on a rolling basis that fit the CDS mission statement. While we typically try to support faculty that need our help, it’s essential to work with the faculty member to scope the project to what our staff can reasonably offer and on a timeline that is feasible. Rather than underperform, we transparently communicate our process so that faculty understand our processes and timelines. As a result of the robust support we offer, we want to ensure that we have capacity to support new projects as they come into CDS, and that we can complete projects that are in our portfolio. 

Advertising our services broadly is important and essential to making CDS project support equitable. Rather than offer a call for projects, which we cannot often sustain, we offer rolling project support and a clear intake process should a faculty member come to us with a project idea. 

For the project intake process, the faculty meets with the Faculty Director and Director of CDS, and submits an intake form on their project idea. All CDS stakeholders and others across the library will be part of an internal discussion before taking on the project to ensure that we can properly support the project and on the timeline that the faculty member needs. It’s essential that we explain this support broadly so that faculty across the campus have equal access to CDS support. In many cases, CDS makes every effort to take on projects that fit our mission. When it is not possible to take on a project due to fit or capacity, CDS will make every effort to refer the faculty member to another unit on campus (e.g. Data Science, Multimedia Labs, Digital Learning and Design) that can better assist as a research partner.