Examples of Digital Scholarship/Humanties projects at MTSU

Digital Scholarship (DS) and Digital Humanities (DH) projects are created with and for scholars. In addition to images and historical documents, projects include multimedia components, contextual themes, and lesson plans, essays or interactive features. These projects are a collaborative effort with content and technology experts who use a variety of digital methods (text analysis, spatial analysis, digitization, photogrammetry, usabilty, etc) and digital tools including CONTENTdm, ArcGIS, StoryMaps, TimelineJS, Drupal, Omeka and more.

Digital Projects began circa 2004, before DSI was formalized in 2014. The initial digitization efforts produced digital collections that became the heart of DSI beginnings. Examples of recent projects include:

• Shades of Gray and Blue (2011-2013)
  In Tennessee, we have all heard stories of life and death on the state’s Civil War battlefields, but what happened to the men, women, and children who stayed at home? Their stories, seen through the lens of the objects that were a part of their daily lives, reflect the ways Tennesseans adapted, coped, and thrived during a war whose reverberations are still felt today.
• Trials, Triumphs, and Transformations (2013-2014; 2017-2018)
  This collection explores African-American Tennesseeans' search for citizenship, community, and opportunity between the end of the American Civil War (1865) and the end of World War II (1945). The project was a collaboration between MTSU's Center for Historic Preservation and the James E. Walker Library, in cooperation with many partner institutions across Tennessee.
• Places, Perspectives (2018-2019)
  This collection documents the histories of communities that are the focus of Places, Perspectives: African American Community-building in Tennessee, 1860-1920, a collaborative partnership initiative funded through a matching grant from the Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area to Middle Tennessee State University’s Department of Geosciences and James E. Walker Library in partnership with the Center for Historic Preservation.
• LibGO (2018)
  This gamified orientation was designed to engage users as an alternative method to library orientation tours, targeting users (faculty, online students, graduate students, community members) who do not take the traditional library instruction courses (which are for undergraduates). The interactive challenge was built with Twine, an open source publishing tool, complete with a scoring system, character selection and used as a test pilot for future UX projects. LibGO was partially funded by the MT Engage grant and had over 60 particpants on day one and nearly 200 participants overall. Learn more from published peer-reviewed articles.